A decision was made to make the system more stable at a cost of possibly wasting memory. XP SP2 introduced a change such that only the bottom 32 bits of physical memory will ever be used, even if that means wasting memory. (This is also the case with Vista.)
Can you provide a reference on this? Something like an MS KB article or something? Not that I don't believe you (the Windows architecture is full of design limits like that), I'd just like to get all the tech details. Plus it's good to have an "official" source when explaining things to others ("See MSKB blah blah").
Incorrect, XP can only manage 3 GiB of RAM. You can install 4 GiB, but you'll have one unused.
I'm pretty sure that's wrong.
As I understand it, Windows XP Pro (32-bit) can actually address more than 4 GB of RAM, provided you use PAE. I know Windows Server can certainly address 4 GB of RAM and more.
I suspect your information is based on a misunderstanding of the user/kernel memory split. The NT memory manager splits the virtual address space into a kernel portion and a user portion. The kernel portion is the same for every process; the userland portion is unique to every process. All the kernel stuff (code, kernel data tables, buffers, cache, etc.) go in the kernel portion.
By default, the split is 50/50, with 2 GB for the kernel and 2 GB for userland. There is a BOOT.INI switch,/3GB, which changes it to 3 GB for userland and 1 GB for the kernel. Use of this switch is not a no-brainer. Applications have to be written to be specifically aware of it (for backwards compatibility reasons). Turning this on takes away from memory the kernel could use for caching and such, so unless you actually *need* more than 2 GB for a userland process, it can be a net performance loss.
"Maximum PC" magazine. April 2007 (Volume 12, Number 4). Article "Face-Off". Page 28. Section title "The Fastest Connection", subtitle, "FireWire 800 vs. USB vs eSATA".
Comparing FireWire 800 and eSATA, based on the information in the article:
Random access seek times (milliseconds): 8.3 for eSATA, 8.1 for FireWire 800 Average sustained read speed (megabytes/second): 77.9 for eSATA, 76.0 for FireWire 800 Maximum burst speed (megabytes/second): 128.8 for eSATA, 87.9 for FireWire 800
Rounded cables have nothing on SATA cables. Yes they are better than ribbon cables but they still suck. They have not terribly flexible, the plugs are still wide, the covers over the part where the cable spreads comes apart, you still have master/slave (assuming you don't get a single connector cable), etc.
You left out: Most "round-ribbon" cables are crap, because the manufactures have never heard about things like shielding.
(Sure, there are some good ones, but they cost a fortune. Meanwhile, I get to do trouble-shooting with a system that doesn't work because it's got crap cables, which the owner assures me are fine because they came from CompUSA...)
"one slot per bus you can have more then one AGP bus"
AGP = Accelerated Graphics Port. It's not a bus. (I'm being pedantic, I know.)
That's why most everything has only one AGP slot. Since it is a point-to-point link, you can only have one slot per AGP controller. Two AGP slots (two ports) would mean two controllers, which would mean some fairly high-end silicon.
I wasn't aware of anything that has more than one AGP port, but Wikipedia told me about the AlphaServer GS1280 (from HP nee Compaq nee DEC). Cool. I love esoteric hardware.:)
"I read a hardware test where Firewire and eSATA were compared. They were close to the same speed for single drives, but once you start adding drives, eSATA pulls away from Firewire pretty quickly."
Any idea on specifics? It occurs to me that it's likely that they probably used a single FireWire host adapter, because Firewire allows that. At the same time, they probably used multiple eSATA ports, because most eSATA gear doesn't allow anything else. So you're comparing a bunch of FireWire drives sharing a single I/O path, vs a bunch of eSATA drives, each with a dedicated I/O path.
I recently read a comparison of USB 2.0 vs FireWire 800 vs eSATA, in the "April 2007" issue of "Maximum PC". (That is magazine time, which is shifted one month ahead of real-time.) They found eSATA and FireWire 800 were about the same in performance (eSATA was marginally faster, but within a few percent). USB sucked mud.
I think it's such a shame that FireWire enjoys such limited adoption. Here was a standard that could be everything. Proper device discovery and management. High-speed, real-time, guaranteed bandwidth for things that need it, like disk drives and video cameras. Multiple hubs and daisy-chains let it work for mice, keyboards, joysticks, all that stuff. A true peer-to-peer design, so you can hook multiple PCs together for small ad hoc networks. Rather than USB, Ethernet, and eSATA, we could have had just FireWire.
It's a pity Apple killed it with their control-freak attitude. By the time they came around, Intel had pushed USB down everyone's throats.
I cannot comment on SarbOx in general. IANAL. I don't even play one on TV. But I can comment on the IT aspects.
I've been through a supposed SarbOx implementation when, as a consultant, one of our clients got gobbled up by a huge company. They had a huge list of requirements, supposedly needed for SarbOx. One in particular stuck in my mind: Passwords had to change every 45 days. They blamed Congress for this whenever I objected.
So I got a copy of the SarbOx legislation. The word "password" doesn't even *OCCUR* in the law. A bunch of other stuff didn't line up, either. When I raised these issues to their attention, I was told their expensive auditing/compliance provider said it was a requirement, while I was just an IT puke, so suck it up. (We sucked it up. At $95/hour.)
Given that some of this stuff has to be done by outside auditors, and the rest is often outsourced to same, it occurs to me that there is an incentive for the auditing houses to make things as onerous as possible. They make more money that way. I'm not saying every situation is like that. Just that money, like electricity, tends to follow the path of least resistance.
The slowness of Debian updates is a feature, not a bug.
You can take that too far.
I've never successfully installed Debian "stable" on any machine that was less than three years old. I've tried maybe ten times over the past seven years. Debian's policy of providing a very vanilla, conservative kernel, combined with the ultra-slow release cycle, virtually guarantees this problem.
These are my experiences. Maybe I'm just unlucky. But as a consequence, I don't run Debian in production. FWIW. YMMV. HAND.
I can recommend the X-Wrt add-on suite for OpenWrt. It replaces the OpenWrt webif (web interface) with webif^2, which is much-improved. It adds a lot more control, many more options, real-time performance graphs, and all sorts of neat things. Installation was a single command, or you can do it via a web page.
"If RedHat regarded CentOS as a part of its family, it wouldn't be so adamant about the RedHat trademark issue."
Sigh. This again. Under US law, you have to protect your trademark against use by others, or you risk loosing ownership of the trademark. That's the way the law works, so that's the way the lawyers enforce it. (Not coincidentally, the lawyers also heavily influence how the law works, but that's not Red Hat's fault.)
"This change in DST was definitely worth it, if only for the benefit of forcing embedded systems designers to remember to not hard-code DST dates into their code."
I'd buy into that if there was any evidence that programmers ever learned from their mistakes. But in my experience, the opposite is true: We keep making the same damn mistakes, over and over.
Hell, look at buffer overflows. Still the #1 cause of security bugs. It's not like bounds checking is a radically new idea.
If you're of a historical mind, read The Mythical Man-Month, by Fred Brooks. It's illuminating to discover that we are still struggling with the same problems today that they were dealing with in 1960.
Could be a Windows issue? Windows and PCs usually store local time, and map back to GMT through time zone info.
Windows expects the hardware clock to be set to local time (mainly because that's all MS-DOS could understand, and so Windows follows suit). Windows does store time internally in UTC. So upon startup, it reads the hardware clock, converts it to UTC, and runs with that.
I still don't see how a DST issue could cause this much havok for GoDaddy. Like others have said, there isn't much they do that should be affected by being an hour off. Of course, programmers are always finding new and interesting ways to screw things up, so who knows?
Okay, this thread desperately needs a knowledge-injection.
(This is all based on Windows 2000/XP, I understand NT4 and Vista are similar, no promises for 9X.)
Windows stores time zone information in two places. One is what Microsoft calls the "time zone database". This is the collection of all the time zones that Windows knows about. It's kept here:
The second location is what gets actively used for local time zone calculations.
So anyway, a lot of people (and it sounds like IntellAdmin might be among them) were updating the first location, but not the second. This typically manifests as clocks being wrong during DST (now), but going in and toggling the local time zone fixes it.
This is all described in excruciating detail in MSKB 914387, "How to configure daylight saving time for the United States in 2007".
There's an additional weirdness I've seen. I was patching some Win 2000 SP4 systems today (post-DST switchover). After installing the registry patches, the clock in the Explorer System Tray was still an hour off. But when I double-clicked the clock to bring up the Date/Time Control Panel, the correct time was displayed. Closing and restarting Explorer seemed to fix the problem.
Additional tip: You can cleanly close Explorer without logging off by clicking Start and then Shutdown to get the "Shutdown" dialog box, and then holding down [CTRL]+[ALT]+[SHIFT] and clicking the "Cancel" button.
(This is more of a reply to all the replies to the parent, then to the parent itself, but it had to go somewhere.)
There's a popular Internet saying: "Information wants to be free."
I coined a counter-saying to that: "Information may want to be free, but infrastructure wants cash."
Wikipedia works not because of it's content, but because of it's community. While you may be able to distribute (mirror) the content, a community (by definition) is joined together. Open source projects have their mailing lists. Slashdot has http://slashdot.org/ . And Wikipedia has, well, a wiki.
I'm not saying this is the end of the world, or even the end of Wikipedia. I'm just saying that throwing techno-anarchist rhetoric around doesn't really solve anything.
"A 40-foot yacht is not so small as to disapear easily that close to shore..."
You ever been up next to a big container ship? I mean like a super-panamax ship? Those things can (and have) run over small sailboats and not even notice. 40-foot might well be a bit too big for that, but I don't know, and I certainly wouldn't bet my life on it -- or Mr. Gray's...
"Unless TiVo change their policies about gathering information on what I watch"
Um, you can call customer service and opt-out of the anonymous tracking of viewing habits. I believe you have been able to since day one.
"forcing downloads of advertising and other content that I don't want"
Most of the advertising content is delivered via recordings of broadcast TV, not download. So far, anyway. The advertising content mainly consists of nicely isolated screens. I'll admit to being a little perplexed as to why it bothers you. It doesn't impact DVR performance in any way that I can determine, and unless you seek it out, you generally don't see it.
People who object to TiVo because they have to pay $12/month or whatever, that I can understand. But your objections seem kind of specious.
DragonHawk: "If somebody in a government position is doing something illegal, they probably just won't tell anybody about it. "
theLOUDroom: "That statement is based on the ridiculously flawed assumption that these actions involve only a single person."
Um, no. You'll notice it reads just as well if you assume a group instead of a single person.
The intent of my statement, which you and others seem oblivious to, is that classifying information creates accountability. There's all sorts of rules and regulations regarding classified information. There's classification guides, original agency tracking, regular inventories, all sorts of crap. (Go read the NISPOM if you don't believe me.) The point of calling something classified is not to keep something hidden, but to let the information be distributed. That distribution is done in an accountable manner, to trusted parties only, but the whole point is to provide a framework where that distribution can happen.
If an entity (be it an individual or a group) wishes to just keep the public from knowing something, it's much better to just not tell anyone else. And that's the other side of the coin which you seem to be missing: A conspiracy can exist easier if it operates outside of the rules. You don't need to call something "classified" to keep it a secret (lower case "S"). Any threats we face from within are going to be far more dangerous in that type of manifestation then under any official banner.
theLOUDroom: "Watergate would be a great example of how totally full of shit this statement is."
Exactly what classified material did the Watergate scandal involve? I'm no expert, but my understanding is that Nixon and his cronies broke into a DNC office in order to steal campaign info. Indeed, I had thought it was explicitly an "off-the-record" sort of program, in order to keep it from being widely known. Which was my point (I guess I need to point that out).
theLOUDroom: "The NSA wiretapping program would be another."
Which NSA wiretapping program? More than one has come to light over the years, ECHELON and TSP just being the most well-known. Speaking of just TSP, you'll remember that there's a not insignificant amount of support from people in all three branches of the government for the "legality" of at least some of it. You and I may not agree, of course, and the debate and controversy over them continues as we speak. Personally, I suspect it goes too far. But that's getting off the real point; read on.
I think the "illegal" part is mostly semantics. So I think you do raise a valid point, but I think the semantic argument obscures the real problem. I think it would be better to address the real problem head on: Even working "within the system", programs can exist, and activities can occur, which a large majority of the US citizenry would object to.
theLOUDroom: "The whole point of doing illegal things in government is that you have the resources of the gov't at your disposal."
I rather suspect that illegal -- and/or (to follow on the above) immoral and objectionable -- things happen in government the same way they happen outside of government: Someone thinks they know better than the rest of us, and/or that "the rules" do not apply to them. The end justifying the means, and all that. I have certainly seen enough of that in private enterprise -- as well as in the ordinary, day-to-day activities of ordinary people -- to believe that there's nothing different there. I do wonder if we perhaps have a better chance of doing something about the corruption in public government, though.
Are they having people manually sort through classified docs in an "old documents" area, looking and the date, and moving them?
Well, I can't speak for everybody, but in the industrial part of US classified world, the NISPOM spells it out pretty clearly. One has to mark every classified document with the date of declassification. The "Declassify On" date comes from the Classification Guide delivered with the contract.
The NISPOM (National Industrial Security Program - Operating Manual) is publicly available; Google for it. Contrary to popular belief, classified information is mainly about accountability and trust, not dark rooms and guys in trench coats. Classified information is about letting information *be distributed*, in an accountable fashion. If somebody in a government position is doing something illegal, they probably just won't tell anybody about it. Calling it "classified" would just draw attention to it.
Which is not to say declassifying old, benign information isn't a good thing; it is. It increases public knowledge of our government while decreasing operating overhead. Indeed, it's generally preferred to have the smallest amount of classified information one can. It's a lot cheaper to work with unclassified material. Better to spend the money on men and equipment.
You almost always have to force the installation using --no-deps --force, because RPM binaries are usually targeted at a specific distro/version.
No. All binaries are targeted that way. When you run./configure, it runs through a bunch of checks to figure out where things are and how they are configured, for all of the dependencies. And "dependencies" includes everything from special-purpose libraries to glibc and the kernel. It includes all the configure options, source defines, patches, compiler switches, and anything else that changes the configuration of the binary. RPM keeps track of all that stuff because that's the only way to be sure it will work. If you change any of it, sure, the resulting binary *might* *appear* to work, but it might just as easily segfault.
Binary compatibility is hard.
The "--force" switch tells RPM, "I know you think this is a bad idea. I say I know otherwise. Do it anyway". You can't then turn around and complain that things broke when you did that. RPM took your word for it when you said you knew better. If you didn't know better, that's your own damn fault, not RPM's.
Put more briefly: If you think you need to use --force, you're almost certainly wrong.
I have Comcast for TV and Internet. (I don't have a landline phone.) It's not that I like Comcast. Indeed, I hate Comcast. It's just that I hate Verizon more.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks,
I'm pretty sure that's wrong.
As I understand it, Windows XP Pro (32-bit) can actually address more than 4 GB of RAM, provided you use PAE. I know Windows Server can certainly address 4 GB of RAM and more.
I suspect your information is based on a misunderstanding of the user/kernel memory split. The NT memory manager splits the virtual address space into a kernel portion and a user portion. The kernel portion is the same for every process; the userland portion is unique to every process. All the kernel stuff (code, kernel data tables, buffers, cache, etc.) go in the kernel portion.
By default, the split is 50/50, with 2 GB for the kernel and 2 GB for userland. There is a BOOT.INI switch,
More information:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291988
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/08
It may be worth noting that the Linux kernel does not work this way, so the issue does not exist on Linux.
"Maximum PC" magazine. April 2007 (Volume 12, Number 4). Article "Face-Off". Page 28. Section title "The Fastest Connection", subtitle, "FireWire 800 vs. USB vs eSATA".
Comparing FireWire 800 and eSATA, based on the information in the article:
Random access seek times (milliseconds): 8.3 for eSATA, 8.1 for FireWire 800
Average sustained read speed (megabytes/second): 77.9 for eSATA, 76.0 for FireWire 800
Maximum burst speed (megabytes/second): 128.8 for eSATA, 87.9 for FireWire 800
Believe what you want to believe.
You left out: Most "round-ribbon" cables are crap, because the manufactures have never heard about things like shielding.
(Sure, there are some good ones, but they cost a fortune. Meanwhile, I get to do trouble-shooting with a system that doesn't work because it's got crap cables, which the owner assures me are fine because they came from CompUSA...)
"one slot per bus you can have more then one AGP bus"
:)
AGP = Accelerated Graphics Port. It's not a bus. (I'm being pedantic, I know.)
That's why most everything has only one AGP slot. Since it is a point-to-point link, you can only have one slot per AGP controller. Two AGP slots (two ports) would mean two controllers, which would mean some fairly high-end silicon.
I wasn't aware of anything that has more than one AGP port, but Wikipedia told me about the AlphaServer GS1280 (from HP nee Compaq nee DEC). Cool. I love esoteric hardware.
"I read a hardware test where Firewire and eSATA were compared. They were close to the same speed for single drives, but once you start adding drives, eSATA pulls away from Firewire pretty quickly."
Any idea on specifics? It occurs to me that it's likely that they probably used a single FireWire host adapter, because Firewire allows that. At the same time, they probably used multiple eSATA ports, because most eSATA gear doesn't allow anything else. So you're comparing a bunch of FireWire drives sharing a single I/O path, vs a bunch of eSATA drives, each with a dedicated I/O path.
"The speed is definitely faster than USB."
I recently read a comparison of USB 2.0 vs FireWire 800 vs eSATA, in the "April 2007" issue of "Maximum PC". (That is magazine time, which is shifted one month ahead of real-time.) They found eSATA and FireWire 800 were about the same in performance (eSATA was marginally faster, but within a few percent). USB sucked mud.
I think it's such a shame that FireWire enjoys such limited adoption. Here was a standard that could be everything. Proper device discovery and management. High-speed, real-time, guaranteed bandwidth for things that need it, like disk drives and video cameras. Multiple hubs and daisy-chains let it work for mice, keyboards, joysticks, all that stuff. A true peer-to-peer design, so you can hook multiple PCs together for small ad hoc networks. Rather than USB, Ethernet, and eSATA, we could have had just FireWire.
It's a pity Apple killed it with their control-freak attitude. By the time they came around, Intel had pushed USB down everyone's throats.
I cannot comment on SarbOx in general. IANAL. I don't even play one on TV. But I can comment on the IT aspects.
I've been through a supposed SarbOx implementation when, as a consultant, one of our clients got gobbled up by a huge company. They had a huge list of requirements, supposedly needed for SarbOx. One in particular stuck in my mind: Passwords had to change every 45 days. They blamed Congress for this whenever I objected.
So I got a copy of the SarbOx legislation. The word "password" doesn't even *OCCUR* in the law. A bunch of other stuff didn't line up, either. When I raised these issues to their attention, I was told their expensive auditing/compliance provider said it was a requirement, while I was just an IT puke, so suck it up. (We sucked it up. At $95/hour.)
Given that some of this stuff has to be done by outside auditors, and the rest is often outsourced to same, it occurs to me that there is an incentive for the auditing houses to make things as onerous as possible. They make more money that way. I'm not saying every situation is like that. Just that money, like electricity, tends to follow the path of least resistance.
Food for thought.
The slowness of Debian updates is a feature, not a bug.
You can take that too far.
I've never successfully installed Debian "stable" on any machine that was less than three years old. I've tried maybe ten times over the past seven years. Debian's policy of providing a very vanilla, conservative kernel, combined with the ultra-slow release cycle, virtually guarantees this problem.
These are my experiences. Maybe I'm just unlucky. But as a consequence, I don't run Debian in production. FWIW. YMMV. HAND.
I can recommend the X-Wrt add-on suite for OpenWrt. It replaces the OpenWrt webif (web interface) with webif^2, which is much-improved. It adds a lot more control, many more options, real-time performance graphs, and all sorts of neat things. Installation was a single command, or you can do it via a web page.
"If RedHat regarded CentOS as a part of its family, it wouldn't be so adamant about the RedHat trademark issue."
Sigh. This again. Under US law, you have to protect your trademark against use by others, or you risk loosing ownership of the trademark. That's the way the law works, so that's the way the lawyers enforce it. (Not coincidentally, the lawyers also heavily influence how the law works, but that's not Red Hat's fault.)
"The pear? Pffth. Bring me.... the COMFY CHAIR!!"
Well, I certainly didn't expect that.
"This change in DST was definitely worth it, if only for the benefit of forcing embedded systems designers to remember to not hard-code DST dates into their code."
I'd buy into that if there was any evidence that programmers ever learned from their mistakes. But in my experience, the opposite is true: We keep making the same damn mistakes, over and over.
Hell, look at buffer overflows. Still the #1 cause of security bugs. It's not like bounds checking is a radically new idea.
If you're of a historical mind, read The Mythical Man-Month, by Fred Brooks. It's illuminating to discover that we are still struggling with the same problems today that they were dealing with in 1960.
"... and if we saw the Easter bunny we ATE HIM."
HAH! That's one of the funniest things I've read in weeks. Major props!
Could be a Windows issue? Windows and PCs usually store local time, and map back to GMT through time zone info.
Windows expects the hardware clock to be set to local time (mainly because that's all MS-DOS could understand, and so Windows follows suit). Windows does store time internally in UTC. So upon startup, it reads the hardware clock, converts it to UTC, and runs with that.
I still don't see how a DST issue could cause this much havok for GoDaddy. Like others have said, there isn't much they do that should be affected by being an hour off. Of course, programmers are always finding new and interesting ways to screw things up, so who knows?
Okay, this thread desperately needs a knowledge-injection.
o rmation
(This is all based on Windows 2000/XP, I understand NT4 and Vista are similar, no promises for 9X.)
Windows stores time zone information in two places. One is what Microsoft calls the "time zone database". This is the collection of all the time zones that Windows knows about. It's kept here:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones\
Now, when you set or change the local time zone, Windows copies the appropriate time zone table from the above into:
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInf
The second location is what gets actively used for local time zone calculations.
So anyway, a lot of people (and it sounds like IntellAdmin might be among them) were updating the first location, but not the second. This typically manifests as clocks being wrong during DST (now), but going in and toggling the local time zone fixes it.
This is all described in excruciating detail in MSKB 914387, "How to configure daylight saving time for the United States in 2007".
There's an additional weirdness I've seen. I was patching some Win 2000 SP4 systems today (post-DST switchover). After installing the registry patches, the clock in the Explorer System Tray was still an hour off. But when I double-clicked the clock to bring up the Date/Time Control Panel, the correct time was displayed. Closing and restarting Explorer seemed to fix the problem.
Additional tip: You can cleanly close Explorer without logging off by clicking Start and then Shutdown to get the "Shutdown" dialog box, and then holding down [CTRL]+[ALT]+[SHIFT] and clicking the "Cancel" button.
Hope this helps,
(This is more of a reply to all the replies to the parent, then to the parent itself, but it had to go somewhere.)
There's a popular Internet saying: "Information wants to be free."
I coined a counter-saying to that: "Information may want to be free, but infrastructure wants cash."
Wikipedia works not because of it's content, but because of it's community. While you may be able to distribute (mirror) the content, a community (by definition) is joined together. Open source projects have their mailing lists. Slashdot has http://slashdot.org/ . And Wikipedia has, well, a wiki.
I'm not saying this is the end of the world, or even the end of Wikipedia. I'm just saying that throwing techno-anarchist rhetoric around doesn't really solve anything.
"A 40-foot yacht is not so small as to disapear easily that close to shore..."
You ever been up next to a big container ship? I mean like a super-panamax ship? Those things can (and have) run over small sailboats and not even notice. 40-foot might well be a bit too big for that, but I don't know, and I certainly wouldn't bet my life on it -- or Mr. Gray's...
"Now facing the Blue Wave of Death."
Is that a new offline mail reader?
(You have to be an old BBS hack to get that one.)
* This thread is useless without pics! *
We want our nerd porn!
"Unless TiVo change their policies about gathering information on what I watch"
Um, you can call customer service and opt-out of the anonymous tracking of viewing habits. I believe you have been able to since day one.
"forcing downloads of advertising and other content that I don't want"
Most of the advertising content is delivered via recordings of broadcast TV, not download. So far, anyway. The advertising content mainly consists of nicely isolated screens. I'll admit to being a little perplexed as to why it bothers you. It doesn't impact DVR performance in any way that I can determine, and unless you seek it out, you generally don't see it.
People who object to TiVo because they have to pay $12/month or whatever, that I can understand. But your objections seem kind of specious.
DragonHawk: "If somebody in a government position is doing something illegal, they probably just won't tell anybody about it. "
theLOUDroom: "That statement is based on the ridiculously flawed assumption that these actions involve only a single person."
Um, no. You'll notice it reads just as well if you assume a group instead of a single person.
The intent of my statement, which you and others seem oblivious to, is that classifying information creates accountability. There's all sorts of rules and regulations regarding classified information. There's classification guides, original agency tracking, regular inventories, all sorts of crap. (Go read the NISPOM if you don't believe me.) The point of calling something classified is not to keep something hidden, but to let the information be distributed. That distribution is done in an accountable manner, to trusted parties only, but the whole point is to provide a framework where that distribution can happen.
If an entity (be it an individual or a group) wishes to just keep the public from knowing something, it's much better to just not tell anyone else. And that's the other side of the coin which you seem to be missing: A conspiracy can exist easier if it operates outside of the rules. You don't need to call something "classified" to keep it a secret (lower case "S"). Any threats we face from within are going to be far more dangerous in that type of manifestation then under any official banner.
theLOUDroom: "Watergate would be a great example of how totally full of shit this statement is."
Exactly what classified material did the Watergate scandal involve? I'm no expert, but my understanding is that Nixon and his cronies broke into a DNC office in order to steal campaign info. Indeed, I had thought it was explicitly an "off-the-record" sort of program, in order to keep it from being widely known. Which was my point (I guess I need to point that out).
theLOUDroom: "The NSA wiretapping program would be another."
Which NSA wiretapping program? More than one has come to light over the years, ECHELON and TSP just being the most well-known. Speaking of just TSP, you'll remember that there's a not insignificant amount of support from people in all three branches of the government for the "legality" of at least some of it. You and I may not agree, of course, and the debate and controversy over them continues as we speak. Personally, I suspect it goes too far. But that's getting off the real point; read on.
I think the "illegal" part is mostly semantics. So I think you do raise a valid point, but I think the semantic argument obscures the real problem. I think it would be better to address the real problem head on: Even working "within the system", programs can exist, and activities can occur, which a large majority of the US citizenry would object to.
theLOUDroom: "The whole point of doing illegal things in government is that you have the resources of the gov't at your disposal."
I rather suspect that illegal -- and/or (to follow on the above) immoral and objectionable -- things happen in government the same way they happen outside of government: Someone thinks they know better than the rest of us, and/or that "the rules" do not apply to them. The end justifying the means, and all that. I have certainly seen enough of that in private enterprise -- as well as in the ordinary, day-to-day activities of ordinary people -- to believe that there's nothing different there. I do wonder if we perhaps have a better chance of doing something about the corruption in public government, though.
Well, I can't speak for everybody, but in the industrial part of US classified world, the NISPOM spells it out pretty clearly. One has to mark every classified document with the date of declassification. The "Declassify On" date comes from the Classification Guide delivered with the contract.
The NISPOM (National Industrial Security Program - Operating Manual) is publicly available; Google for it. Contrary to popular belief, classified information is mainly about accountability and trust, not dark rooms and guys in trench coats. Classified information is about letting information *be distributed*, in an accountable fashion. If somebody in a government position is doing something illegal, they probably just won't tell anybody about it. Calling it "classified" would just draw attention to it.
Which is not to say declassifying old, benign information isn't a good thing; it is. It increases public knowledge of our government while decreasing operating overhead. Indeed, it's generally preferred to have the smallest amount of classified information one can. It's a lot cheaper to work with unclassified material. Better to spend the money on men and equipment.
No. All binaries are targeted that way. When you run
Binary compatibility is hard.
The "--force" switch tells RPM, "I know you think this is a bad idea. I say I know otherwise. Do it anyway". You can't then turn around and complain that things broke when you did that. RPM took your word for it when you said you knew better. If you didn't know better, that's your own damn fault, not RPM's.
Put more briefly: If you think you need to use --force, you're almost certainly wrong.
I have Comcast for TV and Internet. (I don't have a landline phone.) It's not that I like Comcast. Indeed, I hate Comcast. It's just that I hate Verizon more.