RLL-encoding makes long strings of "ones" and "zeros" unlikely.
Back in the old FM days (where there was a direct relationship between flux and data) you might have had a problem such as you describe, but remember that the disks rotated at much lower RPMs then.
These days you don't have anything to worry about.
Between the two leaks [...] I am getting 2 to 3 a day
I opened a new account at bellsouth.net as a result of installing DSL at home, and was spammed the next day. Because my userid is four characters long, I presume that the spammers were using a permutation technique to develop addresses.
Sending spam is so cheap, they can afford to send stuff to *all* short email addresses, published or not.
You can guard against leaks in your best paranoid fashion -- but they'll find you.
Unfortunately, with so many government entities to deal with we will never have legal protection against spam. The low-lifes will simply move to more agreeable jurisdictions. Any long-term solution to the spam problem is therefore a technical issue. I predict that whitelists will become far more common in the next couple of years.
"...niche markets that IT hasn't really touched, like agriculture"
Oh? IT hasn't really touched agriculture?
"Agriculture" is a lot bigger than you seem to think, and you haven't done much research if you believe that farmers are unacquainted with computers.
While ag firms do the same things that a lot of companies do -- general accounting, payables, receivables, payroll, tax accounting, fixed assets and so on -- they also contain dozens and dozens of little subsidiary businesses which all have unique requirements. IOW, targeting "agriculture" is like saying you're going to target "medicine" or "education". It's a big world out here.
Our company collects crops from our own fields, or from independent growers. We pack these, palletize them, and give them to truckers for delivery to a remote distributor or broker. Sound easy? Well the rules are different for every type of crop (we do vegetables, citrus, and cane sugar, shipped not only across state lines, but internationally). The "paperwork" required by the government differs for each type of crop. Labeling differs. Trucking manifests differ. Storage characteristics differ (we're dealing with perishables, and every hour counts).
Growers are paid differently depending on the type of crop, sometimes by weight, sometimes by unit counts. Frequently the price to the grower isn't set until the truck is actually in transit -- and that truck may be carrying produce from different lots, representing different growers.
We are answerable to the state for pesticide and fertilizer use, and have to be able to provide a history of any given crate of produce -- when it was treated, how it was treated, and by whom. We maintain the equivalent of file cabinets of Material Safety Data Sheets, and we are required to provide paper copies of these to each pesticide crew, upon application.
Many ag workers are paid "piece rate", where the number of boxes they pack, or the number of pallets they load figure into their salary. I'm sure many places still do this by hand... but the technology to do data collection in the field has been around for a long time.
Packing lines are becoming more and more automated with palletizers, sizers and whatnot. Citrus and concentrate are monitored end-to-end on the line. The state testing lab is automated and reports results in realtime to the state citrus division as well as to our own information systems.
EDI came slowly to the ag community -- there's so many unstandardized products and container sizes. But it's here, along with a handful of VANs and industry organizations to help it along, such as Agribuys, iTrade Network and ProduceSupply.org
I don't want this to degenerate into a description of the ag business -- slashdotters wouldn't appreciate it much. But your ignorance of a marketplace in which you propose to make your living is a big liability. You have NOT done your homework. A simple googling of "software" and "agriculture" turned up a comprehensive index of products used in the ag community as hit number one.
My apology! By "submission" I meant the original story. Had I meant your comment, I would have said "post". I probably wasn't clear.
I followed up to your post because I was taking your point -- except that I added the "two years" reference. And of course called the submittor a troll.
To my dismay, neither of my girls have ever shown the remotest interest in programming or tearing down our computers to see how they work. I've tried to show them what I do, but their eyes just sort of glaze over.
They are (sob) users. Couldn't live without their wordprocessors and browsers and stuff, but they don't care much about what makes them go.
Notwithstanding my inability to interest them in my livelihood, I guess I am doing some things right. My girls are both straight-A students, and one of them was class valedictorian this last year. They're interested in science, and are better mathematicians than I was at that age.
What am I doing? Pretty much treating them like adults; I never talk down to them, I explain my reasoning when I make a decision, and I have grown-up conversations with them. My cardinal rule is "No BS", for I know that if I ever lied to 'em, my credibility would be shot to hell.
As a result I have LOTS of cred, so I can mention a Slashdot article about quantum fluctuation over pizza. They listen, and maybe learn a little. I lob newspaper articles that I think are important or interesting into their laps. We have (mostly) intelligent discussions at home, talking about science news, current events, politics.
Treat your kids with respect. Retain your authority, but delegate a lot of responsibility. Take home some of the stuff you find interesting; it'll rub off in bits and pieces. But you shouldn't get hung up on one discipline; if it's all that interesting, your kids will let you know.
Actually, Dell's Completecare policy is not offered in all U.S. states (such as Florida, where I live). So I took our brand-new $2500 notebook computer to my State Farm agent.
They wrote a $2500 no-deductible policy for $43/year. Cheaper than Dell Completecare, and available in my state.
Check with your favorite homeowner's insurance agent. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Disclaimer: I did catch the sarcastic tone of your comment.
I followed up on the ICFP competition announcement in/. yesterday, and looked at the 2001 ICSF winner's write-up. Haskell Carrots took the first day and a half of a 72-hour competition "thinking about the algorithm before writing any code". They look pretty 'l33t to me.
Sony believes in "OpenMG X" as an
open platform technology that should support the secure distribution of content, and we are now considering licensing this technology to hardware manufacturers and software vendors.
I don't have to sign an agreement or click-thru something when I purchase a paperback. It doesn't make sense to require it for any copyright (or copyleft) work.
In the interview, Marcelo says that because he mistakenly entered the U.S. on business, using a tourist visa, he was turned away and now cannot reenter.
Is this a permanent condition? And is there any way to appeal this? Contact INS or our local representatives?
I understand the government's paranoia post-911, but this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
My daughter's graduating next week, too. Gosh, how I look forward to living vicariously through her experience next year. My college years were the best years of my life. (My wife doesn't like to hear that much, but there you go.)
You'll meet and rub shoulders with people from vastly different disciplines. You'll learn a lot from roommates and professors both. I had pals who were ham radio enthusiasts, psych majors, musicians, photographers, engineers, pilots, computer people, ex-military,... and a guy who wrote porn paperbacks for spending money.
Don't be in such a hurry to join the Dilbert zone.
Note that they do not provide unlimited hotdogs or pop or Cadillacs...
Right, those are material assets with a capital cost that can only be sold once.
... or bandwidth with the price of admission
Indeed they do "give" away the bandwidth (e.g. the wait in lines, the seat in the auditorium). These are operating costs, and are fixed -- whether the stands are half full, the show goes on.
Disney did really well when they ditched the ride metering and hiked the admission price. And the customers were happier. Is there a lesson here? Maybe.
This piece was so full of FUD that I could scarcely believe it.
z/VM is a niche operating system with virtual machine (VM) support for new hardware features added late or often not at all(3)
Then why did IBM have to port the TCPIP stack from the VM world into MVS, if VM is so far behind?
This is Linux. It's designed for Intel. It's not tuned for [S/390].
Linux is "designed for Intel"??? What about M68K, PPC, ARM, Alpha, SPARC and others? (See the Debian ports page for a more complete list.)
The "legendary" IBM S/390 [reliability] IBM references are the result of decades of development work on IBM's flagship mainframe operating system, known today as z/OS.
Yes, MVS (z/OS) is rock solid reliable. But the machines don't bust either. CPU recovery has been an integral part of the architecture for almost 30 years. If a processor breaks, another takes over with no application effect, or a spare is assigned. Someone on the ibm-main list today mentioned that the processors are themselves duplicated on chip, with comparison logic to ensure that both sides are computing the same thing. Does Intel even parity-check their processors?
thus the application portfolio to run Linux on a mainframe is small
Small? Install a copy of SuSE SLES in a S/390 LPAR (logical partition, a hardware implementation of VM that is delivered on EVERY S/390... no z/VM necessary) and see how much software was delivered with it. You wanted OpenSSH and OpenSSL, though SuSE didn't deliver it? Go to the web, download it, and do configure, make, make install. The big problem with application portability is the proprietary vendors that ship binaries only.
the difference in Intel versus mainframe applications [WRT endian-ness] makes porting difficult
What an amazing assertion. Wish Khan had provided a reference.
Why put an open operating system such as Linux on a closed proprietary mainframe?
Merde. Why run it on a closed proprietary SPARCstation? Or a closed proprietary Mac?
Khan makes a couple of decent points, particularly regarding z/VM skills. But the hyperbole is way out there, and it's hard to take him seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
RLL-encoding makes long strings of "ones" and "zeros" unlikely.
Back in the old FM days (where there was a direct relationship between flux and data) you might have had a problem such as you describe, but remember that the disks rotated at much lower RPMs then.
These days you don't have anything to worry about.
Google for "history of foosball" and you get this.
Apparently it's a decades-old transliteration of the German word.
I opened a new account at bellsouth.net as a result of installing DSL at home, and was spammed the next day. Because my userid is four characters long, I presume that the spammers were using a permutation technique to develop addresses.
Sending spam is so cheap, they can afford to send stuff to *all* short email addresses, published or not.
You can guard against leaks in your best paranoid fashion -- but they'll find you.
Unfortunately, with so many government entities to deal with we will never have legal protection against spam. The low-lifes will simply move to more agreeable jurisdictions. Any long-term solution to the spam problem is therefore a technical issue. I predict that whitelists will become far more common in the next couple of years.
Oh? IT hasn't really touched agriculture?
"Agriculture" is a lot bigger than you seem to think, and you haven't done much research if you believe that farmers are unacquainted with computers.
While ag firms do the same things that a lot of companies do -- general accounting, payables, receivables, payroll, tax accounting, fixed assets and so on -- they also contain dozens and dozens of little subsidiary businesses which all have unique requirements. IOW, targeting "agriculture" is like saying you're going to target "medicine" or "education". It's a big world out here.
Our company collects crops from our own fields, or from independent growers. We pack these, palletize them, and give them to truckers for delivery to a remote distributor or broker. Sound easy? Well the rules are different for every type of crop (we do vegetables, citrus, and cane sugar, shipped not only across state lines, but internationally). The "paperwork" required by the government differs for each type of crop. Labeling differs. Trucking manifests differ. Storage characteristics differ (we're dealing with perishables, and every hour counts).
Growers are paid differently depending on the type of crop, sometimes by weight, sometimes by unit counts. Frequently the price to the grower isn't set until the truck is actually in transit -- and that truck may be carrying produce from different lots, representing different growers.
We are answerable to the state for pesticide and fertilizer use, and have to be able to provide a history of any given crate of produce -- when it was treated, how it was treated, and by whom. We maintain the equivalent of file cabinets of Material Safety Data Sheets, and we are required to provide paper copies of these to each pesticide crew, upon application.
Many ag workers are paid "piece rate", where the number of boxes they pack, or the number of pallets they load figure into their salary. I'm sure many places still do this by hand... but the technology to do data collection in the field has been around for a long time.
Packing lines are becoming more and more automated with palletizers, sizers and whatnot. Citrus and concentrate are monitored end-to-end on the line. The state testing lab is automated and reports results in realtime to the state citrus division as well as to our own information systems.
EDI came slowly to the ag community -- there's so many unstandardized products and container sizes. But it's here, along with a handful of VANs and industry organizations to help it along, such as Agribuys, iTrade Network and ProduceSupply.org
I don't want this to degenerate into a description of the ag business -- slashdotters wouldn't appreciate it much. But your ignorance of a marketplace in which you propose to make your living is a big liability. You have NOT done your homework. A simple googling of "software" and "agriculture" turned up a comprehensive index of products used in the ag community as hit number one.
... considering the way Berman treats Wheaton. Bad reviews == I won't be missing anything.
My apology! By "submission" I meant the original story. Had I meant your comment, I would have said "post". I probably wasn't clear.
I followed up to your post because I was taking your point -- except that I added the "two years" reference. And of course called the submittor a troll.
Kind regards!
"I guess this is why i run tinydns."
BIND 9 has been available for TWO YEARS, Troll.
Yeah, I pretty much have to second that.
To my dismay, neither of my girls have ever shown the remotest interest in programming or tearing down our computers to see how they work. I've tried to show them what I do, but their eyes just sort of glaze over.
They are (sob) users. Couldn't live without their wordprocessors and browsers and stuff, but they don't care much about what makes them go.
Notwithstanding my inability to interest them in my livelihood, I guess I am doing some things right. My girls are both straight-A students, and one of them was class valedictorian this last year. They're interested in science, and are better mathematicians than I was at that age.
What am I doing? Pretty much treating them like adults; I never talk down to them, I explain my reasoning when I make a decision, and I have grown-up conversations with them. My cardinal rule is "No BS", for I know that if I ever lied to 'em, my credibility would be shot to hell.
As a result I have LOTS of cred, so I can mention a Slashdot article about quantum fluctuation over pizza. They listen, and maybe learn a little. I lob newspaper articles that I think are important or interesting into their laps. We have (mostly) intelligent discussions at home, talking about science news, current events, politics.
Treat your kids with respect. Retain your authority, but delegate a lot of responsibility. Take home some of the stuff you find interesting; it'll rub off in bits and pieces. But you shouldn't get hung up on one discipline; if it's all that interesting, your kids will let you know.
They wrote a $2500 no-deductible policy for $43/year. Cheaper than Dell Completecare, and available in my state.
Check with your favorite homeowner's insurance agent. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Good show, jukal.
Somebody has to quibble. TIROS Iwas launched over 42 years ago!
Disclaimer: I did catch the sarcastic tone of your comment.
I followed up on the ICFP competition announcement in
Gomez's Hamburger is featured today (August 7, 2002). I check this site out daily; they frequently post some really tasty pics. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
I don't have to sign an agreement or click-thru something when I purchase a paperback. It doesn't make sense to require it for any copyright (or copyleft) work.
Is this a permanent condition? And is there any way to appeal this? Contact INS or our local representatives?
I understand the government's paranoia post-911, but this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
... can be found here.
You'll meet and rub shoulders with people from vastly different disciplines. You'll learn a lot from roommates and professors both. I had pals who were ham radio enthusiasts, psych majors, musicians, photographers, engineers, pilots, computer people, ex-military, ... and a guy who wrote porn paperbacks for spending money.
Don't be in such a hurry to join the Dilbert zone.
Right, those are material assets with a capital cost that can only be sold once.
Indeed they do "give" away the bandwidth (e.g. the wait in lines, the seat in the auditorium). These are operating costs, and are fixed -- whether the stands are half full, the show goes on.
Disney did really well when they ditched the ride metering and hiked the admission price. And the customers were happier. Is there a lesson here? Maybe.
That could make it more difficult for trolls (that pay) to change identities rapidly.
Another suggestion: add people modifiers to comment preferences so that subscribers can be given more cred at our discretion.
I sit at my desk at work, and probably punch -reload- a couple hundred times over the course of the week, at idle moments.
That behavior is sure gonna change in a hurry.
Ticket books went the way of the dinosaur 20 years ago at the Disney theme parks. One flat (expensive) fee at the gate, and all the rides you want.
The Rat made a killing.
The FSF has posted an Affidavit of Eben Moglen on Progress Software vs. MySQL AB Preliminary Injunction Hearing. It is pretty good reading.
This piece was so full of FUD that I could scarcely believe it.
Then why did IBM have to port the TCPIP stack from the VM world into MVS, if VM is so far behind?
Linux is "designed for Intel"??? What about M68K, PPC, ARM, Alpha, SPARC and others? (See the Debian ports page for a more complete list.)
Yes, MVS (z/OS) is rock solid reliable. But the machines don't bust either. CPU recovery has been an integral part of the architecture for almost 30 years. If a processor breaks, another takes over with no application effect, or a spare is assigned. Someone on the ibm-main list today mentioned that the processors are themselves duplicated on chip, with comparison logic to ensure that both sides are computing the same thing. Does Intel even parity-check their processors?
Small? Install a copy of SuSE SLES in a S/390 LPAR (logical partition, a hardware implementation of VM that is delivered on EVERY S/390... no z/VM necessary) and see how much software was delivered with it. You wanted OpenSSH and OpenSSL, though SuSE didn't deliver it? Go to the web, download it, and do configure, make, make install. The big problem with application portability is the proprietary vendors that ship binaries only.
What an amazing assertion. Wish Khan had provided a reference.
Merde. Why run it on a closed proprietary SPARCstation? Or a closed proprietary Mac?
Khan makes a couple of decent points, particularly regarding z/VM skills. But the hyperbole is way out there, and it's hard to take him seriously.
Ximian has problems figuring dependencies under Slack. See their explanation.