Oh stop that self-loathing. Humans aren't actually particularly violent - in fact, we are a lot less violent than most other animals (the fact we can live in cities of several million people, and virtually all of us will still be alive at the end of the day).
The difference between us and other animals is that when we do violence, we are often much much better at it. Oh, and we invent things like religion to justify it.
Product placement is nothing new - remember that James Bond movie from about ten years ago that featured a couple of hackers? It had very major and blatant product placements from IBM - all the IBM monitors had enlarged IBM badges (about 6 times larger than they are in real life), and any computer not being used was showing a full-screen IBM OS/2 logo. It was so blatant it took something away from the movie. I don't want to watch a 120 minute infomercial thanks.
Firstly, the vast majority of the traffic is not actually big-jet-commercial (they are just more visible because they are bigger and make an awful lot more noise). Not all commercial planes are 'tracked' either. Those flights around the Grand Canyon are below radar coverage, pipeline patrol is generally VFR and outside of radar coverage, helicopter flights taking workers to platforms in the Gulf of Mexico usually aren't talking to anyone either. There are also still areas (albeit limited) that passenger flights are out of radar coverage, for example, during the approach phase for the commuter airliners going into somewhere like Victoria Regional in Texas which doesn't even have a control tower.
Where airliners are getting radar cover, it's hardly tracking to the meter either - the radar just isn't that accurate. The radar also relies on the airliner's transponder returns for altitude which is only accurate within 100 feet at best.
I don't think the speed at which the Earth's magnetic poles change has any bearing on bird lifespans. The weather has a *much* greater effect on their navigation, and changes over a period of hours. Once you're airborne, you won't notice that the 20 knot tailwind has changed to a 20 knot crosswind unless you're supplimenting your magnetic sense with something else. At the speed a bird flies, even a modest crosswind would blow them a long way off course over even just ten miles or so.
Most birds have extremely good eyesight. I read recently that research indicates birds use ground features to aid navigation, just like a VFR pilot in a light aircraft - they follow roads, railway lines, ground features like mountains and rivers.
It's unlikely birds etc. will have a real problem at all. Or even people who use compases to navigate their small boats.
The poles have been moving around since before life began - and has certainly shifted around significantly whilst birds that can use it have existed. In any case, a compass can only really provide you with rough navigation - a bird won't be using the magnetic pole as its sole navigational system (if it did, then normal day to day weather changes would screw them up much more than a pole that takes 50 years to move to Siberia - 50 years being many times longer than most migratory birds lifespans). Birds will at most use their in built compass to tell them the general cardinal direction they are travelling in, and will refine it by other means to take them to their exact destination - and they'll adapt quite happily as they have done during the many times the pole has moved around while migratory birds have existed.
Linux *is* just a kernel - it doesn't actually come with all the GUI 'bloatware'. If you really want, don't use a big distribution - roll your own. I learned C on a Linux system with a 40MB disk and 16MB of RAM (and had X with olvwm - not much space left over on that 40MB).
There's no reason why you can't still do that with Linux. The kernel's a bit bigger than it was in 1993, but you can either build your own custom one, or only put the modules on you actually use. GNOME isn't part of Linux, neither is KDE. They are merely userland programs that can run on the Linux kernel (and run on many other operating systems).
If you want small but very useful (certainly on the server end) try OpenBSD. I have the latest OpenBSD (3.8) running on my VAX and it is very satisfactory.
Most people spend that time backing up code to personal computers or otherwise stealing IP belonging to the employer.
No they don't. And if they did, most people know before they hand in their resignation that they are about to hand in their resignation, and if they had dishonest intent, could do all of this long before handing in their notice.
Most employers here don't treat you as a threat or a criminal when you resign - unless they have a reason to. If you are resigning to move, take a different job and are 'leaving honorably' they'll want you to stay on to make sure everything is handed over in an orderly manner. I wouldn't want to be working for a company that's so paranoid that they eject you the moment you resign (for honorable reasons).
It's not just Tom Clancy who wrote about it - a 9/11 style hijacking actually happened for real in 1994 (using a FedEx DC-10 cargo plane rather than a passenger airliner). The crew managed to overcome their attacker though. There is a very good article about the attempted attack here:
Air traffic control - 'Die Hard' style. Don't make me laugh.
Die Hard was so wrong when it comes to ATC systems that it wasn't even wrong. Of course, showing ATC realistically wouldn't have made a good movie because the aircraft would have simply diverted to their alternates. And of course, you cannot modify the glideslope by computer - you would have to actually physically move the glideslope antenna to modify it. Even if you could, the pilot not flying would have noticed they were going below minimums from his radar altimeter.
With the exception of news sites, the Internet in my part of the world (Texas) didn't even notice. No delays to emails, and non-news sites were running perfectly well.
Similar tracking systems (Mode S transponders) exist for planes, but they are not in widespread use and are unlikely to be in widespread use in the near future, because they are so expensive. You can take off VFR in a light plane in many parts of the US, and no one will see you or track you (there are great swathes of the US without even radar coverage, like most of the western US below about 12,000 ft).
Even where you have radar coverage, VFR traffic is only tracked if the pilot voluntarily calls up and asks for flight following (except for certain types of airspace).
Oh, I agree the 'quasi-governmental force is perverse' - it's just that the argument 'we own it' is totally bogus, because the US now only owns a small fraction, and doesn't even 'own' many of the root servers.
In any case, the issue is largely irrelevant - allow the UN to make their own root servers if they want - no one will use them, just like no one uses the alternative roots. As for IP allocations, the UN can't force ICANN to give that up either, except by forcing all the other nations in the world to make a new, separate Internet - and that won't happen either.
You don't even own the 'root zone server' (actually, it's servers - there's more than one). Many of the root servers are located outside the United States these days. Even if the IP address is notionally one that is geographically in the United States, thanks to anycast, many of the servers that actually respond to that address are located elsewhere.
Actually, you didn't build most of it nor do you own anything more than a small fraction of it. Most of the internet today is outside of the United States, bought for and paid by non-US organizations and citizens.
However, having said that (and as a non-US resident), the current way of running the Internet has worked pretty well, and I'd rather see ICANN carry on as it is (imperfect as it may be) than the UN having *anything* to do with the Internet.
It'd be a thin *server*, not client. HTML+JavaScript interface would be pretty awful - instead it'd be better to use the X Window System. The X clients (i.e. the programs) can run on the Linksys, and the X server (i.e. where the framebuffer is) on the computer with the keyboard and mouse etc.
It'd be fairly pointless as anything other than a neat hack, though,
I have an old VAX which runs OpenBSD. It has no frame buffer (it doesn't even have a keyboard port - the only way of interacting with the VAX is through a serial terminal or over Ethernet), but GUI programs can be run on it, displaying on my Mac or Linux PC.
In which case, Sun is a bit late in the game. You can already get RHEL effectively for free by using CentOS which is built from the RHEL SRPMs. If you decide to need paid support, it would be painless to switch from CentOS to RHEL because under the covers they are the same thing.
I don't know how long ago this was, but none of those things require recompiling the kernel. (What hardware did you have? I've not come across a PC that won't run Fedora Core with all devices working in the last couple of years - the exception being winmodems because these rely on proprietary drivers on WIndows and often haven't been reverse-engineered to run on anything other than Windows).
The packaging system already exists for Linux - it's called Autopackage (http://www.autopackage.org/) and it works very well for producing distro-neutral installers. For Oolite-Linux, we do the same as most Windows developers - bundle up the dependencies. For the end user, an Autopackage is just as easy as a Windows installer. Unlike Windows Installer though, Autopackage can resolve dependencies if there are any.
'ifconfig' generally, from the command line, is not used to write changes anyway on any OS - they will be lost the next time you reboot. Generally, each OS has a permanent store for IP configuration (such as/etc/hostname.interfacename on OpenBSD, or/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts on RedHat). Generally, ifconfig is used read-only on any modern unixalike.
In 1993, I had a Linux system with a 40MB hard disk, 16MB RAM and an 80486-33 processor. The machine was amazing - I could recompile the kernel and the machine wouldn't even _swap_.
I ran X on it, too - using olvwm (Open Look Virtual Window Manager), and the rudimentary TCP/IP stack that Linux had in those days. I learned about Xlib programming on that computer - X, a compiler, development libraries - all fit in 40MB. Admittedly, I had about 512K left to play around with after everything I needed was installed.
You could custom make a Linux from Scratch system that wouldn't take that much more space these days (things have gotten bigger as programs and the kernel have gained features).
If you want to get that pedantic, even boats or nuclear power plants are ultimately air cooled. The ocean for a boat is merely a very big heatsink that gives up the heat to the air, same for a power plant's cooling lake or cooling towers.
They do a DNS lookup *first*, then submit the search if the lookup returns NXDOMAIN. On a local network, the domain part may be set by default, so asking your resolver to resolve 'foo' may come up with a valid IP address (and it may not be in the hosts file). This is transparent to the browser - it's not the browser checking what the default domain for the computer is, it's the TCP/IP library for your system. So this system will fit in just fine with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh stop that self-loathing. Humans aren't actually particularly violent - in fact, we are a lot less violent than most other animals (the fact we can live in cities of several million people, and virtually all of us will still be alive at the end of the day).
The difference between us and other animals is that when we do violence, we are often much much better at it. Oh, and we invent things like religion to justify it.
Not really.
Product placement is nothing new - remember that James Bond movie from about ten years ago that featured a couple of hackers? It had very major and blatant product placements from IBM - all the IBM monitors had enlarged IBM badges (about 6 times larger than they are in real life), and any computer not being used was showing a full-screen IBM OS/2 logo. It was so blatant it took something away from the movie. I don't want to watch a 120 minute infomercial thanks.
Firstly, the vast majority of the traffic is not actually big-jet-commercial (they are just more visible because they are bigger and make an awful lot more noise). Not all commercial planes are 'tracked' either. Those flights around the Grand Canyon are below radar coverage, pipeline patrol is generally VFR and outside of radar coverage, helicopter flights taking workers to platforms in the Gulf of Mexico usually aren't talking to anyone either. There are also still areas (albeit limited) that passenger flights are out of radar coverage, for example, during the approach phase for the commuter airliners going into somewhere like Victoria Regional in Texas which doesn't even have a control tower.
Where airliners are getting radar cover, it's hardly tracking to the meter either - the radar just isn't that accurate. The radar also relies on the airliner's transponder returns for altitude which is only accurate within 100 feet at best.
I don't think the speed at which the Earth's magnetic poles change has any bearing on bird lifespans. The weather has a *much* greater effect on their navigation, and changes over a period of hours. Once you're airborne, you won't notice that the 20 knot tailwind has changed to a 20 knot crosswind unless you're supplimenting your magnetic sense with something else. At the speed a bird flies, even a modest crosswind would blow them a long way off course over even just ten miles or so.
Most birds have extremely good eyesight. I read recently that research indicates birds use ground features to aid navigation, just like a VFR pilot in a light aircraft - they follow roads, railway lines, ground features like mountains and rivers.
It's unlikely birds etc. will have a real problem at all. Or even people who use compases to navigate their small boats.
The poles have been moving around since before life began - and has certainly shifted around significantly whilst birds that can use it have existed. In any case, a compass can only really provide you with rough navigation - a bird won't be using the magnetic pole as its sole navigational system (if it did, then normal day to day weather changes would screw them up much more than a pole that takes 50 years to move to Siberia - 50 years being many times longer than most migratory birds lifespans). Birds will at most use their in built compass to tell them the general cardinal direction they are travelling in, and will refine it by other means to take them to their exact destination - and they'll adapt quite happily as they have done during the many times the pole has moved around while migratory birds have existed.
Linux *is* just a kernel - it doesn't actually come with all the GUI 'bloatware'. If you really want, don't use a big distribution - roll your own. I learned C on a Linux system with a 40MB disk and 16MB of RAM (and had X with olvwm - not much space left over on that 40MB).
There's no reason why you can't still do that with Linux. The kernel's a bit bigger than it was in 1993, but you can either build your own custom one, or only put the modules on you actually use. GNOME isn't part of Linux, neither is KDE. They are merely userland programs that can run on the Linux kernel (and run on many other operating systems).
If you want small but very useful (certainly on the server end) try OpenBSD. I have the latest OpenBSD (3.8) running on my VAX and it is very satisfactory.
No they don't. And if they did, most people know before they hand in their resignation that they are about to hand in their resignation, and if they had dishonest intent, could do all of this long before handing in their notice.
Most employers here don't treat you as a threat or a criminal when you resign - unless they have a reason to. If you are resigning to move, take a different job and are 'leaving honorably' they'll want you to stay on to make sure everything is handed over in an orderly manner. I wouldn't want to be working for a company that's so paranoid that they eject you the moment you resign (for honorable reasons).
It's not just Tom Clancy who wrote about it - a 9/11 style hijacking actually happened for real in 1994 (using a FedEx DC-10 cargo plane rather than a passenger airliner). The crew managed to overcome their attacker though. There is a very good article about the attempted attack here:
http://www.avweb.com/news/profiles/182918-1.html
Air traffic control - 'Die Hard' style. Don't make me laugh.
Die Hard was so wrong when it comes to ATC systems that it wasn't even wrong. Of course, showing ATC realistically wouldn't have made a good movie because the aircraft would have simply diverted to their alternates. And of course, you cannot modify the glideslope by computer - you would have to actually physically move the glideslope antenna to modify it. Even if you could, the pilot not flying would have noticed they were going below minimums from his radar altimeter.
With the exception of news sites, the Internet in my part of the world (Texas) didn't even notice. No delays to emails, and non-news sites were running perfectly well.
Similar tracking systems (Mode S transponders) exist for planes, but they are not in widespread use and are unlikely to be in widespread use in the near future, because they are so expensive. You can take off VFR in a light plane in many parts of the US, and no one will see you or track you (there are great swathes of the US without even radar coverage, like most of the western US below about 12,000 ft).
Even where you have radar coverage, VFR traffic is only tracked if the pilot voluntarily calls up and asks for flight following (except for certain types of airspace).
Oh, I agree the 'quasi-governmental force is perverse' - it's just that the argument 'we own it' is totally bogus, because the US now only owns a small fraction, and doesn't even 'own' many of the root servers.
In any case, the issue is largely irrelevant - allow the UN to make their own root servers if they want - no one will use them, just like no one uses the alternative roots. As for IP allocations, the UN can't force ICANN to give that up either, except by forcing all the other nations in the world to make a new, separate Internet - and that won't happen either.
You don't even own the 'root zone server' (actually, it's servers - there's more than one). Many of the root servers are located outside the United States these days. Even if the IP address is notionally one that is geographically in the United States, thanks to anycast, many of the servers that actually respond to that address are located elsewhere.
Actually, you didn't build most of it nor do you own anything more than a small fraction of it. Most of the internet today is outside of the United States, bought for and paid by non-US organizations and citizens.
However, having said that (and as a non-US resident), the current way of running the Internet has worked pretty well, and I'd rather see ICANN carry on as it is (imperfect as it may be) than the UN having *anything* to do with the Internet.
It has been said in British government circles is that the ship of state is the only ship that leaks from the top!
It'd be a thin *server*, not client.
HTML+JavaScript interface would be pretty awful - instead it'd be better to use the X Window System. The X clients (i.e. the programs) can run on the Linksys, and the X server (i.e. where the framebuffer is) on the computer with the keyboard and mouse etc.
It'd be fairly pointless as anything other than a neat hack, though,
I have an old VAX which runs OpenBSD. It has no frame buffer (it doesn't even have a keyboard port - the only way of interacting with the VAX is through a serial terminal or over Ethernet), but GUI programs can be run on it, displaying on my Mac or Linux PC.
In which case, Sun is a bit late in the game. You can already get RHEL effectively for free by using CentOS which is built from the RHEL SRPMs. If you decide to need paid support, it would be painless to switch from CentOS to RHEL because under the covers they are the same thing.
I don't know how long ago this was, but none of those things require recompiling the kernel. (What hardware did you have? I've not come across a PC that won't run Fedora Core with all devices working in the last couple of years - the exception being winmodems because these rely on proprietary drivers on WIndows and often haven't been reverse-engineered to run on anything other than Windows).
The packaging system already exists for Linux - it's called Autopackage (http://www.autopackage.org/) and it works very well for producing distro-neutral installers. For Oolite-Linux, we do the same as most Windows developers - bundle up the dependencies. For the end user, an Autopackage is just as easy as a Windows installer. Unlike Windows Installer though, Autopackage can resolve dependencies if there are any.
'ifconfig' generally, from the command line, is not used to write changes anyway on any OS - they will be lost the next time you reboot. Generally, each OS has a permanent store for IP configuration (such as /etc/hostname.interfacename on OpenBSD, or /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts on RedHat). Generally, ifconfig is used read-only on any modern unixalike.
Spelling tip: It's spelled 'grammar'.
In 1993, I had a Linux system with a 40MB hard disk, 16MB RAM and an 80486-33 processor. The machine was amazing - I could recompile the kernel and the machine wouldn't even _swap_.
I ran X on it, too - using olvwm (Open Look Virtual Window Manager), and the rudimentary TCP/IP stack that Linux had in those days. I learned about Xlib programming on that computer - X, a compiler, development libraries - all fit in 40MB. Admittedly, I had about 512K left to play around with after everything I needed was installed.
You could custom make a Linux from Scratch system that wouldn't take that much more space these days (things have gotten bigger as programs and the kernel have gained features).
If you want to get that pedantic, even boats or nuclear power plants are ultimately air cooled. The ocean for a boat is merely a very big heatsink that gives up the heat to the air, same for a power plant's cooling lake or cooling towers.
Actually - they don't quite do that.
They do a DNS lookup *first*, then submit the search if the lookup returns NXDOMAIN. On a local network, the domain part may be set by default, so asking your resolver to resolve 'foo' may come up with a valid IP address (and it may not be in the hosts file). This is transparent to the browser - it's not the browser checking what the default domain for the computer is, it's the TCP/IP library for your system. So this system will fit in just fine with that.