If I was presented with the problem, "We have lots of customers, and we want to host them quickly and easily on our domain", it'd be just about the first thing I would think of. I think it's just about the first thing *anyone* would think of who was 'ordinarily skilled in the art' - and that's why it's so commonly done. The bar is set far too low on what's non-obvious - THAT'S where the system breaks down.
There is still the disposal problem for coal, too (mercury contamination in the ocean's fish, acid rain, smog) which is long term. At least with nuclear power, it's possible to lock down the waste into a small, known area. Burning dead dinosaurs spreads the contamination with the wind.
The free market does not always know best. Car companies in the early twentieth century bought up public transportation and shut it down to force people to buy cars.
...in which case you've given an example of a not-free market.
The China Syndrome is fiction. The fuel will very rapidly go non-critical as it disperses, and won't penetrate particularly far. Indeed, at Chernobyl it collected at the bottom of the plant (they sent robotic explorers with cameras down there to take a look).
In fact, my original MTAs must be licensed was really more of a way to see if I could get a troll modded up to +5 than a serious post. However, over the last year, I've started thinking that it might actually be a good idea. The licensing I had in mind was rather like the way amateur radio operators are licensed, with a fairly heavy technical content (but not aimed at a particular MTA). Email abuse coming from the MTA could result in suspension or revocation of the MTA operator's license. License data (i.e. who's ticket the email went under) would be added to the headers of email in the form of a digital signature, which the receiving MTA would be required to check (under the conditions of its operator license) for validity and against a certificate revocation list.
We first got colour TV in the late 1970s. My grandfather (who's still alive) was a TV repair man, and he supplied us with TVs that people were getting rid of, and which he'd fixed.
Our TVs were still full of valves (tubes) until 1989. We bought our first semiconductor TV then - a Sony. We lived in quite a weak signal area, and it often meant fiddling with the vertical hold.
Valves take a while to heat up, so you'd turn on the TV, and about 15 seconds later, the sound would start to pick up in volume as the audio parts got up to temperature, and about another 15 seconds later, the picture would start filling up the screen (starting small and gradually widening to fill the screen). I liked it best when you turned them off - the picture would suddenly zoom out, and then dissolve into three blobs - a red, green and blue blob that would persist often for several minutes.
When I bought my first TV aged 16 in 1988, it was a valve TV - I used it as a monitor for my second-hand Sinclair QL. (I bought them both for GBP5 each). Not many people have had the experience of learning 68000 asm using a monitor full of thermionic valves:-) The worst bit of it was that I could never get the colour convergence quite right (you had to take the back cover off the TV and play with about half a dozen controls).
At a certain three-lettered company with blue stripes over its logo which I spent a few years working at, we had: 1. numerous software engineers over 40 in the department I worked in. None considered fossils. 2. some H1/L1 workers who could - and did - complain to management if things weren't right, and who DID NOT work 80 hour weeks 3. good software developers got rewarded well.
I wouldn't have left had the company had a presence where I really wanted to live, so it was with some regret that I had to quit when I moved.
Set theory is probably one of the most important things in software development that I've come across. So many problems I've had to solve in real world software development were solved by using basic set theory - everything from figuring out the applicable services and charges for Weighing, Mailing and Rating for the USPS front counter system to understanding how to construct good SQL queries.
Ignore set theory at your peril. If you think groking set theory is irrelevant, you're going to have one hell of a wake up call at some point.
Try and learn about hardware. I know it seems like a completely alien idea if you're a software "engineer" (I prefer the term software developer, and that's what I called myself, but this is possibly pedantic hair splitting, but few software "engineers" have a B.Eng or similar - most have a BSc).
I used to be a full-time software developer, but now I've moved into the bit generically known as "IT". Some days, I can be writing C, doing low level bit-twiddling for a test suite for a custom printer we're planning on using. Friday, I installed a 48-port switch in the network rack. Today, I wired in two new servers and installed some software. Last week, I set up a system to write hard drive images 30 at a time with the help of a Knoppix CD I customized. Last Thursday, I configured a new OpenBSD firewall for a brand new test network. Today, I helped a user learn how to use WinZip. Last year, with knowledge gained from the software development experiece I had, I selected a new counter system for our franchisees.
My job can't be outsourced - it requires physical presence. I get to do different things every day. I even get to weild a screwdriver and there's even the odd opportunity to inflict injuries on innocent electronics with a solderin iron. Two years ago, I was doing exactly what you were doing (but I had quite a lot of interest in it - creating new software systems is something I find fun). But this is more fun - I still do a little bit of software development, but I get to do an awful lot of other stuff.
Yes your coworkers (lusers) may reinstall bonzi everyday but as a plumber, people urinate, and shit, and whatever down the toilet everyday, and you have to work in it! Wouldn't you think that gets more annoying?
If you've ever seen Life of Grime, you'll know that some people quite enjoy working in shit and unblocking drains.
On the plus side, think how strong your immune system will be after being exposed to every disease shat down the toilet.
It's quite simple: the smart IT practicioner installs a system policy that forbids the users from installing BonziBuddy and other spyware, then patches the OS so MyDoom doesn't get spread.
The key to much IT happiness is preventative maintenance.
We've survived (as a nation) with far worse things than a single big bomb going off.
The bigger threat by far is that the oil will run out. I still don't see a lot being done to prepare to live in a world where oil is scarce - most of us depend on food that couldn't be grown unless we have plentiful oil. The signs that the oil is diminishing are plain to see - oil companies now call themselves energy companies instead of oil companies, one major oil company has had to make not one but two announcements that their oil reserves are significantly smaller than they thought.
Personally, I'm not having children. I think it would be irresponsible to bring yet more people into a world that soon won't be able to support them.
I lived through the cold war. I was scared shitless as a kid by films like Threads. (A friend sent me an MPEG-4 of this film recently, and I still found it incredibly depressing, despite some of the obvious made-for-TV effects. The acting, storyline and directing makes up greatly for the low budget). When I first saw the film, aged about 13, I only saw half of it because it scared me so much I couldn't keep watching. I then couldn't sleep for weeks, and night lightning from summer thunderstorms woke me in cold sweats. Up until that point, "nuclear attack" had just been words, and I thought of it in a way like WWII - cities in rubble, but people cheerfully rebuilding it. Threads changed this - I suddenly realised with horror that not only was nuclear war possible (and with all the 'Protect and Survive' stuff - the early 80s was the height of nuclear paranoia in Britain), it seemed inevitable.
However, I got to a stage where I could stop worrying about it, and maybe laugh and make jokes about nuclear annihilation. This is because I finally realised there was absolutely NOTHING I can do about it, and therefore it's a bit pointless worrying about it - all I can do is hope it won't happen. In a bizarre Dr. Strangelove way, I learned to stop worrying "and love the bomb" (well, maybe not love the bomb, but I didn't spend half my day worrying about it).
My cellphone can be used a bit like an ST:TOS communicator - flip the keyboard up so it's angled at 45 degrees, and hit 'Speaker' after dialling the number. It also has voice tags so you can voice dial for the full effect. Nokia 6820.
The solution is "don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out".
All the work done by European MS offices must still be done. If they pulled out all together, this work would be done by Apple, SuSE, Mandrake, RedHat et al. I'm sure there'd be turmoil in the short term, but in the long term the EU would be better off without a company that blackmails it if it is punished for breaking the law.
Microsoft aren't a Kamikazi company. Threatening to pull out would be suicidal - do you think any other government around the world is going to be hot for MS products if they threaten to pull out if they break your laws? The EU has on the order of 400M citizens - that's a lot of potential Windows licensees - MS has potentially a lot more business in the EU than in the United States. They aren't going to even think of threatening to pull out of the EU.
Nokia do make nice devices. Phones, though, are a compromise. I've had a look at things like the XDA (you look a real dork holding a big wide PDA to your ear when making a phone call, and it also runs Windows - I don't want MS bloatware in my pocket thanks). The Sony-Ericcson T800/T900 has a much nicer form factor, but you've still got to type with a stylus when you text someone or need to enter a URL.
I bought a new phone less than a month ago, and I looked at all of these. Then I saw the Nokia 6820. It is the same size as my old cheap-o basic Nokia phone, so it fits easily in any pocket I care to put it in...but it folds out - with a full QWERTY keyboard. Although I had to compromise in screen size (standard mobile phone screen) to have a genuine pocket-sized phone, the fold-out keyboard more than makes up for it: texting is fast, if I'm waiting for a plane, I can go onto IRC (using a neat little open source J2ME IRC client), I can ssh into a server if I get the call saying there's trouble and do some basic troubleshooting all with a keyboard. I couldn't care less about cameras particularly.
The camera in my 6820 is useful in case of emergency, or if I really need an image right now and to hell with the quality because it means I now always have a camera with me. If I get rear-ended at traffic lights, I can take some photos of the incident to supply with the insurance forms as an example.
There has been talk on the lkml about using more of the rings, but IIRC, the general consensus that on Intel processors, usin the other rings wasn't worth more than a bucket of warm spit.
This is possibly old hat. Back in the 1960s, when my Dad was just a kid, he and his classmates went on a tour of a sewage plant in Worcestershire, England.
The methane they cracked off the sewage plant was used to heat the local swimming pool.
So how are you going to make a computer display with a low pressure sodium lamp, which has a very narrow spectrum (so narrow that they are being abandoned for use in streelights in preference to the less efficient HP sodium lamp or mercury vapour lamp). Or perhaps light a room?
OLEDs are being designed to solve a different problem than HID lamps were made to solve.
A script kidddy would need to get local access to the box to be able to run code that could exploit this. Not a worry.
Let me disabuse you of this 'Not a worry' right away before you become an admin on real systems.
Treat all local root exploits as if they are remote root exploits. Why?
Can you guarantee someone on your server isn't running a web (PHP or CGI) script that has a local, unprivileged user exploit which can then be used to exploit the local root exploit?
Can you guarantee all your users have good passwords?
Can you guarantee your users aren't actually script kiddies?
I almost got my machine rooted using a local root exploit last year when the script kiddie exploited an insecure PHP script to install the root exploit. It was just fortunate I had set up a workaround to prevent the root exploit from working.
Slashdot Mirror
...which is an obvious use of DNS wildcards.
If I was presented with the problem, "We have lots of customers, and we want to host them quickly and easily on our domain", it'd be just about the first thing I would think of. I think it's just about the first thing *anyone* would think of who was 'ordinarily skilled in the art' - and that's why it's so commonly done. The bar is set far too low on what's non-obvious - THAT'S where the system breaks down.
There is still the disposal problem for coal, too (mercury contamination in the ocean's fish, acid rain, smog) which is long term. At least with nuclear power, it's possible to lock down the waste into a small, known area. Burning dead dinosaurs spreads the contamination with the wind.
The China Syndrome is fiction. The fuel will very rapidly go non-critical as it disperses, and won't penetrate particularly far. Indeed, at Chernobyl it collected at the bottom of the plant (they sent robotic explorers with cameras down there to take a look).
No, I came up with that idea!
In fact, my original MTAs must be licensed was really more of a way to see if I could get a troll modded up to +5 than a serious post. However, over the last year, I've started thinking that it might actually be a good idea. The licensing I had in mind was rather like the way amateur radio operators are licensed, with a fairly heavy technical content (but not aimed at a particular MTA). Email abuse coming from the MTA could result in suspension or revocation of the MTA operator's license. License data (i.e. who's ticket the email went under) would be added to the headers of email in the form of a digital signature, which the receiving MTA would be required to check (under the conditions of its operator license) for validity and against a certificate revocation list.
We first got colour TV in the late 1970s. My grandfather (who's still alive) was a TV repair man, and he supplied us with TVs that people were getting rid of, and which he'd fixed.
:-) The worst bit of it was that I could never get the colour convergence quite right (you had to take the back cover off the TV and play with about half a dozen controls).
Our TVs were still full of valves (tubes) until 1989. We bought our first semiconductor TV then - a Sony. We lived in quite a weak signal area, and it often meant fiddling with the vertical hold.
Valves take a while to heat up, so you'd turn on the TV, and about 15 seconds later, the sound would start to pick up in volume as the audio parts got up to temperature, and about another 15 seconds later, the picture would start filling up the screen (starting small and gradually widening to fill the screen). I liked it best when you turned them off - the picture would suddenly zoom out, and then dissolve into three blobs - a red, green and blue blob that would persist often for several minutes.
When I bought my first TV aged 16 in 1988, it was a valve TV - I used it as a monitor for my second-hand Sinclair QL. (I bought them both for GBP5 each). Not many people have had the experience of learning 68000 asm using a monitor full of thermionic valves
Your rant is not my experience.
At a certain three-lettered company with blue stripes over its logo which I spent a few years working at, we had:
1. numerous software engineers over 40 in the department I worked in. None considered fossils.
2. some H1/L1 workers who could - and did - complain to management if things weren't right, and who DID NOT work 80 hour weeks
3. good software developers got rewarded well.
I wouldn't have left had the company had a presence where I really wanted to live, so it was with some regret that I had to quit when I moved.
Set theory is probably one of the most important things in software development that I've come across. So many problems I've had to solve in real world software development were solved by using basic set theory - everything from figuring out the applicable services and charges for Weighing, Mailing and Rating for the USPS front counter system to understanding how to construct good SQL queries.
Ignore set theory at your peril. If you think groking set theory is irrelevant, you're going to have one hell of a wake up call at some point.
some stuff to defeat the lameness filter.
Try and learn about hardware. I know it seems like a completely alien idea if you're a software "engineer" (I prefer the term software developer, and that's what I called myself, but this is possibly pedantic hair splitting, but few software "engineers" have a B.Eng or similar - most have a BSc).
I used to be a full-time software developer, but now I've moved into the bit generically known as "IT". Some days, I can be writing C, doing low level bit-twiddling for a test suite for a custom printer we're planning on using. Friday, I installed a 48-port switch in the network rack. Today, I wired in two new servers and installed some software. Last week, I set up a system to write hard drive images 30 at a time with the help of a Knoppix CD I customized. Last Thursday, I configured a new OpenBSD firewall for a brand new test network. Today, I helped a user learn how to use WinZip. Last year, with knowledge gained from the software development experiece I had, I selected a new counter system for our franchisees.
My job can't be outsourced - it requires physical presence. I get to do different things every day. I even get to weild a screwdriver and there's even the odd opportunity to inflict injuries on innocent electronics with a solderin iron. Two years ago, I was doing exactly what you were doing (but I had quite a lot of interest in it - creating new software systems is something I find fun). But this is more fun - I still do a little bit of software development, but I get to do an awful lot of other stuff.
If you've ever seen Life of Grime, you'll know that some people quite enjoy working in shit and unblocking drains.
On the plus side, think how strong your immune system will be after being exposed to every disease shat down the toilet.
It's quite simple: the smart IT practicioner installs a system policy that forbids the users from installing BonziBuddy and other spyware, then patches the OS so MyDoom doesn't get spread.
The key to much IT happiness is preventative maintenance.
The BOFH's motto:
"We're not happy till you're not happy"
Since most of the machines are made in Taiwan ROC, I don't think it's got anything to do with where the computer was manufactured.
You'll probably find the only computers manufactured in the US will be higher-end servers. Laptops will all be made in the far-East.
We've survived (as a nation) with far worse things than a single big bomb going off.
The bigger threat by far is that the oil will run out. I still don't see a lot being done to prepare to live in a world where oil is scarce - most of us depend on food that couldn't be grown unless we have plentiful oil. The signs that the oil is diminishing are plain to see - oil companies now call themselves energy companies instead of oil companies, one major oil company has had to make not one but two announcements that their oil reserves are significantly smaller than they thought.
Personally, I'm not having children. I think it would be irresponsible to bring yet more people into a world that soon won't be able to support them.
I lived through the cold war. I was scared shitless as a kid by films like Threads. (A friend sent me an MPEG-4 of this film recently, and I still found it incredibly depressing, despite some of the obvious made-for-TV effects. The acting, storyline and directing makes up greatly for the low budget). When I first saw the film, aged about 13, I only saw half of it because it scared me so much I couldn't keep watching. I then couldn't sleep for weeks, and night lightning from summer thunderstorms woke me in cold sweats. Up until that point, "nuclear attack" had just been words, and I thought of it in a way like WWII - cities in rubble, but people cheerfully rebuilding it. Threads changed this - I suddenly realised with horror that not only was nuclear war possible (and with all the 'Protect and Survive' stuff - the early 80s was the height of nuclear paranoia in Britain), it seemed inevitable.
However, I got to a stage where I could stop worrying about it, and maybe laugh and make jokes about nuclear annihilation. This is because I finally realised there was absolutely NOTHING I can do about it, and therefore it's a bit pointless worrying about it - all I can do is hope it won't happen. In a bizarre Dr. Strangelove way, I learned to stop worrying "and love the bomb" (well, maybe not love the bomb, but I didn't spend half my day worrying about it).
My cellphone can be used a bit like an ST:TOS communicator - flip the keyboard up so it's angled at 45 degrees, and hit 'Speaker' after dialling the number. It also has voice tags so you can voice dial for the full effect. Nokia 6820.
The solution is "don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out".
All the work done by European MS offices must still be done. If they pulled out all together, this work would be done by Apple, SuSE, Mandrake, RedHat et al. I'm sure there'd be turmoil in the short term, but in the long term the EU would be better off without a company that blackmails it if it is punished for breaking the law.
Microsoft aren't a Kamikazi company. Threatening to pull out would be suicidal - do you think any other government around the world is going to be hot for MS products if they threaten to pull out if they break your laws? The EU has on the order of 400M citizens - that's a lot of potential Windows licensees - MS has potentially a lot more business in the EU than in the United States. They aren't going to even think of threatening to pull out of the EU.
WLIrc. Got it from SourceForge.
Nokia do make nice devices. Phones, though, are a compromise. I've had a look at things like the XDA (you look a real dork holding a big wide PDA to your ear when making a phone call, and it also runs Windows - I don't want MS bloatware in my pocket thanks). The Sony-Ericcson T800/T900 has a much nicer form factor, but you've still got to type with a stylus when you text someone or need to enter a URL.
I bought a new phone less than a month ago, and I looked at all of these. Then I saw the Nokia 6820. It is the same size as my old cheap-o basic Nokia phone, so it fits easily in any pocket I care to put it in...but it folds out - with a full QWERTY keyboard. Although I had to compromise in screen size (standard mobile phone screen) to have a genuine pocket-sized phone, the fold-out keyboard more than makes up for it: texting is fast, if I'm waiting for a plane, I can go onto IRC (using a neat little open source J2ME IRC client), I can ssh into a server if I get the call saying there's trouble and do some basic troubleshooting all with a keyboard. I couldn't care less about cameras particularly.
The camera in my 6820 is useful in case of emergency, or if I really need an image right now and to hell with the quality because it means I now always have a camera with me. If I get rear-ended at traffic lights, I can take some photos of the incident to supply with the insurance forms as an example.
There has been talk on the lkml about using more of the rings, but IIRC, the general consensus that on Intel processors, usin the other rings wasn't worth more than a bucket of warm spit.
This is possibly old hat. Back in the 1960s, when my Dad was just a kid, he and his classmates went on a tour of a sewage plant in Worcestershire, England.
The methane they cracked off the sewage plant was used to heat the local swimming pool.
The late 1990s called. They want their business model back!
So how are you going to make a computer display with a low pressure sodium lamp, which has a very narrow spectrum (so narrow that they are being abandoned for use in streelights in preference to the less efficient HP sodium lamp or mercury vapour lamp). Or perhaps light a room?
OLEDs are being designed to solve a different problem than HID lamps were made to solve.
Let me disabuse you of this 'Not a worry' right away before you become an admin on real systems.
Treat all local root exploits as if they are remote root exploits. Why?
Can you guarantee someone on your server isn't running a web (PHP or CGI) script that has a local, unprivileged user exploit which can then be used to exploit the local root exploit?
Can you guarantee all your users have good passwords?
Can you guarantee your users aren't actually script kiddies?
I almost got my machine rooted using a local root exploit last year when the script kiddie exploited an insecure PHP script to install the root exploit. It was just fortunate I had set up a workaround to prevent the root exploit from working.