only in large population centres could you get the stuff you want
The big win of the Internet is that it can abate the historical necessity for talented people in less-populated areas to seek fame and fortune in the proverbial Big City. We may now be able to reverse the trend toward ridiculous over-concentration of population, and all of the crime, pollution, and other ills that seem to be bound up with it.
Using full sized cases seems like a rather inefficient use of space to me.
You aren't looking at the long-term situation. A year or two from now, they'll upgrade to a cluster of G6's or whatever, and have a 1100 cases that just need keyboards, monitors, and mice (many recycled from older machines) attached to them to work as high-powered workstations throughout the university. You can't just stick a 1U on someone's desk.
This gives them 1101 good computers - a kickass cluster now, and 1100 workstations later.
Don't give me that, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings! Shut your festering gob! The spelling 'Monte' is appropriate for French or Spanish, but not English. Spell it 'Monty', you
vacuous, coffee-nosed, maloderous, pervert!!!
No, it talks about the differences between decimal and binary measurement schemes:
According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system.
The result is that a hard drive described as being 20 gigabytes would actually have only 18.6 gigabytes of readable capacity, the lawsuit said.
This is old news, really. Take a '1.44 MB' floppy, for instance. It has 80 tracks per side, 18 sectors per track, and two sides, which is 1440 * 1024 bytes. That's a mixture between binary and decimal, and drive manufacturers have used any number between the two that they felt like ever since.
Email is historically the Internet's killer app, precisely because of interoperability. People can exchange messages without worrying about what client the recipient is using (other than the recurring argument about HTML content).
To put it in perspective, imagine how telephone service would be if my Kyocera cellphone could not receive calls from Nokia phones. I know we have to use different cells that use the various schemes, but if the providers didn't gate traffic to each other, nobody would use them. The only reason we put up with this crap from the IM services is because (most of us) don't pay anything for them.
"Ah," you say! "But the biometric passphrase will protect me!"
Yeah, until they "borrow" your finger.
Bruce Schneier defined the authentication tripod years ago:
Something you have
Something you know
Something you are
The combination of the keyfob, the biometric, and a password is as good as it gets. To really do it up right, the keyfob has male and female USB ends, which allows the 'connect the keyfobs to trade public keys' and also would allow a USB keyboard to connect through the keyfob, so that it could do the password part without passing the keystrokes on to the computer (that might have a keylogger installed).
The Definitive Misspelling Post
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I think your post is proof that we definately do need the middle letters.
But it's apparently not so definite which letters we need.
The trick was (if I remember correctly) adding/I=B000-B7FFF to 32K more "upper" memory since that memory area was only used for monochrome video cards..
And even then, you couldn't get MSCDEX to load in it, because it took up more than 32K before it went resident (at just over 28K, IIRC). So I wrote a little utility package (2 TSRs and 2 drivers) that let you 'borrow' memory from the color text area at B8000-BFFFF, then recall the 'loan' after the transient part was returned to the OS.
I released that thing as shareware (There's even one site that Google knows about that still has VID_HOLE.ZIP [for their subscribers], which actually works under Win9x for Real Mode drivers) but nobody ever sent me the $5 registration. I wonder if anyone (other than I) ever found a use for the thing?
That makes no sense. Coming up with a solution to a problem is only half of resolving it. If you have problems implimenting your solution then you fail the entire task. If you are hungry and you end up burning your dinner, you failed the execution. If you prepare for a job interview, but mumble and stutter through it, you fail the execution.
Right, Coach. And if you never consider the possibility that you've got the wrong plan, you'll keep on trying to do the wrong thing more efficiently. You'll work on execution, but never admit that maybe, just maybe, you also need a good plan to execute. Here in Kansas City, this is known as Schottenheimer Syndrome. Excellent execution of a mediocre plan is often just good enough to keep you in the hunt, but it doesn't win the Big Game.
And that's not just true in sports, but also in business - I get emails all the time at work that basically encourage us to work harder executing the plans handed down from On High, but never for a moment consider that it's a suboptimal plan, right up to the email that announces a new plan to execute, from the same people who announced the last one....
That all sounds pretty wonderful to me. If you're making meth, you're dealing in death and ruined lives.
Yes, you're running the risk that the storm troopers will break in and shoot you (death), bulldoze your house, or that you'll be sent to prison, (either of which ruins your life).
No matter how much you may dislike the alleged effects of a drug on someone, that doesn't make it a 'chemical weapon'.
Welcome to the US Constitution
Please login: root
password: drugs
You have mail.
# date
Wed Sep 12 08:03:42 2001
# passwd
Please enter new password: terrorism
Re-enter new password: terrorism
Password changed.
I care more about execution than I did in the old days. In the old days, vision was really important. Today, you've got to have execution with vision.
This is the same thing you hear from football coaches when people talk about the plays the call. Instead of admitting they called the wrong play, they want to talk about how the play was executed. Far more important to me was this:
Obviously, Microsoft is not operating on market discipline or they couldn't raise their prices with declining unit volumes in the face of post-bubble. They couldn't bundle the houseboat with the sport utility vehicle like they do with Windows and Office.
That's the only thing we need to worry about. All the rest is simple -- everybody trying to make their own case.
He's saying that Microsoft isn't evil because they write crappy software; they're evil because they aren't being punished by the market for it.
Actually, I strongly doubt that Darl personally reads/. himself. But I equally strongly believe that one or more of his minions reads every single word of every SCO thread here and passes along to the higher pay grades an Executive Summary and anything they think they can use against us to make the case that Evil Slashdot Lunix Hackers are coordinating DDoS attacks against them, etc.
Adding "at" to the end of a question like that is not only useless,
Of course it's useless. Rearranging the sentence to move the 'at' doesn't help, because the word 'where' implies the concept of 'at' - you wouldn't correctly say "Can you tell me at where is the library?" - and yet people use obvious redundancies like that all the time... I just had a conversation with Monsterette 2 earlier today about her use of the expression 'ink pen' - I told her that there are only two reasons why one would need to clarify that the word 'pen' refers to a writing instrument that puts ink on paper:
You work around animals a lot, and a 'pen' is where you keep them.
You feel the need to distinguish between 'pen', a writing instrument; and 'pin', a pointed, thin metal rod that penetrates through one or more layers of cloth; and you are either functionally illiterate (and don't know they're two different words) or speak with such an accent as to render the difference undetectable.
As the former does not happen to apply to her, she leaves her listener to conclude the latter.
it makes the speaker sound very ignorant and uneducated.
So does describing atomic energy and weapons as 'nuke-you-lar', as our current President says it, or even 'nuke-ier', as former President Carter - a trained nuclear engineer - does.
I bet they've both signed bills into law with an ink pen.
I think the model that will make the most sense is something analogous to prepaid cellular service. I don't use a cell phone enough to justify the typical flat monthly fee, but it's nice to have it for when I do want to use it. So, even though I'm not exactly their target demographic, I went with Virgin Mobile
Calls are 25 cents a minute for the first 10 minutes in any day, and 10 cents a minute for the rest of the day. There are other services that can be billed to my account as well. I have to 'top up' by adding a minimum of $20 to my account every 90 days, and I never use that much airtime, which is why I like the service. Even if I did use it more than that, it'd still be way less than the conventional accounts are.
I don't see every phone call I make or take on my VISA statement - I just see that $20 charge to Virgin every few months. (You can go cashless by buying a $20 card at various retailers.) I can check out my Virgin transactions online for details, with no dead trees or postage stamps involved. If I could use my prepaid airtime account to do micropayments, I'd probably do it. Sir Richard - are you paying attention?
Viruses and the holes they exploit are the responsibility of the programmers, and they are in a better position to fix these problems rather than trying to distribute the responsibility to users.
Well, here's what the article says about that [emphasis mine]:
To combat threats, software companies have been trying to make technology easier to use -- Microsoft Corp., for instance, is considering automating the download and installation of software fixes.
No user intervention required.
Think about this, folks. Think very, very hard about it. I'll wait.
. . .
Did you get it yet? Isn't installing programs without user intervention the PROBLEM? What happens when a cracker compromises a machine in a position to play Man In The Middle? and some of the 'software fixes' you get are actually worms?
I'm sure that part of the scheme will include installing the pubkey of MS' software update authority, and code that refuses to install a patch not signed by the corresponding privkey. But I am confident that someone will eventually find a loophole in the implementation and be able to impersonate MS to the computers.
And in the meantime, in the guise of fighting viruses, MS gets to absolutely control all software on your computer. Did you know that Open Office, Mozilla, and the GIMP are viruses? (Remember that MS is already on record as describing certain license terms as 'viral'.)
Naah. Just a 'civilized' person. It is inevitable that someone will decide that the Information Highway needs drivers' licenses.I wrote about this recently, only within the context of licenses to write software, not to use it.
Licensure is a BAD idea, whether it be for computers or any other field. Certification is superior, because it allows certification authorities to compete for mindshare, while licensing schemes are imposed by force. I'd rather not have the tests written by people from Redmond.
Exactly. If I try to ping mispel.com, it should give me a DNS error, not create such an IP address out of whole cloth. Beware the temptation to make the Internet a 'smart' network. It works because DNS doesn't know about such things as web browsing.
The ONLY place to address this is at the application level. I should be able to configure my browser to go google for the right spelling.
Oh, I already DID configure it to do that. So I don't need this alleged 'service', thankyouverymuch.
Not necessarily. The word 'about' is not only a preposition, but
also an adjective and an adverb.
I'm often a Grammar Nazi myself, but the inflexible demand that no one use a preposition with which to end a clause (heh) forces a difficult construction, then it's a dumb rule.
A young man from the South did well in school and earned a scholarship to Harvard. His first day on campus, he was walking across the quad, and came upon a cluster of preppies. He stopped to ask directions:
'Scuse me, folks, but can y'all tell me where the library's at?
to which one of them replied:
At Hah-vahd, one does not end a sentence with a preposition!
to which the Southerner replied:
Let me rephrase that:
Can y'all tell me where the library's at, asshole?
Here in America we don't negotiate with terrorists
I was listening to some 'expert' on the radio the other day, who was talking about what kinds of things Al-Qaeda might be doing to try to mark the anniversary of 9/11, and he said something that just clicked:
The terrorists want to create fear and uncertainty
I automatically said back to the radio "...and doubt". And it hit me like a ton of bricks. While we know what FUD means, Joe Sixpack doesn't get it. We need to call it what it is:
Terrorism.
SCO is absolutely a terrorist organization. Their techniques are designed to instill fear into us, to make us uncertain as to whether we will be the next one attacked, and to doubt our decision to be here. Just as the Hamas suicide bomber wants to scare Jews, SCO wants to scare PHBs. There's only one way to deal with terrorists, and that's to let them know that not only are you not afraid, uncertain, or doubtful... you're PISSED. And you're going to hurt them. Not with pathetic DDoS attacks that allow them to claim victim status, but by filing complaints with the SEC and all 50 state AGs, more put-up-or-shut-up like in Germany - give them the legal paper equivalent of DDoS instead.
"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant, and filled him with a terrible resolve"
- Mako, as Isoroku Yamamoto in Tora! Tora! Tora! (no evidence the real Adm. Yamamoto said any such thing)
Instead, the victim is most likely in deep pain and may be under the impression the stopping the game company from making such games might also stop this pain from happening again.
This is no excuse. I just don't understand this mentality at all. When one of my brothers was killed by a drunk driver, it never occured to anyone in my family to sue the distillery or the auto manufacturer - the driver was the responsible party, period.
I have observed this enough times to dub it Sarah Brady Syndrome:
Something horrible happens to someone close to you.
You decide that Something Must Be Done <tm> to prevent anyone else from suffering the same fate.
After considering, and rejecting, the idea of using the existing laws that punish the person who actually caused the problem (especially if that person is the putative 'victim' himself, as in the case of cigarette smoking or McDonald's food), you settle on:
Suing someone other than the perpetrator, under the theory that they aided and abetted the perpetrator by manufacturing one of the tools used, or wrote a book/movie/TV program/video game that 'inspired' the criminal act
Lobbying your legislators for new criminal remedies against these enablers.
Both.
I am heartened by the fact that the latest lawsuit against McDonald's (apparently for forcing kids to eat so much of their food as to have fat asses) was rejected with prejudice by the judge, but recent history is filled with too many examples that go the other way.
We not only have the Brady Bill, but countless other laws named for a victim, and almost without exception, they're bad laws - unnecessary and counterproductive, because they punish people other than the actual perpetrators, which teaches the next round of dumb kids that it isn't their fault when they shoot up their high school, killing scores of people and giving Michael Moore a chance to make another preachy movie (and Katz an excuse to compile a book).
I expect someone to go paint a tunnel on the side of a concrete wall, run their car into it at 60 mph and their family sue Warner Brothers for making Road Runner cartoons give them the idea.
On the web, sites are required by law to warn users before they can enter an adult site. Those that don't comply can be thrown in jail and/or fined.
And it's a damnfool law. The Internet was built by adults (originally at institutions of higher education, the DOD, and its private-sector contractors) for adults. When politicians started pushing the idea that every school and library should be connected to it, in order to access the resources thereof, but didn't provide for any monitoring or supervision of that access, they are the ones who broke the rules.
A far better way to approach the problem of offending the parents of children is to declare that the entire Internet is for adults, except where specifically labelled otherwise. We could have a Rated G Bit in every packet for this. Meanwhile, either watch your kids when they use the computer, use a whitelist, or password-protect it so they don't get on the Internet at all, if you don't want them exposed to 'pornography' (whatever that is).
Personally, I figure if Monsterette 2 (her older sister has flown the nest and is no longer a child) wants to see something sick and perverted, the fact that she wants to see it is the problem, not the images themselves. And if she sees something by mistake, she knows how to delete it, and won't be traumatized by it. Besides, if I put up a firewall, she'd probably hack her way past it anyhow.
My variation on this is that I have email folders named 2002, 2003, etc., with subfolders named 1Q, 2Q, 3Q, 4Q. I just got done dumping files from Inbox to 2003/3Q, in fact. If I want to find something, I do a search on it.
I also have a handful of special-purpose folders that I move things into from time to time, but I basically don't throw away emails at all - they just get archived.
Another reason that occupational licenses for developers will never happen is that would put a serious damper on the ongoing offshoring movement. The window of opportunity to get software developers covered by some licensing requirements has passed.
That's easy enough to finesse. Just look at the stratification of MDs, RNs, LPNs, all the way down to various technicians, orderlies, etc., or the distinction between Barrister and Solicitor in the Commonwealth legal systems.
It will be legal for those offshore people to send submissions to a Licensed Computer Programmer, but can't be actually delivered outside the company until he signs off on them. There will be a handful of LCPs that act as project managers, and get paid a pretty penny for being licensed, while the scut work is done by cheap interns who have not yet gotten licensed to wipe their own butts without an LCP approving it.
We'll have the equivalent of specialties, as well. The larval form of them is in the various certifications that are currently available. [Let me point out that I vastly prefer certification, which is voluntary, to licensure, which is not. A certification that is irrelevant will be ignored by those in the know, but a license that is irrelevant must still be respected by them.] Once there is a law that requires a license, the demand for higher-level licensure for specialties will come as day follows night. The big money will be in the specialties.
Slashdot Mirror
This gives them 1101 good computers - a kickass cluster now, and 1100 workstations later.
To put it in perspective, imagine how telephone service would be if my Kyocera cellphone could not receive calls from Nokia phones. I know we have to use different cells that use the various schemes, but if the providers didn't gate traffic to each other, nobody would use them. The only reason we put up with this crap from the IM services is because (most of us) don't pay anything for them.
- Something you have
- Something you know
- Something you are
The combination of the keyfob, the biometric, and a password is as good as it gets. To really do it up right, the keyfob has male and female USB ends, which allows the 'connect the keyfobs to trade public keys' and also would allow a USB keyboard to connect through the keyfob, so that it could do the password part without passing the keystrokes on to the computer (that might have a keylogger installed).<sigh>
I released that thing as shareware (There's even one site that Google knows about that still has VID_HOLE.ZIP [for their subscribers], which actually works under Win9x for Real Mode drivers) but nobody ever sent me the $5 registration. I wonder if anyone (other than I) ever found a use for the thing?
And that's not just true in sports, but also in business - I get emails all the time at work that basically encourage us to work harder executing the plans handed down from On High, but never for a moment consider that it's a suboptimal plan, right up to the email that announces a new plan to execute, from the same people who announced the last one....
No matter how much you may dislike the alleged effects of a drug on someone, that doesn't make it a 'chemical weapon'.
- You work around animals a lot, and a 'pen' is where you keep them.
- You feel the need to distinguish between 'pen', a writing instrument; and 'pin', a pointed, thin metal rod that penetrates through one or more layers of cloth; and you are either functionally illiterate (and don't know they're two different words) or speak with such an accent as to render the difference undetectable.
As the former does not happen to apply to her, she leaves her listener to conclude the latter. So does describing atomic energy and weapons as 'nuke-you-lar', as our current President says it, or even 'nuke-ier', as former President Carter - a trained nuclear engineer - does. I bet they've both signed bills into law with an ink pen.Think very, very hard about it.
I'll wait.
. . .
Did you get it yet? Isn't installing programs without user intervention the PROBLEM? What happens when a cracker compromises a machine in a position to play Man In The Middle? and some of the 'software fixes' you get are actually worms?
I'm sure that part of the scheme will include installing the pubkey of MS' software update authority, and code that refuses to install a patch not signed by the corresponding privkey. But I am confident that someone will eventually find a loophole in the implementation and be able to impersonate MS to the computers.
And in the meantime, in the guise of fighting viruses, MS gets to absolutely control all software on your computer.
Did you know that Open Office, Mozilla, and the GIMP are viruses? (Remember that MS is already on record as describing certain license terms as 'viral'.)
Licensure is a BAD idea, whether it be for computers or any other field. Certification is superior, because it allows certification authorities to compete for mindshare, while licensing schemes are imposed by force. I'd rather not have the tests written by people from Redmond.
Oh, I already DID configure it to do that. So I don't need this alleged 'service', thankyouverymuch.
I'm often a Grammar Nazi myself, but the inflexible demand that no one use a preposition with which to end a clause (heh) forces a difficult construction, then it's a dumb rule.
A young man from the South did well in school and earned a scholarship to Harvard. His first day on campus, he was walking across the quad, and came upon a cluster of preppies. He stopped to ask directions:
to which one of them replied: to which the Southerner replied:I have observed this enough times to dub it Sarah Brady Syndrome:
- Something horrible happens to someone close to you.
- You decide that Something Must Be Done <tm> to prevent anyone else from suffering the same fate.
- After considering, and rejecting, the idea of using the existing laws that punish the person who actually caused the problem (especially if that person is the putative 'victim' himself, as in the case of cigarette smoking or McDonald's food), you settle on:
- Suing someone other than the perpetrator, under the theory that they aided and abetted the perpetrator by manufacturing one of the tools used, or wrote a book/movie/TV program/video game that 'inspired' the criminal act
- Lobbying your legislators for new criminal remedies against these enablers.
- Both.
I am heartened by the fact that the latest lawsuit against McDonald's (apparently for forcing kids to eat so much of their food as to have fat asses) was rejected with prejudice by the judge, but recent history is filled with too many examples that go the other way.We not only have the Brady Bill, but countless other laws named for a victim, and almost without exception, they're bad laws - unnecessary and counterproductive, because they punish people other than the actual perpetrators, which teaches the next round of dumb kids that it isn't their fault when they shoot up their high school, killing scores of people and giving Michael Moore a chance to make another preachy movie (and Katz an excuse to compile a book).
I expect someone to go paint a tunnel on the side of a concrete wall, run their car into it at 60 mph and their family sue Warner Brothers for making Road Runner cartoons give them the idea.
A far better way to approach the problem of offending the parents of children is to declare that the entire Internet is for adults, except where specifically labelled otherwise. We could have a Rated G Bit in every packet for this. Meanwhile, either watch your kids when they use the computer, use a whitelist, or password-protect it so they don't get on the Internet at all, if you don't want them exposed to 'pornography' (whatever that is).
Personally, I figure if Monsterette 2 (her older sister has flown the nest and is no longer a child) wants to see something sick and perverted, the fact that she wants to see it is the problem, not the images themselves. And if she sees something by mistake, she knows how to delete it, and won't be traumatized by it. Besides, if I put up a firewall, she'd probably hack her way past it anyhow.
I also have a handful of special-purpose folders that I move things into from time to time, but I basically don't throw away emails at all - they just get archived.
It will be legal for those offshore people to send submissions to a Licensed Computer Programmer, but can't be actually delivered outside the company until he signs off on them. There will be a handful of LCPs that act as project managers, and get paid a pretty penny for being licensed, while the scut work is done by cheap interns who have not yet gotten licensed to wipe their own butts without an LCP approving it.
We'll have the equivalent of specialties, as well. The larval form of them is in the various certifications that are currently available. [Let me point out that I vastly prefer certification, which is voluntary, to licensure, which is not. A certification that is irrelevant will be ignored by those in the know, but a license that is irrelevant must still be respected by them.] Once there is a law that requires a license, the demand for higher-level licensure for specialties will come as day follows night. The big money will be in the specialties.