The comparison of shooting an arrow into a Ford sunroof is interesting, but to take the thought process to conclusion, you have to think about script kiddies. In this analogy, someone has created a machine that you can mount in the window, which will keep firing arrows down into the street at random, 24hours per day. Eventually, someone IS going to get killed. That's the problem with information security - it's so easy to keep trying to break in.
I never understood what everyone is so worked up about. Apple iTunes has a "Burn-to-CD" function built right in. So burn your 99cent songs and then rip the burnt CD to MP3s. It's almost too easy. I always figured Apple must be chuckling at how they have given the record labels the DRM they want, and then right under their noses added such a simple way to circumvent it.
I'm surprised VMWare would be saying this. Have you ever tried their products? Testing of their VMWare Server so far is very disappointing, especially with the networking performance. Their support forum is crowded with complaints about abysmal network performance, with no concrete response from VMWare or any solution.
... to see John Dvorak writing about something he's capable of talking about. Reading his tripe about the Linux kernel and running half of Windows attached to Linux is just weird.
As an indication, I've repeatedly tried Handbrake (http://handbrake.m0k.org/ a DVD ripper) on my ImacG5 2.0GHz and also on my AthlonXP3200+, running Gentoo Linux. Ripping a DVD takes 30 hours on the G5 and 6 hours on the PC with exactly the same options selected. I've repeated this test at least 10 times (took weeks, if you add up all those hours). As an interesting note, Handbrake was first developed for the Mac, and then ported to Linux. So you'd think it would perform better on the Mac.
Bottom line: From where I'm standing, I think Steve Jobs' estimate of 3 to 4 times the speed is *conservative*. It could be as high as 5 times the speed.
When an artist drops a gallon of paint in front of a fan, which then blows little blotches all over a huge canvass, is that any different from what you just did with your computer?
... despite a few glitches, which were handled well it seems by a very good test pilot, Scaled Composites has still managed to achieve something that neither Boeing nor Lockheed Martin have been able to do, with all their billions. They'll get it fixed, and this also is not the first glitch they've had ( http://www.space.com/news/ssone_mishap_031218.html ).
Plot down everything you have learned on a time scale of when it was "discovered". The math you've learned so far, for instance, is hundreds of years old. You're about to start your college undergrad years, where you begin working that timeline right down to the present.
You're going to have to buckle down and slug through those years like everyone else, and round out that brain of yours. You might think you're oh so special, and you may very well be, but it'll all be a lot more useful if you "do the time" and stick it through college to the end and get your paper. Lots of "bright" people sound really stupid because they're in a discussion they know nothing about because they never learned the full complement of "stuff" that you need to know to make your way in this world.
By the time you finish your undergrad years, you'll have brought that time-scale of things right down to the point where professors are teaching you stuff they just discovered last week. That's when you're getting somewhere! And then - maybe - you'll have an opportunity to use that "brightness" and contribute to the body of knowledge and make this planet a better place.
Or you can make the same blunder I did, and walk away from a possible academic career, to become yet another cog in the mindless, exploitative business world, where everything exists but to add fat to the shareholder.
The writings Bruce was critiquing were well-thought-out and well-written. Bruce's comments amounted to "oh yeah? well NYAAAAH!" by comparison. I thought Bruce had more to offer than this.
And, by the way, why does everyone say we have no place to dump nuclear waste? We have a completely lifeless MOON, don't we? Why are so many people obsessed with preserving the moon as a pristine park when it means putting a real living ecosystem at risk? The Moon is a PERFECT Nuclear waste dump. Hell! It's even slowly moving away from us!
Ok, a bunch of us are talking about past experiences with catastrophic hardware failures, and losing data on Reiserfs filesystems. But we need to remember - it is not smart to draw conclusions from anecdotes!
Do you really think you would NOT have lost the same data if you had been running ext3 when that hardware failure happened? It sounds to me like it was just a *coincidence* that you were running reiser.
My main server experienced a nasty-blue-smoke power supply failure this past January. I had all my precious 200G of data on a pair of linux-software-mirrored hard drives on Reiserfs. After replacing the power supply, I noticed that my mirrors were not successfully re-mirroring. One hard drive was completely dead. Soon it became apparent that the other one was half-dead as well. So I dug around for my trusty Knoppix CD and booted it up (Klaus - you da man!), an was able to copy the entire 200G of data off the remaining hard drive, with the sole exception of my/tftpboot directory (sob). During this copy, the hard drive crunched and snapped and ground like a dying beast, while my trusty old reiserfs kept slowly pulling off the files.
So, of course, now I've sworn to run nothing but reiserfs on my server till the end of time! I still run ext3 on my laptop because of the simplicity, but nothing but reiser will ever run on my server.
Still, I can NOT claim that reiser is any better than the other filesystems, because I've never experienced the same problem with an ext3 server or XFS or JFS, etc. I'm just sticking with what I know.
Not much more than 200 years ago, the scientific community fully believed and taught that rats spontaneously generated from garbage. Why? Because they observed that if you leave a pile of garbage in your basement overnight, you have rats in the morning. This was a severe lack of critical thought, and a widely accepted conclusion drawn from anecdotes. Please tell me our thinking has progressed at least somewhat since then!
It is great news, and quite refreshing, to see someone actually moving *ahead* in aerospace.
The entire aerospace field has been a complete disappointment since the 1970's.
- the biggest, baddest civilian jetliner that still "rules the skies" is the Boeing 747 - from the late 60's
- the giant B52s carpet-bombing the Taliban last year were from the 60's
- We are witnessing the last flights of the Concorde - a monumental aerospace achievement - from the late 60's
- the world's fastest air-breathing jet, the SR71 Blackbird - also from the late 60's - is now completely retired.
- the fastest rocket plane - the X-15 - was retired in the 60's.
- the aging Space Shuttle (NASA's pride and joy) is 1970s technology that didn't fly until the 80's
America in general, and NASA in particular, have done nothing, and gone nowhere in aerospace in the last quarter century. Compare the 747/Concorde/Blackbird/SaturnV of 1969 with the Spitfire and V2 of 1944. Now that was progress!
It's about time someone else has stood up with even the beginnings of a challenge to American dominance and arrogance in space. America deserves it - they've squandered a 25 year lead. I hope China makes it far. I hope they get to the moon. I hope they build New Beijing on the Lunar South Pole Basin. I am sick and tired of listening to the tired old American "who cares? we were there first" line. So what? What did you manage to do there? Run around, pick up stones, and leave? Good job! You couldn't even get back there now if you wanted to! How many of the engineers and scientists that put Armstrong on the moon are retired? How many of them are even still alive?
America's best achievement right now is the International Space Station. Really, it's just another Mir. Nothing new. Barely outside our atmosphere. I mean come on! Maybe this new development will inspire some new ideas and dreams. Maybe it will propel us at least to the moon again. We need a kick in our proverbial backside.
History will look back on the Kennedy-inspired moon shots as a false start. A sputter of something that failed even as it got going. Ok, but now it's time to let the adventure really begin! Let's get out there and DO something!
Completely melt away? I think there's a mashed metallic arm laying around somewhere. And the blowing up of the office building? Ever heard of off-site backups?
I would recommend the collected short stories of Ray Bradbury and the Foundation series and Robot series by Azimov. Ray Bradbury can have the hair on the back of your neck standing on end in a few pages - an effect rarely produced even by some of the longest and most powerful Novels. Azimov's work is from a different era - the "big fins" 50's view of the future alluded to in Gibson's short story "Gernsback Continuum". If that doesn't satisfy you, be sure to tackle some of the best stuff ever written in the English language: The original Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewiss Carol. So well written that when you put it down, you really feel like you're waking from a twisted dream. The seven Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis also never fail to stimulate the mind. You can't help but almost feel the stuffy old Victorian English attic or closet melt into the wild, adventure-filled, otherworld that is Narnia.
Whatever you do, don't do yourself the disservice of planning to read "A Book" during the summer! At that rate you'll be long dead before you get to the good stuff! Read a few!
This "Cash Register" is really just a PC!!! I've had one of these things running Linux for years. It also runs OS/2, Win98, WinNT, and Win2000. Honestly, I'm really surprised this made it to slashdot. This is barely a hack at all.
Personally I don't think Unions are such a great idea for IT, HOWEVER, I think there is a severe lack of both Industry Associations and good books for IT management.
There is a lot for programming, Sys Admin, Networking, technical details, etc, but barely anything on IT management itself. I think there is a desperate need for good group discussion on how and IT/IS department should function within an organization, providing services to internal customers. The days of the computer geek department are over. Geeks are still necessary, yes, but a more business oriented approach is important, and it seems many IT professionals have nowhere to go to talk about ideas and best practices in this respect.
That's my rant!
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it would be more worthwhile to be able to render the thief inoperable?
Dawkins : Atheism :: Dworkin : Feminism
The comparison of shooting an arrow into a Ford sunroof is interesting, but to take the thought process to conclusion, you have to think about script kiddies. In this analogy, someone has created a machine that you can mount in the window, which will keep firing arrows down into the street at random, 24hours per day. Eventually, someone IS going to get killed. That's the problem with information security - it's so easy to keep trying to break in.
I never understood what everyone is so worked up about. Apple iTunes has a "Burn-to-CD" function built right in. So burn your 99cent songs and then rip the burnt CD to MP3s. It's almost too easy. I always figured Apple must be chuckling at how they have given the record labels the DRM they want, and then right under their noses added such a simple way to circumvent it.
I'm surprised VMWare would be saying this. Have you ever tried their products? Testing of their VMWare Server so far is very disappointing, especially with the networking performance. Their support forum is crowded with complaints about abysmal network performance, with no concrete response from VMWare or any solution.
... to see John Dvorak writing about something he's capable of talking about. Reading his tripe about the Linux kernel and running half of Windows attached to Linux is just weird.
As an indication, I've repeatedly tried Handbrake (http://handbrake.m0k.org/ a DVD ripper) on my ImacG5 2.0GHz and also on my AthlonXP3200+, running Gentoo Linux. Ripping a DVD takes 30 hours on the G5 and 6 hours on the PC with exactly the same options selected. I've repeated this test at least 10 times (took weeks, if you add up all those hours). As an interesting note, Handbrake was first developed for the Mac, and then ported to Linux. So you'd think it would perform better on the Mac.
Bottom line: From where I'm standing, I think Steve Jobs' estimate of 3 to 4 times the speed is *conservative*. It could be as high as 5 times the speed.
When an artist drops a gallon of paint in front of a fan, which then blows little blotches all over a huge canvass, is that any different from what you just did with your computer?
... despite a few glitches, which were handled well it seems by a very good test pilot, Scaled Composites has still managed to achieve something that neither Boeing nor Lockheed Martin have been able to do, with all their billions. They'll get it fixed, and this also is not the first glitch they've had ( http://www.space.com/news/ssone_mishap_031218.html ).
Plot down everything you have learned on a time scale of when it was "discovered". The math you've learned so far, for instance, is hundreds of years old. You're about to start your college undergrad years, where you begin working that timeline right down to the present.
You're going to have to buckle down and slug through those years like everyone else, and round out that brain of yours. You might think you're oh so special, and you may very well be, but it'll all be a lot more useful if you "do the time" and stick it through college to the end and get your paper. Lots of "bright" people sound really stupid because they're in a discussion they know nothing about because they never learned the full complement of "stuff" that you need to know to make your way in this world.
By the time you finish your undergrad years, you'll have brought that time-scale of things right down to the point where professors are teaching you stuff they just discovered last week. That's when you're getting somewhere! And then - maybe - you'll have an opportunity to use that "brightness" and contribute to the body of knowledge and make this planet a better place.
Or you can make the same blunder I did, and walk away from a possible academic career, to become yet another cog in the mindless, exploitative business world, where everything exists but to add fat to the shareholder.
I'm not bitter - Honest! Ah - give me a fork...
The writings Bruce was critiquing were well-thought-out and well-written. Bruce's comments amounted to "oh yeah? well NYAAAAH!" by comparison. I thought Bruce had more to offer than this.
And, by the way, why does everyone say we have no place to dump nuclear waste? We have a completely lifeless MOON, don't we? Why are so many people obsessed with preserving the moon as a pristine park when it means putting a real living ecosystem at risk? The Moon is a PERFECT Nuclear waste dump. Hell! It's even slowly moving away from us!
Ok, a bunch of us are talking about past experiences with catastrophic hardware failures, and losing data on Reiserfs filesystems. But we need to remember - it is not smart to draw conclusions from anecdotes!
/tftpboot directory (sob). During this copy, the hard drive crunched and snapped and ground like a dying beast, while my trusty old reiserfs kept slowly pulling off the files.
Do you really think you would NOT have lost the same data if you had been running ext3 when that hardware failure happened? It sounds to me like it was just a *coincidence* that you were running reiser.
My main server experienced a nasty-blue-smoke power supply failure this past January. I had all my precious 200G of data on a pair of linux-software-mirrored hard drives on Reiserfs. After replacing the power supply, I noticed that my mirrors were not successfully re-mirroring. One hard drive was completely dead. Soon it became apparent that the other one was half-dead as well. So I dug around for my trusty Knoppix CD and booted it up (Klaus - you da man!), an was able to copy the entire 200G of data off the remaining hard drive, with the sole exception of my
So, of course, now I've sworn to run nothing but reiserfs on my server till the end of time! I still run ext3 on my laptop because of the simplicity, but nothing but reiser will ever run on my server.
Still, I can NOT claim that reiser is any better than the other filesystems, because I've never experienced the same problem with an ext3 server or XFS or JFS, etc. I'm just sticking with what I know.
Not much more than 200 years ago, the scientific community fully believed and taught that rats spontaneously generated from garbage. Why? Because they observed that if you leave a pile of garbage in your basement overnight, you have rats in the morning. This was a severe lack of critical thought, and a widely accepted conclusion drawn from anecdotes. Please tell me our thinking has progressed at least somewhat since then!
It is great news, and quite refreshing, to see someone actually moving *ahead* in aerospace.
The entire aerospace field has been a complete disappointment since the 1970's.
- the biggest, baddest civilian jetliner that still "rules the skies" is the Boeing 747 - from the late 60's
- the giant B52s carpet-bombing the Taliban last year were from the 60's
- We are witnessing the last flights of the Concorde - a monumental aerospace achievement - from the late 60's
- the world's fastest air-breathing jet, the SR71 Blackbird - also from the late 60's - is now completely retired.
- the fastest rocket plane - the X-15 - was retired in the 60's.
- the aging Space Shuttle (NASA's pride and joy) is 1970s technology that didn't fly until the 80's
America in general, and NASA in particular, have done nothing, and gone nowhere in aerospace in the last quarter century. Compare the 747/Concorde/Blackbird/SaturnV of 1969 with the Spitfire and V2 of 1944. Now that was progress!
It's about time someone else has stood up with even the beginnings of a challenge to American dominance and arrogance in space. America deserves it - they've squandered a 25 year lead. I hope China makes it far. I hope they get to the moon. I hope they build New Beijing on the Lunar South Pole Basin. I am sick and tired of listening to the tired old American "who cares? we were there first" line. So what? What did you manage to do there? Run around, pick up stones, and leave? Good job! You couldn't even get back there now if you wanted to! How many of the engineers and scientists that put Armstrong on the moon are retired? How many of them are even still alive?
America's best achievement right now is the International Space Station. Really, it's just another Mir. Nothing new. Barely outside our atmosphere. I mean come on! Maybe this new development will inspire some new ideas and dreams. Maybe it will propel us at least to the moon again. We need a kick in our proverbial backside.
History will look back on the Kennedy-inspired moon shots as a false start. A sputter of something that failed even as it got going. Ok, but now it's time to let the adventure really begin! Let's get out there and DO something!
Just so my 8 year old son could say "Come on Dad! Did they really use disks like that?"
Completely melt away? I think there's a mashed metallic arm laying around somewhere. And the blowing up of the office building? Ever heard of off-site backups?
Focus Change? But I thought their focus was on secure trustworthy computing! They haven't finished that one yet!
I would recommend the collected short stories of Ray Bradbury and the Foundation series and Robot series by Azimov. Ray Bradbury can have the hair on the back of your neck standing on end in a few pages - an effect rarely produced even by some of the longest and most powerful Novels. Azimov's work is from a different era - the "big fins" 50's view of the future alluded to in Gibson's short story "Gernsback Continuum". If that doesn't satisfy you, be sure to tackle some of the best stuff ever written in the English language: The original Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewiss Carol. So well written that when you put it down, you really feel like you're waking from a twisted dream. The seven Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis also never fail to stimulate the mind. You can't help but almost feel the stuffy old Victorian English attic or closet melt into the wild, adventure-filled, otherworld that is Narnia.
Whatever you do, don't do yourself the disservice of planning to read "A Book" during the summer! At that rate you'll be long dead before you get to the good stuff! Read a few!
.... which would mean that the Concorde IS currently the world's only supersonic passenger jet, wouldn't it?
This "Cash Register" is really just a PC!!! I've had one of these things running Linux for years. It also runs OS/2, Win98, WinNT, and Win2000. Honestly, I'm really surprised this made it to slashdot. This is barely a hack at all.
Personally I don't think Unions are such a great idea for IT, HOWEVER, I think there is a severe lack of both Industry Associations and good books for IT management. There is a lot for programming, Sys Admin, Networking, technical details, etc, but barely anything on IT management itself. I think there is a desperate need for good group discussion on how and IT/IS department should function within an organization, providing services to internal customers. The days of the computer geek department are over. Geeks are still necessary, yes, but a more business oriented approach is important, and it seems many IT professionals have nowhere to go to talk about ideas and best practices in this respect. That's my rant!