I find it very quick to program in. But again I've literally written megabytes of Perl scripts over the last 2-3 years, and I don't particulary want to learn PHP. If I didn't know perl, I might be inclined to look at PHP.
You might well find it worth your effort. The equivalent PHP code to duplicate the function of a typical ASP snippet is about half as long and twice as readable. Plus it runs faster, is completely cross-platform, you don't have to pay weird fly-by-night companies to buy buggy COM objects for every little basic core function, and the documentation is actually useful.
Have the search result pop up in a framed window with the rating applet at the top (or bottom, or a popup, or whatever). User then rates the relevance of the link based on the information it gives as a result of his/her query. 1 being a crappy link (keywords used to induce search engine hits) and 10 being a great link (relevent topic, good information).
There's more than just "good information". The biggest problem with a rating system, is countering for people's varying capacities for specifying good search terms. Someone who is bad at specifying their search terms will rate perfectly good resources as "poor" because they were not what they were looking for.
I find it discouraging that so many people focus on the eating side of the equation.
Eating healthy is great - there's certainly no harm in cutting down on the amount of crap that you eat. But look around a little. People eat crap the world over, but only Americans are grotesquely fat. Why? Because they sit around all day worrying about diets. All that most people's "diets" ever lead to is cycles of weight loss and gain, frequently accompanied by malnutrition.
There's a much simpler answer: Kill your car. Get rid of the damn thing. It's killing you.
Build exercise into your daily life. Ride a bike to work. Too far? You're too fat and lazy? (Hint: about 20 miles is too far to practically bike to work if you're not a serious cyclist. If you're balking at anything less than that, then yes, you are too fat and lazy) Then at least walk to the subway station and ride that. Every one of my friends that started driving to work flabbed up within months. Those that woke up and stopped driving came right back down.
Never again take an elevator unless you're going up at least 10 floors. Anyone at any age can climb 10 flights if they really need to. Anyone under 40 who can't jog (I didn't say sprint) up 10 flights without breaking into heavy breathing is seriously out of shape and needs to be jogging up a whole lot more stairs. Living in a low-rise city (Washington DC) I haven't been in an elevator for years, except in security buildings where the stairs aren't accessible.
There are other advantages, too: Biking in a city is much faster than driving, and jogging up the stairs is much faster than taking the elevator (jogging up the stairs in my apartment building carrying my steel-frame bike is still faster than taking the elevator). So you save time AND your body.
Whenever you need something from the other side of the office, stand up and get it that very moment. Rather than dialing someone's extension or sending a quick email to answer a question, just walk over to their desk. Don't stay in your chair more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time. There's always a reason to take a little walk around the office. It'll clear your head and help you live longer too. And you'll have a chance to chat with other people, making friends in the process.
Want pizza for lunch? No problem. But don't have it delivered. Get off your spreading rear end and walk the four blocks to pick it up.
You'll be amazed at the difference. Eat what you want, and keep fit at the same time. No need to waste money on gym memberships. Between that and the thousands you'll save by ditching the car, you can afford a giant vacation to Bali each year to show off your new fit self.
The so-called Glencullen University is pretty funny. That same host holds sites for a bunch of other "universities", some with EXACTLY the same layout and graphics (just different names).
There's University of Devonshire, Shelbourne University, Brentwick University, and so on. Some of the photos aren't even in the right countries (such as bunch of people sitting outdoors by a palm tree at a Devonshire University dorm). Brentwick University even sports a "University of Buckingham African and Diaspora Association"; what respectable university is without one of those these days? Back when I was in college we we were all trying to get into the local University of Buckingham Glee Club. How things have changed.
Just out of curiosity, on which platform did you get this to do anything?
I've tried IE and Netscape on Mac and Windows, and Netscape on Linux and FreeBSD, and none of the applets there worked at all. Mainly just a lot of big grey spaces. The most exciting thing was that Mac IE 5 eventually reports "A connection failure has occurred."
Country codes dont mean an awful lot nowerdays anyway. Many of the small countries have sold the rights to their domains to domain name registartion companies.
What is the poinbt of country coes if sites under them are nothing to do with the country in question?
Many of these little countries are selling the rights to.xx, while keeping.com.xx,.org.xx, etc., for their own use. Best of both worlds.
To suggest that it would be No Big Deal to setup a competiting DNS system is bunk. You do realize that the top level DNS server handles over 1 million queries a second?
You're on crack.
Look at the stats for one of the better-connected (and hence more-queried) of the 13 root servers. It's receiving about 2.2Mb/second between two interfaces, which - assuming about 100 bytes per request - is 2750 queries per second. Even charitably assuming all the servers get the same load, that's 35,750 queries per second worldwide.
I've run DNS servers almost that busy on $5K boxes. Bandwidth is the bigger issue. Free it ain't, but it's nowhere near the pipe dream you make it.
For people who can't be bothered to click on the link (and God knows, there are enough of those around), the article can be summarised as follows:
Once you sell something, you no longer own it. Philip Greenspun didn't know that, although he did know absolutely everything else. And he knew it better than anyone else, and doesn't mind saying so.
For those who don't have time to read the above post, it can be summarized as follows: "streetlawyer doesn't recognize the difference between selling 30% of something in a transaction legally designed to keep control out of the hands of the purchaser, and 'selling it'".
Who else in the city has 11Mb/s wireless any where in the city just by pointing a high gain antenna at the place they plan on being before leaving work?
Probably everyone in Legoland. Other than that, you and I must have very different definitions of "city" (as in, having large buildings).
Since when do you need passion to do a job? Do you think coal miners had a passion for their work? How about janitors?
There's not much room for creativity in coal mining - deviate from the script and you endanger a lot of people and equipment. IT, on the other hand, is about problem-solving and creativity. People's brains solve problems when they find them interesting. Therefore I want people who are interested in the types of problems my organization is going to need solved.
Some people have lives folks, especially this time of year, water skiing, hiking, family time, camping etc..
That's nice. I'm not interviewing people to be my backcountry hiking guide, water ski coach, or father.
When I want a backcountry hiking guide, I'm going to hire someone who loves the outdoors first and foremost, not some part-timer who programs computers for a living. And if I got to pick my father, I'd pick someone who loves raising his children more than anything else in the world.
the tactics they used for obtaining the passwords are extremely questionable, and probably border on entrapment.
There is nothing even vaguely like entrapment going on here. Entrapment is when a law enforcement officer commits a crime in order to encourage a suspect to commit that same crime, and then turns around and arrests the suspect when he does. For instance, if I'm a cop and I take you to the store and I shoplift something and say "go ahead, it's fun!" and then you shoplift something too, you Get Out Of Jail Free (tm) because I entrapped you.
Just tricking someone into revealing information about their guilt is not entrapment; it's simply a worthy and useful police tactic.
Furthermore, the CIA does not have investigative powers. They do not serve out serch warrants or the like. The CIA is under the Executive Branch of the government, whereas the FBI is under the legislative branch, and can serve search warrants and the like.
Sounds like you were sleeping in civics class.
Both the FBI and the CIA are under the Executive Branch (the FBI is part of the Department of Justice, a presidential cabinet department). The Executive Branch quite specifically is charged with execution of the law, including investigation of crimes. The legislative branch only makes laws.
Why not just create one central authority (U.N. manages, so that there's at least the illusion of the U.S. not controlling it) that doles out words/numbers/character sequences to various groups, hereafter called a root domain, and analogous to the current.org,.com,.net root domains.
You definitely don't want UN-affiliated bodies anywhere near critical IT infrastructure. Ever hear of the ITU? ISO?
These bodies are made up of national governments, who send senior people from their telecom ministries as delegates. Almost all national governments continue to run their phone companies, and therefore have direct incentives to maximize revenue.
The result has been a steady tradition of obstruction and anti-disclosure. The ITU has been fighting against the internet since Day One, pausing only occasionally to float proposals in which it gets to control it (and shut it down). ITU and ISO don't even freely publish standards - you have to pay thousands of dollars to get a copy. The result, of course, is that only entrenched parties get to play.
Trust me, nothing would be a quicker death blow to the internet. What UN bodies want is for the internet to go away so international phone tariffs can rocket back to the stratosphere again and nobody will be in danger of losing revenue from timed local call charges, or have to waste money on costly new infrastructure to support annoying new "features" like high-speed data networking that customers somehow think they have a right to demand.
The US and the corporate world are far from saintly, but when it comes to this, they're much more your friend than the UN is.
Under the treaty, all other countries need to reduce their CO2 emmissions to 5% below 1990 levels, BUT the USA has to reduce our level 7% below our 1990 levels.
Perhaps you hadn't noticed, but US per capita emissions levels in 1990 were far higher than the European countries'.
The 7% number was just pandering to US greed and unwillingness to play fair (it should have been much higher). Sad that even that wouldn't work.
Well, Dr. Mudge ( L0pht security guy ) mentioned in a Senate (could have been congress) hearing that his group of guys could take down the entire net in less than 30 minutes.
Just because some punk says something doesn't mean it's true. Especially when said punk has a material interest in people believing it.
Ever heard a drunk person in a bar go aggro and say "I could take every single one of you!"? Did you then go running off breathlessly to tell your friends, "I just saw the most amazing thing! There was a man in the bar who was so strong he could beat up 40 people!"
And the Senate is part of Congress.
Anyway, an attack like you describe would require an awful lot of coordination, because after the first couple actions (if successful) your connection would as a collateral effect be so slowed that you'd have great difficulty finishing it off. So you'd need people working on the leaf sides of all these routers. Many of those in developing regions are new installs and high-capacity but are connected via poor, old telco infrastructure, making your task extra-hard.
Not to mention, of course, that there's more to knocking out a secured router than saying "Hey, now let's take out Sri Lanka."
You're crazy - Had to Happen in North Sydney is the best Mexican food this side of the Pacific. Flat-rate broadband cable is available in most cities now, and works nicely. You evidently left too soon.
"The best Mexican food on the this [western]side of the Pacific" is like "the best beer in Italy."
I'm glad to hear about the cable modems, though I hear they have usage caps and overuse fees, but let's face it: The biggest problem always was and still is the Brobdingnagian phone plugs. I once needed to plug three devices into one jack, and ended up having to add two rooms to my house to make space for the adapter.
I hope you realise that a nameserver and the root nameservers don't have anything to do with the lower levels (like IP and ARP).... they are on a higher level (TCP to be precise).
Admittedly, I don't have all the facts since the site is Slashdotted, but if this guy was a Kozmo.com customer, I don't see how he could've won this case on any legal merits. It sounds like Kozmo.com couldn't afford the legal costs (which would've been way more than $50) and just paid him the money to get the matter out of their hair.
Sometimes it's worth waiting for the facts before shooting your mouth off. Kozmo showed up in court and the damages were awarded by a judge.
Maybe California's definition of spam is a little broader than those that I'm familiar with.
From what I see here, it sounds quite reasonable: If you and a firm negotiate that you will not receive email messages from them, then they are not allowed to suddenly start sending you email messages anyway just because they feel like it.
Projects like Samba, OpenH323, 1/2 of Enlightenment and a fair few others are why I am still in Australia
Yeah, I used to live in Australia. But guess what?
Where are the Samba developers now? Where are almost all of the people from high-profile projects that originated in Australia? That's right, Santa Clara county. Or maybe suburban Boston.
In Australia you can't get a decent flat-rate internet connection, nobody returns phone calls, computer equipment costs too much, everybody surfs all damn day instead of doing any work, the phone plugs are the size of battleships, and they don't have any decent Mexican food. Don't get me wrong - it's a fun place to live and the people are great, but I think your jingoism is warping your perception.
Although Samba may be free, the skill and effort required to install and configure it is not. You have to consider the cost of employing someone with the required skills to do this versus the cost of a Windows license and a windows installation
Installing Samba is a one-time cost. The FreeBSD machines we have running Samba 2.0.7 and qmail 1.0.3 have - to my knowledge, which should be pretty good on this - never been touched since installation over a year ago.
It took a couple hours to get each one up and running. Log summaries get mailed to the admin group nightly. The machines run and run and run (VALinux; Slashdot oughtta be happy). Zero downtime, zero admin time. In that period there have been no relevant security updates and no other reasons to even remember the machines exist (aside from the pleasant comfort of seeing their activity lights blinking around the clock).
Now THAT's low TCO. Anyone can afford to have a unix geek come in for a few hours. With MS machines performing similar functions, responsible sysadminning would have required dozens (or more) of hours of work.
Mind being a bit more verbose? What is it exactly that makes the ICANN/Verisign root preferable to some of the alternatives?
It works.
Any rational person who wants to make information available via the web, be contactable via email, etc., will want the widest possible availability (or if they do not, the criteria for limiting availability will not be based on participation in alternate roots, unless the resource in question is a web page about how cool alternate roots are).
Therefore, anything that anyone could want to see or use will be available through the "default" name space.
Therefore, there's no compelling reason for anyone other than hardcore nerds to switch their roots.
Therefore, it won't happen.
The only possible exception is if ICANN or its successor does something to really piss off the major ISPs. If you want to give the alt roots a kick in the pants, work on manipulating ICANN into shooting themselves in the foot.
Slashdot Mirror
You might well find it worth your effort. The equivalent PHP code to duplicate the function of a typical ASP snippet is about half as long and twice as readable. Plus it runs faster, is completely cross-platform, you don't have to pay weird fly-by-night companies to buy buggy COM objects for every little basic core function, and the documentation is actually useful.
There's more than just "good information". The biggest problem with a rating system, is countering for people's varying capacities for specifying good search terms. Someone who is bad at specifying their search terms will rate perfectly good resources as "poor" because they were not what they were looking for.
I find it discouraging that so many people focus on the eating side of the equation.
Eating healthy is great - there's certainly no harm in cutting down on the amount of crap that you eat. But look around a little. People eat crap the world over, but only Americans are grotesquely fat. Why? Because they sit around all day worrying about diets. All that most people's "diets" ever lead to is cycles of weight loss and gain, frequently accompanied by malnutrition.
There's a much simpler answer: Kill your car. Get rid of the damn thing. It's killing you.
Build exercise into your daily life. Ride a bike to work. Too far? You're too fat and lazy? (Hint: about 20 miles is too far to practically bike to work if you're not a serious cyclist. If you're balking at anything less than that, then yes, you are too fat and lazy) Then at least walk to the subway station and ride that. Every one of my friends that started driving to work flabbed up within months. Those that woke up and stopped driving came right back down.
Never again take an elevator unless you're going up at least 10 floors. Anyone at any age can climb 10 flights if they really need to. Anyone under 40 who can't jog (I didn't say sprint) up 10 flights without breaking into heavy breathing is seriously out of shape and needs to be jogging up a whole lot more stairs. Living in a low-rise city (Washington DC) I haven't been in an elevator for years, except in security buildings where the stairs aren't accessible.
There are other advantages, too: Biking in a city is much faster than driving, and jogging up the stairs is much faster than taking the elevator (jogging up the stairs in my apartment building carrying my steel-frame bike is still faster than taking the elevator). So you save time AND your body.
Whenever you need something from the other side of the office, stand up and get it that very moment. Rather than dialing someone's extension or sending a quick email to answer a question, just walk over to their desk. Don't stay in your chair more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time. There's always a reason to take a little walk around the office. It'll clear your head and help you live longer too. And you'll have a chance to chat with other people, making friends in the process.
Want pizza for lunch? No problem. But don't have it delivered. Get off your spreading rear end and walk the four blocks to pick it up.
You'll be amazed at the difference. Eat what you want, and keep fit at the same time. No need to waste money on gym memberships. Between that and the thousands you'll save by ditching the car, you can afford a giant vacation to Bali each year to show off your new fit self.
-- raju1kabir
mid-30s
190lb
The so-called Glencullen University is pretty funny. That same host holds sites for a bunch of other "universities", some with EXACTLY the same layout and graphics (just different names).
There's University of Devonshire, Shelbourne University, Brentwick University, and so on. Some of the photos aren't even in the right countries (such as bunch of people sitting outdoors by a palm tree at a Devonshire University dorm). Brentwick University even sports a "University of Buckingham African and Diaspora Association"; what respectable university is without one of those these days? Back when I was in college we we were all trying to get into the local University of Buckingham Glee Club. How things have changed.
Does anyone actually fall for this stuff?
Just out of curiosity, on which platform did you get this to do anything?
I've tried IE and Netscape on Mac and Windows, and Netscape on Linux and FreeBSD, and none of the applets there worked at all. Mainly just a lot of big grey spaces. The most exciting thing was that Mac IE 5 eventually reports "A connection failure has occurred."
Many of these little countries are selling the rights to .xx, while keeping .com.xx, .org.xx, etc., for their own use. Best of both worlds.
You're on crack.
Look at the stats for one of the better-connected (and hence more-queried) of the 13 root servers. It's receiving about 2.2Mb/second between two interfaces, which - assuming about 100 bytes per request - is 2750 queries per second. Even charitably assuming all the servers get the same load, that's 35,750 queries per second worldwide.
I've run DNS servers almost that busy on $5K boxes. Bandwidth is the bigger issue. Free it ain't, but it's nowhere near the pipe dream you make it.
For those who don't have time to read the above post, it can be summarized as follows: "streetlawyer doesn't recognize the difference between selling 30% of something in a transaction legally designed to keep control out of the hands of the purchaser, and 'selling it'".
Probably everyone in Legoland. Other than that, you and I must have very different definitions of "city" (as in, having large buildings).
There's not much room for creativity in coal mining - deviate from the script and you endanger a lot of people and equipment. IT, on the other hand, is about problem-solving and creativity. People's brains solve problems when they find them interesting. Therefore I want people who are interested in the types of problems my organization is going to need solved.
That's nice. I'm not interviewing people to be my backcountry hiking guide, water ski coach, or father.
When I want a backcountry hiking guide, I'm going to hire someone who loves the outdoors first and foremost, not some part-timer who programs computers for a living. And if I got to pick my father, I'd pick someone who loves raising his children more than anything else in the world.
There is nothing even vaguely like entrapment going on here. Entrapment is when a law enforcement officer commits a crime in order to encourage a suspect to commit that same crime, and then turns around and arrests the suspect when he does. For instance, if I'm a cop and I take you to the store and I shoplift something and say "go ahead, it's fun!" and then you shoplift something too, you Get Out Of Jail Free (tm) because I entrapped you.
Just tricking someone into revealing information about their guilt is not entrapment; it's simply a worthy and useful police tactic.
Sounds like you were sleeping in civics class.
Both the FBI and the CIA are under the Executive Branch (the FBI is part of the Department of Justice, a presidential cabinet department). The Executive Branch quite specifically is charged with execution of the law, including investigation of crimes. The legislative branch only makes laws.
The saying is "jack of all trades..." which has the advantage of making sense.
We now return you to your on-topic discussion already in progress.
Well, I live in Washington DC, but you're right, it is a dreary little armpit.
No, because I've already explained at length, "America" is the accepted short name for "The United States of America".
The fact that I point out a real error doesn't mean that I have magically assumed every incorrect pedantic position known throughout history.
You definitely don't want UN-affiliated bodies anywhere near critical IT infrastructure. Ever hear of the ITU? ISO?
These bodies are made up of national governments, who send senior people from their telecom ministries as delegates. Almost all national governments continue to run their phone companies, and therefore have direct incentives to maximize revenue.
The result has been a steady tradition of obstruction and anti-disclosure. The ITU has been fighting against the internet since Day One, pausing only occasionally to float proposals in which it gets to control it (and shut it down). ITU and ISO don't even freely publish standards - you have to pay thousands of dollars to get a copy. The result, of course, is that only entrenched parties get to play.
Trust me, nothing would be a quicker death blow to the internet. What UN bodies want is for the internet to go away so international phone tariffs can rocket back to the stratosphere again and nobody will be in danger of losing revenue from timed local call charges, or have to waste money on costly new infrastructure to support annoying new "features" like high-speed data networking that customers somehow think they have a right to demand.
The US and the corporate world are far from saintly, but when it comes to this, they're much more your friend than the UN is.
Perhaps you hadn't noticed, but US per capita emissions levels in 1990 were far higher than the European countries'.
The 7% number was just pandering to US greed and unwillingness to play fair (it should have been much higher). Sad that even that wouldn't work.
Yes, and too much routing complexity (assuming you mean to somehow publish these routes so they're actually good for something) to work.
Just because some punk says something doesn't mean it's true. Especially when said punk has a material interest in people believing it.
Ever heard a drunk person in a bar go aggro and say "I could take every single one of you!"? Did you then go running off breathlessly to tell your friends, "I just saw the most amazing thing! There was a man in the bar who was so strong he could beat up 40 people!"
And the Senate is part of Congress.
Anyway, an attack like you describe would require an awful lot of coordination, because after the first couple actions (if successful) your connection would as a collateral effect be so slowed that you'd have great difficulty finishing it off. So you'd need people working on the leaf sides of all these routers. Many of those in developing regions are new installs and high-capacity but are connected via poor, old telco infrastructure, making your task extra-hard.
Not to mention, of course, that there's more to knocking out a secured router than saying "Hey, now let's take out Sri Lanka."
"The best Mexican food on the this [western]side of the Pacific" is like "the best beer in Italy."
I'm glad to hear about the cable modems, though I hear they have usage caps and overuse fees, but let's face it: The biggest problem always was and still is the Brobdingnagian phone plugs. I once needed to plug three devices into one jack, and ended up having to add two rooms to my house to make space for the adapter.
Actually, almost all nameserver traffic is UDP.
Sometimes it's worth waiting for the facts before shooting your mouth off. Kozmo showed up in court and the damages were awarded by a judge.
From what I see here, it sounds quite reasonable: If you and a firm negotiate that you will not receive email messages from them, then they are not allowed to suddenly start sending you email messages anyway just because they feel like it.
Yeah, I used to live in Australia. But guess what?
Where are the Samba developers now? Where are almost all of the people from high-profile projects that originated in Australia? That's right, Santa Clara county. Or maybe suburban Boston.
In Australia you can't get a decent flat-rate internet connection, nobody returns phone calls, computer equipment costs too much, everybody surfs all damn day instead of doing any work, the phone plugs are the size of battleships, and they don't have any decent Mexican food. Don't get me wrong - it's a fun place to live and the people are great, but I think your jingoism is warping your perception.
Installing Samba is a one-time cost. The FreeBSD machines we have running Samba 2.0.7 and qmail 1.0.3 have - to my knowledge, which should be pretty good on this - never been touched since installation over a year ago.
It took a couple hours to get each one up and running. Log summaries get mailed to the admin group nightly. The machines run and run and run (VALinux; Slashdot oughtta be happy). Zero downtime, zero admin time. In that period there have been no relevant security updates and no other reasons to even remember the machines exist (aside from the pleasant comfort of seeing their activity lights blinking around the clock).
Now THAT's low TCO. Anyone can afford to have a unix geek come in for a few hours. With MS machines performing similar functions, responsible sysadminning would have required dozens (or more) of hours of work.
It works.
Any rational person who wants to make information available via the web, be contactable via email, etc., will want the widest possible availability (or if they do not, the criteria for limiting availability will not be based on participation in alternate roots, unless the resource in question is a web page about how cool alternate roots are).
Therefore, anything that anyone could want to see or use will be available through the "default" name space.
Therefore, there's no compelling reason for anyone other than hardcore nerds to switch their roots.
Therefore, it won't happen.
The only possible exception is if ICANN or its successor does something to really piss off the major ISPs. If you want to give the alt roots a kick in the pants, work on manipulating ICANN into shooting themselves in the foot.