Every huge project has something like this, and a watch that keeps Martian time is way cooler than "Opportunity went to Mars and all I got was this lousy coffee mug."
*yawn* I can wait. If I'm gonna have a monitor five feet wide, wake me when they get the resolution up to about 10240x7680. 100x as much detail is worth some serious money to me; bigger pixels are not.
What would I do with all that real estate? How about a couple dozen windows, none overlapping, each more detailed than what I have now? (Then I need to figure out how to touch-type with VR gloves....) There's a lot of low-level event detectors in the human visual pathway that are being wasted by our tendency to view computing processes through the tiny peepholes we call displays.
(Think about the mural display rooms in the opening chapter of Hogan's _The Genesis Machine_, or the Prime Radiant in Asimov's _Second Foundation_. Now, those are some *real* display hardware!)
You may need an ISP's mailer to launder *some* of your outgoing SMTP connections, but not all of them. I've set my MTA up with a special router called "paranoids", which calls out to a script that passes back a munged address routed through my ISP if the recipient is on the list of paranoid ISPs. Other outgoing mail goes direct.
My MTA is smail, and you aren't running smail, so there's no point in inserting any of the code here.
Rob Preston's column in _Network Computing_ (www.nwc.com) of 09-Dec-2003 seems to put this in perspective: "It seems a tad shallow to base two thirds of your company's growth strategy on suing customers and other vendors."
The human race was in far more danger of extinction when there were fewer of us. A long cold snap could've wiped us out in pre-civilized times. A number of diseases almost did for us. It's rather amazing that humankind survived long enough to have the leisure to think up uses for nuclear energy. I believe that any species smart enough to invent an A-bomb is probably smart enough to survive it.
The world was full of danger before we arrived and will be when we've gone. It's a bit arrogant to think that the end of the world only became possible with the advent of humans. Ask any dinosaur.
Hey, boys and girls, there's a book out on _How to Build a Time Machine_. (Sorry, Author, my copy's at home and I'm terrible with names.) Go read it to get some of the wild ideas out of the way, then come back and discuss what's left.
Oh, "velocity relative to the universe" has meaning, all right, but what it means tells us that it is pointless to discuss it since there can be no way to measure that quantity.
In fiction, the author eventually gets around the barrier at the machine's creation by the Tim Taylor technique: More Power! The idea is that it's relatively easy to travel between coupled machines at each end of the span, but with a bit more work you can push from one end without a receiver at the other. (_The End of Eternity_, _The Proteus Operation_, etc.)
OTOH Anderson's timecycles don't seem to have any particular limitations w.r.t. the date of their creation.
A person is an atheist if his religion states that no gods exist. There are plenty of illogical atheists out there. One who treats logical reasoning as the only source of truth is a scientist.
(Notice that a scientist can take off his scientist hat and be a religionist too. Many of the greatest scientists were not only believers in one religion or another, but driven to do science as a part of their working out of their faith. Arguments between science and religion are like arguments between horizontal and vertical.)
Name any point in history at which the human race had more than a 50% chance of surviving the next 100 years without a major disaster. 50% looks pretty good to me. (100% looks better but we'll never have that.)
And yet look at all the disasters we've had and still survived. Life is *tough* and humanity is one of the toughest examples.
I guess my grandchildren will just stare when I tell them the one about the guy who decided to drive from point A to point B, where A and B are separated by an ocean. Pretty soon there won't *be* any major landmasses separated by oceans.
"Gee, gramps, I guess you had to be there. Well, gotta go, I need to catch the elevator to Orbital Station 9 or I'll miss the next bus to Tycho."
ISTR experiments done years ago (spending months living underground, away from the influence of daylight) which showed that the human circadian rhythm free-runs at a period of about 26 hours, so maybe 24.66 hours is not too bad.
OTOH it could be a life-changing experience for some of them. Some people are more sensitive to the light/dark cycle than others. (See SAD, people who need melatonin supplements to get normal sleep in some parts of the year, etc.)
You are a genius. I couldn't make an entire Linux install, *with* X, eat up all of the 60MB partition I gave it when I first set it up. Nowadays, of course, what with gThis and kThat, it's easy to fill up anything the disk builders can make. But X is still pretty small.
Kermit is still doing work for me that can't easily be duplicated by anything else I have. It's not dead, by a long shot. There is more to the world than WWW.
"Kermit's limited popularity can probably be traced to the complexity of the software. Its support for every weird and/or broken piece of telecommunications gear meant that it had lots of options and tunable parameters."
OTOH that's the reason that Kermit is the *only* thing that will be thought of by people who need to talk to weird/broken gear, and eventually when they need to talk to *any* serial gear. Once I got the Kermit habit, I wouldn't think of using anything else.
Besides, it was soooo nice to have that TOPS-20 command auto-completion stuff on a mere PeeCee. I felt as though anyone who bothered to do that deserved to have his stuff used and appreciated.
Nah, I looked at ZModem and went back to Kermit. I didn't have to stay up late studying for hours to figure out whether I was licensed to use Kermit for this or that purpose.
"I'm not a sysadmin of a large Microsoft network, so forgive me if the following question is naive. Rather than have Microsoft delay non-critical patches for everyone so that your corporate update schedule can be more predictable, couldn't Microsoft release the patches as soon as they're ready, and then have your IT department just schedule one day a month when they do a mass update of all patches released since the previous month?"
I *am* a sysadmin for a sizable fleet of MS Windows stations, and that's pretty much what I want. SUS lets us do that, to some extent , and has for some time. If we could just get SUS, Windows Update, and HFNETCHK to agree on what the current patch set is, we'd be all set. (The other thing on my patching wish list is a merger of Windows Update, MS Office Update, and all other MS software products into one giant Microsoft Updates list that we could roll out through SUS. Oh, and HFNETCHK should stop shrieking that we're missing patch X because our copy of the.DLL it replaces is *newer* than the patched version.)
Better way to fix the unnecessary update to WMP9 would have been if Server didn't install the earlier WMP at setup time despite almost anything you do to stop it. Wouldn't it make sense that, if there's no sound card, and this *is* "Server" after all, maybe there's no reason to install multimedia junk unless the user specifically requests it?
Anyway Windows Update does provide a tree control allowing you to unckeck stuff you don't want to see any more, and I've unchecked WMP and.NET and anything else we don't use. Unfortunately HFNETCHK and BSA and on and on will still whine that the patch is missing, because there's an older version that you didn't need or want or ask for but got anyway and cannot uninstall.
True, automagic installation of unwanted junk isn't confined to MS Windows. I absolutely *hate* setting up a new Red Hat box, because it always puts in everything but the kitchen sink, and when I try to remove anything for which we have no use, it wants to remove 69 dependents, two of which we use, and neither of which has any obvious reason to depend on it.
Indeed, I just read the whitepaper on changes to the security patch process and that was one thing that stuck out. They think we want fewer patches, less often, not *fewer bugs* and patches ASAP for those that do slip through. The patch process was okay before; it's their design methodology that needs fixing.
I'm not happy with the thought that MS is going to be giving the kiddies an average of 15 days of free play with each *known* vulnerability, which is the way a lot of people concerned with security are going to look at this. Sadly this move will look good to upper management since it resembles good work planning.
Reminds me of a mail-order company, some years ago, responding to the question, "why do you repeat so many items in your catalog?" They thought they needed to increase the churn in their product line, when in fact what a lot of people wanted was that, if you don't have anything new, *don't send another catalog*.
Slashdot Mirror
Every huge project has something like this, and a watch that keeps Martian time is way cooler than "Opportunity went to Mars and all I got was this lousy coffee mug."
Dilbert would definitely want one.
*yawn* I can wait. If I'm gonna have a monitor five feet wide, wake me when they get the resolution up to about 10240x7680. 100x as much detail is worth some serious money to me; bigger pixels are not.
What would I do with all that real estate? How about a couple dozen windows, none overlapping, each more detailed than what I have now? (Then I need to figure out how to touch-type with VR gloves....) There's a lot of low-level event detectors in the human visual pathway that are being wasted by our tendency to view computing processes through the tiny peepholes we call displays.
(Think about the mural display rooms in the opening chapter of Hogan's _The Genesis Machine_, or the Prime Radiant in Asimov's _Second Foundation_. Now, those are some *real* display hardware!)
Microsoft released an unsupported add-on for IPv6 in Windows XP. I expect it'll be fully integrated in Longhorn, and that'll be the tipping point.
Meanwhile I've had it on my Linux boxes for years and am still waiting for someone to talk v6 with.
You may need an ISP's mailer to launder *some* of your outgoing SMTP connections, but not all of them. I've set my MTA up with a special router called "paranoids", which calls out to a script that passes back a munged address routed through my ISP if the recipient is on the list of paranoid ISPs. Other outgoing mail goes direct.
My MTA is smail, and you aren't running smail, so there's no point in inserting any of the code here.
Rob Preston's column in _Network Computing_ (www.nwc.com) of 09-Dec-2003 seems to put this in perspective: "It seems a tad shallow to base two thirds of your company's growth strategy on suing customers and other vendors."
Preferably without any Nvidia (unsupportable) or VIA (never saw a VIA chipset that didn't need weird secret tweaks to work at all) parts?
...you could put a 4x7 array of them on a carrier to fit a normal 3.5" bay. RAID on 28 spindles in one bay, think of it! :-)
The human race was in far more danger of extinction when there were fewer of us. A long cold snap could've wiped us out in pre-civilized times. A number of diseases almost did for us. It's rather amazing that humankind survived long enough to have the leisure to think up uses for nuclear energy. I believe that any species smart enough to invent an A-bomb is probably smart enough to survive it.
The world was full of danger before we arrived and will be when we've gone. It's a bit arrogant to think that the end of the world only became possible with the advent of humans. Ask any dinosaur.
Maybe the Time Patrol herds the silly tourists back home before they mess up the future? :-)
Hey, boys and girls, there's a book out on _How to Build a Time Machine_. (Sorry, Author, my copy's at home and I'm terrible with names.) Go read it to get some of the wild ideas out of the way, then come back and discuss what's left.
Oh, "velocity relative to the universe" has meaning, all right, but what it means tells us that it is pointless to discuss it since there can be no way to measure that quantity.
In fiction, the author eventually gets around the barrier at the machine's creation by the Tim Taylor technique: More Power! The idea is that it's relatively easy to travel between coupled machines at each end of the span, but with a bit more work you can push from one end without a receiver at the other. (_The End of Eternity_, _The Proteus Operation_, etc.)
OTOH Anderson's timecycles don't seem to have any particular limitations w.r.t. the date of their creation.
Sorry, I read Asimov's "Olympiad" and learned to distrust instant education.
"...to me the concept of absolute truth is a paradoxical statement with no meaning."
So you disbelieve in arithmetic? If you believe in ordinary addition, I can generate an infinite series of absolute truths for you.
A person is an atheist if his religion states that no gods exist. There are plenty of illogical atheists out there. One who treats logical reasoning as the only source of truth is a scientist.
(Notice that a scientist can take off his scientist hat and be a religionist too. Many of the greatest scientists were not only believers in one religion or another, but driven to do science as a part of their working out of their faith. Arguments between science and religion are like arguments between horizontal and vertical.)
Name any point in history at which the human race had more than a 50% chance of surviving the next 100 years without a major disaster. 50% looks pretty good to me. (100% looks better but we'll never have that.)
And yet look at all the disasters we've had and still survived. Life is *tough* and humanity is one of the toughest examples.
I guess my grandchildren will just stare when I tell them the one about the guy who decided to drive from point A to point B, where A and B are separated by an ocean. Pretty soon there won't *be* any major landmasses separated by oceans.
"Gee, gramps, I guess you had to be there. Well, gotta go, I need to catch the elevator to Orbital Station 9 or I'll miss the next bus to Tycho."
Maybe it won't be so bad, after all....
ISTR experiments done years ago (spending months living underground, away from the influence of daylight) which showed that the human circadian rhythm free-runs at a period of about 26 hours, so maybe 24.66 hours is not too bad.
OTOH it could be a life-changing experience for some of them. Some people are more sensitive to the light/dark cycle than others. (See SAD, people who need melatonin supplements to get normal sleep in some parts of the year, etc.)
"eats 150 Megs"
You are a genius. I couldn't make an entire Linux install, *with* X, eat up all of the 60MB partition I gave it when I first set it up. Nowadays, of course, what with gThis and kThat, it's easy to fill up anything the disk builders can make. But X is still pretty small.
Kermit is still doing work for me that can't easily be duplicated by anything else I have. It's not dead, by a long shot. There is more to the world than WWW.
"Kermit's limited popularity can probably be traced to the complexity of the software. Its support for every weird and/or broken piece of telecommunications gear meant that it had lots of options and tunable parameters."
OTOH that's the reason that Kermit is the *only* thing that will be thought of by people who need to talk to weird/broken gear, and eventually when they need to talk to *any* serial gear. Once I got the Kermit habit, I wouldn't think of using anything else.
Besides, it was soooo nice to have that TOPS-20 command auto-completion stuff on a mere PeeCee. I felt as though anyone who bothered to do that deserved to have his stuff used and appreciated.
Nah, I looked at ZModem and went back to Kermit. I didn't have to stay up late studying for hours to figure out whether I was licensed to use Kermit for this or that purpose.
"I'm not a sysadmin of a large Microsoft network, so forgive me if the following question is naive. Rather than have Microsoft delay non-critical patches for everyone so that your corporate update schedule can be more predictable, couldn't Microsoft release the patches as soon as they're ready, and then have your IT department just schedule one day a month when they do a mass update of all patches released since the previous month?"
.DLL it replaces is *newer* than the patched version.)
I *am* a sysadmin for a sizable fleet of MS Windows stations, and that's pretty much what I want. SUS lets us do that, to some extent , and has for some time. If we could just get SUS, Windows Update, and HFNETCHK to agree on what the current patch set is, we'd be all set. (The other thing on my patching wish list is a merger of Windows Update, MS Office Update, and all other MS software products into one giant Microsoft Updates list that we could roll out through SUS. Oh, and HFNETCHK should stop shrieking that we're missing patch X because our copy of the
Better way to fix the unnecessary update to WMP9 would have been if Server didn't install the earlier WMP at setup time despite almost anything you do to stop it. Wouldn't it make sense that, if there's no sound card, and this *is* "Server" after all, maybe there's no reason to install multimedia junk unless the user specifically requests it?
.NET and anything else we don't use. Unfortunately HFNETCHK and BSA and on and on will still whine that the patch is missing, because there's an older version that you didn't need or want or ask for but got anyway and cannot uninstall.
Anyway Windows Update does provide a tree control allowing you to unckeck stuff you don't want to see any more, and I've unchecked WMP and
True, automagic installation of unwanted junk isn't confined to MS Windows. I absolutely *hate* setting up a new Red Hat box, because it always puts in everything but the kitchen sink, and when I try to remove anything for which we have no use, it wants to remove 69 dependents, two of which we use, and neither of which has any obvious reason to depend on it.
Indeed, I just read the whitepaper on changes to the security patch process and that was one thing that stuck out. They think we want fewer patches, less often, not *fewer bugs* and patches ASAP for those that do slip through. The patch process was okay before; it's their design methodology that needs fixing.
I'm not happy with the thought that MS is going to be giving the kiddies an average of 15 days of free play with each *known* vulnerability, which is the way a lot of people concerned with security are going to look at this. Sadly this move will look good to upper management since it resembles good work planning.
Reminds me of a mail-order company, some years ago, responding to the question, "why do you repeat so many items in your catalog?" They thought they needed to increase the churn in their product line, when in fact what a lot of people wanted was that, if you don't have anything new, *don't send another catalog*.