See, the problem with enforcing rules like frequent password changes and mandatory "good" passwords (not from a dictionary word, upper case and lower case, non-alphanumeric characters, etc) is that users will, when forced to remember passwords like this, write them down.
Sometimes, the more spectacularly idiotic users will write down the password on a post-it note and stick it to their monitor so they never have to remember it at all.
Just making those passwords mandatory is trivial programmatically (though things like 'P@ssw0rd' are still perfectly legal under those rules). Hell, most Linux installs I've used are set default with a passwd that checks to make sure you're not using a dictionary word. The hard part is trying to fix stupid users.
It used to work quite well plugged right into your router via Ethernet. Then they switched to the "new, improved" model 360 router, which would, as far as I could tell, randomly screw with packets. TCP/IP handled this gracefully, of course, but it brought the performance back down to roughly modem speed with the added bonus of extra-terrestrial latency times.
But then, a few months ago, they decided that they would stop allowing packets that didn't go through their Windows-only proxy software at all. So we completely lost network connectivity for a week or so while we cobbled together the spare parts around the house to set up a Windows box.
So if you want to use Linux, MacOS, Solaris, or basically anything not Windows, keep on looking.
Oh, and high latency is a bitch when trying to use telnet. Damn speed of light.
Okay, two immediate thoughts come to mind with relation to this.
First off, with the way that human mating works nowadays, there really isn't much evolutionary motivation. You date people who you find attractive for whatever damn fool reason you have rather than for the purpose of creating healthy offspring. I, for instance, tend to prefer dating women who find fat, bearded computer geeks attractive. That's not an evolutionarily sound move on my part, but that's not going to make me dump my lovely girlfriend. So this development makes it possible for Humans to actually take control of evolution and start breeding out diseases and infirmaties.
However, the problem that immediately comes to mind is something that dog breeders have found over the years. People started breeding for certain traits such as soft coat, ears that are floppy in exactly the right way, short tails, etc. While this makes for very pretty dogs, it leads to the problem that the average Dalmation, far from rescuing its brethren from Cruella DeVille, could just barely rescue itself from a small, wet paper sack. And that's only if it had 100 other dogs helping it. And the wet paper sack also had food in it that they wanted to get to. And maybe was perforated. Which is why sheepdog owners are, last I heard (which was, admittedly, years ago), fighting tooth and nail to keep their breed out of competition. They raise sheepdogs to be/smart/ and/strong/ and/useful/. Not pretty.
The point I'm trying to make is that genetically manipulating which kids we have to screen for diseases is fine by me, but I'd hate to live in a future where people start screening their reproductive cells so that they only have pretty babies. They'll probably be able to play games with Dalmations on the same intellectual level.
The key is to get creative. We were actually playing this in my dorm room last night. After doing a binary search to center the answer on my jar of coins, on the last question we were allowed before losing, we figured out that the thing beginning with the letter 'I' that my friend Nick Skupnik had spied with his little eye was, in fact, the Iconographic Representation of President Lincoln.
Um... I don't want to sound like one of the Natalie Portman, Hot Grits, and Goatse.cx crowd here but I for one wouldn't want a telephone embedded in my hand.
There are all sorts of unpleasant possibilities for misdialing while looking at porn on the computer embedded into your skin.
On the plus side, they could call that hypothetically hand-embedded handheld a Rosy Palm...
Well, they asked a sample of students who were accused of cheating by this system and, according to them, it turns out that every last one was a false positive. They were all actually innocent. Who'd have thunk it?:)
I always recommend Slackware as an introductory distribution.
See, when a user first installs a distribution like Redhat or Mandrake, they see a desktop that looks and acts remarkably like Windows...up to a point. After which, little things simply don't work (IE, try to do cut & paste between two apps that implement their own versions of cut & paste, which annoyingly many do). When things that they think look familiar don't work properly, I've found that more often than not, they give up in disgust.
But with Slackware, you're immediately greeted with... a text console. You have to set up X yourself. And to do that, you have to figure out what the command is to set up the X server. And the learning curve continues to be steep as hell, all the way to the top.
At which point you realize that you know Linux. Intimately. Your system is customized, you know every nook and cranny, everything's set up how you like it, and you know how everything's set up.
Another reason I reccomend Slackware is that it's much easier to set up a secondary machine running Slackware. I still regularly fit Slackware installs in under 100MB of disk, so I can have a friend set up a little spare machine out of spare parts using an old Pentium I or even 486 board so they can get used to the system without having to take the big productivity hit of giving up Windows or MacOS entirely. Dual-boot systems, I've found, never get booted into.
I've set up four of my friends using Linux. One with Slackware, one with RedHat, and two with Mandrake. The only one who's still using it is the Slackware guy, and he doesn't use anything else. One of the Mandrake guys is slowly getting back into Linux using Slackware.
I'm just waiting for Intel to abandon the Pentium line altogether and move on to the Sexium. They have a great slogan ready-made for them: "The Intel Sexium processor--Turn it on."
Then later they can introduce the Septium and, for a greatly reduced price, lower quality versions called 'Deviated Septiums'.
If you're talking about the story of Grace Hopper finding a moth in a mainframe, be sure that you realize that this wasn't really the first usage of "bug" in a computer-error sense. Check the Jargon File entry on 'bug' for an explanation.
Other materials you really ought to check out for this class include:
Anything by Steven Levy. Hackers for geek culture history (though see the note about this in the end of the Jargon File), Insanely Great for history of Macintosh, Crypto for history of the cryptography movement.
Cyberpunk fiction. Gibson is good, Stephenson is better (Gibson's stuff is really not written from the computer geek perspective, Stephenson's stuff is). Vinge is also quite worthwhile, from what I've read of his.
Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg. He's a psycho luddite, but it doesn't show through in an annoying way in this book.:)
Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine
Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Can't remember the names of the co-authors of this book and I don't have my copy handy, but it's a good book about the history of the Internet.
Open Sources, an O'Reilly book with multiple essays about the Open Source movement by people who are actually in the Open Source movement (IE, Linus and RMS, and it's edited by ESR).
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. Really doesn't apply to this, but it's a damn good book and I want to put the full force of the Allan Crain Seal of Approval behind it.;)
PS: Any chance you could conduct this class at the University of Missouri-Rolla? I'd like to take it.
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See, the problem with enforcing rules like frequent password changes and mandatory "good" passwords (not from a dictionary word, upper case and lower case, non-alphanumeric characters, etc) is that users will, when forced to remember passwords like this, write them down.
Sometimes, the more spectacularly idiotic users will write down the password on a post-it note and stick it to their monitor so they never have to remember it at all.
Just making those passwords mandatory is trivial programmatically (though things like 'P@ssw0rd' are still perfectly legal under those rules). Hell, most Linux installs I've used are set default with a passwd that checks to make sure you're not using a dictionary word. The hard part is trying to fix stupid users.
--AC
It used to work quite well plugged right into your router via Ethernet. Then they switched to the "new, improved" model 360 router, which would, as far as I could tell, randomly screw with packets. TCP/IP handled this gracefully, of course, but it brought the performance back down to roughly modem speed with the added bonus of extra-terrestrial latency times.
But then, a few months ago, they decided that they would stop allowing packets that didn't go through their Windows-only proxy software at all. So we completely lost network connectivity for a week or so while we cobbled together the spare parts around the house to set up a Windows box.
So if you want to use Linux, MacOS, Solaris, or basically anything not Windows, keep on looking.
Oh, and high latency is a bitch when trying to use telnet. Damn speed of light.
--AC
Okay, two immediate thoughts come to mind with relation to this.
/smart/ and /strong/ and /useful/. Not pretty.
First off, with the way that human mating works nowadays, there really isn't much evolutionary motivation. You date people who you find attractive for whatever damn fool reason you have rather than for the purpose of creating healthy offspring. I, for instance, tend to prefer dating women who find fat, bearded computer geeks attractive. That's not an evolutionarily sound move on my part, but that's not going to make me dump my lovely girlfriend. So this development makes it possible for Humans to actually take control of evolution and start breeding out diseases and infirmaties.
However, the problem that immediately comes to mind is something that dog breeders have found over the years. People started breeding for certain traits such as soft coat, ears that are floppy in exactly the right way, short tails, etc. While this makes for very pretty dogs, it leads to the problem that the average Dalmation, far from rescuing its brethren from Cruella DeVille, could just barely rescue itself from a small, wet paper sack. And that's only if it had 100 other dogs helping it. And the wet paper sack also had food in it that they wanted to get to. And maybe was perforated. Which is why sheepdog owners are, last I heard (which was, admittedly, years ago), fighting tooth and nail to keep their breed out of competition. They raise sheepdogs to be
The point I'm trying to make is that genetically manipulating which kids we have to screen for diseases is fine by me, but I'd hate to live in a future where people start screening their reproductive cells so that they only have pretty babies. They'll probably be able to play games with Dalmations on the same intellectual level.
--AC
The key is to get creative. We were actually playing this in my dorm room last night. After doing a binary search to center the answer on my jar of coins, on the last question we were allowed before losing, we figured out that the thing beginning with the letter 'I' that my friend Nick Skupnik had spied with his little eye was, in fact, the Iconographic Representation of President Lincoln.
--AC
Um... I don't want to sound like one of the Natalie Portman, Hot Grits, and Goatse.cx crowd here but I for one wouldn't want a telephone embedded in my hand.
There are all sorts of unpleasant possibilities for misdialing while looking at porn on the computer embedded into your skin.
On the plus side, they could call that hypothetically hand-embedded handheld a Rosy Palm...
--AC
--AC
AMD has just moved us that little bit closer to having a Halt and Catch Fire instruction.
--AC
See, when a user first installs a distribution like Redhat or Mandrake, they see a desktop that looks and acts remarkably like Windows...up to a point. After which, little things simply don't work (IE, try to do cut & paste between two apps that implement their own versions of cut & paste, which annoyingly many do). When things that they think look familiar don't work properly, I've found that more often than not, they give up in disgust.
But with Slackware, you're immediately greeted with... a text console. You have to set up X yourself. And to do that, you have to figure out what the command is to set up the X server. And the learning curve continues to be steep as hell, all the way to the top.
At which point you realize that you know Linux. Intimately. Your system is customized, you know every nook and cranny, everything's set up how you like it, and you know how everything's set up.
Another reason I reccomend Slackware is that it's much easier to set up a secondary machine running Slackware. I still regularly fit Slackware installs in under 100MB of disk, so I can have a friend set up a little spare machine out of spare parts using an old Pentium I or even 486 board so they can get used to the system without having to take the big productivity hit of giving up Windows or MacOS entirely. Dual-boot systems, I've found, never get booted into.
I've set up four of my friends using Linux. One with Slackware, one with RedHat, and two with Mandrake. The only one who's still using it is the Slackware guy, and he doesn't use anything else. One of the Mandrake guys is slowly getting back into Linux using Slackware.
I'm just waiting for Intel to abandon the Pentium line altogether and move on to the Sexium. They have a great slogan ready-made for them: "The Intel Sexium processor--Turn it on."
Then later they can introduce the Septium and, for a greatly reduced price, lower quality versions called 'Deviated Septiums'.
Other materials you really ought to check out for this class include:
- Anything by Steven Levy. Hackers for geek culture history (though see the note about this in the end of the Jargon File), Insanely Great for history of Macintosh, Crypto for history of the cryptography movement.
- Cyberpunk fiction. Gibson is good, Stephenson is better (Gibson's stuff is really not written from the computer geek perspective, Stephenson's stuff is). Vinge is also quite worthwhile, from what I've read of his.
- Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg. He's a psycho luddite, but it doesn't show through in an annoying way in this book.
:)
- Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine
- Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Can't remember the names of the co-authors of this book and I don't have my copy handy, but it's a good book about the history of the Internet.
- Open Sources, an O'Reilly book with multiple essays about the Open Source movement by people who are actually in the Open Source movement (IE, Linus and RMS, and it's edited by ESR).
- Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. Really doesn't apply to this, but it's a damn good book and I want to put the full force of the Allan Crain Seal of Approval behind it.
;)
PS: Any chance you could conduct this class at the University of Missouri-Rolla? I'd like to take it.Ed Roberts, founder of MITS and creator of the Altair 8800 (widely acknowledged as the first personal computer), is now a small-town doctor.
Ken Thompson, co-creator of Unix, is now a flight instructor.
What's next? Douglas Engelbart becoming a professional bowler? Tim Berners-Lee realizing his life-long dream of becoming a plumber?
Oblikvopunkto.