The UK courts would, I think, uphold the earlier ruling that Sealand is outside of their durisdiction (because it clearly is, under international law).
International law explicity excludes territorial claims on the basis of man made platforms. Otherwise countries would be building them to claim mineral rights.
The English courts rulled that the platform was outside their jurisdiction. So is Glasgow, but that is certainly not recognized as an independent state. The ruling says nothing about the claims of the British crown which are considerably more extensive. Very little of the North Sea Oil is within the 3 mile or 12 mile territorial limit, but the UK claims sovereign rights with respect to the minerals.
The rulling of the English courts was based on the then law which set the territorial limit at 3 miles. It has since been expanded to 12 miles.
It's not very likely, since Britain's own courts have recognized the sovereignty of Sealand.
That is Sealand propaganda. The court actually rulled that the platform was outside UK territorial waters and thus not subject to UK law. There are many parts of the world that are outside UK jurisdiction, not all of them are states.
In particular under UK law a man made platform is considered to be a ship and not land.
When the UK expanded its territorial limits the platform came under the jurisdiction of the UK courts again. HavenCo have ownership of the place under the UK squatting laws (12 years occupation).
Seems like you don't want to LEARN, you just want to ape the procedure and never have to exercise the gray cells.
I get plenty of exercise in that area solving real problems without having to solve other people's invented puzzles.
The process of engineering is knowing which details are important and which are not. I don't care about how an algorithm works unless there is a good reason to care.
I consider the value of a book lies in both the ideas it presents and the ability of the author to communicate them. Unfortunately Knuth appears to be going for the Heidegger/Habbermass school of presentation which is in my view indefensible when you are presenting other people's ideas.
If I want to spend time on something that is a badly written presentation of interesting ideas I'll read a continental philosopher.
C# didn't exist when he started volume 4. Java didn't exist when he started 1-3. Are you suggesting that he should rewrite each volume every time a new language becomes fashionable?
Knuth was working on volume 4 before I started my thesis which was considerably earlier than Java.
I did not suggest that he write the book in Java or C#, I suggested that if he is going to invent a language a high level language is more convenient than an invented assembler code. Moreover examples that provide the loop invariants, pre and post conditions can be put through automatic proof checkers which is kinda useful if you want to be sure that the algoriths are correct.
The point of a bare bones old language is that it favors nothing. If you have to see an idea in C# or Java to understand it, then you are a piss poor programmer.
It isn't that long ago that I used to write 6502 machine code without the need for an assembler. I probably could understand Don's examples if I wanted to but to be honest I'm not that insecure about my technical ability that I need to decode other people's obscurantism.
At this point a compendium of algorithms does not in my view justify the title 'the art of computer programming'. There is much more to the art than knowing which algorithms to apply.
C# didn't exist when he started volume 4. Java didn't exist when he started 1-3. Are you suggesting that he should rewrite each volume every time a new language becomes fashionable?
If you use a high level enough language you can do that with a script.
My point was however that if you are going to invent languages to describe algorithms it is better to invent a high level language than a low level language.
And although Java and C# have only just been introduced, the format is readily accessible to anyone who has used CPL or one of the algol family of languages.
If you have to see an idea in C# or Java to understand it, then you are a piss poor programmer.
I can still code 6502 machine code (i.e. without an assembler), I could probably learn MIX, but I very much doubt I will bother. If I want to use an algorithm from Knuth's book I will give the book to an engineer and tell him to give me C# or Java classes that implement the ones I might want to use. Privilege of rank.
As for the loop invariants, pre- and postconditions, &c -- if one can't determine those at a glance, one has no chance of maintaining others' code (read: surviving) in the Real World.
The pre and post conditions are no more or less trivial than the algorithm they describe.
And given the number of folk who can specify a sort and forget to state that the output must be a permutation of the input I don't think that using formal methods is as trivial as you make it out.
It's just like when the US "invaded the Confederate States of America." The powers of Europe never saw the CSA as an independent nation, so the entire civil war (as opposed to a revolution) was seen as an internal matter by the rest of the world.
That is a very good point, during the war of independence the critical turning point was recognition of the US by France. During the US Civil War the European powers were at one point within a few weeks of recognizing the confederate states. Had that happened the secessionists would probably have succeeded. Then the tide started to go the other way and the European powers decided to stay out of the affair.
The Sealand people are no different from the numerous loonies to be found in Montana and the like in places called 'JustUs County' and such. They can argue from dawn to dusk, but at the end of the day Mao was right on the origin of power.
They played by the rules. Without doubt, they are a sovereign nation (check the history of Sealand if you don't believe me).
The Iraquois and the Apache were sovereign nations, that did not do them much good. In the case of 'Sealand' the UK govt. has a 12 mile territorial claim that is uncontested by any other nation state recognized by the UN.
Yes, the SAS could raid them, but that would effectively mean that the UK had declared war on another nation. That wouldn't be a particularly good PR exercise.
Have a look at our history sometime. We spent most of the past 500 years invading places on tenuous pretexts. It was rarely unpopular.
Actually the UK does not need to use the SAS to invade, they just arrest Ryan at Heathrow Airport when he flies in or out.
Basically the way things work in the UK is that people can pretty much do what they please so long as they appear to be harmless. MI5 probably prefer to have all the HavenCo customers where they can see them and tap them than have them scatterted all over the place.
What would lead to problems is if they did start collecting arms. That is not going to be considered humourously.
Knuth's argument boils down to, because any high level language is bound to be out of fashion I will use an assembler that is guaranteed to be out of fashion.
I don't buy that argument. And the business about TAoCP being like the Encyclopedia Britainica, a work for the ages is a bit of a crock. As compendiums of algorithm's go I prefer the one written by Ron Rivest and friends. I can't remember whether it is written in Pascal or C and I really don't mind because I can easily read both.
My ideal algorithms book would be written in a modified version of C# or Java. First I would get rid of the unnecessary braces and semicolons. All they do is to make the code fragments longer. Indentation shows block structure much better, continuation lines are not actually ambiguous in algol like languages.
I would also add in statement of the loop invariants, pre and post conditions which as a formal methods person I regard as an important part of an algorithm.
see sites without HTML tags HEAD tags even without BODY tags, and IE still accepts them as valid HTML
No, the browser obeys the HTML spec and makes a best attempt at rendering the content.
This behaviour was specified by Tim B-L before Hakon, Ragget and the rest of us got on the case. Dave Ragget's Arena browser had a smiley face that frowned when you had bad HTML.
The lax processing model was specified to make writing scripts as easy as possible. Basically Tim thought that systems that refuse to show you anything on a page because a footnote was missing a close element were broken. I think he was right there.
The other thing that got messed up completely was the content negotiation mechanism which the folk at NCSA could never understand. First they had Mosaic sending 2Kb of accept headers ending with Accept: */* because they would go to the rescap file and look for viewers. Then after we told the this was not a good idea they cut out the headers completely. The idea of a happy medium never occured to them.
Netscape's current problems are a direct consequence of their own behavior when they began the company. Netscape went out of their way to kill any working content negotiation mechanism. They calculated that as the dominant browser it would be better for Netscape if they controlled the standard. So instead of identifying the HTML version number the browser could accept they promoted scripts that checked for the string Mozilla in the user agent field.
The news.com article actually misses the main point I presume Hakon wants to make, when Web Designers only write for IE they are only writing for people surfing from computer browsers. You lose the audience of PDA users, voice browser users, disabled users etc.
Unfortunately Javascript and flash tend to be used aggressively on sites which would often be better without. I particularly loath the Javascript designers arrogance in allowing the content to override my UI choices. If I say I want the browser to go back to the previous page I want it to go back boyyo. The only reason to deprive the user of those bittons is to pander to advertisiers, which of course Netscape did.
Where I work they gave me a $7,500 security training budget for myself. I was faced with just the opposite problem -- where to go for decent training, and not just a "hang out" conference.
Hey, go on a geek cruise!. For $2000 you get a cabin for 2 and 7 days training!
I thought this was an incredible boondoggle until I looked at how much you would pay for a hotel for a 5 day course.
$75 this year, but they're paying the speakers, so it should have a better set of talks.
How much can they afford to pay the speakers if the conference is $75?
I arrived at the WWW2002 conference this year to find that they charge speakers the conference fee! Fortunately I was giving a tutorial and got a free admission but some of the speakers I invited for my panels were somewhat put out.
I suspect that at that price the speakers are not getting much more than a cheap air fare.
I do charge for appearing at some conferences but DefCon is not the sort of place I would expect an large honorarium from.
Last year there was a fringe meeting held just before the RSA conference called CodeCon. The hook there was you had to have written code to speak. It was a reasonably good setup, only the venue was Jammie Z's nightclub which meant an ID check at the door (which kept out some of the cipherpunks) and there was no good place to network duing talks.
Next year I plan to skip the RSA talks, and do CodeCon and the RSA floor show.
Hey if I post something that starts off with the phrase 'I have built systems this big' and then you go sniping at the details in a patronising manner then prepare to be patronized.
If you mean "machines must need rebooting less than once a year", well, that'd obviously be lovely, but as I'm sure you'd be the first to admit, it's not really needed.
If you have 256 machines and the average uptime is only a year then you are going to be rebooting a machine almost every day.
You need the average uptime to be rather higher than that if you want the system as a whole to function reliably.
The main problem is that most O/S are not written well from the point of view of recovery when a peer or a server goes down. You are very likely to find that a hardware failure at one node causes a ripple effect as other nodes that were communicating with it either time out in an inconsistent state or work from a divergent dataset.
This is why under the old VAXCluster system the system had built in the somewhat counter intuitive notion that when a node lost sync with the cluster it should simply halt rather than attempting to continue and propagate an inconsistent state.
And no, high levels of stability are five nines which works out at 5.6 minutes of downtime per year, not a reboot per year.
The slow boot-up of Windows 2000 is a DCHP bug in the OS that can be fixed with some tweking,
It is astonishing how you think you are able to diagnose the reason for a system you have no knowledge of behaving in a particular way to the extent that it gives you the right to be insulting about it.
Your analysis was completely wrong. The machines in question do not run off a 56K modem. The DHCP service in the house comes off my firewall and all the machines are on 802.11b.
Perhaps you don't understand this OS stuff as much as you'd like to believe that you do,
Pot, Kettle, black
I think it is quite legitimate to call people who start a post 'I have not used XP but' ignorant. And I note that your post fits into this pattern only instead of telling us upfront you are a twit you make us wait till the end of your post, as you admit you do not use XP but you still make (incorrect) comments about other people's systems.
As I said in the original post, there are improvements in XP that are worth having if all else is equal but they are not so great that it is a must have upgrade from w2k. However folk arguing that can't have it both ways, if the upgrade is not so great as to not be worth having then the difference between XP and w2k can't be so great as to justify the synthetic slashoutrage in this thread.
Perhaps you should tell that to Google, who seem to have realised you can make Linux work stably enough to run a cluster of 10,000 machines.
Google's achievement is not a trivial one with any O/S platform.
The point you seem to be deliberately missing is that running large clusters of processors is a non-trivial task, one that traditionally people have paid premium prices for.
Notice that nowhere in the article did I say that 'Linux can't do this'. In fact my own company has switched to using Linux for certain mission critical clusters. However the engineering required to do that is distinctly non-trivial and certainly not an out of the box configuration.
what I was arguing against was the slashweenie attitude 'of course this is possible, in fact it is trivial'.
Actually, part of the point of clustering is that you don't need enormous levels of fault tolerance
You learned that in your 'theory' class eh? Well the practical class teaches you that you need both fault tolerant software and a pretty high level of basic stability. The problem being that 'redundant' designs with zero common points of failur are much harder to build in the real world than on paper.
The article is pretty confused. I seriously doubt that Microsoft is nixing installation of W2K server since XP does not support any of the server stuff - including Active Directory and Kerberos domain controller.
That said W2K Workstation and XP Pro are similar enough that just as a lot of folk see no advantage to upgrading, there is not a lot of downside to upgrading. If you want to have a homogenous IT shop in which everyone has exactly the same setup then you will be installing from a pre-mastered disk image anyway.
The slashdot blathering against XP from people who admit they have never used it is simple ignorance. The sae people can be found lambasting Microsoft for unreliable software and then proudly proclaiming that they never upgraded from Win95. Well Duuuuhhh!!!!
XP is a big improvement over w2k in a few areas. The big one being that you can run Win98 software on a system with an NT kernel. The nice to have feature is that my Vaio now reboots in 30 seconds instead of taking 4 minutes.
I think that the real reason that so many of the slashdot crowd are so anti-XP is that they are scared of it. It takes several releases for any O/S to become reliable. In the early days of Linux the main attraction was that it was more reliable than several of the commercial O/S. When Solaris 2 first came out it was a byword for flaky, people were running SunOs for reliability.
Call up any vendor. Tell them their systems are unstable out of the box. Think they're gonna say something like, "oh, yeah, just tweak this little setting...". I don't think the quote above is very logical; no vendor is going to be that helpful with stability issues. Maybe "stability issues" was just a poor choice of words?
Why is it that every time someone with real world experience of running Linux on a large scale talks of a problem the response is always that they must be either mistaken or stupid?
Fifteen years ago you could have made the same coment about running large scale UNIX clusters. Sure you could buy 64 RISC workstations and configure them in a farm, but you would end up rebooting a machine at least once an hour - I know because thats what I was doing fifteen years ago, only with rather more processors.
Experience of running a single machine or a small cluster of office or university machines is not applicable to running large scale systems. If you have a system that is using multiple processors in a single computational task you have to have both software that is designed for fault tolerance and a very high level of basic reliability. If you have a render wall of 256 processors and each one in standalone mode runs for a week without a crash you will end up dealling with a system crash every 40 minutes, most likely more frequently due to interactions between the machines.
This type of processing is the reason people used to pay a hefty premium for systems from folk like DEC who had lots of experience filling a room with machines and getting them to work reliably. Today that ability is the only thing keeping Sun afloat.
My criterion for an acceptable DRM system is simple. It must be incapable of removing any rights from the end user.
That goal cannot be achieved technically for the same reason that DRM cannot be achieved technically. Information is policy neutral, the only means of attaching a policy to information is through secure hardware which does not exist in mass producable form (as the advocates of the Clipper chip discovered).
I have not yet written a submission, if I do it will probably be on the following lines:
DRM technology must be judged by its actual capabilities and not the claims made for it. At present DRM technologies are subject to a technical equivalent of Gresham's law, the bad schemes drive out the good. Nobody has a scheme that can provide for perfect security.
The purpose of security technology is to control risk, not eliminate it
Legislation should not be used to deprive consumers of use rights, in particular those that operate in restraint of trade The real purpose of the DVD zone scheme is to allow artificial price differentials between markets to be preserved. While this is repeatedly denied these denials are not credible.
The primary impact of any DRM enforcement mechanism is psychological.
It's a parody of critical theory that amuses only those who know so little about critical theory, that they might actually think that the satirical gun was loaded. It wasn't.
I thought it was reasonably obvious that the main point of comparison between the two was that in both cases people worry excessively about what they are and are not seen to read.
In the case of post-modern philosophy there are certainly pseuds who read the stuff to look trendy. But the anti-faction are just as ignorant, in most cases criticising work they haven't read.
With Harry Potter, the humourless jerks who are saying that they wouldn't be seen reading it past the age of 14 never read anything more intellectual than the Penthouse letters page.
The Flintstones was intended as an ironic satire of 'modern' conveniences. Each week there would be a different gadget such as a dishwasher or a gramaphone that was powered by dinosaur.
Rowling uses the same joke throughout the Harry Potter books, except that instead of dinosaurs, magic is used as a substitute for electricity etc. etc.
A word of advice to people over fourteen (esp. males): Never recommend Harry Potter books to anyone, and never freely admit having read them. Doing so, (1) reveals your lack of intellectual sophistication, (2) hints at your inability to read books from start to finish (unless they are "For Dummies..." or nine-year-olds, and (3) makes you one of those annoying asswipes that insists that everyone read the all-seeing, all-knowing work of infinite philisophical importance that is the last book you managed to complete (mostly).
Actually the books are very sophisticated intellectually. The sophistication is generally lost on American readers however who are unaware of the cultural and litterary references that Rowling ads in for the amusement of older readers.
For example Hogwarts Castle is a parody of Mallory Towers. The use of Magic as a substitute for technological mod cons is a homage to the Flintstones.
This simply carries on a long tradition of British Children's works, The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe is an allegory of the New Testament. The Harry Potter series as a whole is an allegory of a series of works by Foucault. The Dumbledore character is an anegogical reference to Derrida. The Dursleys are of course a reference to Proust.
Helpful users have been finding out the IP address blocks owned by the "bad guys" and submitting them to create a "ban list" for search results.
Oh please tell me where this is!
Because as a Cable Internet user I am really wazzed off by the slowdown in my modem because of all the filesharing theives arround. So if I report the IP address block of my provider as a bad IP block that will cause the f*#$*g theives who slow down my access to get booted.
A simple boycott of the Overpeer'ed songs would be a good start. If you had a website that listed the songs in question, along with the suggestion to boycott, that's just plain old freedom of speech, right? It's not like anyone really needs to have these files anyway.
Good idea! only I think you will find that boycotting the files is exactly what the RIAA wants. They want you to boycott the files and buy the smegging CD
Only the P2P people are already boycotting the CD because they are a bunch of theives who steal it via P2P rather than buy it
Sometimes they rename pornos with titles like 'mulan.avi', etc. Sigh. Lots of wasted bandwidth.
Yeah! I had to download Mulan 32 times before I got my fix of pr0n!
It is pretty appropriate to put fake P2P files up since P2P is pretty much a fake scene. The bit about it really and trully being to allow people to swap their own self generated content and the copyright theft thing is a tiny, tiny minority is such a crock.
If material is not illicit in some fashion there is no reason to use P2P instead of a Web server. There are only two types of legitimate material that P2P would be necessary for - samizdat political tracts and Pr0n. Despite the best efforts of John Ashcroft it is still possible to publish material critical of Govenor Bush as the reports of his insider trading and Enronesque accounting methods demonstrate.
As for Pr0n, while there is no doubt an amateur Pr0n scene somewhere on the Web I have never heard that it is a big part of the P2P scene. Which if the propaganda was true one would expect it to be, after all you don't need much to DIY Pr0n, no acting ability required, just a razor, plenty of lubricants, condoms, a camera and a girlfriend... ohhh dear well that could be tricky.
Even the Roman Empire fell. And not because they didn't enforce their copyright laws.
The Roman Empire fell because they stopped having enough orgies.
What really happened is that the Visigoths came down to Rome on a Club 18-30 package tour thinking that they would visit the Colloseum for a spot of combat, spend the afternoon looking at the architecture and round the evening off with a nice orgy. Problem was that the local chapter of the Christian Coalition had got the Emp. to ban the gladiator contests and close down the brothels. Result several thousand very angry Visigoths who trashed the place.
The Roman Empire may be gone, but it lasted twice as long as the US has been in existence. The Empire in the East lasted 1,500 years.
It's time for folks to step back and take a deep breath and think about what's best for society and civilization and stop worrying so much about their own private interests
Quite true, how about starting with asking whether file sharing networks whose almost exclusive purpose is to facilitate copyright theft are a sustainable model?
Slashdot Mirror
International law explicity excludes territorial claims on the basis of man made platforms. Otherwise countries would be building them to claim mineral rights.
The English courts rulled that the platform was outside their jurisdiction. So is Glasgow, but that is certainly not recognized as an independent state. The ruling says nothing about the claims of the British crown which are considerably more extensive. Very little of the North Sea Oil is within the 3 mile or 12 mile territorial limit, but the UK claims sovereign rights with respect to the minerals.
The rulling of the English courts was based on the then law which set the territorial limit at 3 miles. It has since been expanded to 12 miles.
That is Sealand propaganda. The court actually rulled that the platform was outside UK territorial waters and thus not subject to UK law. There are many parts of the world that are outside UK jurisdiction, not all of them are states.
In particular under UK law a man made platform is considered to be a ship and not land.
When the UK expanded its territorial limits the platform came under the jurisdiction of the UK courts again. HavenCo have ownership of the place under the UK squatting laws (12 years occupation).
Seems like you don't want to LEARN, you just want to ape the procedure and never have to exercise the gray cells.
I get plenty of exercise in that area solving real problems without having to solve other people's invented puzzles.
The process of engineering is knowing which details are important and which are not. I don't care about how an algorithm works unless there is a good reason to care.
I consider the value of a book lies in both the ideas it presents and the ability of the author to communicate them. Unfortunately Knuth appears to be going for the Heidegger/Habbermass school of presentation which is in my view indefensible when you are presenting other people's ideas.
If I want to spend time on something that is a badly written presentation of interesting ideas I'll read a continental philosopher.
Knuth was working on volume 4 before I started my thesis which was considerably earlier than Java.
I did not suggest that he write the book in Java or C#, I suggested that if he is going to invent a language a high level language is more convenient than an invented assembler code. Moreover examples that provide the loop invariants, pre and post conditions can be put through automatic proof checkers which is kinda useful if you want to be sure that the algoriths are correct.
The point of a bare bones old language is that it favors nothing. If you have to see an idea in C# or Java to understand it, then you are a piss poor programmer.
It isn't that long ago that I used to write 6502 machine code without the need for an assembler. I probably could understand Don's examples if I wanted to but to be honest I'm not that insecure about my technical ability that I need to decode other people's obscurantism.
At this point a compendium of algorithms does not in my view justify the title 'the art of computer programming'. There is much more to the art than knowing which algorithms to apply.
If you use a high level enough language you can do that with a script.
My point was however that if you are going to invent languages to describe algorithms it is better to invent a high level language than a low level language.
And although Java and C# have only just been introduced, the format is readily accessible to anyone who has used CPL or one of the algol family of languages.
If you have to see an idea in C# or Java to understand it, then you are a piss poor programmer.
I can still code 6502 machine code (i.e. without an assembler), I could probably learn MIX, but I very much doubt I will bother. If I want to use an algorithm from Knuth's book I will give the book to an engineer and tell him to give me C# or Java classes that implement the ones I might want to use. Privilege of rank.
The pre and post conditions are no more or less trivial than the algorithm they describe.
And given the number of folk who can specify a sort and forget to state that the output must be a permutation of the input I don't think that using formal methods is as trivial as you make it out.
That is a very good point, during the war of independence the critical turning point was recognition of the US by France. During the US Civil War the European powers were at one point within a few weeks of recognizing the confederate states. Had that happened the secessionists would probably have succeeded. Then the tide started to go the other way and the European powers decided to stay out of the affair.
The Sealand people are no different from the numerous loonies to be found in Montana and the like in places called 'JustUs County' and such. They can argue from dawn to dusk, but at the end of the day Mao was right on the origin of power.
The Iraquois and the Apache were sovereign nations, that did not do them much good. In the case of 'Sealand' the UK govt. has a 12 mile territorial claim that is uncontested by any other nation state recognized by the UN.
Yes, the SAS could raid them, but that would effectively mean that the UK had declared war on another nation. That wouldn't be a particularly good PR exercise.
Have a look at our history sometime. We spent most of the past 500 years invading places on tenuous pretexts. It was rarely unpopular.
Actually the UK does not need to use the SAS to invade, they just arrest Ryan at Heathrow Airport when he flies in or out.
Basically the way things work in the UK is that people can pretty much do what they please so long as they appear to be harmless. MI5 probably prefer to have all the HavenCo customers where they can see them and tap them than have them scatterted all over the place.
What would lead to problems is if they did start collecting arms. That is not going to be considered humourously.
I don't buy that argument. And the business about TAoCP being like the Encyclopedia Britainica, a work for the ages is a bit of a crock. As compendiums of algorithm's go I prefer the one written by Ron Rivest and friends. I can't remember whether it is written in Pascal or C and I really don't mind because I can easily read both.
My ideal algorithms book would be written in a modified version of C# or Java. First I would get rid of the unnecessary braces and semicolons. All they do is to make the code fragments longer. Indentation shows block structure much better, continuation lines are not actually ambiguous in algol like languages.
I would also add in statement of the loop invariants, pre and post conditions which as a formal methods person I regard as an important part of an algorithm.
No, the browser obeys the HTML spec and makes a best attempt at rendering the content.
This behaviour was specified by Tim B-L before Hakon, Ragget and the rest of us got on the case. Dave Ragget's Arena browser had a smiley face that frowned when you had bad HTML.
The lax processing model was specified to make writing scripts as easy as possible. Basically Tim thought that systems that refuse to show you anything on a page because a footnote was missing a close element were broken. I think he was right there.
The other thing that got messed up completely was the content negotiation mechanism which the folk at NCSA could never understand. First they had Mosaic sending 2Kb of accept headers ending with Accept: */* because they would go to the rescap file and look for viewers. Then after we told the this was not a good idea they cut out the headers completely. The idea of a happy medium never occured to them.
Netscape's current problems are a direct consequence of their own behavior when they began the company. Netscape went out of their way to kill any working content negotiation mechanism. They calculated that as the dominant browser it would be better for Netscape if they controlled the standard. So instead of identifying the HTML version number the browser could accept they promoted scripts that checked for the string Mozilla in the user agent field.
The news.com article actually misses the main point I presume Hakon wants to make, when Web Designers only write for IE they are only writing for people surfing from computer browsers. You lose the audience of PDA users, voice browser users, disabled users etc.
Unfortunately Javascript and flash tend to be used aggressively on sites which would often be better without. I particularly loath the Javascript designers arrogance in allowing the content to override my UI choices. If I say I want the browser to go back to the previous page I want it to go back boyyo. The only reason to deprive the user of those bittons is to pander to advertisiers, which of course Netscape did.
Hey, go on a geek cruise!. For $2000 you get a cabin for 2 and 7 days training!
I thought this was an incredible boondoggle until I looked at how much you would pay for a hotel for a 5 day course.
How much can they afford to pay the speakers if the conference is $75?
I arrived at the WWW2002 conference this year to find that they charge speakers the conference fee! Fortunately I was giving a tutorial and got a free admission but some of the speakers I invited for my panels were somewhat put out.
I suspect that at that price the speakers are not getting much more than a cheap air fare.
I do charge for appearing at some conferences but DefCon is not the sort of place I would expect an large honorarium from.
Last year there was a fringe meeting held just before the RSA conference called CodeCon. The hook there was you had to have written code to speak. It was a reasonably good setup, only the venue was Jammie Z's nightclub which meant an ID check at the door (which kept out some of the cipherpunks) and there was no good place to network duing talks.
Next year I plan to skip the RSA talks, and do CodeCon and the RSA floor show.
If you mean "machines must need rebooting less than once a year", well, that'd obviously be lovely, but as I'm sure you'd be the first to admit, it's not really needed.
If you have 256 machines and the average uptime is only a year then you are going to be rebooting a machine almost every day.
You need the average uptime to be rather higher than that if you want the system as a whole to function reliably.
The main problem is that most O/S are not written well from the point of view of recovery when a peer or a server goes down. You are very likely to find that a hardware failure at one node causes a ripple effect as other nodes that were communicating with it either time out in an inconsistent state or work from a divergent dataset.
This is why under the old VAXCluster system the system had built in the somewhat counter intuitive notion that when a node lost sync with the cluster it should simply halt rather than attempting to continue and propagate an inconsistent state.
And no, high levels of stability are five nines which works out at 5.6 minutes of downtime per year, not a reboot per year.
It is astonishing how you think you are able to diagnose the reason for a system you have no knowledge of behaving in a particular way to the extent that it gives you the right to be insulting about it.
Your analysis was completely wrong. The machines in question do not run off a 56K modem. The DHCP service in the house comes off my firewall and all the machines are on 802.11b.
Perhaps you don't understand this OS stuff as much as you'd like to believe that you do,
Pot, Kettle, black
I think it is quite legitimate to call people who start a post 'I have not used XP but' ignorant. And I note that your post fits into this pattern only instead of telling us upfront you are a twit you make us wait till the end of your post, as you admit you do not use XP but you still make (incorrect) comments about other people's systems.
As I said in the original post, there are improvements in XP that are worth having if all else is equal but they are not so great that it is a must have upgrade from w2k. However folk arguing that can't have it both ways, if the upgrade is not so great as to not be worth having then the difference between XP and w2k can't be so great as to justify the synthetic slashoutrage in this thread.
Google's achievement is not a trivial one with any O/S platform.
The point you seem to be deliberately missing is that running large clusters of processors is a non-trivial task, one that traditionally people have paid premium prices for.
Notice that nowhere in the article did I say that 'Linux can't do this'. In fact my own company has switched to using Linux for certain mission critical clusters. However the engineering required to do that is distinctly non-trivial and certainly not an out of the box configuration.
what I was arguing against was the slashweenie attitude 'of course this is possible, in fact it is trivial'.
Actually, part of the point of clustering is that you don't need enormous levels of fault tolerance
You learned that in your 'theory' class eh? Well the practical class teaches you that you need both fault tolerant software and a pretty high level of basic stability. The problem being that 'redundant' designs with zero common points of failur are much harder to build in the real world than on paper.
That said W2K Workstation and XP Pro are similar enough that just as a lot of folk see no advantage to upgrading, there is not a lot of downside to upgrading. If you want to have a homogenous IT shop in which everyone has exactly the same setup then you will be installing from a pre-mastered disk image anyway.
The slashdot blathering against XP from people who admit they have never used it is simple ignorance. The sae people can be found lambasting Microsoft for unreliable software and then proudly proclaiming that they never upgraded from Win95. Well Duuuuhhh!!!!
XP is a big improvement over w2k in a few areas. The big one being that you can run Win98 software on a system with an NT kernel. The nice to have feature is that my Vaio now reboots in 30 seconds instead of taking 4 minutes.
I think that the real reason that so many of the slashdot crowd are so anti-XP is that they are scared of it. It takes several releases for any O/S to become reliable. In the early days of Linux the main attraction was that it was more reliable than several of the commercial O/S. When Solaris 2 first came out it was a byword for flaky, people were running SunOs for reliability.
Why is it that every time someone with real world experience of running Linux on a large scale talks of a problem the response is always that they must be either mistaken or stupid?
Fifteen years ago you could have made the same coment about running large scale UNIX clusters. Sure you could buy 64 RISC workstations and configure them in a farm, but you would end up rebooting a machine at least once an hour - I know because thats what I was doing fifteen years ago, only with rather more processors.
Experience of running a single machine or a small cluster of office or university machines is not applicable to running large scale systems. If you have a system that is using multiple processors in a single computational task you have to have both software that is designed for fault tolerance and a very high level of basic reliability. If you have a render wall of 256 processors and each one in standalone mode runs for a week without a crash you will end up dealling with a system crash every 40 minutes, most likely more frequently due to interactions between the machines.
This type of processing is the reason people used to pay a hefty premium for systems from folk like DEC who had lots of experience filling a room with machines and getting them to work reliably. Today that ability is the only thing keeping Sun afloat.
That goal cannot be achieved technically for the same reason that DRM cannot be achieved technically. Information is policy neutral, the only means of attaching a policy to information is through secure hardware which does not exist in mass producable form (as the advocates of the Clipper chip discovered).
I have not yet written a submission, if I do it will probably be on the following lines:
At present DRM technologies are subject to a technical equivalent of Gresham's law, the bad schemes drive out the good. Nobody has a scheme that can provide for perfect security.
The real purpose of the DVD zone scheme is to allow artificial price differentials between markets to be preserved. While this is repeatedly denied these denials are not credible.
I thought it was reasonably obvious that the main point of comparison between the two was that in both cases people worry excessively about what they are and are not seen to read.
In the case of post-modern philosophy there are certainly pseuds who read the stuff to look trendy. But the anti-faction are just as ignorant, in most cases criticising work they haven't read.
With Harry Potter, the humourless jerks who are saying that they wouldn't be seen reading it past the age of 14 never read anything more intellectual than the Penthouse letters page.
The Flintstones was intended as an ironic satire of 'modern' conveniences. Each week there would be a different gadget such as a dishwasher or a gramaphone that was powered by dinosaur.
Rowling uses the same joke throughout the Harry Potter books, except that instead of dinosaurs, magic is used as a substitute for electricity etc. etc.
Actually the books are very sophisticated intellectually. The sophistication is generally lost on American readers however who are unaware of the cultural and litterary references that Rowling ads in for the amusement of older readers.
For example Hogwarts Castle is a parody of Mallory Towers. The use of Magic as a substitute for technological mod cons is a homage to the Flintstones.
This simply carries on a long tradition of British Children's works, The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe is an allegory of the New Testament. The Harry Potter series as a whole is an allegory of a series of works by Foucault. The Dumbledore character is an anegogical reference to Derrida. The Dursleys are of course a reference to Proust.
Oh please tell me where this is!
Because as a Cable Internet user I am really wazzed off by the slowdown in my modem because of all the filesharing theives arround. So if I report the IP address block of my provider as a bad IP block that will cause the f*#$*g theives who slow down my access to get booted.
Good idea! only I think you will find that boycotting the files is exactly what the RIAA wants. They want you to boycott the files and buy the smegging CD
Only the P2P people are already boycotting the CD because they are a bunch of theives who steal it via P2P rather than buy it
Yeah! I had to download Mulan 32 times before I got my fix of pr0n!
It is pretty appropriate to put fake P2P files up since P2P is pretty much a fake scene. The bit about it really and trully being to allow people to swap their own self generated content and the copyright theft thing is a tiny, tiny minority is such a crock.
If material is not illicit in some fashion there is no reason to use P2P instead of a Web server. There are only two types of legitimate material that P2P would be necessary for - samizdat political tracts and Pr0n. Despite the best efforts of John Ashcroft it is still possible to publish material critical of Govenor Bush as the reports of his insider trading and Enronesque accounting methods demonstrate.
As for Pr0n, while there is no doubt an amateur Pr0n scene somewhere on the Web I have never heard that it is a big part of the P2P scene. Which if the propaganda was true one would expect it to be, after all you don't need much to DIY Pr0n, no acting ability required, just a razor, plenty of lubricants, condoms, a camera and a girlfriend... ohhh dear well that could be tricky.
The Roman Empire fell because they stopped having enough orgies.
What really happened is that the Visigoths came down to Rome on a Club 18-30 package tour thinking that they would visit the Colloseum for a spot of combat, spend the afternoon looking at the architecture and round the evening off with a nice orgy. Problem was that the local chapter of the Christian Coalition had got the Emp. to ban the gladiator contests and close down the brothels. Result several thousand very angry Visigoths who trashed the place.
The Roman Empire may be gone, but it lasted twice as long as the US has been in existence. The Empire in the East lasted 1,500 years.
It's time for folks to step back and take a deep breath and think about what's best for society and civilization and stop worrying so much about their own private interests
Quite true, how about starting with asking whether file sharing networks whose almost exclusive purpose is to facilitate copyright theft are a sustainable model?