I had assumed for a long time that, due to simple American superiority complexes (and I'm an American), although every other country was relegated to com.CC (or co.CC) and org.CC and edu.CC (or ac.CC), that US simply had domain over.com,.org,.edu, etc as their very own proxy ccTLD.
Then they started selling.com to overseas companies, which started to confuse me, because then you couldn't rely on the TLD to determine where a company or website was located. You always knew that demon.co.uk was in the UK, but you couldn't quite be sure where a.com was located anymore.
Which made me wonder... aside from simple American arrogance, why was US so special? Why did other countries put up with having to use ccTLDs while American companies had full reign of gTLDs?
You'd think, with all the hoo-rah about this imaginary "drought" of domain names, that companies would be stir crazy about the.us TLD. Then they wouldn't have to live in fear of very, very messy domain name disputes with people in faraway countries where legal action is difficult to initiate and maintain.
But the thing is, NOT having to tack on a ccTLD at the end of your domain name is confusing, and oh so common. Its much nicer to have sony.com than sony.com.us. (Though they have no problem with also picking up sony.co.jp.) Besides, Americans (especially now) don't want to have to start typing longer URLs, as rare as they actually have to do that anymore.
The only way to get American companies and others to start using the.us TLD is to eliminate the gTLDs, long the kingdom of American companies, forcing them all to move use domain.com.us instead. If they already have domain.com, they're not going to see any reason to bother with domain.com.us.
I don't know why the gTLDs exist anymore if they are not US-only, to be honest, aside from the difficulty there would be in eliminating them now.
A good space of the geographic subnets of the.us TLD have already been doled out to small-time ISPs, who are free to charge any price for it, and put up any restrictions. These.us domains aren't governmentally controlled as they are elsewhere, nor do they have any enforced rules for use. So, GreenNet can charge something unreasonable for lynn.ma.us, out of proportion to the actual usefulness of the domain. Of course, they aren't selling any, which either means they aren't paying attention to that market, or that their goal is to bilk city governments who might want the domain.
Of course, no one apparently told them that Lynn (et al) is a pretty poor community. Which is why www.lynnma.net at $35/yr exists (and is privately run) instead of www.lynn.ma.us which is going for an undisclosed price.
I expected to see UNICOS in there somewhere, which is UNIX for the Cray.
And I always wondered about those Unices that the Emacs and trn installers ask about... Venix, Eunice, etc.
Also, isnt EROS a Unixish OS?
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The Geek Secession, or 'How the Geeks Got Cool'
on
Geeks vs. Nerds
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· Score: 2
In my youth, "geek" and "nerd" meant the same thing. I imagine it was much the same everywhere. If you got good grades, and liked getting good grades, AND people didn't like you too much, you were a nerd. AND a geek. I was called both, not to mention a fair spread of other not nice things.
Then in the 90s something happened. Perhaps as we got older, and certain new fields of knowledge grew, a distinction began to be made. At once, humanities enthusiasts were called "nerds", and technology enthusiasts began to be called "geeks".
Now, what happened, and no one denies it, is that the "geeks" began to become more important than the "nerds". Computers were an expanding world, and were encroaching ever faster into every professional and personal arena. Consequently, geeks got good-paying jobs. So, not only did geeks begin to get a lot of money, but they also started working with other geeks. As a result, they were able to bond. And they were able to do the things they secretly wanted to do -- buy cool cars, get nice clothes, hang out with lots of friends, go out to places in groups. In short, they began to feel successful, and most importantly, desirable.
For the most part, the nerds didn't care. They enjoyed doing what they were doing. It hurt to think that they had missed out on The Big Secret -- but they were still happy doing what they were already doing. Some became geekish in limited extents.
But what happened between geeks and nerds is that the geeks started to feel popular. They realized that they had broken the social glass ceiling (even if only due to some coincidental and uncertain shifts in modern industry). And a peculiar thing happened to geeks, as happens to all those who become popular: they needed someone to pick on. And that group was the nerds. And the term "geek" became owned by that community, and was lifted, at least among themselves, as a title of triumph; of superiority in power and significance, and success. And "nerd" became a sign of past sorrow and failure, of the pathetic creatures "we once were", before the world decided to make them (the geeks) feel important.
Nerds are the ones who are unpopular. Nerds are the ones who no one likes, and who talk about things no one else cares about. Nerds are the ones who aren't making all the money. They're the ones that missed the boat and fell behind. No one today, not even geeks, would be willing to call themselves a "nerd", but "geek" is a badge of pride.
Nerds are now the estranged old friends of the geeks. The geeks look down on them, as if they can no longer understand their way of life. They say, if only you had gone this way or that way. If only you could bring yourself up. If only you could be more like us. Despite the fact that we simply just got lucky.
I'm sure that a good portion of the MP3 and other trading communities will lart me for this, especially #mp3files and other like-minded groups, but I'd like to stand on the wooden box and pronounce:
Ratios are good.
They're not great; as with any system, they are bound to be abused, and no system (no, not even Slashdot's hairy moderation system) will be free of abuse.
Sharing thrives because people always have something to share. And sites grow because their collections grow. And their collections will grow as contributions are made. It follows that a site which gets contributions from its users will grow faster, and ostensibly, get better.
I've run FTP sites in the past that were essentially anonymous. I almost got run out of certain IRC channels and newsgroups on a rail because I decided, on and off, to make that server a ratio server.
For me, I liked ratio sites, because they always seemed to have better selections of items. On some sites that weren't ratio, I still uploaded. Plus, I had plenty of obscure items that I wanted to spread, so not only was I contributing to the quality of the site, I was also exposing site admins to new things, and increasing the availability of those items.
In the FTP arena, a lot of sharing problems just came from a simple lack of respect. Many 33.6 modem pups would initiate a dozen or so connections at once, all multitasking among each other, and let them sit, say overnight or while they were out. Then I would have this chode sitting on my site, eating up a login slot, crawling away at 0.4 kB/s or less. I would normally kill these connections on sight once they got that low. It's simply a show of disrespect. There's no reason why you can't (with the right clients) arrange these transfers so that they go sequentially instead of simultaneously. At 33.6 you can download a meg in about 3 mins. A 4-5 MB file then takes 12-15 minutes. That's acceptable. But 1-2 hours or more is not. I had much more respect for those visitors who were giving my site the respect of not leeching at ignorantly slow speeds.
Ratio sites are also ALWAYS available -- it keeps the disrespectful leeches away. I never had a problem finding a login slot on a ratio server. On a leech server, forget it. You could try to hit it all day, and basically you were in a massive race condition with goodness knows how many other #mp3files lurkers. This is assuredly why so many noteworthy leech FTP sites then died a horrible death -- to the dismay of all those leech-dependent trading pups.
Once I went to ratio, of course, I would start to get a fair amount of total crap. Not just dupes, which were annoying, but out-and-out crap -- like 15 minute long news reports taped off radio encoded at 44.1 / 128 or more. Not only did the disrespect of uploading these files get my goat, but the sheer braindeadness of encoding such large, worthless files just to use as ratio cloggers when it would be just as easy to encode and upload worthwhile stuff.
But this didn't encourage me to turn off ratios, because I would always ban those IPs (zones if necessary) after looking through the logs, and because for every ratio revolutionary, there was at least one visitor who uploaded something worthwhile. And the fact that there people out there who respected my site, and were honestly interested in trading, made me keep my site up as long as I could. (Eventually, I had two logins; a ratio login, and a leech login with limited downloadable selection.)
I started a server not only so I could spit stuff out into the trading (i.e. leeching) community. I started it so I could also get back from that community. It was give and take, not just take, take, take. Leech sites only work in theory -- they have crap, they're overloaded, and they almost never grow. Their admins eventually get discouraged, and turn away from the trading community altogether.
It burns me to see people out there on Napster who don't share anything they have. They should at least have the common decency to set their sharing directory to an empty dir, if they are going to drop max DLs to 0. That's just disrespectful. And they don't deserve any respect back.
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Re:Request that ICANN re-open the membership drive
on
ICANN Elections
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· Score: 2
Instead of worrying about who we're going to endorse and vote on, shouldn't we be making sure that ICANN's at-large membership is truly representative of the Internet community?
No, not at the moment. Let's focus for a little bit. We have the opportunity to potentially put a truly representative person ON THE BOARD -- namely one of the member-nominated candidates. Let's do that NOW while we have the chance and then spend the time AFTER the election to worry about building up the at large membership. In fact, having that person on the board will put just a little more pressure on ICANN to fix the currently jammed registration process.
Obviously, this is a case of a minority making decisions for the entire community, something which history has almost always proved a Very Bad Idea.
You mean like the US Senate? Please reread your history.
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Re:Getting on ICANN@Large, and what it can mean
on
ICANN Elections
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· Score: 2
As it turned out, the ability to be on the ALM was really limited to the first batch.
And even then, if you recall, ICANN reported that they would be up to 3 months backlogged -- on the first batch.
It took 2 months to get my member ID and password, and then 3 more months to get my PIN.
I pride myself with having realized the significance of being on the ALM early on, while others were taking a pessimistic "wait and see" approach. Well they aren't seeing much. Friends of mine with ties to the alternate-DNS community are jealous.
I fault ICANN for not putting more resources into the registration mechanisms. It would be inexcusable in any other arena for the process to be so overloaded for this long. Obviously there are strong forces in ICANN right now which are diverting resources away from the ALM registration engines. Which is why ANY, and ALL, inroads we can make into ICANN and the Board -- including the ALM board seats -- are very important, regardless of the impact they may have in the short term.
Many politically structured organizations attempt the "appeasement" theory; that by giving us certain concessions, they can then continue to gum up the works for further concessions, and fend off massive grievances. Giving the @Large membership some input into the board selection process is such an appeasement tactic. Luckily, the former result does not happen often, and even small inroads can conceivably lead to more inroads.
It is also important that ALL forces working on those inroads continue to put on their pressure, and not get diluted. This includes ICANNVote. Thinning out the pool of pressures on ICANN will not help this process -- we need more people, each playing a part in putting different pressures on ICANN. Not less people, each futilely trying to take on more roles. Personally, I'm worried that this could happen with the NA seat.
Thanks for the advance notice for those of us who are nowhere near San Jose.
I knew Slashdot was just a weblog, but I didn't know it had become a San Jose weblog.
If I can finally get that damned IBM teleporter working, I'll be there around 8:30. (Easy with those cell modems guys, these are my electrons you're fooling with.)
It's nice to see Slashdot hasn't lost its Close Personal Friends of Taco aspect -- Hemos' wedding, Rob's parties, probably Robin's nephew's Bris or something will be next. Now I want a personal 300,000 user weblog too.
is the Internet going to affect how you vote because of faster dissemination of information?
The question is, what information is being disseminated faster? The same brain-dead journalistic cruft that's been disseminated for decades, that's what.
Face it, despite the fact that the Green Party has a website, they still really have next to no chance. The fact that their message is getting dissseminated faster isn't making people accept it any faster.
not only are smaller political groups getting far more publicity than before (because you no longer have to actually print out newsletters to send to readers--they can the information online), but the Internet has become increasingly a "balance" to the mainstream media itself.
This sounds like the Internet I like to think about. It might even be the Internet that I use. But it's not the Internet that, unfortunately, most people use.
Most people are now going online to find online versions of traditional media. MSNBC is the greatest example. Going online to find the rare gems is not the cool thing about the Internet, to the masses.
So therefore, it follows that Democrats are going to www.gore2000.com, and Republicans are going to www.georgebush.com. Democrats are not accidentally stumbling upon www.greens.org, and thereby deciding to vote for Nader.
When those of us (and I'm sure many are) who are At Large Members of ICANN get the voting stage, I hope that we are able to make the best of the limited voice that we are given.
Firstly, I would recommend that the idea of supporting the NOMCOM-nominated candidates be disposed of. I see no reason to support any candidate that was not chosen by the membership through a popular process. (Shameful that there was no popular nomination option, but self-nomination should provide enough of the same benefits of that.)
Of course, ICANN does not seem to be performing much in the way of filtering this list of self-nominators. Amazingly, the list is fairly short, but I wouldn't be suprised to see it get immense over the weekend, as everyone and his brother decides that "if that guy can run, so can I". So, to avoid having to do that weeding out later, I'll go with the names that were on that list this morning (it has grown by four names in the past two hours).
Secondly, we need to dispose of the notion that we can choose a candidate "who will represent all the users". This doesn't work. It doesn't work in government politics. It won't work here, and for the following reasons: One, who are "the users?" Are they everyone on the Internet? Everyone in the Internet technology field? Or everyone on the ICANN ALM? If you imagine a "user representative" being someone who periodically kibitzes with the userdom, and then returns to policymaking sessions armed with the opinions and decisions of the constituents, you are being far too idealist. (Even if such a situation were feasible, and desirable, we could do away with all representative government and replace it with direct democracy.) Besides, the only group which the ALM reps could realistically do this with would be the ALM membership.
It remains then, that the best method of approaching representative elections is from the standpoint of which candidate is best able, without discussing it with me, of representing my views. In other words, choosing the person I most agree with.
Furthermore, in terms of the effectiveness of the ALM voice, I think it's important that the candidate is selected by as close to a simple majority as possible -- i.e. agreed upon by as many people as possible. An election by plurality will weaken the effectiveness of the vote, as well as weaken the winning candidate's ability to say that s/he is representing "the users". I personally would want to see the winning candidate speak from as powerful a representative position as possible.
Now, I don't know if anyone will agree with my opinions on the world of DNS, but I hold the following views about the domain naming system:
1. The DNS registration system needs to be more tightly regulated -- i.e. certain restrictions should be made on the use of the existing domains. This includes gTLDs as well as national TLDs.
2. The "domain name drought" is entirely imaginary, brought up only by marketers of large corporations who are simply jealous of those who had the sense or foresight to register similar names first, and themselves are too unimaginative to come up with, and market, other names.
3. The development and cultivation of new domain names should be done by a thoughtful and open process by which a new TLD is approved solely on its merits as a categorizer of Internet sites (not just of Web sites). Such TLDs should also be added to the gTLD pool, not granted as exclusive property to individual registrars.
4. We cannot dilute the TLD pool into a free-for-all, as it would make the TLD structure meaningless.
5. Currently, ICANN is letting the DNS system fall apart into a big irreconcilable mess in these and other regards.
(No, I am not a candidate.)
In general, the perspective I take is one in which the current system has been allowed to be abused, and is leading into disarray. I want to see some better order in the DNS system, and I want it done with technical insight as well. I doubt many people share the above views, but I think in essence the perspective is shared.
Going over the list of self-noms, I've done an assessment of how well each of these candidates are in tune with this perspective.
I've skimmed lightly over most of the employment, qualification, and official status details, since although evidence of their technical expertise is important, their actual perspectives on the DNS system are most important to me. A lot of these candidates are saying boastful things like "I was here before there was TCP!!!", but that has no bearing to me on their perspective on ICANN. This information is best found in the Background sections.
A few don't give anyone any reason to select them. The best example is Daniel Bowers, who offers the world nothing except becoming the first ICANN electoral troll in history. And Eric Lee lives in Europe, not North America, so I consider him disqualified for the North America position.
Robin Bandy speaks in grandiose terms, referring not to personal views but to "the last remnant of a democratic system" on the Internet. She believes in the ideal direct-representation view I dismissed above; while its a nice idea, as all ideals are, I'm positive that Robin will fail in trying to meet this ideal, as so many others have.
Terry Calhoun seems to espouse the same ideal, but more vaguely, with an added feelgood platform reminiscient of "Personal Power" tape #1. And Rick Wesson says the same thing, but almost as if transcribed from an grade school student council election. speech.
Others don't espouse any viewpoint at all. Martin Goslar (Ph.D., that is) and Alan Herrell seemingly leave the question open. Leland Hardy, Sondlo Mhlaba, and Christopher Stewart don't mention anything at all about ICANN in their background explanations (though Chris does mention all the awards he won in high school). Teri Powell's reference page crashes my browser, so I don't know what he thinks -- but if his web page isn't reliably sound, I don't expect his ICANN views to be sound either. Finally, Robert Alberti talks mostly about MUDs, IRC, RPGing, and aikido, and only refers to "embracing change", without mentioning what change he has in mind.
We're down to 3 candidates with something resembling content in their expression. Michael McNulty endorses gTLD dilution, and cross-TLD domain name exclusivity, which are both in opposition to my own views, but invalidate each other.
So my decision (and recommendation) comes down to Karl Auerback and Daniel Chemko. Both seem to espouse an organized and logical-development view of DNS structure. Both seem to believe in ICANN fairness, responsibility, and egalitariance. They both seem to offer the viewpoints which can help keep ICANN on track and resist the current movement towards DNS chaos.
Now, if you've not totally lost me so far, my recommendation is for Karl Auerbach. Daniel has a good platform, but is less technically experienced than Karl, and lacks any evidence of ability to handle organizational politics well. Karl shows both the ability and intent to act as a reasoning force on the ICANN board. Coupled with the fact that he shares some of my viewpoints, he's the best person to represent me.
You of course, have to assess what is important to you in ICANN leadership and direction. Maybe you are AlterNic or OpenNic and you would love to see total gTLD deregulation, allowing the floodgates of meaningless TLDs to confuse the Internet. Maybe you are an executive of a large Internet corporation who wants the exclusive freedom to snatch up any domain associated with the name you happened to choose for your business. (Or maybe the idea of a lawyer-turned-geek warms your heart so much that you fall for Larry Lessig's act.) Regardless, there are still only a very few to choose from.
I'm not going to argue the merits of my ICANN / DNS views over anyone else's, but I do hope that those on Slashdot, and those who joined the ALM, are able to have a coherent sense of what DNS structure would benefit the Internet as a whole the most. And I hope we can send a clear, strong message to the ICANN board when we choose a person to represent our views among them.
Now, I'd like to think that being an ALM counts as being "politically active", but right now it still feels pretty hollow. More like being politically contained.
Anyhoo, let's hope we elect decent reps. I personally hope that a good number of member-nominated candidates win, or else I'll lose lots of faith in this whole At Large stuff.
The monitor "does" 1152x900 but won't display it all
No, it does. I noticed the discrepancy when using Xvnc for the first time. I remembered that the root window size on the target machine was 1152x?, so I set it to 1152x864 by doing the 4:3 math.
But then I couldn't figure out why I couldn't fit the same number of windows on the screen as I do when using X on the target's console. I had to force vncviewer to open at 1152x900 in order to get the same results. [*]
Others are using the same X setup as me, with similar boxen (older sparcs mostly) and they have the same res and effects.
[*] I actually had to walk upstairs to the target and run X on it, check the root window size, close X, and walk back downstairs to reopen the XVNC client. It was silly. Luckily it was a temporary necessity.
Incidentally, my Sun's monitor has resolution of 1152x900, which is... uh... 25:32 aspect ratio. Normally (insofar as 1152 x anything is a normal res) you see 1152x864.
--
Re:You missed something else...
on
Selfish Society
·
· Score: 1
I think one should be a little slower to assume that there is such a thing as equality of opportunity.
I never did. The original poster suggested that computer skill was a direct result of economic conditions, which is not true. Other things are at play, which are more important. Social forces have a much more significant effect.
I didn't say it explicitly, but I also have a theory that economically depressed groups tend to fear technology, therefore hurting the possibility that those kids will have any interest in technology.
The difference, I think, stemmed from the respect these students were shown, the degree to which their minds were encouraged to imagine positive futures for themselves.
That seems to support my point that social support of an interest in a field is more important than the economic means to be at that field's forefront.
There's lots of other things I would like to have done when I was younger (that other kids did), but couldn't afford to. Certainly I think I should have had those opportunities too. I simply had to be realistic and limit my expectations to within my means. I'm still playing catch up to middle-class "poor kids" who got everything from a wealthy grandparent or a responsibly maintained trust fund. There's some unmentioned skills that they have that I don't, because of the choices I made.
Trust me, I'm not trying to sound like some sort of Republican success story. I'm just trying to put this thread into perspective.
I have been lucky because my situation/family/background/financial situation enabled me to have the opportunity to use computers. Some people aren't so lucky. Some people may have been able to afford a computer but without having any guidance or inspiration, they have been shown what their potential could have achieved using computers.
While this is of course, entirely helpful, it doesn't have any dependency on one's computer skills, or vice versa.
I come from a lower-class background. While this means I end up behind a lot of people who were coding assembler at 6 because their families could afford SOTA computers in the early 80s, it didn't entirely prevent me from getting into the computer field and being fairly good in it. (I had other resources, mostly friends and family members who did have computers, eventually loaning me a then-clunky C64 in '93.)
On the other hand, I did work relatively hard -- in grade and high school -- to get where I am now; without high marks and class rank in high school, I wouldn't have been able to get into a decent college without selling drugs or selling my body (or something). And that's where I got the resources I needed to really play around with and learn computers.
All this aside, here's what I think you missed: Most people still don't want to know about computers. There may be antitheses to this rule (California, Cambridge, Scandinavia, etc.), but for the wide majority of the populace, its true. If it weren't for the 'Internet revolution', there would be hardly anyone who cared about knowing computers, and it would still be 1980 in terms of computer use.
For those who have the inclination, and the social support (and I envy the young geeks who can build large social groups around technology interests today), computers are an accessible skill. But, regardless of economic background, if the social support isn't there, the interest in computers probably is not either.
Some of us bucked the norm and found satisfaction in computer interests, but most people don't buck the norm, and simply go along with the crowd. And if that crowd isn't (really) into computers, they won't care about whatever options there are in IT, at least not for many years.
If what you say about the significance of "being shown the possibilities" were true, then "Intro to Computers" classes would be creating CS majors left and right. But they aren't.
There are some people working where I do, that I went to grade school with. Back then I was fooling with computers here and there, and for them, it was a laughable thing to do. Now they are trying to find their "options" in the IT field. Right now that option is to work downstairs -- making about half what I make upstairs.
Now, I don't think I'm arrogant about it, but I do chuckle to myself when I think of the scorn I went through in order for that situation to happen. I'm glad I was able to experience it.
The point is, although economic limitations will definitely hinder you, as they have me, they wont prevent you. But if you let yourself have disdain for the computer field (or culture, for what there is of one), then you prevent yourself, and I don't pity you.
There's plenty of scorn going around. Whether that scorn comes from those who laugh at what you know, or from those who laugh at what you don't know... if you ask me, both are part of the computer learning experience. If I'm exuding a little scorn, it can't be all that bad.
It seems to me we have anought trouble with the wealthy being given greater advantage. Bill Gates and his wealthy family. George W. Bush and his acceptance into Yale with a C average in high school. Already, its the wealthy becoming the wealthy, or successful.
Now you're arguing that we should be able to increase our genetic material. I'm all for it; what I'm not for is only allowing the wealthy to have the genetically altered kids. They already have access to the better training, and better schools, and better academic, financial, and physiological resources.
Giving them the advantage of the last remaining variable -- the ability to make their kids smarter, or stronger, at birth -- will destroy the idea of the individual's ability to overcome the norms and succeed on what makes them better than others, because there will be no such thing.
I'm willing to give up the possibility of genetic improvement for my own children, if it will mean that they will retain the possibility of excelling above others on an even playing field.
I don't want to see a 21st century feudalism where the genetically altered maintain arbitrary dominion over the genetically inferior, who work for them as serfs, being physically and mentally unable to compete with or challenge that dominion, due to the access to genetic improvement that is unavailable to their economic or social class.
You may want to write this off as alarmism, and I could be overdoing it, but the point stands -- I don't want the financially superior, in this day and age, being the ones able to make their kids smarter and stronger.
You want to make the human race better through genetic engineering? Good. Share it.
VNC is a nice idea, but as a sysadmin, I strongly dislike it. Especially when 20 employees are running VNC (sometimes more than once!) on the same Sparc 20.
When you run a local X server, more of the load is taken by the PC, and keeps the PC responsible for some of the interface. (FWIW, MI/X comes with twm, which if you want to use it, helps this idea.) With VNC, you expect the remote machine to take all the load, and rely on your network to bring the image to you. Personally, I've found VNC to be twice or more as slow as an SSH tunneled X session.
What's more, VNC doesn't encourage you to be responsible about your use of the server, because it allows you to keep your session (and all its clients) running, after you've closed the VNCviewer.
Which is why the first thing we kill whenever the machine is about to tank, is an Xvnc process owned by a user whose shift is over. This usually is a big inconvenience to them, not only because they have to restart everything, but because Xvnc always seems to leave some problem-causing cruft behind when its killed.
My advice is to avoid VNC unless you really need its particular benefits. --
Let's take an inventory of what you really need. You want each client to run and admin their own webserver. You don't want each client to be able to affect the others. This means no rampant interfering resource usage.
No. You've confused "dedicated server" with "virtual host". Which may be understandable, given the title of the article. But these are not the same thing. With a dedicated server[1]:
1. Customers want to be able to run servers and apps beyond just HTTPD and its front/backends. 2. Customers want the freedom and control of root access, and don't want anyone else to have it. (In some cases, not even the hosting provider!) 3. Customers don't want to worry about anyone else clogging their server's pipe.
Providing the first two items to multiple customers of the same box is going to be messy on any OS you come across. The product being described is interesting, but the price tag is excessive. One wonders what sort of installations will be able to turn a profit. My workplace has maybe 4-5 dozen deds. Being able to condense some of the lower-usage customers might free up a handful of boxes. Would it be $25,000 worth? I don't know.
On the other hand, I wonder how they can address the third item. If two customers on the same ded suddenly ring up a lot of traffic at the same time, there could be contention, which would cause both customers to cry foul.
Not only that, but you'd either have to cheat your customers, or you'd have to be up front about the fact that you're not really giving them a DEDICATED server. [2] And then, you wouldn't be able to charge as much. Thus cutting into the margin you would need in order to make up for the cost of this product.
It seems to me if your users' aren't using their full capacity, that's great. They're paying you for something they aren't using, and you're making more money off them. If they are spendthrifts, that's their problem. If a dedicated server is more than they need, then they should get a vhost and be happy.
[1] This reflects the definition of "dedicated server" used by my employer, Shore.Net. YRMV. Incidentally, the term is being phased out in favor of "managed colocated server". [2] "Shared dedicated server" is an oxymoron.
I knew Google was a good engine, but I haven't been this impressed by a search engine in a long time.
There's more stuff about me on Google than there is on AV or Yahoo. Combined. There's even the infamous post to CSS-WG which got me in trouble with my employer, a number of my essays and papers, a campus newspaper interview from the best year of my life, and even an attendance roster from a meeting I don't remember going to.
This suggests that Google knows more about me than I do!
The annoying thing is the amount of noise, from people with the same or similar names (I. Keith Tyler, Tyler Keith, etc.), and the names of cities in Texas.
Anyway, I'm impressed, and no, I don't mind this stuff about me being readily available (except maybe the CSS-WG letter). I like it. "Look at me, everybody! I'm on Google!"
(Well, at least it's more impressive than an ODP link.)
Everyone is shouting "Steganography". I was about to shout "SSH" or "PGP", which I think is more realistic, but not much.
Keep in mind -- Most of these rogue nations also have pretty poor pipes. Maybe Iran and China are getting getting better, but what about seriously rogue states -- North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, much of Africa, etc. where pipes are small (if not nonexistent).
It might be okay to put small messages inside of images, but how practical is it for people in countries with small pipes to send MIME-encoded JPEGs over email? A relatively few countries benefit from DSL, ISDN, 56K or even 28.8 modems.
Perhaps a simple message as "I'm going to shoot the king" will be relatively practical to steganographize for these people. It sounds like we are all saying "well, if *I* was in the Congo, with my P333 laptop, Gnome suite, and 33.6 cell modem, I'd do _this_" -- but that isn't always available. We're talking about areas of the world where FidoNet is considered efficient and practical.
On the other hand, these rogue nations are by no means technocracies (being effectively or partially shut out of the western world is a big barrier to that), so I bet some simple encryption would suffice for these people. I doubt it even has to be complicated. Establish your code phrases, and sprinkle your friendly correspondence with them.
Hey, in Spies Like Us, they managed to fool the Russians with pig latin.:)
Normal people should not be interfering with TV broadcasts, this means... If your neighbor complains, you must stop using your drill or switch off your computer.
Hold on -- isn't a TV also a Part 15 device, and therefore must accept any unwanted interference?
If the way you put it is true, that means the people upstairs will never be able to vacuum.
I think this might apply to interefering with broadcast transmissions on a large scale, not on random interference. I'm certainly in trouble if I, say, interfere with HBO's feed and display a message saying their license fees are too high. --
Slashdot Mirror
I had assumed for a long time that, due to simple American superiority complexes (and I'm an American), although every other country was relegated to com.CC (or co.CC) and org.CC and edu.CC (or ac.CC), that US simply had domain over .com, .org, .edu, etc as their very own proxy ccTLD.
.com to overseas companies, which started to confuse me, because then you couldn't rely on the TLD to determine where a company or website was located. You always knew that demon.co.uk was in the UK, but you couldn't quite be sure where a .com was located anymore.
.us TLD. Then they wouldn't have to live in fear of very, very messy domain name disputes with people in faraway countries where legal action is difficult to initiate and maintain.
.us TLD is to eliminate the gTLDs, long the kingdom of American companies, forcing them all to move use domain.com.us instead. If they already have domain.com, they're not going to see any reason to bother with domain.com.us.
Then they started selling
Which made me wonder... aside from simple American arrogance, why was US so special? Why did other countries put up with having to use ccTLDs while American companies had full reign of gTLDs?
You'd think, with all the hoo-rah about this imaginary "drought" of domain names, that companies would be stir crazy about the
But the thing is, NOT having to tack on a ccTLD at the end of your domain name is confusing, and oh so common. Its much nicer to have sony.com than sony.com.us. (Though they have no problem with also picking up sony.co.jp.) Besides, Americans (especially now) don't want to have to start typing longer URLs, as rare as they actually have to do that anymore.
The only way to get American companies and others to start using the
I don't know why the gTLDs exist anymore if they are not US-only, to be honest, aside from the difficulty there would be in eliminating them now.
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A good space of the geographic subnets of the .us TLD have already been doled out to small-time ISPs, who are free to charge any price for it, and put up any restrictions. These .us domains aren't governmentally controlled as they are elsewhere, nor do they have any enforced rules for use. So, GreenNet can charge something unreasonable for lynn.ma.us, out of proportion to the actual usefulness of the domain. Of course, they aren't selling any, which either means they aren't paying attention to that market, or that their goal is to bilk city governments who might want the domain.
Of course, no one apparently told them that Lynn (et al) is a pretty poor community. Which is why www.lynnma.net at $35/yr exists (and is privately run) instead of www.lynn.ma.us which is going for an undisclosed price.
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I expected to see UNICOS in there somewhere, which is UNIX for the Cray.
And I always wondered about those Unices that the Emacs and trn installers ask about... Venix, Eunice, etc.
Also, isnt EROS a Unixish OS?
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In my youth, "geek" and "nerd" meant the same thing. I imagine it was much the same everywhere. If you got good grades, and liked getting good grades, AND people didn't like you too much, you were a nerd. AND a geek. I was called both, not to mention a fair spread of other not nice things.
Then in the 90s something happened. Perhaps as we got older, and certain new fields of knowledge grew, a distinction began to be made. At once, humanities enthusiasts were called "nerds", and technology enthusiasts began to be called "geeks".
Now, what happened, and no one denies it, is that the "geeks" began to become more important than the "nerds". Computers were an expanding world, and were encroaching ever faster into every professional and personal arena. Consequently, geeks got good-paying jobs. So, not only did geeks begin to get a lot of money, but they also started working with other geeks. As a result, they were able to bond. And they were able to do the things they secretly wanted to do -- buy cool cars, get nice clothes, hang out with lots of friends, go out to places in groups. In short, they began to feel successful, and most importantly, desirable.
For the most part, the nerds didn't care. They enjoyed doing what they were doing. It hurt to think that they had missed out on The Big Secret -- but they were still happy doing what they were already doing. Some became geekish in limited extents.
But what happened between geeks and nerds is that the geeks started to feel popular. They realized that they had broken the social glass ceiling (even if only due to some coincidental and uncertain shifts in modern industry). And a peculiar thing happened to geeks, as happens to all those who become popular: they needed someone to pick on. And that group was the nerds. And the term "geek" became owned by that community, and was lifted, at least among themselves, as a title of triumph; of superiority in power and significance, and success. And "nerd" became a sign of past sorrow and failure, of the pathetic creatures "we once were", before the world decided to make them (the geeks) feel important.
Nerds are the ones who are unpopular. Nerds are the ones who no one likes, and who talk about things no one else cares about. Nerds are the ones who aren't making all the money. They're the ones that missed the boat and fell behind. No one today, not even geeks, would be willing to call themselves a "nerd", but "geek" is a badge of pride.
Nerds are now the estranged old friends of the geeks. The geeks look down on them, as if they can no longer understand their way of life. They say, if only you had gone this way or that way. If only you could bring yourself up. If only you could be more like us. Despite the fact that we simply just got lucky.
I'm a nerd/geek.
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I'm sure that a good portion of the MP3 and other trading communities will lart me for this, especially #mp3files and other like-minded groups, but I'd like to stand on the wooden box and pronounce:
Ratios are good.
They're not great; as with any system, they are bound to be abused, and no system (no, not even Slashdot's hairy moderation system) will be free of abuse.
Sharing thrives because people always have something to share. And sites grow because their collections grow. And their collections will grow as contributions are made. It follows that a site which gets contributions from its users will grow faster, and ostensibly, get better.
I've run FTP sites in the past that were essentially anonymous. I almost got run out of certain IRC channels and newsgroups on a rail because I decided, on and off, to make that server a ratio server.
For me, I liked ratio sites, because they always seemed to have better selections of items. On some sites that weren't ratio, I still uploaded. Plus, I had plenty of obscure items that I wanted to spread, so not only was I contributing to the quality of the site, I was also exposing site admins to new things, and increasing the availability of those items.
In the FTP arena, a lot of sharing problems just came from a simple lack of respect. Many 33.6 modem pups would initiate a dozen or so connections at once, all multitasking among each other, and let them sit, say overnight or while they were out. Then I would have this chode sitting on my site, eating up a login slot, crawling away at 0.4 kB/s or less. I would normally kill these connections on sight once they got that low. It's simply a show of disrespect. There's no reason why you can't (with the right clients) arrange these transfers so that they go sequentially instead of simultaneously. At 33.6 you can download a meg in about 3 mins. A 4-5 MB file then takes 12-15 minutes. That's acceptable. But 1-2 hours or more is not. I had much more respect for those visitors who were giving my site the respect of not leeching at ignorantly slow speeds.
Ratio sites are also ALWAYS available -- it keeps the disrespectful leeches away. I never had a problem finding a login slot on a ratio server. On a leech server, forget it. You could try to hit it all day, and basically you were in a massive race condition with goodness knows how many other #mp3files lurkers. This is assuredly why so many noteworthy leech FTP sites then died a horrible death -- to the dismay of all those leech-dependent trading pups.
Once I went to ratio, of course, I would start to get a fair amount of total crap. Not just dupes, which were annoying, but out-and-out crap -- like 15 minute long news reports taped off radio encoded at 44.1 / 128 or more. Not only did the disrespect of uploading these files get my goat, but the sheer braindeadness of encoding such large, worthless files just to use as ratio cloggers when it would be just as easy to encode and upload worthwhile stuff.
But this didn't encourage me to turn off ratios, because I would always ban those IPs (zones if necessary) after looking through the logs, and because for every ratio revolutionary, there was at least one visitor who uploaded something worthwhile. And the fact that there people out there who respected my site, and were honestly interested in trading, made me keep my site up as long as I could. (Eventually, I had two logins; a ratio login, and a leech login with limited downloadable selection.)
I started a server not only so I could spit stuff out into the trading (i.e. leeching) community. I started it so I could also get back from that community. It was give and take, not just take, take, take. Leech sites only work in theory -- they have crap, they're overloaded, and they almost never grow. Their admins eventually get discouraged, and turn away from the trading community altogether.
It burns me to see people out there on Napster who don't share anything they have. They should at least have the common decency to set their sharing directory to an empty dir, if they are going to drop max DLs to 0. That's just disrespectful. And they don't deserve any respect back.
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Instead of worrying about who we're going to endorse and vote on, shouldn't we be making sure that ICANN's at-large membership is truly representative of the Internet community?
No, not at the moment. Let's focus for a little bit. We have the opportunity to potentially put a truly representative person ON THE BOARD -- namely one of the member-nominated candidates. Let's do that NOW while we have the chance and then spend the time AFTER the election to worry about building up the at large membership. In fact, having that person on the board will put just a little more pressure on ICANN to fix the currently jammed registration process.
Obviously, this is a case of a minority making decisions for the entire community, something which history has almost always proved a Very Bad Idea.
You mean like the US Senate? Please reread your history.
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As it turned out, the ability to be on the ALM was really limited to the first batch.
And even then, if you recall, ICANN reported that they would be up to 3 months backlogged -- on the first batch.
It took 2 months to get my member ID and password, and then 3 more months to get my PIN.
I pride myself with having realized the significance of being on the ALM early on, while others were taking a pessimistic "wait and see" approach. Well they aren't seeing much. Friends of mine with ties to the alternate-DNS community are jealous.
I fault ICANN for not putting more resources into the registration mechanisms. It would be inexcusable in any other arena for the process to be so overloaded for this long. Obviously there are strong forces in ICANN right now which are diverting resources away from the ALM registration engines. Which is why ANY, and ALL, inroads we can make into ICANN and the Board -- including the ALM board seats -- are very important, regardless of the impact they may have in the short term.
Many politically structured organizations attempt the "appeasement" theory; that by giving us certain concessions, they can then continue to gum up the works for further concessions, and fend off massive grievances. Giving the @Large membership some input into the board selection process is such an appeasement tactic. Luckily, the former result does not happen often, and even small inroads can conceivably lead to more inroads.
It is also important that ALL forces working on those inroads continue to put on their pressure, and not get diluted. This includes ICANNVote. Thinning out the pool of pressures on ICANN will not help this process -- we need more people, each playing a part in putting different pressures on ICANN. Not less people, each futilely trying to take on more roles. Personally, I'm worried that this could happen with the NA seat.
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Thanks for the advance notice for those of us who are nowhere near San Jose.
I knew Slashdot was just a weblog, but I didn't know it had become a San Jose weblog.
If I can finally get that damned IBM teleporter working, I'll be there around 8:30. (Easy with those cell modems guys, these are my electrons you're fooling with.)
It's nice to see Slashdot hasn't lost its Close Personal Friends of Taco aspect -- Hemos' wedding, Rob's parties, probably Robin's nephew's Bris or something will be next. Now I want a personal 300,000 user weblog too.
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is the Internet going to affect how you vote because of faster dissemination of information?
The question is, what information is being disseminated faster? The same brain-dead journalistic cruft that's been disseminated for decades, that's what.
Face it, despite the fact that the Green Party has a website, they still really have next to no chance. The fact that their message is getting dissseminated faster isn't making people accept it any faster.
not only are smaller political groups getting far more publicity than before (because you no longer have to actually print out newsletters to send to readers--they can the information online), but the Internet has become increasingly a "balance" to the mainstream media itself.
This sounds like the Internet I like to think about. It might even be the Internet that I use. But it's not the Internet that, unfortunately, most people use.
Most people are now going online to find online versions of traditional media. MSNBC is the greatest example. Going online to find the rare gems is not the cool thing about the Internet, to the masses.
So therefore, it follows that Democrats are going to www.gore2000.com, and Republicans are going to www.georgebush.com. Democrats are not accidentally stumbling upon www.greens.org, and thereby deciding to vote for Nader.
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When those of us (and I'm sure many are) who are At Large Members of ICANN get the voting stage, I hope that we are able to make the best of the limited voice that we are given.
Firstly, I would recommend that the idea of supporting the NOMCOM-nominated candidates be disposed of. I see no reason to support any candidate that was not chosen by the membership through a popular process. (Shameful that there was no popular nomination option, but self-nomination should provide enough of the same benefits of that.)
Of course, ICANN does not seem to be performing much in the way of filtering this list of self-nominators. Amazingly, the list is fairly short, but I wouldn't be suprised to see it get immense over the weekend, as everyone and his brother decides that "if that guy can run, so can I". So, to avoid having to do that weeding out later, I'll go with the names that were on that list this morning (it has grown by four names in the past two hours).
Secondly, we need to dispose of the notion that we can choose a candidate "who will represent all the users". This doesn't work. It doesn't work in government politics. It won't work here, and for the following reasons: One, who are "the users?" Are they everyone on the Internet? Everyone in the Internet technology field? Or everyone on the ICANN ALM? If you imagine a "user representative" being someone who periodically kibitzes with the userdom, and then returns to policymaking sessions armed with the opinions and decisions of the constituents, you are being far too idealist. (Even if such a situation were feasible, and desirable, we could do away with all representative government and replace it with direct democracy.) Besides, the only group which the ALM reps could realistically do this with would be the ALM membership.
It remains then, that the best method of approaching representative elections is from the standpoint of which candidate is best able, without discussing it with me, of representing my views. In other words, choosing the person I most agree with.
Furthermore, in terms of the effectiveness of the ALM voice, I think it's important that the candidate is selected by as close to a simple majority as possible -- i.e. agreed upon by as many people as possible. An election by plurality will weaken the effectiveness of the vote, as well as weaken the winning candidate's ability to say that s/he is representing "the users". I personally would want to see the winning candidate speak from as powerful a representative position as possible.
Now, I don't know if anyone will agree with my opinions on the world of DNS, but I hold the following views about the domain naming system:
1. The DNS registration system needs to be more tightly regulated -- i.e. certain restrictions should be made on the use of the existing domains. This includes gTLDs as well as national TLDs.
2. The "domain name drought" is entirely imaginary, brought up only by marketers of large corporations who are simply jealous of those who had the sense or foresight to register similar names first, and themselves are too unimaginative to come up with, and market, other names.
3. The development and cultivation of new domain names should be done by a thoughtful and open process by which a new TLD is approved solely on its merits as a categorizer of Internet sites (not just of Web sites). Such TLDs should also be added to the gTLD pool, not granted as exclusive property to individual registrars.
4. We cannot dilute the TLD pool into a free-for-all, as it would make the TLD structure meaningless.
5. Currently, ICANN is letting the DNS system fall apart into a big irreconcilable mess in these and other regards.
(No, I am not a candidate.)
In general, the perspective I take is one in which the current system has been allowed to be abused, and is leading into disarray. I want to see some better order in the DNS system, and I want it done with technical insight as well. I doubt many people share the above views, but I think in essence the perspective is shared.
Going over the list of self-noms, I've done an assessment of how well each of these candidates are in tune with this perspective.
I've skimmed lightly over most of the employment, qualification, and official status details, since although evidence of their technical expertise is important, their actual perspectives on the DNS system are most important to me. A lot of these candidates are saying boastful things like "I was here before there was TCP!!!", but that has no bearing to me on their perspective on ICANN. This information is best found in the Background sections.
A few don't give anyone any reason to select them. The best example is Daniel Bowers, who offers the world nothing except becoming the first ICANN electoral troll in history. And Eric Lee lives in Europe, not North America, so I consider him disqualified for the North America position.
Robin Bandy speaks in grandiose terms, referring not to personal views but to "the last remnant of a democratic system" on the Internet. She believes in the ideal direct-representation view I dismissed above; while its a nice idea, as all ideals are, I'm positive that Robin will fail in trying to meet this ideal, as so many others have.
Terry Calhoun seems to espouse the same ideal, but more vaguely, with an added feelgood platform reminiscient of "Personal Power" tape #1. And Rick Wesson says the same thing, but almost as if transcribed from an grade school student council election. speech.
Others don't espouse any viewpoint at all. Martin Goslar (Ph.D., that is) and Alan Herrell seemingly leave the question open. Leland Hardy, Sondlo Mhlaba, and Christopher Stewart don't mention anything at all about ICANN in their background explanations (though Chris does mention all the awards he won in high school). Teri Powell's reference page crashes my browser, so I don't know what he thinks -- but if his web page isn't reliably sound, I don't expect his ICANN views to be sound either. Finally, Robert Alberti talks mostly about MUDs, IRC, RPGing, and aikido, and only refers to "embracing change", without mentioning what change he has in mind.
We're down to 3 candidates with something resembling content in their expression. Michael McNulty endorses gTLD dilution, and cross-TLD domain name exclusivity, which are both in opposition to my own views, but invalidate each other.
So my decision (and recommendation) comes down to Karl Auerback and Daniel Chemko. Both seem to espouse an organized and logical-development view of DNS structure. Both seem to believe in ICANN fairness, responsibility, and egalitariance. They both seem to offer the viewpoints which can help keep ICANN on track and resist the current movement towards DNS chaos.
Now, if you've not totally lost me so far, my recommendation is for Karl Auerbach. Daniel has a good platform, but is less technically experienced than Karl, and lacks any evidence of ability to handle organizational politics well. Karl shows both the ability and intent to act as a reasoning force on the ICANN board. Coupled with the fact that he shares some of my viewpoints, he's the best person to represent me.
You of course, have to assess what is important to you in ICANN leadership and direction. Maybe you are AlterNic or OpenNic and you would love to see total gTLD deregulation, allowing the floodgates of meaningless TLDs to confuse the Internet. Maybe you are an executive of a large Internet corporation who wants the exclusive freedom to snatch up any domain associated with the name you happened to choose for your business. (Or maybe the idea of a lawyer-turned-geek warms your heart so much that you fall for Larry Lessig's act.) Regardless, there are still only a very few to choose from.
I'm not going to argue the merits of my ICANN / DNS views over anyone else's, but I do hope that those on Slashdot, and those who joined the ALM, are able to have a coherent sense of what DNS structure would benefit the Internet as a whole the most. And I hope we can send a clear, strong message to the ICANN board when we choose a person to represent our views among them.
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Lessig seems to be a good guy for the job from North America,
Please don't be serious. Lessig is the kind of guy who would revoke tux.org's domain for not selling dinner jackets.
being from Europe, I'm also curious about the European nominees.
There is that one guy from the UK who has nominated himself for the North America area. I don't quite get that one.
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I signed up. It was a painful wait.
Now, I'd like to think that being an ALM counts as being "politically active", but right now it still feels pretty hollow. More like being politically contained.
Anyhoo, let's hope we elect decent reps. I personally hope that a good number of member-nominated candidates win, or else I'll lose lots of faith in this whole At Large stuff.
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Well, OK. But...
$300 so I can still play my old DOS games. I'm too cheap. I'd try to rewrite them myself before I'd do that.
BTW, are you the same greenrd from dmoz?
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- The luser doesn't need it, and the power user should use Win2000 in their view.
And Win2000 has only cosmetic DOS emulation, a la WinNT.
Thus, I'm getting impatient on waiting for a DOS emulator for Windows, but I expect it wont be too long now.
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The monitor "does" 1152x900 but won't display it all
No, it does. I noticed the discrepancy when using Xvnc for the first time. I remembered that the root window size on the target machine was 1152x?, so I set it to 1152x864 by doing the 4:3 math.
But then I couldn't figure out why I couldn't fit the same number of windows on the screen as I do when using X on the target's console. I had to force vncviewer to open at 1152x900 in order to get the same results. [*]
Others are using the same X setup as me, with similar boxen (older sparcs mostly) and they have the same res and effects.
[*] I actually had to walk upstairs to the target and run X on it, check the root window size, close X, and walk back downstairs to reopen the XVNC client. It was silly. Luckily it was a temporary necessity.
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Incidentally, my Sun's monitor has resolution of 1152x900, which is... uh... 25:32 aspect ratio. Normally (insofar as 1152 x anything is a normal res) you see 1152x864.
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I think one should be a little slower to assume that there is such a thing as equality of opportunity.
I never did. The original poster suggested that computer skill was a direct result of economic conditions, which is not true. Other things are at play, which are more important. Social forces have a much more significant effect.
I didn't say it explicitly, but I also have a theory that economically depressed groups tend to fear technology, therefore hurting the possibility that those kids will have any interest in technology.
The difference, I think, stemmed from the respect these students were shown, the degree to which their minds were encouraged to imagine positive futures for themselves.
That seems to support my point that social support of an interest in a field is more important than the economic means to be at that field's forefront.
There's lots of other things I would like to have done when I was younger (that other kids did), but couldn't afford to. Certainly I think I should have had those opportunities too. I simply had to be realistic and limit my expectations to within my means. I'm still playing catch up to middle-class "poor kids" who got everything from a wealthy grandparent or a responsibly maintained trust fund. There's some unmentioned skills that they have that I don't, because of the choices I made.
Trust me, I'm not trying to sound like some sort of Republican success story. I'm just trying to put this thread into perspective.
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I have been lucky because my situation/family/background/financial situation enabled me to have the opportunity to use computers. Some people aren't so lucky. Some people may have been able to afford a computer but without having any guidance or inspiration, they have been shown what their potential could have achieved using computers.
While this is of course, entirely helpful, it doesn't have any dependency on one's computer skills, or vice versa.
I come from a lower-class background. While this means I end up behind a lot of people who were coding assembler at 6 because their families could afford SOTA computers in the early 80s, it didn't entirely prevent me from getting into the computer field and being fairly good in it. (I had other resources, mostly friends and family members who did have computers, eventually loaning me a then-clunky C64 in '93.)
On the other hand, I did work relatively hard -- in grade and high school -- to get where I am now; without high marks and class rank in high school, I wouldn't have been able to get into a decent college without selling drugs or selling my body (or something). And that's where I got the resources I needed to really play around with and learn computers.
All this aside, here's what I think you missed: Most people still don't want to know about computers. There may be antitheses to this rule (California, Cambridge, Scandinavia, etc.), but for the wide majority of the populace, its true. If it weren't for the 'Internet revolution', there would be hardly anyone who cared about knowing computers, and it would still be 1980 in terms of computer use.
For those who have the inclination, and the social support (and I envy the young geeks who can build large social groups around technology interests today), computers are an accessible skill. But, regardless of economic background, if the social support isn't there, the interest in computers probably is not either.
Some of us bucked the norm and found satisfaction in computer interests, but most people don't buck the norm, and simply go along with the crowd. And if that crowd isn't (really) into computers, they won't care about whatever options there are in IT, at least not for many years.
If what you say about the significance of "being shown the possibilities" were true, then "Intro to Computers" classes would be creating CS majors left and right. But they aren't.
There are some people working where I do, that I went to grade school with. Back then I was fooling with computers here and there, and for them, it was a laughable thing to do. Now they are trying to find their "options" in the IT field. Right now that option is to work downstairs -- making about half what I make upstairs.
Now, I don't think I'm arrogant about it, but I do chuckle to myself when I think of the scorn I went through in order for that situation to happen. I'm glad I was able to experience it.
The point is, although economic limitations will definitely hinder you, as they have me, they wont prevent you. But if you let yourself have disdain for the computer field (or culture, for what there is of one), then you prevent yourself, and I don't pity you.
There's plenty of scorn going around. Whether that scorn comes from those who laugh at what you know, or from those who laugh at what you don't know... if you ask me, both are part of the computer learning experience. If I'm exuding a little scorn, it can't be all that bad.
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Two words:
Social Darwinism.
It seems to me we have anought trouble with the wealthy being given greater advantage. Bill Gates and his wealthy family. George W. Bush and his acceptance into Yale with a C average in high school. Already, its the wealthy becoming the wealthy, or successful.
Now you're arguing that we should be able to increase our genetic material. I'm all for it; what I'm not for is only allowing the wealthy to have the genetically altered kids. They already have access to the better training, and better schools, and better academic, financial, and physiological resources.
Giving them the advantage of the last remaining variable -- the ability to make their kids smarter, or stronger, at birth -- will destroy the idea of the individual's ability to overcome the norms and succeed on what makes them better than others, because there will be no such thing.
I'm willing to give up the possibility of genetic improvement for my own children, if it will mean that they will retain the possibility of excelling above others on an even playing field.
I don't want to see a 21st century feudalism where the genetically altered maintain arbitrary dominion over the genetically inferior, who work for them as serfs, being physically and mentally unable to compete with or challenge that dominion, due to the access to genetic improvement that is unavailable to their economic or social class.
You may want to write this off as alarmism, and I could be overdoing it, but the point stands -- I don't want the financially superior, in this day and age, being the ones able to make their kids smarter and stronger.
You want to make the human race better through genetic engineering?
Good. Share it.
VNC is a nice idea, but as a sysadmin, I strongly dislike it. Especially when 20 employees are running VNC (sometimes more than once!) on the same Sparc 20.
When you run a local X server, more of the load is taken by the PC, and keeps the PC responsible for some of the interface. (FWIW, MI/X comes with twm, which if you want to use it, helps this idea.)
With VNC, you expect the remote machine to take all the load, and rely on your network to bring the image to you. Personally, I've found VNC to be twice or more as slow as an SSH tunneled X session.
What's more, VNC doesn't encourage you to be responsible about your use of the server, because it allows you to keep your session (and all its clients) running, after you've closed the VNCviewer.
Which is why the first thing we kill whenever the machine is about to tank, is an Xvnc process owned by a user whose shift is over. This usually is a big inconvenience to them, not only because they have to restart everything, but because Xvnc always seems to leave some problem-causing cruft behind when its killed.
My advice is to avoid VNC unless you really need its particular benefits.
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Let's take an inventory of what you really need. You want each client to run and admin their own webserver. You don't want each client to be able to affect the others. This means no rampant interfering resource usage.
No. You've confused "dedicated server" with "virtual host". Which may be understandable, given the title of the article. But these are not the same thing. With a dedicated server[1]:
1. Customers want to be able to run servers and apps beyond just HTTPD and its front/backends.
2. Customers want the freedom and control of root access, and don't want anyone else to have it. (In some cases, not even the hosting provider!)
3. Customers don't want to worry about anyone else clogging their server's pipe.
Providing the first two items to multiple customers of the same box is going to be messy on any OS you come across. The product being described is interesting, but the price tag is excessive. One wonders what sort of installations will be able to turn a profit. My workplace has maybe 4-5 dozen deds. Being able to condense some of the lower-usage customers might free up a handful of boxes. Would it be $25,000 worth? I don't know.
On the other hand, I wonder how they can address the third item. If two customers on the same ded suddenly ring up a lot of traffic at the same time, there could be contention, which would cause both customers to cry foul.
Not only that, but you'd either have to cheat your customers, or you'd have to be up front about the fact that you're not really giving them a DEDICATED server. [2] And then, you wouldn't be able to charge as much. Thus cutting into the margin you would need in order to make up for the cost of this product.
It seems to me if your users' aren't using their full capacity, that's great. They're paying you for something they aren't using, and you're making more money off them. If they are spendthrifts, that's their problem. If a dedicated server is more than they need, then they should get a vhost and be happy.
[1] This reflects the definition of "dedicated server" used by my employer, Shore.Net. YRMV. Incidentally, the term is being phased out in favor of "managed colocated server".
[2] "Shared dedicated server" is an oxymoron.
I knew Google was a good engine, but I haven't been this impressed by a search engine in a long time.
There's more stuff about me on Google than there is on AV or Yahoo. Combined. There's even the infamous post to CSS-WG which got me in trouble with my employer, a number of my essays and papers, a campus newspaper interview from the best year of my life, and even an attendance roster from a meeting I don't remember going to.
This suggests that Google knows more about me than I do!
The annoying thing is the amount of noise, from people with the same or similar names (I. Keith Tyler, Tyler Keith, etc.), and the names of cities in Texas.
Anyway, I'm impressed, and no, I don't mind this stuff about me being readily available (except maybe the CSS-WG letter). I like it. "Look at me, everybody! I'm on Google!"
(Well, at least it's more impressive than an ODP link.)
Everyone is shouting "Steganography". I was about to shout "SSH" or "PGP", which I think is more realistic, but not much.
:)
Keep in mind -- Most of these rogue nations also have pretty poor pipes. Maybe Iran and China are getting getting better, but what about seriously rogue states -- North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, much of Africa, etc. where pipes are small (if not nonexistent).
It might be okay to put small messages inside of images, but how practical is it for people in countries with small pipes to send MIME-encoded JPEGs over email? A relatively few countries benefit from DSL, ISDN, 56K or even 28.8 modems.
Perhaps a simple message as "I'm going to shoot the king" will be relatively practical to steganographize for these people. It sounds like we are all saying "well, if *I* was in the Congo, with my P333 laptop, Gnome suite, and 33.6 cell modem, I'd do _this_" -- but that isn't always available. We're talking about areas of the world where FidoNet is considered efficient and practical.
On the other hand, these rogue nations are by no means technocracies (being effectively or partially shut out of the western world is a big barrier to that), so I bet some simple encryption would suffice for these people. I doubt it even has to be complicated. Establish your code phrases, and sprinkle your friendly correspondence with them.
Hey, in Spies Like Us, they managed to fool the Russians with pig latin.
Normal people should not be interfering with TV broadcasts, this means... If your neighbor complains, you must stop using your drill or switch off your computer.
Hold on -- isn't a TV also a Part 15 device, and therefore must accept any unwanted interference?
If the way you put it is true, that means the people upstairs will never be able to vacuum.
I think this might apply to interefering with broadcast transmissions on a large scale, not on random interference. I'm certainly in trouble if I, say, interfere with HBO's feed and display a message saying their license fees are too high.
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Specifically what accepting interference means is that if my cell phone crashes your computer, its is your responsibility to fix your computer
:) )
OK.... but replace "computer" with "life support system".
Of course, I guess in turn, you can't ask the hospital to turn off its cell jammers if they are denying your cell service.
(Hey... if I get a cellular modem for my Palm, can I sue the hospital for DOS?
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