I didn't mean the subject as flamebait, I was more pointing out that it was very different in important ways from UNIX. Trying to port a Unix program to VMS was a pain. The "Unix way" didn't fit there.
Forking off a subprocess and reading its stdout was an extreme pain under VMS. I had to port a program there once. It took 60 lines to do it in Unix (lots of error checking), and 182 lines (3x the code) on VMS.
On the bright side, it had enough other POSIX stuff (file I/O, pthreads, etc.) that the rest of the port was pretty easy.
Logicals are actually kind of cool - a bastard cross between environment variables and symlinks, but you could do some neat things with 'em.
If we're wandering into such territory, almost any book by Oliver Sacks is thoroughly interesting. He's a practicing neurologist who writes like he swallowed a poet. Seeing the symptoms when portions of the brain break down (and how the person copes and adapts to this) really changes the way you look at your own self.
"The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" and "An Anthropologist On Mars" are both excellent. You might also want to read the real story behind the movie "Awakenings".
One thing that makes the Palm a lot more linkable is Megawiki. Gives you something very close to hypertext, can link all kinds of records of various apps together. Highly useful.
I'm sure there is a comparable (if not greater) amount of critical bugs in windows's kernel that because of its closed nature we don't ever get to see...
For a lot of tasks, there's no substitute for screen real estate, and a full-size keyboard is the way to go for entering large amounts of text - even voice recognition can't compete in many environments.
If you had a phone/PDA combo that could plug into commonly-available docks, like a laptop dock, you might be on to something. Add in wired networking (which will always be faster than wireless, by the nature of signals) and extra, long-term storage, some good speakers for gravy.
For now, I have a PDA (Handera 330, sweet little machine), and I love and use it... but I'm typing this in on a desktop, 'cause I code for a living, and coding on a PDA, while possible, is painful, even with a plug-in keyboard.
Everyone is so quick to blame Microsoft that they seem to forget that hardware fails too.
To quote the post you were replying to: "Linux never, ever crashes on it."
And, yeah, I do comparable stuff on it. Indeed, my wife only uses it for web, email, and greeting cards; I only use XP for games. I do all the real work on Linux. But, even in games, Linux doesn't crash.
I'll grant XP's more stable than 98SE, but it'd be hard to be much worse.
whenever my girlfriend blames the computer for not doing "what [she] wants it to do", I usually roll my eyes and figure she's just not doing something right.
I've been getting a lot of spam at work, and my company makes me use Outlook for email & calendaring. (I use Linux for absolutely everything else except actual Windows development, which I sometimes have to do.) I've been getting a lot of nearly identical spam, and I tried to set up a rule to deal with it.
It says, basically, "When a message arrives, see if it has "Buy Cialis" or "Buy Viagra" in the body. If so, forward it to the FTC and the FDA as an attachment, stick it in the "Spam" folder, clear the message flag, and stop processing rules.
It's the very first rule in the list. I have my copy of Outlook running almost continuously. But guess what? It only works some of the time. Some messages get auto-forwarded, and some get caught by later rules and end up in the Spam folder. The ones that slip by are essentially identical in form and content to the ones that don't.
WTF? I sure never had this problem with procmail...
It's not like it's terribly hard to keep Windows stable.
My dual-Athlon system at home has Windows XP and Linux. Linux never, ever crashes on it. If I leave XP running overnight, about two times out of seven I'll get that lovely "The system has recovered from a serious error" message, i.e. it crashed hard and rebooted.
I've got antivirus and I regularly sweep for spyware with two different utilities. The hardware has the latest drivers and isn't terribly advanced in many ways (a GF4-MX, OEM SB Live, etc.), but XP just borks out every so often for no apparent reason.
I've read debug logs before. The damn "error report" gives no useful information at all.
People living forever means less need for kids, which slows down evolution...
Only if you assume that there's just a single planet to expand into. This solar system alone has several more, and a whole lot of empty space near a comfy star that isn't being exploited at all. Depending on how far lifespans can be extended, other star systems become available, too.
Take away the motivation of a limited lifespan
and suddenly everything seems a lot less urgent.
I don't plan on dying tomorrow, but I'm still finishing the molding in the bathroom tonight. I expect that I'll still have a few years to enjoy it in. If I thought I was going to die sooner, I probably wouldn't bother.
How's this for a thought: If you expected to be here in a thousand years, how would that change your thinking about the nuclear waste problem? Perhaps a longer time horizon is a good thing...
I already posted it once, but here's my favorite quote on this subject:
"Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious
Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude
has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues
for as many centuries as it takes." - Patrick Nielsen Hayden
"Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious
Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude
has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues
for as many centuries as it takes." - Patrick Nielsen Hayden
The "paradox" comes from the fact that you're trying to have your cake and eat it, too, when you declare that "time" is a dimension of that static 4D sculpture, yet you can somehow move in "time".
Go read the page. There's no real contradiciton there. Consider a flip-book animation. Each page is one 2-D slice of a 3-D 'universe'; you get an illusion of time by only seeing one slice at a time. Now, all the ways we can think of to move back in time (black holes, Tipler cylinders, etc.) involve warping up space something fierce. What if you made a flip-book mobius strip? I.e. the 'static sculpture' contains some paths where items can flow 'around' back to 'before' they left, that's all.
Besides, if time isn't in some sense a physical exent, how could you 'travel' along it? If the past doesn't physically exist to travel to, how could you ever get there?
'Meta-time' (on my page I call it 'hyper-time', same difference) is only necessary to have room for alternate universes. E.g., a 4-D arrangement of 3-D flip-books. If you don't have alternate universes, you don't need the concept.
The paradox isn't a property of time, it's a property of the language used to try to describe it.
And the 'change-wave' idea is a result of trying to apply 'normal' ideas of time to a situation where they fundamentally don't apply. Consider - how many seconds per second does the change-wave move? From a given point in time, how do you tell how 'far' the change-wave has 'advanced'? You need a hypertime to describe it, and at that point you might as well just have alternate universes. What happens when the wave gets to the time travel event itself? Why doesn't it flow 'back' along with the time traveller and undo the change that spawned it?
Short version: If you go back in time, you either can change the past, or you can't. If you can, the only logically consistent explanation is that you've created an alternate universe. ("Change waves" and other such malarkey don't add up.) So it's not really time travel, it's basically travel into alternate universes.
On the other hand, if you are travelling into "the" past, the past that gave rise to you, then you must "already" be there, and be part of that history. In this case, all of time can be thought of as one static four-dimensional sculpture, and normally we only see one 3D slice of it at a time.
The former seems to be consistent with quantum mechanics. The latter is consistent with general relativity. Unfortunately, QM and GR are not consistent with each other, and no one has a clue how to reconcile them yet. Until we do, or find a way to do practical time travel experiments, we won't know which model really holds.
But I always interpreted the point of the scene differently. I thought the general looked pathetic, that he really believed that his mission to protect freedom made the ends worth the means. Of course, his mission was to protect Gitmo from cuba, which is a pretty damn useless missions.
I interpreted it as a challenge to the audience. If ours really is a government "by the people", then that general was our employee. We're not just 'entitled' to the truth; we have a positive duty to judge what he's doing, because we aren't subjects of a mideval feifdom, we are citizens and he's acting on our behalf.
We don't have the "luxury" of ignoring such things. In a real sense, we're doing them. Our employees did those things at Abu G. If you think CEOs should be held responsible for corporate actions... then welcome to the hotseat. Personally, I want my country to be held to a higher standard than just "somewhat better than Saddam Hussein".
Okay, let's game it out. It's post 9-11, and Saddam actually has WMDs. What are his options?
Attack one of his neighbors, either conventionally or with WMDs.
Result: Gulf War II, only with full international support, and they don't stop short of Baghdad.
Attack Israel, either conventionally or with WMDs.
Result: At least airstrikes. If he actually used WMDs, I wouldn't be shocked if Israel used nukes in retaliation. Conceivably Gulf War II.
Attack the US, with or without WMDs.
Result: Gulf War II, squared. Probably not nukes, but every single 'palace' is a smoking crater and few if any are willing to hide him.
Give Al Quaeda WMDs.
Result: If it's ever traced back to him (and keeping secrets like that isn't all that easy), see above. He was mostly a secular leader anyway; hooking up with religious fanatics who didn't like him much wouldn't be a great idea.
Maintain the status quo.
Result: Pretty good, from Saddam's perspective. He's still rich and comfortable. He can jerk the price of oil around a bit by rattling sabers if he wants to tweak the U.S. He gets a bit of support from his neighbors by appearing to stand up to the 'Great Satan'.
Saddam's a sick, evil SOB, but (a) no sicker than a lot of other Thugocrats in the world that no one seems to care about, and (b) he isn't stupid. He can see the consequences of the above actions the same as anybody. They'd be hard to miss after Kuwait. He was, pretty much, contained by the status quo. He certainly posed no serious threat to the U.S. except by his influence over the price of oil.
He had no connection to 9-11, and I call BS on anyone who claims different. And, as has become increasingly clear, he didn't have vast stockpiles of WMDs. He just didn't. He had some, but I think he was mostly running a bluff. He tried to make it at least seem possible that he did have a signficant amount, to make invading Iraq seem more costly.
But he didn't think the current U.S. administration would use that bluff, along with the specter of 9-11, to ram through PNAC's war. He overestimated us.
A side point: we had plenty of support for, and little to no active opposition to, our invasion of Afghanistan. We had a population that didn't like the existing theocracy and were willing to go for a more secular government. If we'd spent the kind of money there that we are currently hemmoraging in Iraq, where would we be now?
Dude, I have an H330, too. Any chance I could get a copy of that OS4.1? Will it work okay with the stock 8MB RAM? Go to my website above, click on "Contact", and email me, please!
I use a Handera 330. The screen is 320x240 grayscale, but it renders text just fine, and the battery life is comparable to my old Palm IIIxe (weeks between battery changes). Of course, if you're just going to be using it as a reader it's overkill, but for my geek purposes the rest of it works quite well.
...initiated by God, as a way of carrying out His justice. That is, I believe, why God led the Israelites to slaughter all the tribes living in Canaan. The Bible makes it fairly clear that they were allowed to do that because the wickedness in that area was so great.
Yeah, killing livestock
and infants is the way I like to carry out my justice, too.
This is why we should move to procedurally generated textures...
There was a time in the mid-90's when games had boatloads of pre-rendered movies and such. The hardware wasn't up to 3D graphics, so to make good eye candy you needed lots of pre-generated data.
There were games that came on 5 CDs or more. You'd swap them a lot, because the hard disks couldn't store that much. Then 3D accelerators came along, and you could fit a lot of eye candy into a much smaller space - like Half-Life, you could generate cutscenes and such inside the game engine.
But now, we've got huge amounts of textures and world data and games are going past two CDs again, even a full DVD. But procedurally generating textures, and even maps, could shift the balance again, and make the games both smaller and prettier.
Again, it'll be the video card tech that drives it. First it was 3D acceleration, period. Now its shader programs.
God is perfect, cannot make mistakes, cannot lie, cannot do evil.
So, does God lack free will, or does whatever God happens to do become, by definition, good?
If the former, why worship an automaton? If the latter, what makes God anything but the biggest bully on the block?
If God both has free will, and yet would never do evil, why not create humans with that remarkable trait from the start? It's obviously not logically contradictory...
I did pretty much the grandparent's idea with Ostiary. Yes, it has an open port, and requires shared keys. But it is so utterly simple (16 bytes (an MD5 hash) out, 16 bytes back (HMAC)) that it eliminates the chances of buffer overflows or anything like that, and even runs on a Palm Pilot.
Public key stuff has had buffer overflows and exploits before. I have my sshd disabled until and unless I give it the correct signal; I don't have to panic whenever it has a hole discovered.
Order and Delivery Of Packets Is Not Guaranteed!
on
Port Knocking in Action
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Packets are not guaranteed to arrive in the order that they were sent, or even to arrive at all. The longer or more complex the knock sequence, the more unreliable this system will be. Especially for a busy server.
There are less stealthy but more secure alternatives. I wrote one.
Slashdot Mirror
And as I said, it sure did have some nice points.
On the bright side, it had enough other POSIX stuff (file I/O, pthreads, etc.) that the rest of the port was pretty easy.
Logicals are actually kind of cool - a bastard cross between environment variables and symlinks, but you could do some neat things with 'em.
"The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" and "An Anthropologist On Mars" are both excellent. You might also want to read the real story behind the movie "Awakenings".
I always liked Deuternomy 25:11-12 myself. :->
One thing that makes the Palm a lot more linkable is Megawiki. Gives you something very close to hypertext, can link all kinds of records of various apps together. Highly useful.
Why not use a tool like crashme to find them?
Just a couple months ago Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow was released with a bug that would crash the system if you stayed in the game browser for more than ten seconds. Hard to imagine how that one got missed...
If you had a phone/PDA combo that could plug into commonly-available docks, like a laptop dock, you might be on to something. Add in wired networking (which will always be faster than wireless, by the nature of signals) and extra, long-term storage, some good speakers for gravy.
For now, I have a PDA (Handera 330, sweet little machine), and I love and use it... but I'm typing this in on a desktop, 'cause I code for a living, and coding on a PDA, while possible, is painful, even with a plug-in keyboard.
To quote the post you were replying to: "Linux never, ever crashes on it."
And, yeah, I do comparable stuff on it. Indeed, my wife only uses it for web, email, and greeting cards; I only use XP for games. I do all the real work on Linux. But, even in games, Linux doesn't crash.
I'll grant XP's more stable than 98SE, but it'd be hard to be much worse.
I've been getting a lot of spam at work, and my company makes me use Outlook for email & calendaring. (I use Linux for absolutely everything else except actual Windows development, which I sometimes have to do.) I've been getting a lot of nearly identical spam, and I tried to set up a rule to deal with it.
It says, basically, "When a message arrives, see if it has "Buy Cialis" or "Buy Viagra" in the body. If so, forward it to the FTC and the FDA as an attachment, stick it in the "Spam" folder, clear the message flag, and stop processing rules.
It's the very first rule in the list. I have my copy of Outlook running almost continuously. But guess what? It only works some of the time. Some messages get auto-forwarded, and some get caught by later rules and end up in the Spam folder. The ones that slip by are essentially identical in form and content to the ones that don't.
WTF? I sure never had this problem with procmail...
It's not like it's terribly hard to keep Windows stable.
My dual-Athlon system at home has Windows XP and Linux. Linux never, ever crashes on it. If I leave XP running overnight, about two times out of seven I'll get that lovely "The system has recovered from a serious error" message, i.e. it crashed hard and rebooted.
I've got antivirus and I regularly sweep for spyware with two different utilities. The hardware has the latest drivers and isn't terribly advanced in many ways (a GF4-MX, OEM SB Live, etc.), but XP just borks out every so often for no apparent reason.
I've read debug logs before. The damn "error report" gives no useful information at all.
Only if you assume that there's just a single planet to expand into. This solar system alone has several more, and a whole lot of empty space near a comfy star that isn't being exploited at all. Depending on how far lifespans can be extended, other star systems become available, too.
Take away the motivation of a limited lifespan and suddenly everything seems a lot less urgent.
I don't plan on dying tomorrow, but I'm still finishing the molding in the bathroom tonight. I expect that I'll still have a few years to enjoy it in. If I thought I was going to die sooner, I probably wouldn't bother.
How's this for a thought: If you expected to be here in a thousand years, how would that change your thinking about the nuclear waste problem? Perhaps a longer time horizon is a good thing...
I already posted it once, but here's my favorite quote on this subject:
Very recently, this was shown to be false, at least for mice. But everyone now confidently expects to find similar results in humans.
"Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes." - Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Go read the page. There's no real contradiciton there. Consider a flip-book animation. Each page is one 2-D slice of a 3-D 'universe'; you get an illusion of time by only seeing one slice at a time. Now, all the ways we can think of to move back in time (black holes, Tipler cylinders, etc.) involve warping up space something fierce. What if you made a flip-book mobius strip? I.e. the 'static sculpture' contains some paths where items can flow 'around' back to 'before' they left, that's all.
Besides, if time isn't in some sense a physical exent, how could you 'travel' along it? If the past doesn't physically exist to travel to, how could you ever get there?
'Meta-time' (on my page I call it 'hyper-time', same difference) is only necessary to have room for alternate universes. E.g., a 4-D arrangement of 3-D flip-books. If you don't have alternate universes, you don't need the concept.
The paradox isn't a property of time, it's a property of the language used to try to describe it.
And the 'change-wave' idea is a result of trying to apply 'normal' ideas of time to a situation where they fundamentally don't apply. Consider - how many seconds per second does the change-wave move? From a given point in time, how do you tell how 'far' the change-wave has 'advanced'? You need a hypertime to describe it, and at that point you might as well just have alternate universes. What happens when the wave gets to the time travel event itself? Why doesn't it flow 'back' along with the time traveller and undo the change that spawned it?
Oh, plenty have. Heck, I have.
Short version: If you go back in time, you either can change the past, or you can't. If you can, the only logically consistent explanation is that you've created an alternate universe. ("Change waves" and other such malarkey don't add up.) So it's not really time travel, it's basically travel into alternate universes.
On the other hand, if you are travelling into "the" past, the past that gave rise to you, then you must "already" be there, and be part of that history. In this case, all of time can be thought of as one static four-dimensional sculpture, and normally we only see one 3D slice of it at a time.
The former seems to be consistent with quantum mechanics. The latter is consistent with general relativity. Unfortunately, QM and GR are not consistent with each other, and no one has a clue how to reconcile them yet. Until we do, or find a way to do practical time travel experiments, we won't know which model really holds.
I interpreted it as a challenge to the audience. If ours really is a government "by the people", then that general was our employee. We're not just 'entitled' to the truth; we have a positive duty to judge what he's doing, because we aren't subjects of a mideval feifdom, we are citizens and he's acting on our behalf.
We don't have the "luxury" of ignoring such things. In a real sense, we're doing them. Our employees did those things at Abu G. If you think CEOs should be held responsible for corporate actions... then welcome to the hotseat. Personally, I want my country to be held to a higher standard than just "somewhat better than Saddam Hussein".
- Attack one of his neighbors, either conventionally or with WMDs.
- Attack Israel, either conventionally or with WMDs.
- Attack the US, with or without WMDs.
- Give Al Quaeda WMDs.
- Maintain the status quo.
Saddam's a sick, evil SOB, but (a) no sicker than a lot of other Thugocrats in the world that no one seems to care about, and (b) he isn't stupid. He can see the consequences of the above actions the same as anybody. They'd be hard to miss after Kuwait. He was, pretty much, contained by the status quo. He certainly posed no serious threat to the U.S. except by his influence over the price of oil.Result: Gulf War II, only with full international support, and they don't stop short of Baghdad.
Result: At least airstrikes. If he actually used WMDs, I wouldn't be shocked if Israel used nukes in retaliation. Conceivably Gulf War II.
Result: Gulf War II, squared. Probably not nukes, but every single 'palace' is a smoking crater and few if any are willing to hide him.
Result: If it's ever traced back to him (and keeping secrets like that isn't all that easy), see above. He was mostly a secular leader anyway; hooking up with religious fanatics who didn't like him much wouldn't be a great idea.
Result: Pretty good, from Saddam's perspective. He's still rich and comfortable. He can jerk the price of oil around a bit by rattling sabers if he wants to tweak the U.S. He gets a bit of support from his neighbors by appearing to stand up to the 'Great Satan'.
He had no connection to 9-11, and I call BS on anyone who claims different. And, as has become increasingly clear, he didn't have vast stockpiles of WMDs. He just didn't. He had some, but I think he was mostly running a bluff. He tried to make it at least seem possible that he did have a signficant amount, to make invading Iraq seem more costly.
But he didn't think the current U.S. administration would use that bluff, along with the specter of 9-11, to ram through PNAC's war. He overestimated us.
A side point: we had plenty of support for, and little to no active opposition to, our invasion of Afghanistan. We had a population that didn't like the existing theocracy and were willing to go for a more secular government. If we'd spent the kind of money there that we are currently hemmoraging in Iraq, where would we be now?
Microsoft might like that better than a big blank check.
Dude, I have an H330, too. Any chance I could get a copy of that OS4.1? Will it work okay with the stock 8MB RAM? Go to my website above, click on "Contact", and email me, please!
I use a Handera 330. The screen is 320x240 grayscale, but it renders text just fine, and the battery life is comparable to my old Palm IIIxe (weeks between battery changes). Of course, if you're just going to be using it as a reader it's overkill, but for my geek purposes the rest of it works quite well.
Yeah, killing livestock and infants is the way I like to carry out my justice, too.
There was a time in the mid-90's when games had boatloads of pre-rendered movies and such. The hardware wasn't up to 3D graphics, so to make good eye candy you needed lots of pre-generated data.
There were games that came on 5 CDs or more. You'd swap them a lot, because the hard disks couldn't store that much. Then 3D accelerators came along, and you could fit a lot of eye candy into a much smaller space - like Half-Life, you could generate cutscenes and such inside the game engine.
But now, we've got huge amounts of textures and world data and games are going past two CDs again, even a full DVD. But procedurally generating textures, and even maps, could shift the balance again, and make the games both smaller and prettier. Again, it'll be the video card tech that drives it. First it was 3D acceleration, period. Now its shader programs.
So, does God lack free will, or does whatever God happens to do become, by definition, good?
If the former, why worship an automaton? If the latter, what makes God anything but the biggest bully on the block?
If God both has free will, and yet would never do evil, why not create humans with that remarkable trait from the start? It's obviously not logically contradictory...
Public key stuff has had buffer overflows and exploits before. I have my sshd disabled until and unless I give it the correct signal; I don't have to panic whenever it has a hole discovered.
There are less stealthy but more secure alternatives. I wrote one.