every joe blow windows programmer thinks he can revolutionize the UI, which makes running windows so god damn frustrating.
grip, x11amp, Enlightement, etc. etc. That syndrome is hardly unique to Windows, unfortunately. Having not just two different native looks (Athena, Motif+derivatives), but two different feels (Athena, Motif+derivatives) doesn't really help matters much either. It's a shame Motif is implemented in terms of Xt, because it would be so much easier to drop-in replace with Gtk+ or Qt or whatever you like if it weren't.
Why can't a button be just a button, and why do skins seem to automatically mean bitmaps pasted over buttons?
This "design" is completely obvious to anyone the least bit skilled in the state of the art, and frankly doesn't add much information at all. There's ZERO reason you would need a PLA for this project when 7400 series TTL has many available multi-input OR gate functions. What's worst, none of this works anyway because all you need to do is unplug the PC or otherwise disrupt the power to the gate or PLA to break into it (the normal state is, after all, active low).
So what we have here is some fourteen year old with his own "security" organization, a metric buttload of super glue and an utter lack of clue who writes a frankly useless article so that he can pretend he's important whilst slinging around big acronyms like "PLA" and "VHDL" when the tools they represent are useless to the task at hand. In other words, a snake-oil salesman.
Check me if I'm wrong here, but I very clearly remember that when NSI started charging for domain names (I also still remember when they were free) they charged $35/year. Not $50.
Originally they charged $50 per year, $15 of which was deposited into the Intellectual Infrastructure Fund for the use of the National Science Foundation. That $15 was found an unauthorized tax in 1998 in Thomas v. Network Solutions.
Being an IT guy i work at the exective offices, i have 2 offices, one in our corporate building and one in our data center. I have access to all the perks of upper management without having to be management. Why would anyone want to give this away?
Exactly. Your anti-union testimony is not only bought, but largely false. Slashdot needs a "-1, Toadie" moderation.
The price of a piece of consumer electronics is ideally roughly 3x the time and materials that went into the assembly (not counting engineering time, overhead, etc.). You can shave some costs by using or modifying an existing design and Linux port, using offshore R&D talent, and using cheaper materials (wasn't there a flash shortage not too far back?). Looks to me like Softfield is doing all three.
From all appearances, this is a bog-standard DivX;-) player, for Windows. I imagine there's more code bytes in the crap skinning and the phoning home than there is in the few dozen Windows API calls required to implement the player itself. DirectShow shells are a penny a bale in ten-bale lots, so what consumer-beneficial differentiators are there to this one?
Yeah, okay, there's a logo that took all of twenty "inspired" minutes in front of Photoshop to draw. Fscking tribal neo-crypto-monkeys will rally around anything, regardless of merit.
Then again, some of the stuff I listen to on a regular basis either a) was recoded on a shoestring like this, or b) was recorded a while ago and the recording quality is probably the same as what can be done at home now.
You can get the same quality at home these days that you can get in many studios. The guy across the way does some eclectic pieces with rock foundations. His studio consists of an SB Live, a wide collection of sound fonts, Cakewalk 9 Pro, a Johnson J-Station (buy it for its effects, dig it for its clean 24-bit ADC and S/PDIF output, love it for the low low price), a crappy $4 boom mic, some Casiotone keyboard of no particular honor but MIDI in/out, a low-grade Ibanez solid-body guitar, and a corner of his living room. He turns out stuff that's definitely not out of place on movie soundtracks, either in production quality or content.
Unfortunately, he's a horrible businessman and has a credit file published in multiple volumes, so he won't be starting his own label anytime soon. (And nothing I've said or done has convinced him to even consider an indie label,)
The key is having solid production values and knowing how music is built. Regarding production values, 16 bits just isn't enough for source material, and 44.1kHz is cutting it rather close. Don't try to use the default sound fonts on something you want to show to anyone. Have a fast CPU. Knowing how music is built just comes with practice. It also helps to have the patience and inspiration (or dumb luck) to tweak velocities and CC's on MIDI tracks until your brain falls out your fingertips -- or an engineer willing to do the same for you.
(Both of the artists at Rainbow Sally use Windows, and have system instability issues day in and day out. Where the hell are the Linux audio applications people? Sigh...)
-jhp
Re:BIOSes should not be operating system-specific.
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LinuxBIOS Gains Steam
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Intel is pushing a new BIOS standard called EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface?); it's not really clear why they're not just using Open Firmware except maybe the conspiracy theory you mentioned.
Intel has its own reasons and incentives to keep its customers isolated from and ignorant of good engineering, not the least of which is good old Not Invented Here syndrome. Instead of putting a command line on the serial port for lights-out system management, they instead rolled their own binary proprietary protocol called EMP, through which you can make some configuration changes, reset the system, power it on/off, and the like. There are even clients for Linux that speak this protocol (VACM by VA Whatever This Week) but that doesn't necessarily make it any more useful in a pinch when you most need it. Compare that with OpenFirmware and Sun's LOM facility on the Netra line, which is easy to learn and easy to use, even if all you have handy is a dumb terminal or a Palm with a serial cable.
If a card is to be used in the boot process, it needs to have initialization code and some sort of basic driver code on-board. Intel's continuing ability to define the direction of the computing market and thus maintain a ready market for its half-arsed "innovations" depends on lock-in. If that init/driver code becomes portable, then the hardware is instantly useful without and independent of the Intel architecture, and customers' barriers to mixing or even switching architectures drop as quickly as the load in Intel's skivvies. Vendors like Adaptec that can double or more the list price on a SCSI card just by replacing the x86 SCSI BIOS code with OpenFirmware code wouldn't be thrilled by such a move either.
Large bureaucracies exist primarily to perpetuate themselves, and the customer is only a means to this end. (It only takes a little bit of dot-connecting to conclude that capitalism serves only itself, just like 1984's Ingsoc and the Party, but that's another flame war for another time.)
There's no such thing as a "world without scarcity".
Information isn't scarce except for laws that decree it so. Sunlight isn't scarce because we have more of it than we can use.
The concept of "scarce" applied to an open-ended future is meaningless. Webster's definition of "scarce" (emphasis mine):
1 : deficient in quantity or number
compared with the demand : not plentiful or abundant
Loosely translated, there exists "enough" of a good when demand exceeds supply. You have no need for oil in 500 years as there's a better-than-even chance you'll be dead by then. The only thing that could inspire demand for oil in 500 years is the progenitor of scarcity, and that is greed (loosely translated, "the drive to acquire more than what one can make legitimate use of").
Given the enabling technology, it certainly is possible for the average person to have the needs of life and significant creature comforts met with only a modicum of effort (say, 10 hours a month of easy labor).
Resources can become less scarce thanks to technology, but there will never be an infinite amount of crude oil.
Thank you, Mr. Cheney. By the time the oil supply runs out, there will be sufficient carbon on the surface to construct "enough" of whatever carbon-based foo we can possibly make use of.
The argument that eventually technology will go beyong the use of oil, and use fuel cells or solar power or some such doesn't work either. There is a finite amount of hydrogen and oxygen in the universe, and just because it is a huge amount technically doesn't make it not "scarce".
Sorry, smart guy. Not only are you using a flawed definition of "scarce", but there exists an abundance of hydrogen and oxygen because we can't destroy hydrogen and oxygen without working very hard at it. Furthermore, none of either is lost in the cycle since it essentially returns itself to the source from whence it came:
Environmental H2O electrolysed to produce H2 and O2: energy + H2O -> 2H2 + O2
H2 and O2 reacted in fuel cell or turbine to produce H2O, vented to environment: 2H2 + O2 -> H2O + energy
For further study, I recommend a web search on "conservation of matter".
If the Sun will beam enough energy down over a fixed time period (say, a day) to meet the demand of that period (say, a day), with capacity to spare, then there is an abundant energy supply, and therefore any scarcity of energy is due to the human social order imposing scarcity somewhere between the supply point and the demand point.
Einstein said there's plenty of hydrogen and stupidity in the universe. I leave the conclusions to the reader to draw.
The people who came up with this idea deserve to be considered heros!
Wouldn't that be BrightLight?
I don't know the characteristics of the hashing algorthm used, but perhaps by doing three hashes: start of message, middle of message, and end of message, it may be possible to identify spam even if a small part has been change.
HTML email provides too many places to hide garbage. Comment tags and unused X- attributes are the obvious ones; finely (or grossly) tweaking COLOR elements, or any number of things done to inlined images, provide an effectively infinite number of variations which will pass any filter based on the usual message digest algorithms.
Many such tricks can be defeated by only hashing words that appear in some standard dictionary and discarding all else, such that
gets reduced to LIVE NAKED DRESSED GIRLS before hashing. Even then, the smart thing to do is not to block matching mail but to blackhole the sources of matching mail, preferably permanently.
(Not to be too gushing: SPAM is a rich mans problem - I hope someone comes up with some cool technological solutions to some of humanities more basic problems.)
Humanity's more basic problems are the inability to cope with the concept of a world without scarcity. Would that technology fix that instead of providing the powerful with more ways to create unnatural scarcity.
Idolatry is just one side of the objectification coin. They're already there.
Of course it takes the fairness and fun out of the sport. What makes you think sponsors are interested in fun and fairness? Fun and fairness doesn't sell sports. Rivalry sells sports. Tostitos and ESPN/Disney didn't just solicit free marketing work from their addicts^Wcustomers to find the best teams in the leagues. No, they specifically asked for the best rivalry.
Personally, I don't care. I never understood competitive sport anyway.
-jhp
This post is dedicated to George Harrison. May he rest in peace.
When you buy a $100 cubic-zirconium ring, and then take it home only to find out it's a real diamond... do you take it back? Yes. If you don't you're stealing.
No it isn't. They still have their source code and complete control over it.
Is Apple getting the $80 they deserve from the people modifying their CDs?
Am I getting the several hundred dollars I deserve from websites and corporations selling and reselling my name and address without my explicit consent? Clearly, no. What's law for the corporates is law for the common folk.
-jhp
Re:Computer Science Major and Political Science Mi
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· Score: 3, Interesting
could I be right when I make the assumption that the government is no longer for the people which it represents and more for how well their own pockets can be lined by our fellow extremely wealthy citizens.
Close, but perhaps a little too cynical. It is valid (and urgent) to ask why the government has been allowed to advocate its own interests distinct from and in many cases adversarial to the public interest, and whose interest the government really is serving if not the public interest. It may not be that the current regime consciously acts in service of wealth, but that wealth itself, or traits closely associated with wealth, such as photogenicity, a firm handshake, the ability to lie with a straight face and close deals, and the unshakable drive to power, is a prerequisite in the eyes of the majority of the public, and the wealthy, like any other clique, fend for their own. Keep in mind the two "major" parties would have no reason to exist were donations to the parties made illegal.
I have the sinking feeling that political means won't solve this problem when the two "major" parties fight each other only for show and become instant allies whenever a promising adversary appears. Yet any attempt to apply non-political means would only get the Communists rounded up and killed just like after the Reichstag fire. It appears the most reliable way to be free of the socialist overclass enforcing capitalism for the underclass is to pollute ourselves into infirmity as the Romans did, and wait a couple hundred years for the Visigoths to take Rome again.
I'm starting to doubt the New Agers' fawning over the Age of Aquarius. Technological feudalism is every bit as comfortable under Aquarius as the socialist collective.
It's thinking like yours that keeps people "inside the box."
In case you haven't noticed, a system administrator's job is not to suffer through streams of alerts every night so that the development crew can sleep eight hours and achieve self-actualization. A system administrator's job is to keep the damned site up. If the organization's primary face is the site, then keeping the site up is not open to compromise.
Developers, you say, should shrug off problems in the production environment because they don't have the password, nobody wants them mucking around there anyway.
Exactly. If there's a problem in the production environment, and not in the pre-production testing environment, then 99 times out of 100 the problem is either with the production environment itself or with the data in the production environment.
What is so foreign about the concept of keeping application code in its own managed, gated little world? In my experience it has almost always produces better, more reliable code. Giving engineering staff free rein on production has almost always resulted in poorer, less reliable code.
Thinking like yours is what PRODUCES developers who just don't give a shit about the nuts and bolts anymore.
Good. They're employed to write business logic and HTML. If you want to give a shit about the nuts and bolts, microcontroller trainers and Linux boxes are embarrassingly cheap and available.
Again, the system administrator's job is not to assist in the self-actualization of the application developer.
There are plenty of folks around who can see big-picture technical systems issues well, can code a bit, and can arbitrate well between operations and engineers. These people are valuable assets to a development organization and are useful for writing whatever glue is necessary to support the business logic and HTML/graphic content.
Developers get sick of justifying every idea to IT, and they get sick of submitting to unreasonable demands and restrictions.
What exactly is unreasonable about "production is not a toy"? If they want to test things they have machines set aside for the purpose. If they don't, then there is a serious problem of not only QA but development process, and that needs to be fixed. As far as justifying every idea to IT, what sort of justification do we ask for? We ask that you've tested the hell out of it, that it is well-behaved, that it requires minimal maintenance beyond code pushes or perhaps the occasional automated restart, and that it run with privileges appropriate to application software. As a sysadmin, it needs to not increase my workload, because in most cases my manager is all too keen to do that anyway, and preferably needs to decrease it. Is that too much to ask?
Spoken like a true BOFH.
Why, thank you.
In my experience those who say 'nothing', 'never', 'shouldn't ever' as much as you, really don't have much of value to say either.
I have my ideals. I've seen something very close to them in action at one installation, and things worked well there. The site had excellent uptime, the apps scaled well, and Things Just Worked. I've seen places that meet my ideals less than well, and they too work less than well.
Why should research be banned that could allow you to "grow" a new heart (or liver or whatever) if yours breaks somewhere down the line?
In the US, whenever you hear "religion" or "ethics" from a politician, they really mean "money". Their real fear is the po folks having any chance at this technology once it gets cheap. High-level officials paid lavishly on the public dole (I hesitate to call it "payroll") aren't affected as they can travel overseas to where such procedures are legal and (will be) well-developed, or provide appropriate legal protection to their domestic cloners, a la abortion pre-Roe.
I'd like to see either a total ban or a complete lack of restriction. The hypocritical prunes in public office don't deserve to extend their lives beyond the public they ostensibly serve, not a single one. Except maybe Tom Campbell, but he's not in public office anymore and certainly isn't hypocritical.
Imagine having to live in China or Russia for a while to get your heart transplant because saving your life this way in the U.S. is illegal.
Are you red-baiting? The only things wrong with Russia is that it's cold and has gangs. It's indistinguishable from Chicago except the media hegemony doesn't control what software you can write.
Content management system. It's crucial when doing a large website. Ours is horribly outdated. Keys to a good content management system: it should be web-based, and it should be a standard, out-of-the-box solution with as little customization as possible. It should allow for maximum flexibility. (We've run into problems with ours not supporting custom META tags, for instance.)
"Content management system" is a glorified name for "source control software" with prettier buttons and a heftier price tag. Whatever you do, do NOT spend more than $20k on your content management system. If you do, you could have just as well paid a monkey to hack CVS for a month and come out the other side with something much nicer, cleaner, and more customizable. Web interfaces are not essential; a GUI client is very nice to have for the content producers. Customization is not evil when offset by documentation; make sure the latter gets done, all the time, every time.
If I told you what IT refuses to do to our website, you'd be shocked.
It's easy to shock Linux fetishists with supposed wrongs when you've never administered a production site for yourself.
If I told you what development at a recent job has done to our systems, you'd be embarrassed. Let's see... NFS was used for all inter-machine communication because apparently none of them could be bothered to write socket code. A single machine served NFS requests for "site_status" because eng couldn't be bothered to write socket code; the ramifications to the stability of the site were Not Their Problem. Developers controlled the configuration files; adding a machine to the web farm involved haggling with them. Worse still, they hardcoded web farm machine names into the code to make exceptions rather than use proper configuration files or documentation. They controlled portions of the health and monitoring system, which became a messy accretion of sad, broken, unreliable tools. These were all people with over ten years of experience in software engineering, supposedly.
Meanwhile, we continue to get last priority with IT, and we don't have the root passwords to our own servers.
Damned right you don't.
Developers don't get access to production, ever. If a developer needs access to production, then they are fixing a problem irreproducible in the test environment. At no other time does a developer need to even touch production -- that's what test harnesses and environments are for. If you haven't even got a separate pre-production test environment, then pretty much nothing you have to say is of any value at all.
Applications should never run as root. If you think you need root access to listen on port 80, what you really need is to run your web server on high ports and make the load balancer or other firewall translate the request. If you think you need root access to modify certain system files, you really need to not use that part of the system. If it takes two years to get access to logs, then maybe your operations people are trying to tell you to stop shitting on them.
If you have someone in each department doing the website, you're going to get a website that defines subsections by the organization's departments, some of which may be mumbo-jumbo to outsiders.
Which is why you have an editor or relatively small editing committee that makes final decisions about every color, every menu, every word, every URL that gets published.
You can then also hire graphic designers without having to hire a complementary Dreamweaver jockey; good systems create HTML and correct menus for you in a lot of cases.
When you give powerful tools to people who have no idea what the consequences of using them are, you get a web site that impresses only managers. So your content management system creates menus and HTML for you? Is it compatible HTML? Does it work on all browsers? With or without Javascript enabled? (It's hard enough for Dreamweaver jockeys to get that last one right.)
If your copy people can't hand-code HTML when necessary and understand every single detail of any HTML that's automatically generated, they're not qualified for the job, especially in this market.
the good thing is that in a good content management system, you can customize it to fit your needs.
What happened to "as little customization as possible"? Heh.
Why don't you identify your success story of a site? The Keynote numbers can tell us whether your lessons make for a better, more reliable site, or whether you just talk a good game.
When I was in school, we had teletype terminals and IBM DOS machines. There was no MS monopoly back then.
That's correct. There wasn't. You had VMS, CP/M and OS/9, which were very popular in the microcomputing world at the time. If you're in your 30s, you also had Coherent and perhaps some V7 Unix for the PC. Plenty of choice. Office automation was also nowhere near as pervasive then as now, and back then many users never interacted with the shell or the browser -- they logged in, ran the company software and did their company job. Today people demand that every Internet-connected computer serve double-duty as an entertainment terminal, and many OSes make it impossible for you to do your work without acclimating yourself to a particular way of interacting with the browser.
Face it, there is no OS on the planet that can go into schools that will get a 100% endorsement even within the free/open-source software world. Period.
"Face it" and "period" do not establish your authority or the validity of your conjecture. BSD people don't have all that much to complain about if Linux makes it into schools en masse. Most people I know came into BSD after diddling with Linux for a while, and are happy where they are. Linux distributions as they are today make a perfectly serviceable "training Unix", if you will, and there's no reason the BSD camp shouldn't be overjoyed to see Linux absorb the burden of supporting the user who hasn't been exposed to any Unix. Knowledge is more portable between different flavors of Unix than between different flavors of Windows, once you need to fix or program something.
Let's see what's more benefitial: average PC users receive a check for the $20 determined to be the "damage" we sustained as a result of MS's monopolistic actions, or kids in poor neighborhoods/schools get access to training, hardware, and computer related education that they would not be given access to otherwise. [...] If you have to honestly think about it, you need to work on being more human and less greedy.
You need to work on being less of a patsy, get some principles, act upon them, and learn to spell "beneficial". Are you this easily bought? Government could just as easily forfeit the company and distribute the booty to the schools, and they certainly have the sovereign right (but not the self-interest) to do so. The only reason corporations, as an institution or as entities, still exist is because we let them live.
It is a fallacy that sending checks for $20 or seeding the market are our only choices. Look at Red Hat's counter-proposal, for example.
Gee, could it be possible that I had -- *GASP* -- freedom of choice?
Yet you support the ability of a major corporation whose goal is to remove that choice from you to bribe their way out of changing the way they do business? Makes no sense.
Reading comments posted here, you'd think that if MS puts Windows in classrooms that the people in those classes will nevereverEVER touch anything other than Windows.
Most of them won't, and even if they do, will they be in a position to use Linux in their day-to-day computing? Will this be more difficult or less difficult if Microsoft continues to use their revenue stream to advocate for absolute intellectual property rights? Remember, the typical American thinks no farther into the future than their next paycheck and has a very poor opinion of their own judgment.
And until developers start putting the end-user experience in front of developer coolness (take a hint, free/open-source developers), this will continue to be a true statement.
I agree, to a point. I personally have no desire to put crappy plastic baubles with simulated LCD displays on my desktop. I also agree that UI consistency and elegance is of far greater strategic importance to desktop Linux than making the desktop look like a dance club flyer, and I observe that platforms with published style guides, consistently followed (Macintosh) are easier and less aggravating for the neophyte to learn and use than platforms with loosely followed style guides (Windows), and platforms with three different UI toolkits, none of which behaves exactly alike and none of which satisfies a user's expectations anywhere near all the time (Linux/X11) come in dead last. Nokia cell phones have a UI that avoids surprises. Almost every button on the phone does something, and 99 times out of 100 it's exactly what you expected the phone to do when you pressed that button. Motorola StarTAC requires lots of manual reading before you can get your preferences dialed in, let alone make "power use" of the phone, and documentation, no matter how copious, is not acceptable in lieu of design.
That said, consistency and elegance of programmer-level internals is important to reduce user aggravation through reducing the number and severity of unpleasant surprises a programmer has to work around and reducing the amount of work a programmer has to do to deliver consistency and elegance at the UI level.
Unless companies completely ditch Windows and start over with a new OS (which will not happen, no matter how many op-ed pieces you read saying the opposite),
Not necessarily. Public corporations are driven by valuation. Companies will switch to Product L when Price M is greater than Price L + Price PHBHP (an imaginary dollar amount representing the price of the pointy haired boss's head on a platter). Company M, being a public corporation and obliged to maintain its indefinite existence as well as its valuation, is obliged to maximize, over the medium term, Price M * Purchases M and to maximize the perceived Price PHBHP through FUD. The market failure is that Purchases M is a very large number, thus Company M has wide latitude in setting Price M. Company M can therefore offer very high prices to build a war chest on the backs of retail and small-volume customers and bargain almost any other vendor without such a regular revenue stream into the ground.
I have to hand Rush Limbaugh one small word of praise: at least he practiced what he preached when he bought a computer and failed to fall for "symbolism over substance".
And with the web services wave just about ready to rise, the OS people use will become less important than the browser it's running, so people will have less incentive to go through the IS/deployment/training nightmare associated with a company-wide OS switch.
I call bullshit. MSIE's application service technology is nothing more than providing a lightly authenticated download service for Win32 applications, which for the most part still require Product M to run, for both technical and legal reasons. Not much choice when you're stuck buying something from unfriendly Company M because the law removes your choice. This is all the more reason to spank them hard, because not only do they own the license to exclusively deal in their software product, but they can attach conditions to and charge for the use of your physical goods as a result. MAI v. Peak was a sad, sad day for the independent researcher.
As for OS switching, the Mozilla/Netscape 6 user interface is (now) almost identical on all platforms, and is asserted to behave similarly from a user perspective no matter what the underlying platform. Right-clicking now more or less consistently does what you expect it to. The only problem in the IT department is dealing with users who demand to use unauthorized software, and unfortunately sysadmins generally have little power to see even relevant company policy enforced.
You can be subjected to a world of shit by the FBI these days for "giving aid and comfort to terrorist organizations", where "terrorist organizations" are defined as "the personal enemies of the current administration". Besides, many Americans are perfectly willing to live with government surveillance because they're innocent (of the crime of critical thought).
Thats what Prof Deutch of MIT did while head of the CIA and Wenho Lee of Los Alamos.
It can be made impossible (read: "prohibitively difficult") for most people to move data off of the red network without infosec officers noticing. simply by defining your network border to include end-user terminals and securing the network to match. Yank the floppy drives, lock down MAC addresses on switch ports, ban CD writers, install tamper switches in the cases. Ban cameras, save copies (hard or soft) of everything that gets printed, control physical access to printers, embed radio security tags into the paper. A rogue user can always lie about why they're removing plaintext classified information from a classified network, but if they can't get it off the network, they can't get it out of the building.
As for open vs. closed networks, who cares about evolution? If you've got the tools to do your job correctly, you don't need anymore.
The fact that your physically diverse circuits aren't has been proven time and again by the mighty backhoe
And even the mighty backhoe takes doing to impede the satellite or the carrier pigeon. If you've got such a large organization, and the data Absolutely Positively Has To Be There and Absolutely Positively Has To Remain Private, you use diverse media and serious encryption.
Trust no one, not even a sweetheart government contractor.
None of the major backbones are willing to provide IPv6 connections.
Bullshit. None of the major backbones are willing to provide IPv6 routing because IPv6 is still experimental for the next several quarters, and I assure you they're as desperate for a gimmick as the rest of the technology sector, or more so. If you think it's so damn easy, buy a Cadence or Synopsys license, take the risk, and do it already.
Why not start by requiring IPv6 in all government RFPs/RFQs for long-haul comm?
What does IPv6 use for security? It uses IPsec encapsulation and authentication, exactly the same as IPv4 save that it's not optional in IPv6. What's the advantage? We don't even have an address assignment scheme for IPv6 yet that's known to scale, and IPv6 users and early adopters need to work the bugs out as the scale of the system grows. Do you want routers to die or run impaired just because some non-conforming implementation tries to send a packet formed just wrong? Neither do I, and good infosec does things correctly, not quickly.
There are ZERO operational advantages to carrying classified information over the public network when you are an organization of this size. You get a lack of control over the availability and of the network as a whole, and a nonzero possibility of leaked information via covert channels. Strictly divorcing the government operations network, properly done and with appropriate physical security applied to end-user terminals, reduces the chance of information leakage to zero and gives the network operator absolute control over availability, reliability, and access.
If it were such a bad idea, then why do so many large corporations lease lines between offices?
Absolute portable bandwidth isn't all that interesting anyway. It's only when the bandwidth is cheap enough to make casual, spontaneous use accessible to most that wireless applications will take off. If it costs you sixteen cents per second to feed that 32kbps file at full tilt, streaming a movie to your backseat costs US$5000 - US$6000 and wouldn't be worth watching anyway. Maybe you should've just gotten great seats at the opera.
None other than Mitch Glazier, the little toady-whore who tried to kill the 35-year ownership limit on works for hire by corrupting a committee on the Satellite Home Viewing Improvement Act.
/.'ers need to find out where this scumpuppy lives and make his life as hellish as is legally permissible.
It was already presented at the 10th USENIX Security Symposium in Washington, D.C., apparently without incident. The RIAA cartel figured out they bit off more than they could chew, and for tactical reasons wants to pretend like this one doesn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't a button be just a button, and why do skins seem to automatically mean bitmaps pasted over buttons?
-jhp
So what we have here is some fourteen year old with his own "security" organization, a metric buttload of super glue and an utter lack of clue who writes a frankly useless article so that he can pretend he's important whilst slinging around big acronyms like "PLA" and "VHDL" when the tools they represent are useless to the task at hand. In other words, a snake-oil salesman.
-jhp, smacking down dim-bulbs everywhere
-jhp
-jhp, who could give not a shit whether fat cats and sales reps are employed or not
-jhp
-jhp
Yeah, okay, there's a logo that took all of twenty "inspired" minutes in front of Photoshop to draw. Fscking tribal neo-crypto-monkeys will rally around anything, regardless of merit.
-jhp
Unfortunately, he's a horrible businessman and has a credit file published in multiple volumes, so he won't be starting his own label anytime soon. (And nothing I've said or done has convinced him to even consider an indie label,)
The key is having solid production values and knowing how music is built. Regarding production values, 16 bits just isn't enough for source material, and 44.1kHz is cutting it rather close. Don't try to use the default sound fonts on something you want to show to anyone. Have a fast CPU. Knowing how music is built just comes with practice. It also helps to have the patience and inspiration (or dumb luck) to tweak velocities and CC's on MIDI tracks until your brain falls out your fingertips -- or an engineer willing to do the same for you.
(Both of the artists at Rainbow Sally use Windows, and have system instability issues day in and day out. Where the hell are the Linux audio applications people? Sigh...)
-jhp
If a card is to be used in the boot process, it needs to have initialization code and some sort of basic driver code on-board. Intel's continuing ability to define the direction of the computing market and thus maintain a ready market for its half-arsed "innovations" depends on lock-in. If that init/driver code becomes portable, then the hardware is instantly useful without and independent of the Intel architecture, and customers' barriers to mixing or even switching architectures drop as quickly as the load in Intel's skivvies. Vendors like Adaptec that can double or more the list price on a SCSI card just by replacing the x86 SCSI BIOS code with OpenFirmware code wouldn't be thrilled by such a move either.
Large bureaucracies exist primarily to perpetuate themselves, and the customer is only a means to this end. (It only takes a little bit of dot-connecting to conclude that capitalism serves only itself, just like 1984's Ingsoc and the Party, but that's another flame war for another time.)
-jhp
The concept of "scarce" applied to an open-ended future is meaningless. Webster's definition of "scarce" (emphasis mine):
Loosely translated, there exists "enough" of a good when demand exceeds supply. You have no need for oil in 500 years as there's a better-than-even chance you'll be dead by then. The only thing that could inspire demand for oil in 500 years is the progenitor of scarcity, and that is greed (loosely translated, "the drive to acquire more than what one can make legitimate use of").Given the enabling technology, it certainly is possible for the average person to have the needs of life and significant creature comforts met with only a modicum of effort (say, 10 hours a month of easy labor).
Thank you, Mr. Cheney. By the time the oil supply runs out, there will be sufficient carbon on the surface to construct "enough" of whatever carbon-based foo we can possibly make use of. Sorry, smart guy. Not only are you using a flawed definition of "scarce", but there exists an abundance of hydrogen and oxygen because we can't destroy hydrogen and oxygen without working very hard at it. Furthermore, none of either is lost in the cycle since it essentially returns itself to the source from whence it came:Environmental H2O electrolysed to produce H2 and O2: energy + H2O -> 2H2 + O2
H2 and O2 reacted in fuel cell or turbine to produce H2O, vented to environment: 2H2 + O2 -> H2O + energy
For further study, I recommend a web search on "conservation of matter".
If the Sun will beam enough energy down over a fixed time period (say, a day) to meet the demand of that period (say, a day), with capacity to spare, then there is an abundant energy supply, and therefore any scarcity of energy is due to the human social order imposing scarcity somewhere between the supply point and the demand point.
Einstein said there's plenty of hydrogen and stupidity in the universe. I leave the conclusions to the reader to draw.
-jhp
Many such tricks can be defeated by only hashing words that appear in some standard dictionary and discarding all else, such that
gets reduced to LIVE NAKED DRESSED GIRLS before hashing. Even then, the smart thing to do is not to block matching mail but to blackhole the sources of matching mail, preferably permanently. Humanity's more basic problems are the inability to cope with the concept of a world without scarcity. Would that technology fix that instead of providing the powerful with more ways to create unnatural scarcity.-jhp
Of course it takes the fairness and fun out of the sport. What makes you think sponsors are interested in fun and fairness? Fun and fairness doesn't sell sports. Rivalry sells sports. Tostitos and ESPN/Disney didn't just solicit free marketing work from their addicts^Wcustomers to find the best teams in the leagues. No, they specifically asked for the best rivalry.
Personally, I don't care. I never understood competitive sport anyway.
-jhp
This post is dedicated to George Harrison. May he rest in peace.
-jhp
I have the sinking feeling that political means won't solve this problem when the two "major" parties fight each other only for show and become instant allies whenever a promising adversary appears. Yet any attempt to apply non-political means would only get the Communists rounded up and killed just like after the Reichstag fire. It appears the most reliable way to be free of the socialist overclass enforcing capitalism for the underclass is to pollute ourselves into infirmity as the Romans did, and wait a couple hundred years for the Visigoths to take Rome again.
I'm starting to doubt the New Agers' fawning over the Age of Aquarius. Technological feudalism is every bit as comfortable under Aquarius as the socialist collective.
-jhp
What is so foreign about the concept of keeping application code in its own managed, gated little world? In my experience it has almost always produces better, more reliable code. Giving engineering staff free rein on production has almost always resulted in poorer, less reliable code.
Good. They're employed to write business logic and HTML. If you want to give a shit about the nuts and bolts, microcontroller trainers and Linux boxes are embarrassingly cheap and available. Again, the system administrator's job is not to assist in the self-actualization of the application developer.There are plenty of folks around who can see big-picture technical systems issues well, can code a bit, and can arbitrate well between operations and engineers. These people are valuable assets to a development organization and are useful for writing whatever glue is necessary to support the business logic and HTML/graphic content.
What exactly is unreasonable about "production is not a toy"? If they want to test things they have machines set aside for the purpose. If they don't, then there is a serious problem of not only QA but development process, and that needs to be fixed. As far as justifying every idea to IT, what sort of justification do we ask for? We ask that you've tested the hell out of it, that it is well-behaved, that it requires minimal maintenance beyond code pushes or perhaps the occasional automated restart, and that it run with privileges appropriate to application software. As a sysadmin, it needs to not increase my workload, because in most cases my manager is all too keen to do that anyway, and preferably needs to decrease it. Is that too much to ask? Why, thank you. I have my ideals. I've seen something very close to them in action at one installation, and things worked well there. The site had excellent uptime, the apps scaled well, and Things Just Worked. I've seen places that meet my ideals less than well, and they too work less than well.-jhp
I'd like to see either a total ban or a complete lack of restriction. The hypocritical prunes in public office don't deserve to extend their lives beyond the public they ostensibly serve, not a single one. Except maybe Tom Campbell, but he's not in public office anymore and certainly isn't hypocritical.
Are you red-baiting? The only things wrong with Russia is that it's cold and has gangs. It's indistinguishable from Chicago except the media hegemony doesn't control what software you can write.-jhp
Applications should never run as root. If you think you need root access to listen on port 80, what you really need is to run your web server on high ports and make the load balancer or other firewall translate the request. If you think you need root access to modify certain system files, you really need to not use that part of the system. If it takes two years to get access to logs, then maybe your operations people are trying to tell you to stop shitting on them.
Which is why you have an editor or relatively small editing committee that makes final decisions about every color, every menu, every word, every URL that gets published. When you give powerful tools to people who have no idea what the consequences of using them are, you get a web site that impresses only managers. So your content management system creates menus and HTML for you? Is it compatible HTML? Does it work on all browsers? With or without Javascript enabled? (It's hard enough for Dreamweaver jockeys to get that last one right.) If your copy people can't hand-code HTML when necessary and understand every single detail of any HTML that's automatically generated, they're not qualified for the job, especially in this market. What happened to "as little customization as possible"? Heh.Why don't you identify your success story of a site? The Keynote numbers can tell us whether your lessons make for a better, more reliable site, or whether you just talk a good game.
-jhp
It is a fallacy that sending checks for $20 or seeding the market are our only choices. Look at Red Hat's counter-proposal, for example.
Yet you support the ability of a major corporation whose goal is to remove that choice from you to bribe their way out of changing the way they do business? Makes no sense. Most of them won't, and even if they do, will they be in a position to use Linux in their day-to-day computing? Will this be more difficult or less difficult if Microsoft continues to use their revenue stream to advocate for absolute intellectual property rights? Remember, the typical American thinks no farther into the future than their next paycheck and has a very poor opinion of their own judgment. I agree, to a point. I personally have no desire to put crappy plastic baubles with simulated LCD displays on my desktop. I also agree that UI consistency and elegance is of far greater strategic importance to desktop Linux than making the desktop look like a dance club flyer, and I observe that platforms with published style guides, consistently followed (Macintosh) are easier and less aggravating for the neophyte to learn and use than platforms with loosely followed style guides (Windows), and platforms with three different UI toolkits, none of which behaves exactly alike and none of which satisfies a user's expectations anywhere near all the time (Linux/X11) come in dead last. Nokia cell phones have a UI that avoids surprises. Almost every button on the phone does something, and 99 times out of 100 it's exactly what you expected the phone to do when you pressed that button. Motorola StarTAC requires lots of manual reading before you can get your preferences dialed in, let alone make "power use" of the phone, and documentation, no matter how copious, is not acceptable in lieu of design.That said, consistency and elegance of programmer-level internals is important to reduce user aggravation through reducing the number and severity of unpleasant surprises a programmer has to work around and reducing the amount of work a programmer has to do to deliver consistency and elegance at the UI level.
Not necessarily. Public corporations are driven by valuation. Companies will switch to Product L when Price M is greater than Price L + Price PHBHP (an imaginary dollar amount representing the price of the pointy haired boss's head on a platter). Company M, being a public corporation and obliged to maintain its indefinite existence as well as its valuation, is obliged to maximize, over the medium term, Price M * Purchases M and to maximize the perceived Price PHBHP through FUD. The market failure is that Purchases M is a very large number, thus Company M has wide latitude in setting Price M. Company M can therefore offer very high prices to build a war chest on the backs of retail and small-volume customers and bargain almost any other vendor without such a regular revenue stream into the ground.I have to hand Rush Limbaugh one small word of praise: at least he practiced what he preached when he bought a computer and failed to fall for "symbolism over substance".
I call bullshit. MSIE's application service technology is nothing more than providing a lightly authenticated download service for Win32 applications, which for the most part still require Product M to run, for both technical and legal reasons. Not much choice when you're stuck buying something from unfriendly Company M because the law removes your choice. This is all the more reason to spank them hard, because not only do they own the license to exclusively deal in their software product, but they can attach conditions to and charge for the use of your physical goods as a result. MAI v. Peak was a sad, sad day for the independent researcher.As for OS switching, the Mozilla/Netscape 6 user interface is (now) almost identical on all platforms, and is asserted to behave similarly from a user perspective no matter what the underlying platform. Right-clicking now more or less consistently does what you expect it to. The only problem in the IT department is dealing with users who demand to use unauthorized software, and unfortunately sysadmins generally have little power to see even relevant company policy enforced.
-jhp
-jhp
As for open vs. closed networks, who cares about evolution? If you've got the tools to do your job correctly, you don't need anymore.
-jhp
Trust no one, not even a sweetheart government contractor.
-jhp
There are ZERO operational advantages to carrying classified information over the public network when you are an organization of this size. You get a lack of control over the availability and of the network as a whole, and a nonzero possibility of leaked information via covert channels. Strictly divorcing the government operations network, properly done and with appropriate physical security applied to end-user terminals, reduces the chance of information leakage to zero and gives the network operator absolute control over availability, reliability, and access.
If it were such a bad idea, then why do so many large corporations lease lines between offices?
-jhp
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-jhp