I have been using Mozilla browsers as long as they have existed. But I have never been really impressed by their safety, stability or security. At times, they may have been better than IE - but as I never have used IE, that comparison means very little to me. I am not interested in relative safety, stability or security, I want absolutes.
Let me explain what it is that I want:
First, usefulness. Given that pages are designed by clueless morons who suck up to each and every feature or plugin that might be available (Java, Javascript, Flash, embedded objects of of all kinds, perhaps even ActiveX?) the browser needs to handle such pages gracefully. However, such plugins, which may sometimes be closed-source blobs, should be treated with utmost suspicion, and only be allowed to run in a jaillike sandbox, with all priviledges revoked, and isolated from all other parts of the executing session.
Second, stability. On my NetBSD system, I have a setup with mplayer-plugin, java-plugin, and seamonkey, all natively compiled. I admit that by using an obscure OS, my stability issues are partly self-inflicted, but sound defensive programming could avoid some of those problems. Why is it, that a page loading a plugin and crashing, takes down each and every window I have open? Because everything runs without isolation, that's why. If each session ran in its own OS-process, with just a shared display process, this could not happen. But that's not the worst part. Often, I find myself typing lengthy text into a textarea (like just now), and although I have Mozex installed, I still haven't gotten used to it. (There you go.) Although vi may be considered an archaic editor, it does a thing or two right. First, it is far less prone to going belly-up. Second, when it does, I have a fair chance of recovering the text I was typing. Not so with Mozilla. If I am really lucky, the Mozilla process hangs instead of exiting, and then I can use strings on/dev/mem to recover my text. If not, well, then I'm not so lucky. A safe and stable system would ensure that anything related to the configuration of the browser or entered by the user, was flushed to disk ASAP. Recently, I tried to install the NoScript plugin - I was at the same time astonished and infuriated when I got an error message which I can't remember exactly, but said something like "installation failed, this error is very likely to be transient, so please try again". Please - heed the wise words of Yoda: "Do, or do not. There is no try." I found myself with a broken plugin installation, and in order to fix it, I had to do things I'd rather not think about. A safe browser would ensure that it would be possible to undo the partial plugin installation and revert to exactly how things were before, without resorting to editing XML files by hand.
Third, security. Why is this always an afterthought? I would like to know, record (with timestamp), and archive any exchange of information for later investigation. The only way I would be able to do so would be by making a proxy and go through that always. Why not a function of the browser? I would like to control preemtively each and every IP-address my browser wants to connect to, unless it's on a white-list. Why can't I? The default browser configuration let's me block images from a given server, but why this coarse and arbitrary resolution? Why can't I block URLs by regex? I wan't the ability to restrict beforehand through ACLs, which sites and URLs I like to see. And it goes without saying, that no session should ever be able to send my private data to the server without my approval. I want this enforced, by a provably secure design, using OS security measures to make proper guarantees: the session should run as nobody, chrooted to an empty workdir, and all requests for config and private information should go through a client-server like connection, that should be filtered, logged and audited. And of course anything stored locally should optionally be stored encrypted. Nothing unapproved would ever go on
In a group G of n people, there are (2**n)-1 possible distinct types of people, excluding the empty type, as nobody actually is of that type. Given that for any subset S of G you can find or invent something that these guys and gals have in common which is not shared with G\S, this is also the actual number of distinct types. There can be no more, as if S is defined by more than one property, the type consisting of just that property will just be a subtype of S.
Thus, there are 2**n-1 types of people, where n is the number of people.
-Lasse
-- There are (2**n)-1 types of people in the world (where n = the number of people in the world.)
Resume smoking, or better, use more nicotine gum. But also do yourself a favor and see a psychiatrist about your mental condition. Even if your mother was borderline, you may "just" be adult ADHD of some kind. That's treatable. Although nicotine may help, there are drugs that might work more effectively for you. And without increased risk of cancer.
Your story is very encouraging and uplifting. Have you tried nicotine gum?
My mother (taking her heart condition seriously) stopped smoking many years ago while I was in highschool (my father continued to smoke pipe, but smoked mostly outdoors), and suddenly our house no longer reeked of smoke. However, I developed what at that time was viewed as a depression. Later, after moving out, I found I had trouble keeping up at the university. I did manage to get a BA, and found work. However I suffered from stress on several occasions, also I tended to impulsiveness (I actually quit my first job as sysadmin at the university on an impulse, right after attending a meeting where I learned that I had not been given the resources I needed to have our systems running as well as I would have liked.) Got another round of depression, found another job, got ill from stress, etc. Recently, I was diagnosed with ADD, which explains perfectly my history. Before that, I had smoked on a few occasions - only very rarely. I bought a pipe, and also some nicotine gum. I find that pipe smoking is an extremly pleasant way to relax, although I do it very sparingly. Doing it once or twice a year shouldn't be significant when compared to the other smoke from barbecuing, occasional camp fires etc that I get. I do however take a 2 mg nicotine gum a few times a week, as a sort of "booster" to the quite expensive drug I take for the ADD (Modafinil.) In addition to the cost, I can't take Modafinil continuously without unpleasant side effects, so the supplement from nicotine is very welcome.
I think it is a matter of keeping the dose sufficiently low. For me, high doses, whether of the Modafinil or nicotine, are not doing any good. Small doses do wonders.
But I have a few relatives, who have suffered severe cardiovascular problems, bypass operations etc, and still are unable to quit smoking. Their lives are in great danger, yet they are unable to stop. So definitely smoking is not something to recommend, unless you are able to keep it in strict control. I suppose that is fundamentally true no matter what kind of stimulant or addictive behaviour we are talking about - including sports.
My father, who will be 80 later in the year, still smokes a pipe or two each day. His physical condition has diminished a bit over the last years (a few years ago he could easily handle the outboard engine of his boat, which I had trouble lifting!) but his mental condition is excellent. My father-in-law, same age, on the other hand, quit smoking pipe 8-10 years ago, and he is sadly suffering from dementia (probably Alzheimer's). Sometimes I wonder whether he could be helped to regain a little of his short-term memory and general understanding of the world, if he was given either Modafinil or nicotine (or both), but I am not sure anyone in the family would support me in making the experiment.
Psychoactive substances should be used with care, but when used wisely, they can improve life significantly. I for one would prefer taking a risk of cancer to a risk of dementia any day. However, so little is actually known for certain about these matters, and how such drugs work - it seems that even for drugs like Modafinil it is not known for sure how it works - that everyone will have to choose for himself. Pick your poison, make your bets.
To quote Nietzsche: "Ein wenig Gift ab und zu: das macht angenehme Traeume. Und viel Gift zuletzt, zu einem angenehmen Sterben."
No, you can't. Unless the group of 100 happens to be soldiers on an international mission, wearing the obligatory national flag on the shoulder. Any distinction you could make on a group of civilians would have to be based on stereotypes, and very few of such stereotypes continue to be valid anymore. For example, yellow raincoats or a certain type of maritime cap used to be associated with German tourists here in Denmark. Today, you would typically have to listen in on a conversation, or check the license plate of the car to identify a German in Denmark. It would take a person who is _very_ trained in various national fashion trends to identify a person just by appearance.
What do you mean ? There's tons of distributed hosting solutions out there, from Usenet to BitTorrent.
Usenet is distributed, yes, and file sharing is possible, and BitTorrent (which I haven't used and know next to nothing about) probably also supports distributed file sharing. That's not what I am talking about. I am talking about a way that a community can have an "ordinary" website, except that the members of the community who want to mirror the entire website, so that no single member can take down the site (on his own initiative or because autorities raid his hosting service provider and take his server - or just due to a crash.)
Of course, mirroring of ftp and websites is possible - even easy snd common - today, but if you have dynamic services, I believe things get a bit more complicated. What I am thinking about is a way to make what is effectively a distributed cluster, with redundancy, so that you have separate database copies etc, with continuous synchronization.
This should not just be a defense against shutdown of controversial sites, but also a defense against a fraction of a community that happens to run the server unilaterally taking it down. The ideal would be something like SETI@Home, where you would participate in a distributed hosting network with the cycles and space you had to spare, for redundancy as well as efficiency. Thanks for the link to freenet, it really seems to be very close.
It never ceases to amaze me how we remain bound by real-world limitation, which we carry into the virtual world of the Internet as metaphors. Although useful to make the experience digestable, it is sometimes a hindrance, and not really necessary.
On the Internet, you can have as many copies of your house as you like. This will make it a lot harder for any mayor to burn it down. And your connectivity to your friends is not limited by location, but by protocol. If you stop using a proprietary site-specific protocol to communicate with your friends, and use an open one instead, it doesn't matter where your friends are located.
Infrastructure as you call it, which is single-site only, is not really Internet Infrastructure. It's proprietary infrastructure.
Of course it isn't in the interest of blog-hosting sites to facilitate blog-site interoperability, so such an invention has to come from other parties.
I used Usenet a lot in the past, and I'm sad to admit that I don't go there much these days, although I know the groups I participated in still thrive and have strong communities. However, I have found a few webbased boards for some topics that interest me. Boards that are very useful. Also some wikis.
However, an unpleasant experience in the past caused me to think about this issue. Let me explain the experience first. I visited often a place for Danish skeptics, skeptica.dk. At one point a third interested party offered the site to host a forum for the site. However, after a while, the third party, being part of a movement that suddenly found themselves under the conspicous eyes of skepticism, and received a lot of flak on the forum, their motivation being questioned etc. Naturally, one day the forum owner shut down the forum. Poof - gone. All the other relevant debate was suddenly inaccessible.
This could never have happened with Usenet. Why? Because of the distributed nature of Usenet. This is the LOCKSS project principle at work again. Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.
We need two things: 1) A way to distribute blog hosting, so that a blog can't be shut down by a strike against a single hosting service. I don't have a solution at hand for that.
2) A way to distribute blog and web forum comments, so that the comments are distributed in a shared framework for all types of forums. I believe the existing and proven Usenet technology is easily adapted for this purpose, although RSS might also play a role. For example, a new hierarchy, similar to the IANA OID hierarchy, or the Java package hierarchy, using DNS names at the top level, could be used. This way, suppose I have myblog, and you have yourblog. So you post an entry about Java and OOP on your blog: it ends up in a newsgroup, blog.your.org.java, and perhaps you even tag it with the OOP category, so it also is crossposted to blog.your.org.oop. I post a response on my blog: blog.my.org.programming (because I lump it all into one category), and also crosspost to your blog newsgroups. In addition, I call it to attention to the existing Usenet community by crossposting to usenet.comp.lang.java.misc. Of course, there has to be some additions to make this work. Perhaps a way to subscribe to your blog newsfeed. Authentication and authorization. Anonymity/Pseudonymity. Etc.
I believe this could bring the known synergy effect from Usenet back into play by making a new unified, but distributed, framework for Internet-based discussion. A kind of Babel-tower project, I suppose. Discussion would again be uniformly searchable (presuming Google would carry all the groups), and foremost: a discussion would not be orphaned when the forum goes down. I visited a great Joomla forum daily until recently, but it went down for maintenance and hasn't been up for a few weeks due to problems. Terrible. What if slashdot.org went down?
Again, as for-profit hosting services will not win much - if anything - from this an approach, they will have to be forced to use it by user demand.
Any takers? This idea is free for anyone to use. But please only one project - having different models would defeat the entire purpose.
A.C.: You obviously haven't been on the net longer than since September, max. And you probably wouldn't even know which September I am referring to. _And_ your nanoscale attention span probably means you'll never see this belated followup. (I have been on a vacation in the meantime, I'm _so_ sorry.)
It may be so that the hearing deteriorates after 30, however I am 39 and can hear the TV whine right now, which is on, but muted. I can also hear the faint whoosh of the Scorpio harddisk in my laptop computer. And a lawnmower at some distance. And the ventilator in the bathroom.
Sometimes at night I hear a loud droning or roaring sound, at a very low frequency, not unlike being in the vicinity of a Leopard tank with its engines running. It is impossible to locate the source, but it really makes my head ache. When I go outside - its often unhearable. I suppose it is some sort of vibration that travels through the ground.
So why do some people hear this, while others don't? I suppose it is not a matter of hearing ability as it is a matter of differences in mental filters. When I was younger, I couldn't sleep well in the vicinity of a mechanical alarm clock, and had a radio clock for that reason. I can easily hear a clock ticking. I suppose when you have heard the same clock tick for some long time, you may be able to filter it out, and the people who can do this easily are also not bothered by other noises. However, I have ADD, and apparantly my filters don't quite work the same way. I suppose it is related to that - maybe some sort of hyperattention or -sensitivity to noise. The brain is an amazing device, and I find it far more likely that this is the right explanation, than that this noise is of a frequency that some people just can't hear.
As for EM radiation, I can only say that, yes, I am hypersensitive (when it comes to UV: pale skin - suffering a little from a sunburn right now), but I am not bothered by it, nor do I worry much about WiFi.
The Internet would not have had the financial backing, nor would it have had grown to where it is today. Without the number of users that we have today, there would not be an entire economy based off services and products based off the web.
You are saying it as if that would have been a *bad* thing?! A web without an entire economy of services and products based off it would be a PARADISE!!!
So true. As the ITIL slogan goes: "IT is the business, the business is IT."
The grandparent is wrong in some parts. What good does a working sales department do, if they can't operate, because their systems are down? Sorry, but IT is a vital component, and the importance of the IT department shouldn't be underestimated like that. Unfortunately, it often is. It's even worse when the IT-department provides services to your customer, such as hosting applications or other types of systems. Then the IT truly is the business, and you damn better be sure it's running smoothly. The oil metaphor is a very good one. Like motor oil, sysadministration show up everywhere, it's impossible to figure out exactly what it does, it's sometimes dirty, and most of the time you just ignore it. But if you forget to keep your machine oiled - woe!
Professionalism, politeness and tact can coexist nicely with sysadmin knowledge. However, lack of same in users, whether they be student lusers (I worked at a university department ten years ago), customers, project managers, developers or anything else, quickly erodes these properties from the mind of a sysadmin.
Probably your sysadmin is annoyed, because you, or your management, has set up an awkward system, which, instead of allowing him to apply his skills, forces him to suffer you to tell him to push a button you could just as well push yourself, if he was only given the necessary time to hack up a system that allowed you to do just that. Contrary to what you seem to think, sysadmins are very good at thinking in whole systems, but unfortunately they are often not permitted to apply that thinking to build effective, rational systems.
If "his job was to move content out when he gets an ECC task", then what you need is a Pavlovian dog, not a sysadmin. I am told there are plenty of places where you can hire cheap workers that are relatively easily trained to have such reflexes. A sysadmin however is completely unsuitable for such a job. A sysadmin who is prevented from applying his thoughts about automating his routine tasks, is a sysadmin doing boring routine tasks for a while, using his now unused capacity to think about how to escape from the job. And there's a good chance he will skip the boring routine completely.
This is a very common problem. Stupid salesmen sell stupid proposals, written up by stupid architects, to stupid customers, who are even stupid enough to ask to cut vital parts out of the proposed system to get a lower price, a request which the stupid salesman stupidly accepts, stupidly unaware that this will make the service goal of 99.999 uptime into a stupid joke. Then stupid developers implement the now even more stupid design in a timeframe that's probably beyond stupid and well into insane, because the stupid salesman promised delivery yesterday. The resulting system is then dumped onto the innocent sysadmin, who is now tasked with running this stupid piece of shit in a way so that: 1. The customer is happy 2. The customer is happy enough to order more stupid functionality, so that the salesman is happy. 3. The developer is happily implementing the new functionality, and not bothered by requests to fix bugs discovered by the sysadmin while running the system. Such fixes really ruin an already insane delivery schedule.
Often this means that the sysadmins have to babysit the stupid system 24/7, to make sure it keeps running, and fix stuff that breaks all the time. And of course write up huge reports on the availability of the system, because it is not designed to produce such reports automatically. On rare occasions, there will be a little time between the firefighting sessions to actually try to write a little script or two to alleviate some of the problems, but it is too late to fix the really important fundamentally stupid design errors, which are the main cause of the fires.
Fred Brooks says you should plan to throw one away; unfortunately it seems project managers misunderstand this, and instead of throwing one away, they label it version 1.0 and throw it at the sysadmins: "here, this system runs in our development environment up to several hours without crashing (and without production load.) Get it into production and make sure it runs 99.999%". Yeah right. Yessir! Magic is our purpose in life!
BTW, 10+ years of sysadmin work has hardened me against luser hatred. I understand it, and I don't mind. The feeling is absolutely mutual. I'm prepared for any kind of backstabbing, shitfeeding, badmouthing, sacking, sueing etc that a luser might use against me. I have experienced most of them already.
I have a cobblestone on my desk. It's nominal purpose is "paperweight", but it has a relaxing effect when casually moved from one hand to the other while talking to a user. I haven't actually thrown it *at* a user. Yet.
Every conversation I have with this guy is a reinterpretation of "Who's on first?" Not surprising. If you had told me "I just entered a Pre-approved ECC to move the Learning Center content out" I'd say: "Oh, fine, good for you, what the fuck do I care."
What *is* surprising is that your sysadmin hasn't LARTed you with a ClueX4 over the head numerous times.
Users are by far the worst thing about being a sysadmin. The three B's (Bosses, Bureaucracy, Beancounters) are far behind.
Oh, and it was absolutely right to ask you to keep your voice down. Sysadmins don't worry about bitching users - but they like it quiet.
They came even closer with the lime iMac, the other fruits being blueberry, strawberry, grape and tangerine. They were just sweet, a shame they seem to be almost forgotten by now. That was a wonderful colorful time.
I often wonder, why is hardware once again always shades of grey, while GUIs are plastered with more and more ugly colours and effects? I want my GUI black and white and unobtrusive, and have color on the case.
The first computer I used was black and orange-red. Very nice combo. (Danish ICL Comet 1400/3000.)
And for the record, there are 11 types of people in the world: Those that understand Binary, those that don't, and those that are extremely tired of that joke. Which half of binary is it that you don't understand? 1 or 0?
Indeed. That was back in the days where MS hadn't yet begun to suck completely. And that reminds me of the ONE significant thing I miss in essentially all today's word processors, including newer versions of Word. Back when I used Word 5.1 for the Mac, it had a fantastic outlining tool. For some reason MS has let this rot in newer versions (weird font problems, updating problems, nonintuitive interface, did I see crashes when I tried it, too?), and neither OOo nor AbiWord seem to have anything even close. And no, using dedicated outline processors is just not the same.
For some reason Word 5.1a doesn't really like BasiliskII or running in OS 9 or OS X. So I'll probably just have to load OS 8 onto my good old iMac and stick with that, until someone reimplements Word 5.1 in open source. Still faster than working on a new machine, I guess.
Even so, back in the day, we who knew the HIG by heart didn't think too highly of Word 5.1 - after all it did break numerous interface rules. Compared to Word 6 it was great, though. Word 6 for the Mac was HELL, pure and simple.
-Lasse
Did anyone search there for the missing Apollo foo
on
A Space Junkyard
·
· Score: 1
footage? (The subject length limit seemed appropriate!)
If the junkyard has junk from NASA facilities, wouldn't it be possible that the missing high-quality Apollo recordings could be there, stored in some seemingly insignificant crates? Judging from the images, stuff does not seem to be stored very orderly, nor do I get the impression that any inventory lists would be very precise. Probably far-fetched, but perhaps it could be worth a look.
In other words: everything in moderation, including moderation. Which BTW is why I am posting excessively (well, moderately excessive) instead of moderating.
What if your existence is just a figment of your imagination? Cogito, but sum doesn't follow.
Speaking for myself, I am alright with only living in a state of mind. I fully agree with Blake: "Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age."
When science approaches the limits, I have a feeling that it may often cease to be meaningful and join the religions in pointlessness, like this Hawking-speech. I too used to like to stare into the abyss, but when it began to stare back, I became dizzy, flinched, and decided to forget about it and engage myself in nearer things. Reality is way overrated, and in reality, it just isn't all that it's thought to be. At the end of the day (also at the beginning of the day, and the remainder of the day, for that matter) all you can trust is your feelings, yet even they may betray you now and then. Remember: Always look on the bright side of life!
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot one step: FireDinosaur, AKA Mozilla.
-Lasse
I have been using Mozilla browsers as long as they have existed. But I have never been really impressed by their safety, stability or security. At times, they may have been better than IE - but as I never have used IE, that comparison means very little to me. I am not interested in relative safety, stability or security, I want absolutes.
/dev/mem to recover my text. If not, well, then I'm not so lucky. A safe and stable system would ensure that anything related to the configuration of the browser or entered by the user, was flushed to disk ASAP. Recently, I tried to install the NoScript plugin - I was at the same time astonished and infuriated when I got an error message which I can't remember exactly, but said something like "installation failed, this error is very likely to be transient, so please try again". Please - heed the wise words of Yoda: "Do, or do not. There is no try." I found myself with a broken plugin installation, and in order to fix it, I had to do things I'd rather not think about. A safe browser would ensure that it would be possible to undo the partial plugin installation and revert to exactly how things were before, without resorting to editing XML files by hand.
Let me explain what it is that I want:
First, usefulness. Given that pages are designed by clueless morons who suck up to each and every feature or plugin that might be available (Java, Javascript, Flash, embedded objects of of all kinds, perhaps even ActiveX?) the browser needs to handle such pages gracefully. However, such plugins, which may sometimes be closed-source blobs, should be treated with utmost suspicion, and only be allowed to run in a jaillike sandbox, with all priviledges revoked, and isolated from all other parts of the executing session.
Second, stability. On my NetBSD system, I have a setup with mplayer-plugin, java-plugin, and seamonkey, all natively compiled. I admit that by using an obscure OS, my stability issues are partly self-inflicted, but sound defensive programming could avoid some of those problems. Why is it, that a page loading a plugin and crashing, takes down each and every window I have open? Because everything runs without isolation, that's why. If each session ran in its own OS-process, with just a shared display process, this could not happen. But that's not the worst part. Often, I find myself typing lengthy text into a textarea (like just now), and although I have Mozex installed, I still haven't gotten used to it. (There you go.) Although vi may be considered an archaic editor, it does a thing or two right. First, it is far less prone to going belly-up. Second, when it does, I have a fair chance of recovering the text I was typing. Not so with Mozilla. If I am really lucky, the Mozilla process hangs instead of exiting, and then I can use strings on
Third, security. Why is this always an afterthought? I would like to know, record (with timestamp), and archive any exchange of information for later investigation. The only way I would be able to do so would be by making a proxy and go through that always. Why not a function of the browser? I would like to control preemtively each and every IP-address my browser wants to connect to, unless it's on a white-list. Why can't I? The default browser configuration let's me block images from a given server, but why this coarse and arbitrary resolution? Why can't I block URLs by regex? I wan't the ability to restrict beforehand through ACLs, which sites and URLs I like to see. And it goes without saying, that no session should ever be able to send my private data to the server without my approval. I want this enforced, by a provably secure design, using OS security measures to make proper guarantees: the session should run as nobody, chrooted to an empty workdir, and all requests for config and private information should go through a client-server like connection, that should be filtered, logged and audited. And of course anything stored locally should optionally be stored encrypted. Nothing unapproved would ever go on
Please. Let's clear this up once and for all.
In a group G of n people, there are (2**n)-1 possible distinct types of people, excluding the empty type, as nobody actually is of that type. Given that for any subset S of G you can find or invent something that these guys and gals have in common which is not shared with G\S, this is also the actual number of distinct types. There can be no more, as if S is defined by more than one property, the type consisting of just that property will just be a subtype of S.
Thus, there are 2**n-1 types of people, where n is the number of people.
-Lasse
--
There are (2**n)-1 types of people in the world (where n = the number of people in the world.)
Resume smoking, or better, use more nicotine gum. But also do yourself a favor and see a psychiatrist about your mental condition. Even if your mother was borderline, you may "just" be adult ADHD of some kind. That's treatable. Although nicotine may help, there are drugs that might work more effectively for you. And without increased risk of cancer.
-Lasse
Your story is very encouraging and uplifting. Have you tried nicotine gum?
My mother (taking her heart condition seriously) stopped smoking many years ago while I was in highschool (my father continued to smoke pipe, but smoked mostly outdoors), and suddenly our house no longer reeked of smoke. However, I developed what at that time was viewed as a depression. Later, after moving out, I found I had trouble keeping up at the university. I did manage to get a BA, and found work. However I suffered from stress on several occasions, also I tended to impulsiveness (I actually quit my first job as sysadmin at the university on an impulse, right after attending a meeting where I learned that I had not been given the resources I needed to have our systems running as well as I would have liked.) Got another round of depression, found another job, got ill from stress, etc. Recently, I was diagnosed with ADD, which explains perfectly my history. Before that, I had smoked on a few occasions - only very rarely. I bought a pipe, and also some nicotine gum. I find that pipe smoking is an extremly pleasant way to relax, although I do it very sparingly. Doing it once or twice a year shouldn't be significant when compared to the other smoke from barbecuing, occasional camp fires etc that I get. I do however take a 2 mg nicotine gum a few times a week, as a sort of "booster" to the quite expensive drug I take for the ADD (Modafinil.) In addition to the cost, I can't take Modafinil continuously without unpleasant side effects, so the supplement from nicotine is very welcome.
I think it is a matter of keeping the dose sufficiently low. For me, high doses, whether of the Modafinil or nicotine, are not doing any good. Small doses do wonders.
But I have a few relatives, who have suffered severe cardiovascular problems, bypass operations etc, and still are unable to quit smoking. Their lives are in great danger, yet they are unable to stop. So definitely smoking is not something to recommend, unless you are able to keep it in strict control. I suppose that is fundamentally true no matter what kind of stimulant or addictive behaviour we are talking about - including sports.
My father, who will be 80 later in the year, still smokes a pipe or two each day. His physical condition has diminished a bit over the last years (a few years ago he could easily handle the outboard engine of his boat, which I had trouble lifting!) but his mental condition is excellent. My father-in-law, same age, on the other hand, quit smoking pipe 8-10 years ago, and he is sadly suffering from dementia (probably Alzheimer's). Sometimes I wonder whether he could be helped to regain a little of his short-term memory and general understanding of the world, if he was given either Modafinil or nicotine (or both), but I am not sure anyone in the family would support me in making the experiment.
Psychoactive substances should be used with care, but when used wisely, they can improve life significantly. I for one would prefer taking a risk of cancer to a risk of dementia any day. However, so little is actually known for certain about these matters, and how such drugs work - it seems that even for drugs like Modafinil it is not known for sure how it works - that everyone will have to choose for himself. Pick your poison, make your bets.
To quote Nietzsche:
"Ein wenig Gift ab und zu: das macht angenehme Traeume. Und viel Gift zuletzt, zu einem angenehmen Sterben."
-Lasse
You mean a mob flash?
-Lasse
No, you can't. Unless the group of 100 happens to be soldiers on an international mission, wearing the obligatory national flag on the shoulder.
Any distinction you could make on a group of civilians would have to be based on stereotypes, and very few of such stereotypes continue to be valid anymore. For example, yellow raincoats or a certain type of maritime cap used to be associated with German tourists here in Denmark. Today, you would typically have to listen in on a conversation, or check the license plate of the car to identify a German in Denmark. It would take a person who is _very_ trained in various national fashion trends to identify a person just by appearance.
-Lasse
Agree completely. If there was a /. hall of fame that one sure deserved a place.
-Lasse
Usenet is distributed, yes, and file sharing is possible, and BitTorrent (which I haven't used and know next to nothing about) probably also supports distributed file sharing. That's not what I am talking about. I am talking about a way that a community can have an "ordinary" website, except that the members of the community who want to mirror the entire website, so that no single member can take down the site (on his own initiative or because autorities raid his hosting service provider and take his server - or just due to a crash.)
Of course, mirroring of ftp and websites is possible - even easy snd common - today, but if you have dynamic services, I believe things get a bit more complicated. What I am thinking about is a way to make what is effectively a distributed cluster, with redundancy, so that you have separate database copies etc, with continuous synchronization.
This should not just be a defense against shutdown of controversial sites, but also a defense against a fraction of a community that happens to run the server unilaterally taking it down. The ideal would be something like SETI@Home, where you would participate in a distributed hosting network with the cycles and space you had to spare, for redundancy as well as efficiency. Thanks for the link to freenet, it really seems to be very close.
-Lasse
It never ceases to amaze me how we remain bound by real-world limitation, which we carry into the virtual world of the Internet as metaphors. Although useful to make the experience digestable, it is sometimes a hindrance, and not really necessary.
On the Internet, you can have as many copies of your house as you like. This will make it a lot harder for any mayor to burn it down. And your connectivity to your friends is not limited by location, but by protocol. If you stop using a proprietary site-specific protocol to communicate with your friends, and use an open one instead, it doesn't matter where your friends are located.
Infrastructure as you call it, which is single-site only, is not really Internet Infrastructure. It's proprietary infrastructure.
Of course it isn't in the interest of blog-hosting sites to facilitate blog-site interoperability, so such an invention has to come from other parties.
I used Usenet a lot in the past, and I'm sad to admit that I don't go there much these days, although I know the groups I participated in still thrive and have strong communities. However, I have found a few webbased boards for some topics that interest me. Boards that are very useful. Also some wikis.
However, an unpleasant experience in the past caused me to think about this issue. Let me explain the experience first. I visited often a place for Danish skeptics, skeptica.dk. At one point a third interested party offered the site to host a forum for the site. However, after a while, the third party, being part of a movement that suddenly found themselves under the conspicous eyes of skepticism, and received a lot of flak on the forum, their motivation being questioned etc. Naturally, one day the forum owner shut down the forum. Poof - gone. All the other relevant debate was suddenly inaccessible.
This could never have happened with Usenet. Why? Because of the distributed nature of Usenet. This is the LOCKSS project principle at work again. Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.
We need two things:
1) A way to distribute blog hosting, so that a blog can't be shut down by a strike against a single hosting service. I don't have a solution at hand for that.
2) A way to distribute blog and web forum comments, so that the comments are distributed in a shared framework for all types of forums. I believe the existing and proven Usenet technology is easily adapted for this purpose, although RSS might also play a role. For example, a new hierarchy, similar to the IANA OID hierarchy, or the Java package hierarchy, using DNS names at the top level, could be used. This way, suppose I have myblog, and you have yourblog. So you post an entry about Java and OOP on your blog: it ends up in a newsgroup, blog.your.org.java, and perhaps you even tag it with the OOP category, so it also is crossposted to blog.your.org.oop.
I post a response on my blog: blog.my.org.programming (because I lump it all into one category), and also crosspost to your blog newsgroups. In addition, I call it to attention to the existing Usenet community by crossposting to usenet.comp.lang.java.misc.
Of course, there has to be some additions to make this work. Perhaps a way to subscribe to your blog newsfeed. Authentication and authorization. Anonymity/Pseudonymity. Etc.
I believe this could bring the known synergy effect from Usenet back into play by making a new unified, but distributed, framework for Internet-based discussion. A kind of Babel-tower project, I suppose. Discussion would again be uniformly searchable (presuming Google would carry all the groups), and foremost: a discussion would not be orphaned when the forum goes down. I visited a great Joomla forum daily until recently, but it went down for maintenance and hasn't been up for a few weeks due to problems. Terrible. What if slashdot.org went down?
Again, as for-profit hosting services will not win much - if anything - from this an approach, they will have to be forced to use it by user demand.
Any takers? This idea is free for anyone to use. But please only one project - having different models would defeat the entire purpose.
-Lasse Hillerøe Petersen
"Hmmm." ...
"Oooh!"
"Urgh!"
"Urgh!"
"Urgh!"
"Urgh!"
"You can cancel one research program:"
"Get lots of money immediately"
"Build a decoy ship"
-Lasse
A.C.: You obviously haven't been on the net longer than since September, max. And you probably wouldn't even know which September I am referring to. _And_ your nanoscale attention span probably means you'll never see this belated followup. (I have been on a vacation in the meantime, I'm _so_ sorry.)
-Lasse
It may be so that the hearing deteriorates after 30, however I am 39 and can hear the TV whine right now, which is on, but muted. I can also hear the faint whoosh of the Scorpio harddisk in my laptop computer. And a lawnmower at some distance. And the ventilator in the bathroom.
Sometimes at night I hear a loud droning or roaring sound, at a very low frequency, not unlike being in the vicinity of a Leopard tank with its engines running. It is impossible to locate the source, but it really makes my head ache. When I go outside - its often unhearable. I suppose it is some sort of vibration that travels through the ground.
So why do some people hear this, while others don't? I suppose it is not a matter of hearing ability as it is a matter of differences in mental filters. When I was younger, I couldn't sleep well in the vicinity of a mechanical alarm clock, and had a radio clock for that reason. I can easily hear a clock ticking. I suppose when you have heard the same clock tick for some long time, you may be able to filter it out, and the people who can do this easily are also not bothered by other noises. However, I have ADD, and apparantly my filters don't quite work the same way. I suppose it is related to that - maybe some sort of hyperattention or -sensitivity to noise. The brain is an amazing device, and I find it far more likely that this is the right explanation, than that this noise is of a frequency that some people just can't hear.
As for EM radiation, I can only say that, yes, I am hypersensitive (when it comes to UV: pale skin - suffering a little from a sunburn right now), but I am not bothered by it, nor do I worry much about WiFi.
-Lasse
You are saying it as if that would have been a *bad* thing?! A web without an entire economy of services and products based off it would be a PARADISE!!!
-Lasse
I'm not!
-Lasse
So true. As the ITIL slogan goes: "IT is the business, the business is IT."
The grandparent is wrong in some parts. What good does a working sales department do, if they can't operate, because their systems are down? Sorry, but IT is a vital component, and the importance of the IT department shouldn't be underestimated like that. Unfortunately, it often is. It's even worse when the IT-department provides services to your customer, such as hosting applications or other types of systems. Then the IT truly is the business, and you damn better be sure it's running smoothly. The oil metaphor is a very good one. Like motor oil, sysadministration show up everywhere, it's impossible to figure out exactly what it does, it's sometimes dirty, and most of the time you just ignore it. But if you forget to keep your machine oiled - woe!
-Lasse
Professionalism, politeness and tact can coexist nicely with sysadmin knowledge. However, lack of same in users, whether they be student lusers (I worked at a university department ten years ago), customers, project managers, developers or anything else, quickly erodes these properties from the mind of a sysadmin.
Probably your sysadmin is annoyed, because you, or your management, has set up an awkward system, which, instead of allowing him to apply his skills, forces him to suffer you to tell him to push a button you could just as well push yourself, if he was only given the necessary time to hack up a system that allowed you to do just that. Contrary to what you seem to think, sysadmins are very good at thinking in whole systems, but unfortunately they are often not permitted to apply that thinking to build effective, rational systems.
If "his job was to move content out when he gets an ECC task", then what you need is a Pavlovian dog, not a sysadmin. I am told there are plenty of places where you can hire cheap workers that are relatively easily trained to have such reflexes. A sysadmin however is completely unsuitable for such a job. A sysadmin who is prevented from applying his thoughts about automating his routine tasks, is a sysadmin doing boring routine tasks for a while, using his now unused capacity to think about how to escape from the job. And there's a good chance he will skip the boring routine completely.
This is a very common problem. Stupid salesmen sell stupid proposals, written up by stupid architects, to stupid customers, who are even stupid enough to ask to cut vital parts out of the proposed system to get a lower price, a request which the stupid salesman stupidly accepts, stupidly unaware that this will make the service goal of 99.999 uptime into a stupid joke. Then stupid developers implement the now even more stupid design in a timeframe that's probably beyond stupid and well into insane, because the stupid salesman promised delivery yesterday. The resulting system is then dumped onto the innocent sysadmin, who is now tasked with running this stupid piece of shit in a way so that:
1. The customer is happy
2. The customer is happy enough to order more stupid functionality, so that the salesman is happy.
3. The developer is happily implementing the new functionality, and not bothered by requests to fix bugs discovered by the sysadmin while running the system. Such fixes really ruin an already insane delivery schedule.
Often this means that the sysadmins have to babysit the stupid system 24/7, to make sure it keeps running, and fix stuff that breaks all the time. And of course write up huge reports on the availability of the system, because it is not designed to produce such reports automatically. On rare occasions, there will be a little time between the firefighting sessions to actually try to write a little script or two to alleviate some of the problems, but it is too late to fix the really important fundamentally stupid design errors, which are the main cause of the fires.
Fred Brooks says you should plan to throw one away; unfortunately it seems project managers misunderstand this, and instead of throwing one away, they label it version 1.0 and throw it at the sysadmins: "here, this system runs in our development environment up to several hours without crashing (and without production load.) Get it into production and make sure it runs 99.999%". Yeah right. Yessir! Magic is our purpose in life!
BTW, 10+ years of sysadmin work has hardened me against luser hatred. I understand it, and I don't mind. The feeling is absolutely mutual. I'm prepared for any kind of backstabbing, shitfeeding, badmouthing, sacking, sueing etc that a luser might use against me. I have experienced most of them already.
I have a cobblestone on my desk. It's nominal purpose is "paperweight", but it has a relaxing effect when casually moved from one hand to the other while talking to a user. I haven't actually thrown it *at* a user. Yet.
-Lasse
What *is* surprising is that your sysadmin hasn't LARTed you with a ClueX4 over the head numerous times.
Users are by far the worst thing about being a sysadmin. The three B's (Bosses, Bureaucracy, Beancounters) are far behind.
Oh, and it was absolutely right to ask you to keep your voice down. Sysadmins don't worry about bitching users - but they like it quiet.
-Lasse
They came even closer with the lime iMac, the other fruits being blueberry, strawberry, grape and tangerine. They were just sweet, a shame they seem to be almost forgotten by now. That was a wonderful colorful time.
I often wonder, why is hardware once again always shades of grey, while GUIs are plastered with more and more ugly colours and effects? I want my GUI black and white and unobtrusive, and have color on the case.
The first computer I used was black and orange-red. Very nice combo. (Danish ICL Comet 1400/3000.)
-Lasse
-Lasse
That's so true. Kill all anonymous cowards. Right now! Then continue with the Pseudonymous Cowards. ARMM: ARMM: ARMM: ARMM!
-Lasse Hillerøe Petersen
Indeed. That was back in the days where MS hadn't yet begun to suck completely. And that reminds me of the ONE significant thing I miss in essentially all today's word processors, including newer versions of Word. Back when I used Word 5.1 for the Mac, it had a fantastic outlining tool. For some reason MS has let this rot in newer versions (weird font problems, updating problems, nonintuitive interface, did I see crashes when I tried it, too?), and neither OOo nor AbiWord seem to have anything even close. And no, using dedicated outline processors is just not the same.
For some reason Word 5.1a doesn't really like BasiliskII or running in OS 9 or OS X. So I'll probably just have to load OS 8 onto my good old iMac and stick with that, until someone reimplements Word 5.1 in open source. Still faster than working on a new machine, I guess.
Even so, back in the day, we who knew the HIG by heart didn't think too highly of Word 5.1 - after all it did break numerous interface rules. Compared to Word 6 it was great, though. Word 6 for the Mac was HELL, pure and simple.
-Lasse
footage? (The subject length limit seemed appropriate!)
If the junkyard has junk from NASA facilities, wouldn't it be possible that the missing high-quality Apollo recordings could be there, stored in some seemingly insignificant crates? Judging from the images, stuff does not seem to be stored very orderly, nor do I get the impression that any inventory lists would be very precise. Probably far-fetched, but perhaps it could be worth a look.
-Lasse
In other words: everything in moderation, including moderation. Which BTW is why I am posting excessively (well, moderately excessive) instead of moderating.
-Lasse
What if your existence is just a figment of your imagination? Cogito, but sum doesn't follow.
Speaking for myself, I am alright with only living in a state of mind. I fully agree with Blake:
"Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age."
When science approaches the limits, I have a feeling that it may often cease to be meaningful and join the religions in pointlessness, like this Hawking-speech. I too used to like to stare into the abyss, but when it began to stare back, I became dizzy, flinched, and decided to forget about it and engage myself in nearer things. Reality is way overrated, and in reality, it just isn't all that it's thought to be. At the end of the day (also at the beginning of the day, and the remainder of the day, for that matter) all you can trust is your feelings, yet even they may betray you now and then. Remember: Always look on the bright side of life!
-Lasse