I dunno. Any reading of the Apollo program histories indicates that you could substitute Slayton and/or Sheppard for Abbey in the above sentence and have a true statement about Gemini and Apollo flight crew decisions.
Uh, what? Slayton and Shepard were orders of magnitude better than George Abbey. Read Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir and you'll learn what an irredeemable bastard George Abbey is. He doesn't just play favorites. He's completely inscrutable. One minute, you're assigned to a plum job on a high-value mission. The next, you're reassigned to a bullshit backwater desk job with no explanation. Don't ever speak up about safety issues, or you'll get pegged as a troublemaker and you'll never see another flight.
Shepard and Slayton were hard-asses, but the astronauts respected them and believed they were fair. The only time there was even a hint of controversy with them was when Shepard put himself on the next available mission immediately after he was finally cleared to fly again. After some discussion and deal-making, Shepard was pushed back from Apollo 13 to Apollo 14.
Nobody believes George Abbey is fair. Even the people who've most benefited from his occasional benevolence don't profess to believe that he does things the right way. George Abbey still has his job because he is "protected from up on high by the Prince of Darkness."
He desperately needs to be fired. As soon as he's gone, morale in the astronaut ranks will greatly improve, at least until he's replaced by another political toady.
Goldin's biggest flaw is that he's been a staunch supporter of George Abbey. Anybody who's followed NASA politics knows that George Abbey runs the manned spaceflight crew rosters with a mixture of cronyism and voodoo. People get dropped from missions without explanation and put into permanent perpetual hold until they figure out what they did to piss Abbey off and either resign or correct their mistakes.
Manned spaceflight has no room for such nonsense. Abbey grew close to Goldin and NASA has suffered for his presence.
Yes, the ISS needs more money to avoid becoming the kind of white elephant the Space Shuttle turned out to be. Yes, the cost overruns on the ISS have eaten the NASA budget alive and killed unmanned missions that could have had high value. But there's only so much a NASA administrator can do without the support of the American public. Right now, it's going to be hard to push for more money for space exploration when people are worried about contracting fatal diseases from opening their mail. You need to recognize what the winnable battles are, and right now, one fast way to improve NASA is to fire George Abbey and put somebody with integrity in charge of manned spaceflight.
A guy who was working from home got so aggravated by the endless telemarketing calls that interrupted him, he started messing with the telemarketers for sport. He wound up recording his calls and turned them into a CD called Revenge on the Telemarketers.
I heard some excerpts on morning radio when the guy was plugging his CD. The parts I heard were damn funny. Of course, I never got around to actually ordering his CD.
TiVo and ReplayTV each have their advantages, but TiVo has some important advantages in ease-of-use. Some people like to think of ease of use as "moron" features, but can openers are easy to use and nobody thinks you'd have to be a moron to resent using a needlessly-complex can opener.
Now, with regard to Replay's "advantages":
TiVo does charge $9.95 per month if you want to pay a monthly fee, or you can pay $249.95 to get the "lifetime" subscription. To be clear, the lifetime is the lifetime of your TiVo box, not the lifetime of its owner.
TiVo doesn't offer a 30-second skip button, but most TiVo owners are quite satisfied with being able to reliably fast-forward through 3 minutes of commercials in five seconds (including the "oh, there's the show again" delay in hitting the play button). TiVo's two highest-speed fast-forward modes automatically correct for reaction time delays and backtrack to before you hit the button, allowing reliable commercial skipping with a minimum of effort. TiVo also has the 8-second instant replay button on the remote, so there's no advantage to ReplayTV there.
Replay's internet website seems like a great idea, but the Replay box won't usually call out more than once per day, so it's not likely you'll often be able to program the device to record something you forgot about from work. More likely, it would be useful for extended absences from home (business trips or vacation). TiVo owners using the TiVoNet cards have actually got apache running on their TiVos. Some users are actually working on web-based interfaces to the TiVo recording functions, allowing you to connect to your TiVo from anywhere on the Internet (assuming you've got a full-time connection at home) and make changes to your TiVo.
TiVo's user-interface is extremely efficient and intuitive. Every direct comparison I've ever seen with Replay indicates that Replay's interface is clunkier, although that may have changed in recent ReplayTV software revs.
TiVo allows much finer control of program selection, even going so far as to allow you to specify conflict resolution between overlapping shows for which you have Season Passes. Season Passes are vastly superior to Replay's method for recording your favorite shows every week, although once again, this may have improved in recent ReplayTV updates.
TiVo allows users to determine when programs can be deleted, by specifying "save until I manually delete" or by giving a specific date when programs are safe to delete. The last I heard, Replay's space-management scheme was much clunkier.
TiVo has the "To Do List" which is indispensible. Users can view upcoming programs which will be recorded and manually cancel or reschedule recordings. TiVo also has the "View upcoming episodes" feature which allows you to easily find another showing of a program. The To Do List also allows you to see Season Pass programs that will not be recorded and the reason why.
TiVo offers suggestions. Some people find this feature annoying, but I love it. I give three thumbs up to programs I really like but don't want to create season passes for (such as Simpsons reruns). Whenever there's available space and nothing else is scheduled to record opposite, TiVo's suggestions mechanism will record those shows for you. In addition, TiVo will scout for shows it thinks you may like based on your Thumbs preferences. Occasionally, TiVo will find stuff you like a lot but would never have found on your own.
Overall, TiVo's ability to allow you fine-grain control over what you will or won't record, its superior management of disk space and its superior hackability all add up to compelling arguments for most people in the/. crowd.
Oh, one other thing. If you decide you like ReplayTV better for whatever reason, be sure to not buy the Panasonic ShowStopper models. Panasonic botched the implementation of Macrovision on their boxes. TiVo strips Macrovision, tags the show with a Macrovision bit and then reapplies Macrovision on playback. Panasonic ReplayTV units just flat out won't record anything with Macrovision.
The problem is that parent paths aren't automatically blocked from going any higher than \InetPub\Webroot, which to me is a huge security hole. Yes, properly-secured NTFS ACLs on the filesystem will prevent any real damage from occurring, but NT and Win2k default to EVERYONE|Full Control on all filesystems, both at the NTFS ACL level and at the share level.
Look, if it were possible to just fix your server once and then not have to go back and fix the same flaw again (and again and again...), more NT systems would be properly patched, but Microsoft seems to have gone out of its way to hose NT 4.0 customers. Win2k does finally let you patch your install folders with updates from the service packs, but NT doesn't let you do that, and there's no good reason for that. Any time you add or remove a service in NT, you end up putting the install CD in. The second you do that, you have to re-run your service pack and reapply all of your hotfixes.
IIS 4.0 is the current version of IIS for NT 4.0. Let's say you decide you want to build an Outlook Web Access server for your organization and your company hasn't moved to Win2k Server yet, so you use NT 4.0. How do you get IIS 4.0 on that server? You use the Microsoft Option Pack 1 for NT 4.0. Guess what? That thing installs an insecure version of MDAC, an unpatched version of IIS and a host of other crap you may or may not want (such as the MS transaction server and indexing). All of it is incredibly old and almost all of it has to be patched and repatched the second you install it.
So, here's how you build your server: You install NT 4.0 and apply the latest service pack (SP6a because SP6 had heinous bugs). You install IE 4.0 or newer. Then, if you're smart, you install a version of MDAC (2.5 or newer) that sets proper registry security and is reasonably recent and free of its own security holes. Then you install the Option Pack so you can have IIS 4.0 and which insists on trying to install MDAC 1.5--be sure to deselect RDS because that's a huge security hole that Russian hackers use to steal credit card numbers. Now, you're ready to install Outlook Web Access. Think you're finished? Ha! Not even close. Next, you run HFNETCHK to find the enormous list of hotfixes you've got to download and apply. Each hotfix is in a different place on Microsoft's website, and there isn't a convenient tool you can use to just go and download the patches you need and store them in conveniently-labeled folders. Then, you download QCHAIN so you can apply those patches without having to reboot after each one. If you're smart, you'll use WindowsUpdate and MPSA to make sure you're not missing anything.
By the time you've finished with this minimum effort, you've spent no less than four or five hours just installing NT, IIS and the hotfixes, not to mention the hour or two it takes to install and configure OWA. Now, at this point, all you have is a product that's reasonably free of serious buffer overflow security flaws. You still don't have a product that's actually remotely secure. Now, you have to go and fix all of MS's idiotically optimistic NTFS permissions and find and disable any unnecessary services. Maybe you run MS's IIS Lockdown tool, which removes the IISamples folder and a few other obvious things.
By now, you've probably spent at least 8-12 hours building this server, patching the holes and fixing the default security settings.
So, you've patched the living hell out of the server and it's ready to go. You're immune to attacks, right? Almost certainly not. New holes are found in IIS every week and keeping on top of them is a huge job even if you have no other job responsibilities. Add to that the fact that any time somebody adds or removes a service from NT, you have to reapply the latest service pack and all the hotfixes (in order) and then reboot, and you've got yourself a nightmare.
Let me be clear.
There are enormous numbers of jackasses running IIS who can't figure out how to toast bread. However, there are plenty of overworked sysadmins who're only trying to keep their damn networks running who find it nearly impossible to keep their IIS servers patched and locked down because Microsoft makes it so damn difficult.
Yes, matters get a little better when you're running Windows 2k server, but things don't turn into a panacea just because you can patch your install media and some hotfixes don't require reboots. Microsoft still releases at least two or three patches for Win2k and/or IIS every month (sometimes they release that many in a week). They still automatically set file and share privileges too optimistically. They still install dozens of unnecessary services by default. They still force you to have unnecessary applications installed by default that you can't remove without pliers and a blowtorch (OutlookExpress). In short, they still don't take security maintenance seriously and until they do, it'll be tough for even conscientious admins to keep up. Newbies, idiots and lazy bastards won't have a hope.
These are the guys who have still be unable to figure out that the Buffer Overflow, etc. patches are available to them on Windows Update--or that almost all the new exploits would be fixed by getting Service Pack 2.
Um, I think you've completely missed the point. First off, not all patches are available from WindowsUpdate. In fact, precious few are. Most of the updates from WindowsUpdate apply to IE, not IIS. Second, there are a large number of exploits that have appeared since SP2 shipped. I have personally installed nearly two dozen Post-SP2 hotfixes to one server. I average between 8 and 10 post-SP2 hotfixes per server.
Mind you, actually keeping up-to-date on hotfixes actually became possible with the release of HFNETCHK. Before then, it was virtually impossible for any normal sysadmin to keep up with all of Microsoft's patches and apply only the ones they were supposed to. Also, before the release of QCHAIN, it was a horrible and time-consuming process to apply hotfixes to a server, even when you knew which ones to apply, because each hotfix wanted its own reboot to complete and you couldn't just apply them all and then reboot once.
I actually use WindowsUpdate, HFNETCHK and MPSA to check and make sure I catch all possible vulnerabilities. I've found that it's not uncommon for each one to catch something the others did not.
Even with the three tools I listed above, properly securing IIS (or any MS server) is still a royal pain. The damn things come preconfigured with their flies completely unzipped. MS's IIS Lockdown Tool won't even run if you've already taken some steps on your own to manually lock down IIS, and even if it does run, it doesn't turn off the "../" parent directory functionality that's enabled by default. You still have to go into IIS Admin and turn that damn thing off manually.
Let's not pick on IIS admins unfairly. Many of them prefer Linux and use it at home, but have to use IIS at work because that's been mandated. Debian makes it easy to stay patched and does a half decent job of implementing default security, but MS leaves everything wide open by default, makes it damn difficult to lock any system down effectively, installs unnecessary services by default (and won't even let you uninstall some of them) and has a half-assed mechanism for rolling hotfixes and patches out to customers.
Microsoft needs something like Symantec's LiveUpdate, which allows sysadmins to roll out tested updates to internal users on their own schedules, without physically touching every system on their networks. Yes, there are IIS admins out there who are jackasses, but there are plenty of overworked sysadmins out there who'd love to properly secure IIS, if only it weren't damn near impossible.
Other people have already berated you for misreading Katz's quote about the towers, so I won't belabor that point.
However, since the Petronas twin towers in Kuala Lumpur were completed, the title "World's Tallest Building" has been split into four categories. The Petronas towers are the tallest in one category: Height to the structural or architectural top. The Sears Tower is the tallest in two categories: Height to the highest occupied floor and height to the top of the roof. The world's tallest building in the fourth category (height to the top of antenna)? Used to be the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
BTW: Chicago is building a new World's Tallest Building which will own the title in all four categories when complete. It's currently called 7 South Dearborn. It will be 108 stories, 1550 feet tall and will have digital TV antennae stretching up to the FAA's 2000 ft. limit.
They may have invented pointers, but Doug Engelbart invented the mouse in 1968 while working at Stanford Research Institute. Xerox PARC invented a lot of cool stuff--in fact, they invented most of the things we take for granted in computing, but they didn't invent all of them.
You're thinking of Lew Kornfeld. He was the president of Radio Shack under Charles Tandy. It was Charles Tandy who turned Radio Shack from a failed 9-store chain specializing in hardcore geek parts into a huge nationwide chain of electronic convenience stores that also sold popular items like CB radios and stereo components.
Radio Shack has never been able to afford to hire real parts geeks. The only time you'll ever find somebody in a RadioShack with real knowledge of capacitors, diodes or 74-series ICs is when you stumble across a student in the local university's EE program who's working there part time while in school.
It's hard enough for RadioShack to keep a crew of employees who can actually understand the things that most people walk into their stores to buy: VCRs, cellphones, stereos, alarm systems, answering machines, batteries and adapters out the wazzoo.
Why is it so hard for them to keep knowledgeable people? Simple economics. I worked for Radio Shack (as it was then known--with the space between the words) for 8 years. I managed a store for five of them. I worked 60 hours a week and when I quit, I got a job as a novice network administrator for the same money I'd been making at Radio Shack and I got to work 40 hours a week in the bargain. Less than 10 years since I quit, I make nearly 3 times what I made at Radio Shack. If I--a store manager with a rudimentary understanding of electronics--found a vastly better paying job, imagine how impossible it is to find a normal salesdroid there who knows squat about electronics.
There's no sense in bitching about RadioShack. They're the 7-11 of the electronics retail business and they're quite happy to be that. They don't want the whole market, just the profitable part.
No, they don't sell the highest quality zener diodes or tantalum capacitors. They don't have to. The people who really want that stuff can find it without them.
I'll let you in on a little secret: The stuff you're bitching about isn't a huge part of their dollar volume. They make most of their money on batteries, TV accessories and phone accessories.
Oh, and while it's certainly possible they've discontinued the part, they did used to sell a 1/4" mono-to-stereo adapter plug. They also had stereo 1/4" to 1/8" adapters. You could have then attached a 1/8" to RCA plug cable to another 1/8" to RCA plug cable via some RCA couplers. Yes, it would have been a horrible kludge, but you apparently would prefer that to soldering up your own cable.
According to the EETimes article pointed to elsewhere in this thread, the instruction set will either be MIPS or PowerPC, with the most likely nod being MIPS.
One place MIPS sees a huge market penetration is in networking equipment, especially Cisco routers. If Intrinsity can clock up to 2.2GHz without massively increasing power consumption and heat dissipation, I could see Cisco's high-end routers using the hell out of MIPS CPUs using that technology.
Are you saying that your employer pays you 4 cents a second? Or are you a contractor hired out by your true employer to your customer?
Regardless, 4 cents a second (times 3600 seconds per hour times 2000 work hours per year) adds up to about $288k per year. At that rate, I'd sure as hell hope your employer was maximizing every second of your productivity.
That'd be a good justification for installing workstations in the bathrooms. Or maybe toilets at the cubicles.
By the way, your comments reminded me of one of the things I absolutely love about most Cameron stories: The characters see all the same obvious shit we do.
In Aliens, the characters don't do the typical moron horror-movie character stuff (i.e., "Hey, let's stay here on this horrible planet and let the nasty monsters plant larvae in our chests!"). They decide the smart thing to do is get the hell off the planet and nuke it from orbit. Cameron's genius is in preventing them from doing so in a believable way.
Likewise, the characters in Dark Angel see the same obvious shit we do and actually try to take the easy way out whenever possible. Cameron finds credible ways to keep them from doing so. He also complicates their lives in creative ways that seem to flow naturally from the characters' motivations, rather than from the demands of this week's "A very special Dark Angel" or whatever.
The characters are as simultaneously cynical and idealistic as most of us. I like that a lot.
Oh, and have I mentioned that Jessica Alba's luscious?
Maybe I missed the meeting where everybody decided that only serious llamas like Dark Angel, but I think it's a great show. Jessica Alba is seriously luscious and the stories are well written. I like the neo-dystopian post-pulse rotting Seattle she lives in. I like the hard-core Russian/South African gangs that are chasing her. I like the bad-asses at Manticore who won't stop until she's reprogrammed. I really like the fact that they're not afraid to kill off characters that have appeared in more than one episode.
All in all, it's one of the few shows I make a point to watch every week--along with Futurama, South Park and The Sopranos.
Tell me about a problem you've solved that you're particularly proud of. Tell me what the problem was, how you figured out what was causing it and what you did to resolve it.
Tell me about the biggest disaster you've ever caused: how it happened, how you handled it and what you learned from it.
So, what do I learn from these? First off, sysadmin work is frequently nothing more than creative problem solving. I want to know how people resolve problems and what kinds of problem solving they're proud of.
Second, everybody has made a huge mistake at some point in his/her life as a sysadmin. What sets the great sysadmins apart from the clowns I don't want to hire is how they dealt with the situation and what they learned from the experience.
Once upon a time, Radio Shack tried to replace the Model 100/102/200 line with a dedicated word processor called the WP-2. In theory, it had all the necessary ingredients to be a successful replacement for the M10x line. In practice, it never sold well and was discontinued after about a year and a half of lackluster sales.
It had a full-size typewriter style keyboard that was actually better than the M10x line had, featuring comfortable sculpted keycaps. It had an 80-column by 8 line display. It had excellent runtime on AA batteries. It had a parallel printer port (something the M10x family never had), it had a real serial port that could go faster than 19,200 bps. It just never sold well.
Why? Well, I think the problem was the display. The 80-column width made the characters too small to see easily. If the machine had a higher-contrast display, the battery life would have suffered, but I think the display was too hard to read and that doomed the machine.
Anything that's going to successfully carry on the Model 100's legacy needs to have a readable display above all else.
Oh, by the way. For people who'd rather just click on a link than copy'n'paste URLs, here are the websites mentioned in the post to which I'm replying:
I stupidly traded mine to a friend who is a collector of outdated equipment. I have a KayPro that somebody gave me (complete with WordStar and DBaseII), but I've never turned it on. I'm hoping to trade it to my friend to get my old Model 100 back.
The keyboard on that thing was absolutely magnificent. I used to sit in bed, BBSing till all hours of the morning. I even rigged a null-modem cable to connect it to my TRS-80 Color Computer running OS/9 and logged in using the M100 as a terminal.
My Palm V is as close as I've gotten to the sheer indispensability of my Model 100. I miss it.
Umm, actually, it's the software industry against their customers, with the FBI as the cudgel held by the industry.
One of the most ridiculous tenets of the DMCA is its protection of the weakest forms of encryption. The irony is, as someone has pointed out, that if the encryption method is weak enough, there will be people who can read it without the help of software. There are people who can look at "encrypted"[1] passwords on Cisco routers and tell you what the passwords are. Are they cracking encryption, or simply reading aloud a language they know well?
If I weren't so damn lazy today, I'd go look up the link to Ron Rivest's essay on Chaffing and Winnowing to point out how silly attempts to regulate encryption really are.
[1] These would be the simple login and "enable" passwords, not the "secret" passwords which are much better encrypted and provide greater granularity of permissions.
The OS is definitely BSD-based, but it looks like replacing drives is to be done only by authorized VARs and/or field techs. Which, of course, means somebody has to reverse engineer their upgrade process before end users can do so themselves. Think of it as a BlessSnap floppy
Yes, the British show "Scrapheap Challenge" is relabeled by TLC as "Junkyard Wars." Until the recent all-US version, that's all Junkyard Wars was. But TLC's ratings for the relabeled Scrapheap Challenge have been terrific, so they contracted with RDF Media and Cathy Rogers to produce an all-US version of the show.
And yes, Robert Llewellyn (the British host) is much better than George Gray (the American host). I find it amusing that two cast members from Red Dwarf have jobs as gameshow hosts. Craig Charles (who plays Lister) hosts the British show Robot Wars while Robert Llewellyn (Kryten) hosts Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars UK.
Apparently, British viewers got to see the US vs. UK championship back in December 2000. I'd discovered that website months back and studiously avoided reading too much on there because I wanted to be surprised by the outcomes of the shows.
By the way, the first season of the all-US version of the show was shot in England at the same junkyard as the British version. The second US season will be shot at an American junkyard in California (and is probably being filmed right now).
The federal laws regarding wiretapping involve recording conversations when neither party has given consent to being recorded. If you record a conversation you are having with another party, you have consented to record your conversation and you are not violating the federal wiretapping laws. Local jurisdictions occasionally expand on what constitutes wiretapping, such as the Massachussetts law being discussed here.
I used to work for a large national chain of retail electronics stores where we sold devices for recording phone conversations. In the state where I live, there are no supplemental laws. Thus, anyone buying a phone recording device to record his/her own conversations was perfectly within their rights. However, anyone who wanted to record a spouse's or child's conversations without their knowledge was plotting to violate federal wiretapping laws and we were forbidden from selling them the equipment for such purposes.
So the moral of the story is: If you're looking to break federal wiretapping laws, don't tell the kid behind the counter at Circuit Hut before he sells you the necessary gear.
What you're complaining about is Debian's extraordinarily long release cycles and its notoriously old packages when any given Debian distro is finally released. However, there are some extenuating circumstances you've failed to mention or notice (I honestly don't know which).
The old package problem you're complaining about--while not entirely solved--is improving. Debian had some problems during the transition from slink to potato which led to the amazingly long gestation of potato.
Stable Debian packages aren't regularly replaced by the latest versions, but this does not mean that Debian packages are necessarily out of date. Debian always backports security fixes to the current stable release. Debian's focus is stability and solidity, not bleeding-edge compliance with the latest versions of all possible packages.
Debian is tested as a complete distribution, which is one of the reasons why stable remains locked into older package versions. It's not feasible to retest the entire distribution every time a new revision of emacs is released. When Debian ships a stable release, you can be largely certain that it's one of the most stable OSes you'll ever run.
Debian has added the testing archive for folks who want more recent packages than what's shipping in stable, but who aren't willing to live with the occasional broken dependency you find in unstable.
The Debian freeze process has been changed. To ensure fresher packages ship with woody when it's released, the most dynamic packages will be frozen last. This should allow users to have reasonably recent versions of important packages.
Recent versions of apt allow you to pick and choose among the three archives (stable, testing and unstable). Need the absolute latest version of Mozilla? Apt-get it from unstable. Debian hasn't tested your distribution with that version, but that doesn't mean you'll suffer unnecessarily. I ran 2.2 kernels in slink forever and I don't think slink was ever certified with 2.2.x kernels.
You'll always have the ability to download a tarball and roll your own Debianized package for whatever you need. You can't apt-get tarball yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if somebody adds that functionality to apt someday.
Overall, I think Debian's package-management system is excellent. It only took one ill-fated attempt to add XFree86 to a Red Hat machine to convince me that rpm's file-based dependencies are inferior to dpkg's package-based dependencies.
There can be no "one size fits all" PDA for everyone. For some people, the additional functionality of the iPaq is worth the added cost, size and battery drain. For someone like me, whose primary purpose is to always have his address book and calendar with him (and I mean always), the smaller form factor of a Palm V/Vx is the most important feature.
Do I wish my Palm V was faster? Sure, sometimes. Am I willing to give up the 3-4 weeks of battery life on a charge and the supremely portable form factor? Not on your life. I might be willing to sacrifice battery life down to a day or two for a bright color screen, but that'd be it. No increase in size, please.
The only thing that really disappoints me about Palm is that they can't settle on a charging/docking cradle or serial connector. The first cradle worked with everything except the Palm V family. Now the M100s and M500s each have their own new cradle style.
Note to Palm: Quit screwing with the cradles. Pick a style and stop.
I once read an interview with Bob Carver in Stereo Review. He was talking about the psychology of high-end audio and how even though he'd been able to perfectly duplicate the sound of any tube amp ever made with a pure transistor amp, there were always going to be some people who looked at their tube amps and saw the tubes glowing and automatically knew that the tube amp sounded better than any transistor amp and there was no way they'd be convinced otherwise.
The problem with many audiophiles is that they'd never bother with double blind a/b comparisons to test their beliefs. Carver performed such double-blind tests with audio critics who never believed he could make one of his amps sound like any randomly-chosen amp. The test in question occurred at a high end audio trade show. Carver was given 24 hours notice of the exact amp he needed to duplicate. He'd put that amp on an oscilloscope and as closely as possible matched what he called the amp's "transfer function."
When the tests were run, the critics couldn't tell the difference between Carver's amp and the amp he had cloned.
Carver also told a story about the time he tested some $1,000 silver patch cables. He and a friend were astonished at the amazing quality difference. When he switched back to his original patch cables, he and his friend marveled at how sonically dead and flat the soundstage had become. They swapped back and forth a few times, with Carver's friend continuing to hear the difference, but eventually, Carver was able realize the effect had been completely created within their own minds. When he listened to the sound as critically and objectively as he could, he no longer heard the difference.
In general, audiophiles are an irrational bunch. Yes, there are differences between high-end audiophile components and even the best "audiophile-grade" mass-produced consumer stuff, but don't tell me putting your power supplies in sandboxes will make that much of a difference. And definitely don't tell me your CDs sound better when you paint the circumferential edge green with a felt pen.
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I dunno. Any reading of the Apollo program histories indicates that you could substitute Slayton and/or Sheppard for Abbey in the above sentence and have a true statement about Gemini and Apollo flight crew decisions.
Uh, what? Slayton and Shepard were orders of magnitude better than George Abbey. Read Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir and you'll learn what an irredeemable bastard George Abbey is. He doesn't just play favorites. He's completely inscrutable. One minute, you're assigned to a plum job on a high-value mission. The next, you're reassigned to a bullshit backwater desk job with no explanation. Don't ever speak up about safety issues, or you'll get pegged as a troublemaker and you'll never see another flight.
Shepard and Slayton were hard-asses, but the astronauts respected them and believed they were fair. The only time there was even a hint of controversy with them was when Shepard put himself on the next available mission immediately after he was finally cleared to fly again. After some discussion and deal-making, Shepard was pushed back from Apollo 13 to Apollo 14.
Nobody believes George Abbey is fair. Even the people who've most benefited from his occasional benevolence don't profess to believe that he does things the right way. George Abbey still has his job because he is "protected from up on high by the Prince of Darkness."
He desperately needs to be fired. As soon as he's gone, morale in the astronaut ranks will greatly improve, at least until he's replaced by another political toady.
Goldin's biggest flaw is that he's been a staunch supporter of George Abbey. Anybody who's followed NASA politics knows that George Abbey runs the manned spaceflight crew rosters with a mixture of cronyism and voodoo. People get dropped from missions without explanation and put into permanent perpetual hold until they figure out what they did to piss Abbey off and either resign or correct their mistakes.
Manned spaceflight has no room for such nonsense. Abbey grew close to Goldin and NASA has suffered for his presence.
Yes, the ISS needs more money to avoid becoming the kind of white elephant the Space Shuttle turned out to be. Yes, the cost overruns on the ISS have eaten the NASA budget alive and killed unmanned missions that could have had high value. But there's only so much a NASA administrator can do without the support of the American public. Right now, it's going to be hard to push for more money for space exploration when people are worried about contracting fatal diseases from opening their mail. You need to recognize what the winnable battles are, and right now, one fast way to improve NASA is to fire George Abbey and put somebody with integrity in charge of manned spaceflight.
A guy who was working from home got so aggravated by the endless telemarketing calls that interrupted him, he started messing with the telemarketers for sport. He wound up recording his calls and turned them into a CD called Revenge on the Telemarketers.
I heard some excerpts on morning radio when the guy was plugging his CD. The parts I heard were damn funny. Of course, I never got around to actually ordering his CD.
Could be useful for collecting loose potato chips too!
<Simpsons Reference>
Oh, come on. All you need for collecting loose potato chips in space is a hungry, hungry Homer!
</Simpsons Reference>
TiVo and ReplayTV each have their advantages, but TiVo has some important advantages in ease-of-use. Some people like to think of ease of use as "moron" features, but can openers are easy to use and nobody thinks you'd have to be a moron to resent using a needlessly-complex can opener.
Now, with regard to Replay's "advantages":
Overall, TiVo's ability to allow you fine-grain control over what you will or won't record, its superior management of disk space and its superior hackability all add up to compelling arguments for most people in the /. crowd.
Oh, one other thing. If you decide you like ReplayTV better for whatever reason, be sure to not buy the Panasonic ShowStopper models. Panasonic botched the implementation of Macrovision on their boxes. TiVo strips Macrovision, tags the show with a Macrovision bit and then reapplies Macrovision on playback. Panasonic ReplayTV units just flat out won't record anything with Macrovision.
The problem is that parent paths aren't automatically blocked from going any higher than \InetPub\Webroot, which to me is a huge security hole. Yes, properly-secured NTFS ACLs on the filesystem will prevent any real damage from occurring, but NT and Win2k default to EVERYONE|Full Control on all filesystems, both at the NTFS ACL level and at the share level.
Look, if it were possible to just fix your server once and then not have to go back and fix the same flaw again (and again and again...), more NT systems would be properly patched, but Microsoft seems to have gone out of its way to hose NT 4.0 customers. Win2k does finally let you patch your install folders with updates from the service packs, but NT doesn't let you do that, and there's no good reason for that. Any time you add or remove a service in NT, you end up putting the install CD in. The second you do that, you have to re-run your service pack and reapply all of your hotfixes.
IIS 4.0 is the current version of IIS for NT 4.0. Let's say you decide you want to build an Outlook Web Access server for your organization and your company hasn't moved to Win2k Server yet, so you use NT 4.0. How do you get IIS 4.0 on that server? You use the Microsoft Option Pack 1 for NT 4.0. Guess what? That thing installs an insecure version of MDAC, an unpatched version of IIS and a host of other crap you may or may not want (such as the MS transaction server and indexing). All of it is incredibly old and almost all of it has to be patched and repatched the second you install it.
So, here's how you build your server: You install NT 4.0 and apply the latest service pack (SP6a because SP6 had heinous bugs). You install IE 4.0 or newer. Then, if you're smart, you install a version of MDAC (2.5 or newer) that sets proper registry security and is reasonably recent and free of its own security holes. Then you install the Option Pack so you can have IIS 4.0 and which insists on trying to install MDAC 1.5--be sure to deselect RDS because that's a huge security hole that Russian hackers use to steal credit card numbers. Now, you're ready to install Outlook Web Access. Think you're finished? Ha! Not even close. Next, you run HFNETCHK to find the enormous list of hotfixes you've got to download and apply. Each hotfix is in a different place on Microsoft's website, and there isn't a convenient tool you can use to just go and download the patches you need and store them in conveniently-labeled folders. Then, you download QCHAIN so you can apply those patches without having to reboot after each one. If you're smart, you'll use WindowsUpdate and MPSA to make sure you're not missing anything.
By the time you've finished with this minimum effort, you've spent no less than four or five hours just installing NT, IIS and the hotfixes, not to mention the hour or two it takes to install and configure OWA. Now, at this point, all you have is a product that's reasonably free of serious buffer overflow security flaws. You still don't have a product that's actually remotely secure. Now, you have to go and fix all of MS's idiotically optimistic NTFS permissions and find and disable any unnecessary services. Maybe you run MS's IIS Lockdown tool, which removes the IISamples folder and a few other obvious things.
By now, you've probably spent at least 8-12 hours building this server, patching the holes and fixing the default security settings.
So, you've patched the living hell out of the server and it's ready to go. You're immune to attacks, right? Almost certainly not. New holes are found in IIS every week and keeping on top of them is a huge job even if you have no other job responsibilities. Add to that the fact that any time somebody adds or removes a service from NT, you have to reapply the latest service pack and all the hotfixes (in order) and then reboot, and you've got yourself a nightmare.
Let me be clear.
There are enormous numbers of jackasses running IIS who can't figure out how to toast bread. However, there are plenty of overworked sysadmins who're only trying to keep their damn networks running who find it nearly impossible to keep their IIS servers patched and locked down because Microsoft makes it so damn difficult.
Yes, matters get a little better when you're running Windows 2k server, but things don't turn into a panacea just because you can patch your install media and some hotfixes don't require reboots. Microsoft still releases at least two or three patches for Win2k and/or IIS every month (sometimes they release that many in a week). They still automatically set file and share privileges too optimistically. They still install dozens of unnecessary services by default. They still force you to have unnecessary applications installed by default that you can't remove without pliers and a blowtorch (OutlookExpress). In short, they still don't take security maintenance seriously and until they do, it'll be tough for even conscientious admins to keep up. Newbies, idiots and lazy bastards won't have a hope.
These are the guys who have still be unable to figure out that the Buffer Overflow, etc. patches are available to them on Windows Update--or that almost all the new exploits would be fixed by getting Service Pack 2.
Um, I think you've completely missed the point. First off, not all patches are available from WindowsUpdate. In fact, precious few are. Most of the updates from WindowsUpdate apply to IE, not IIS. Second, there are a large number of exploits that have appeared since SP2 shipped. I have personally installed nearly two dozen Post-SP2 hotfixes to one server. I average between 8 and 10 post-SP2 hotfixes per server.
Mind you, actually keeping up-to-date on hotfixes actually became possible with the release of HFNETCHK. Before then, it was virtually impossible for any normal sysadmin to keep up with all of Microsoft's patches and apply only the ones they were supposed to. Also, before the release of QCHAIN, it was a horrible and time-consuming process to apply hotfixes to a server, even when you knew which ones to apply, because each hotfix wanted its own reboot to complete and you couldn't just apply them all and then reboot once.
I actually use WindowsUpdate, HFNETCHK and MPSA to check and make sure I catch all possible vulnerabilities. I've found that it's not uncommon for each one to catch something the others did not.
Even with the three tools I listed above, properly securing IIS (or any MS server) is still a royal pain. The damn things come preconfigured with their flies completely unzipped. MS's IIS Lockdown Tool won't even run if you've already taken some steps on your own to manually lock down IIS, and even if it does run, it doesn't turn off the "../" parent directory functionality that's enabled by default. You still have to go into IIS Admin and turn that damn thing off manually.
Let's not pick on IIS admins unfairly. Many of them prefer Linux and use it at home, but have to use IIS at work because that's been mandated. Debian makes it easy to stay patched and does a half decent job of implementing default security, but MS leaves everything wide open by default, makes it damn difficult to lock any system down effectively, installs unnecessary services by default (and won't even let you uninstall some of them) and has a half-assed mechanism for rolling hotfixes and patches out to customers.
Microsoft needs something like Symantec's LiveUpdate, which allows sysadmins to roll out tested updates to internal users on their own schedules, without physically touching every system on their networks. Yes, there are IIS admins out there who are jackasses, but there are plenty of overworked sysadmins out there who'd love to properly secure IIS, if only it weren't damn near impossible.
Other people have already berated you for misreading Katz's quote about the towers, so I won't belabor that point.
However, since the Petronas twin towers in Kuala Lumpur were completed, the title "World's Tallest Building" has been split into four categories. The Petronas towers are the tallest in one category: Height to the structural or architectural top. The Sears Tower is the tallest in two categories: Height to the highest occupied floor and height to the top of the roof. The world's tallest building in the fourth category (height to the top of antenna)? Used to be the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
BTW: Chicago is building a new World's Tallest Building which will own the title in all four categories when complete. It's currently called 7 South Dearborn. It will be 108 stories, 1550 feet tall and will have digital TV antennae stretching up to the FAA's 2000 ft. limit.
They invented pointers and mice.
They may have invented pointers, but Doug Engelbart invented the mouse in 1968 while working at Stanford Research Institute. Xerox PARC invented a lot of cool stuff--in fact, they invented most of the things we take for granted in computing, but they didn't invent all of them.
You're thinking of Lew Kornfeld. He was the president of Radio Shack under Charles Tandy. It was Charles Tandy who turned Radio Shack from a failed 9-store chain specializing in hardcore geek parts into a huge nationwide chain of electronic convenience stores that also sold popular items like CB radios and stereo components.
Radio Shack has never been able to afford to hire real parts geeks. The only time you'll ever find somebody in a RadioShack with real knowledge of capacitors, diodes or 74-series ICs is when you stumble across a student in the local university's EE program who's working there part time while in school.
It's hard enough for RadioShack to keep a crew of employees who can actually understand the things that most people walk into their stores to buy: VCRs, cellphones, stereos, alarm systems, answering machines, batteries and adapters out the wazzoo.
Why is it so hard for them to keep knowledgeable people? Simple economics. I worked for Radio Shack (as it was then known--with the space between the words) for 8 years. I managed a store for five of them. I worked 60 hours a week and when I quit, I got a job as a novice network administrator for the same money I'd been making at Radio Shack and I got to work 40 hours a week in the bargain. Less than 10 years since I quit, I make nearly 3 times what I made at Radio Shack. If I--a store manager with a rudimentary understanding of electronics--found a vastly better paying job, imagine how impossible it is to find a normal salesdroid there who knows squat about electronics.
There's no sense in bitching about RadioShack. They're the 7-11 of the electronics retail business and they're quite happy to be that. They don't want the whole market, just the profitable part.
No, they don't sell the highest quality zener diodes or tantalum capacitors. They don't have to. The people who really want that stuff can find it without them.
I'll let you in on a little secret: The stuff you're bitching about isn't a huge part of their dollar volume. They make most of their money on batteries, TV accessories and phone accessories.
Oh, and while it's certainly possible they've discontinued the part, they did used to sell a 1/4" mono-to-stereo adapter plug. They also had stereo 1/4" to 1/8" adapters. You could have then attached a 1/8" to RCA plug cable to another 1/8" to RCA plug cable via some RCA couplers. Yes, it would have been a horrible kludge, but you apparently would prefer that to soldering up your own cable.
According to the EETimes article pointed to elsewhere in this thread, the instruction set will either be MIPS or PowerPC, with the most likely nod being MIPS.
One place MIPS sees a huge market penetration is in networking equipment, especially Cisco routers. If Intrinsity can clock up to 2.2GHz without massively increasing power consumption and heat dissipation, I could see Cisco's high-end routers using the hell out of MIPS CPUs using that technology.
Are you saying that your employer pays you 4 cents a second? Or are you a contractor hired out by your true employer to your customer?
Regardless, 4 cents a second (times 3600 seconds per hour times 2000 work hours per year) adds up to about $288k per year. At that rate, I'd sure as hell hope your employer was maximizing every second of your productivity.
That'd be a good justification for installing workstations in the bathrooms. Or maybe toilets at the cubicles.
By the way, your comments reminded me of one of the things I absolutely love about most Cameron stories: The characters see all the same obvious shit we do.
In Aliens, the characters don't do the typical moron horror-movie character stuff (i.e., "Hey, let's stay here on this horrible planet and let the nasty monsters plant larvae in our chests!"). They decide the smart thing to do is get the hell off the planet and nuke it from orbit. Cameron's genius is in preventing them from doing so in a believable way.
Likewise, the characters in Dark Angel see the same obvious shit we do and actually try to take the easy way out whenever possible. Cameron finds credible ways to keep them from doing so. He also complicates their lives in creative ways that seem to flow naturally from the characters' motivations, rather than from the demands of this week's "A very special Dark Angel" or whatever.
The characters are as simultaneously cynical and idealistic as most of us. I like that a lot.
Oh, and have I mentioned that Jessica Alba's luscious?
Maybe I missed the meeting where everybody decided that only serious llamas like Dark Angel, but I think it's a great show. Jessica Alba is seriously luscious and the stories are well written. I like the neo-dystopian post-pulse rotting Seattle she lives in. I like the hard-core Russian/South African gangs that are chasing her. I like the bad-asses at Manticore who won't stop until she's reprogrammed. I really like the fact that they're not afraid to kill off characters that have appeared in more than one episode.
All in all, it's one of the few shows I make a point to watch every week--along with Futurama, South Park and The Sopranos.
There are two questions I ask everybody:
So, what do I learn from these? First off, sysadmin work is frequently nothing more than creative problem solving. I want to know how people resolve problems and what kinds of problem solving they're proud of.
Second, everybody has made a huge mistake at some point in his/her life as a sysadmin. What sets the great sysadmins apart from the clowns I don't want to hire is how they dealt with the situation and what they learned from the experience.
Once upon a time, Radio Shack tried to replace the Model 100/102/200 line with a dedicated word processor called the WP-2. In theory, it had all the necessary ingredients to be a successful replacement for the M10x line. In practice, it never sold well and was discontinued after about a year and a half of lackluster sales.
It had a full-size typewriter style keyboard that was actually better than the M10x line had, featuring comfortable sculpted keycaps. It had an 80-column by 8 line display. It had excellent runtime on AA batteries. It had a parallel printer port (something the M10x family never had), it had a real serial port that could go faster than 19,200 bps. It just never sold well.
Why? Well, I think the problem was the display. The 80-column width made the characters too small to see easily. If the machine had a higher-contrast display, the battery life would have suffered, but I think the display was too hard to read and that doomed the machine.
Anything that's going to successfully carry on the Model 100's legacy needs to have a readable display above all else.
Oh, by the way. For people who'd rather just click on a link than copy'n'paste URLs, here are the websites mentioned in the post to which I'm replying:
www.alphasmart.com
www.quickpad.com
www.perfectsolutions.com
www.dreamwriter.com
www.calcuscribe.com
Alphasmart review
Quickpad review
I stupidly traded mine to a friend who is a collector of outdated equipment. I have a KayPro that somebody gave me (complete with WordStar and DBaseII), but I've never turned it on. I'm hoping to trade it to my friend to get my old Model 100 back.
The keyboard on that thing was absolutely magnificent. I used to sit in bed, BBSing till all hours of the morning. I even rigged a null-modem cable to connect it to my TRS-80 Color Computer running OS/9 and logged in using the M100 as a terminal.
My Palm V is as close as I've gotten to the sheer indispensability of my Model 100. I miss it.
Umm, actually, it's the software industry against their customers, with the FBI as the cudgel held by the industry.
One of the most ridiculous tenets of the DMCA is its protection of the weakest forms of encryption. The irony is, as someone has pointed out, that if the encryption method is weak enough, there will be people who can read it without the help of software. There are people who can look at "encrypted"[1] passwords on Cisco routers and tell you what the passwords are. Are they cracking encryption, or simply reading aloud a language they know well?
If I weren't so damn lazy today, I'd go look up the link to Ron Rivest's essay on Chaffing and Winnowing to point out how silly attempts to regulate encryption really are.
[1] These would be the simple login and "enable" passwords, not the "secret" passwords which are much better encrypted and provide greater granularity of permissions.
The OS is definitely BSD-based, but it looks like replacing drives is to be done only by authorized VARs and/or field techs. Which, of course, means somebody has to reverse engineer their upgrade process before end users can do so themselves. Think of it as a BlessSnap floppy
Yes, the British show "Scrapheap Challenge" is relabeled by TLC as "Junkyard Wars." Until the recent all-US version, that's all Junkyard Wars was. But TLC's ratings for the relabeled Scrapheap Challenge have been terrific, so they contracted with RDF Media and Cathy Rogers to produce an all-US version of the show.
And yes, Robert Llewellyn (the British host) is much better than George Gray (the American host). I find it amusing that two cast members from Red Dwarf have jobs as gameshow hosts. Craig Charles (who plays Lister) hosts the British show Robot Wars while Robert Llewellyn (Kryten) hosts Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars UK.
Apparently, British viewers got to see the US vs. UK championship back in December 2000. I'd discovered that website months back and studiously avoided reading too much on there because I wanted to be surprised by the outcomes of the shows.
By the way, the first season of the all-US version of the show was shot in England at the same junkyard as the British version. The second US season will be shot at an American junkyard in California (and is probably being filmed right now).
The federal laws regarding wiretapping involve recording conversations when neither party has given consent to being recorded. If you record a conversation you are having with another party, you have consented to record your conversation and you are not violating the federal wiretapping laws. Local jurisdictions occasionally expand on what constitutes wiretapping, such as the Massachussetts law being discussed here.
I used to work for a large national chain of retail electronics stores where we sold devices for recording phone conversations. In the state where I live, there are no supplemental laws. Thus, anyone buying a phone recording device to record his/her own conversations was perfectly within their rights. However, anyone who wanted to record a spouse's or child's conversations without their knowledge was plotting to violate federal wiretapping laws and we were forbidden from selling them the equipment for such purposes.
So the moral of the story is: If you're looking to break federal wiretapping laws, don't tell the kid behind the counter at Circuit Hut before he sells you the necessary gear.
What you're complaining about is Debian's extraordinarily long release cycles and its notoriously old packages when any given Debian distro is finally released. However, there are some extenuating circumstances you've failed to mention or notice (I honestly don't know which).
Overall, I think Debian's package-management system is excellent. It only took one ill-fated attempt to add XFree86 to a Red Hat machine to convince me that rpm's file-based dependencies are inferior to dpkg's package-based dependencies.
As always, YMMV.
There can be no "one size fits all" PDA for everyone. For some people, the additional functionality of the iPaq is worth the added cost, size and battery drain. For someone like me, whose primary purpose is to always have his address book and calendar with him (and I mean always), the smaller form factor of a Palm V/Vx is the most important feature.
Do I wish my Palm V was faster? Sure, sometimes. Am I willing to give up the 3-4 weeks of battery life on a charge and the supremely portable form factor? Not on your life. I might be willing to sacrifice battery life down to a day or two for a bright color screen, but that'd be it. No increase in size, please.
The only thing that really disappoints me about Palm is that they can't settle on a charging/docking cradle or serial connector. The first cradle worked with everything except the Palm V family. Now the M100s and M500s each have their own new cradle style.
Note to Palm: Quit screwing with the cradles. Pick a style and stop.
I once read an interview with Bob Carver in Stereo Review. He was talking about the psychology of high-end audio and how even though he'd been able to perfectly duplicate the sound of any tube amp ever made with a pure transistor amp, there were always going to be some people who looked at their tube amps and saw the tubes glowing and automatically knew that the tube amp sounded better than any transistor amp and there was no way they'd be convinced otherwise.
The problem with many audiophiles is that they'd never bother with double blind a/b comparisons to test their beliefs. Carver performed such double-blind tests with audio critics who never believed he could make one of his amps sound like any randomly-chosen amp. The test in question occurred at a high end audio trade show. Carver was given 24 hours notice of the exact amp he needed to duplicate. He'd put that amp on an oscilloscope and as closely as possible matched what he called the amp's "transfer function."
When the tests were run, the critics couldn't tell the difference between Carver's amp and the amp he had cloned.
Carver also told a story about the time he tested some $1,000 silver patch cables. He and a friend were astonished at the amazing quality difference. When he switched back to his original patch cables, he and his friend marveled at how sonically dead and flat the soundstage had become. They swapped back and forth a few times, with Carver's friend continuing to hear the difference, but eventually, Carver was able realize the effect had been completely created within their own minds. When he listened to the sound as critically and objectively as he could, he no longer heard the difference.
In general, audiophiles are an irrational bunch. Yes, there are differences between high-end audiophile components and even the best "audiophile-grade" mass-produced consumer stuff, but don't tell me putting your power supplies in sandboxes will make that much of a difference. And definitely don't tell me your CDs sound better when you paint the circumferential edge green with a felt pen.