Yes, and a related topic is indexing files that are in some specialized format.
I run a search site that only indexes a few hundred other sites and around 170,000 files (today). What the files contain doesn't matter here. What's significant is that the data, while being (usually) plain ascii text, is not in any human language. If you saw it and didn't know the subject area, you wouldn't be able to make sense of it. It's very useful to a few thousand users, and of no interest whatsoever to anyone else.
One thing that could be feasible with an open-source search project is to discuss ways in which specialized search engine like mine can be incorporated. The data that I index can be related to several other kinds of online data that are in turn indexed by others. But my code doesn't make the connection, and neither do the search engines for the related types of data.
This strikes me as a significant problem that the big guys can't much work on (yet). And, like "orphan" drugs, they probably won't ever find it worthwhile to work on most kinds of data that only exist in a few thousand files.
But if we could define a way to interface search engines so that they can recognize each other and refer queries to each other, then these specialized data formats could be usefully searched and indexed.
Sounds worthwhile to me. I wonder if I could find someone to pay me a salary while I worked on it?
Heh, heh. Good point. I do like to use 2- and 3-letter names in perl, but the real perl hackers tend to disparage my code as readable.
Back in the 70's, I learned a language (whose name I've forgotten) whose syntax was entirely in the punctuation. You could use letters however you liked, with an interesting rule: Only upper-case letters were noticed by the compiler. Lower-case letters were stripped out (except inside quoted strings).
This had two interesting effects. One was that the language didn't need a comment syntax, since lower-case comments could be used anywhere outside of quotes. The other was that you could use names in any language, and insert "keyword" tokens anywhere by making them lower case. Typical variable names were mixed case, but you had to take care to make the upper-case letters unique in every name, because those were the only letters that counted.
I remember seeing "translations" of programs that were very readable in several languages. One example was presented in English, German and Hawaiian. Today, I suppose we'd see examples in languages from LOTR or Star Trek. Part of the fun of the language was that you could use the natural inflections in names, in lower case, so you could write things like plurals and tenses so they read naturally.
Or you could avoid lower-case letters and get code that looked like line noise.
It did occur to me once that you could almost make this work with C. For example, (...){...}{...} would be an if-then-else construct. You could write it "if (...) then {...} else {...} if you like. Or you could write it "bip (...) qix {...} glor {...} fow" if that makes more sense to you. Strip out the lower-case letters, and they're both the same. But to make it really work, you need to introduce more semicolons, and you need to somewhat modify other parts of the punctuation.
Well, if you want to get so nit picky about it, knowledge and information aren't interchangable either.
I'm often reminded of a comment by the instructor in a CompSci class I took back in the 60's, when there were still IBM punch cards easily on hand. He held up two of them, one with lots of holes punched out, and the other one without any holes. He commented that both contain exactly the same amount of "information". 960 bits of information, to be precise.
This did a lot to get across to the class just what "information" really means. And he didn't even have to make the distinction between true and false information, which is something at a higher level.
Of course, many people use the term "knowledge" when they mean "belief", and don't distinguish those terms, either. Sometimes this is from ignorance; sometimes the confusion qualifies as malice aforethought.
A few pictures change everything... the military is going to ban cameras.
Probably true. But I've noticed that there is a growing suggestion in a lot of the world, including here in the US: Require cameras.
There are serious discussions in several US states and a number of other countries of the idea that all interactions of prisoners with police or military questioners should be videotaped. Part of the idea is that anything like a confession that isn't fully taped is considered to be coerced.
It doesn't take a lot of thought to come up with the further suggestion: Prisoners should be watched by web cams. This is getting to be quite feasible now. This would partially overcome the problems with videotapes in government vaults, unavailable to the public.
Imagine the effect if everything in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and other such places were visible real-time on the web.
And, of course, if the cameras were turned off, we'd have to assume the worst.
It's interesting to consider what effect this might have on the world.
Re:what happened to the old security measure?
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RFID MasterCard
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· Score: 1
A bit of advice that I've read from a number of people who deal with credit fraud and identity theft: If your signature is an unreadable squiggle, just about anyone can successfully forge it. If your signature is legible, it's difficult to forge. Most people have been reading for most of their lives, and they can easily spot tiny differences in handwriting or fonts. So successfully forging a legible signature is a lot more difficult than forging a squiggle.
OTOH, we now have a number of stores that ask you to sign credit receipts on those electronic signature readers. Those stores' computers can forge your signature exactly. So it's only a matter of time until someone with access to these signatures uses them to fake your signature. Eventually this could well end the usefulness of signatures.
Couldn't they disable any system on your network by MAC filtering?
How're they going to do that? The only MAC address they see is that of my linux masq/NATing firewall. Incoming packets from the ISP don't get past that machine without being rewritten.
I wonder if anyone is working on a cheap linux-based "ISP firewall in a box" that's really just the linux iptables stuff? I'd bet there would be a good commercial market for it. Mostly with the corporate world at first, of course, but it should also fit inside something the size of your hand, so it would be fairly practical as a home gateway.
All it takes is for an ISP to come along with no policies restricting what you can connect to the network and everyone with more than one machine or a wireless LAN will switch.
Most people have only one ISP available. And if you try to horn in with your own silly-assed upstart ISP, you'll quickly learn what "gentlemen's agreement" means.
Fact is, in most places outside of big cities, the ISP is a de-facto monopoly, often the same company that provides cable TV and telephone. And the local government will make sure that they keep their monopoly. A lot of people's side income depends on it.
I also agree management has no one to blame but themselves for sticking with Microsoft. They get what they deserve.
Heh, no. You get what they deserve.
It's rarely the management that suffers from such things. They don't work with the computers. They hire people like you to do that. Management makes decisions. And they've arranged things so that you suffer the consequences of those decisions.
Yeah; I realized that as I was typing it. Then, with an evil glint in my eye, I figured I'd just leave it that way, as a troll to see if anyone was actually reading. I guess one person did. So there are at least two of us here that know the difference.
For the stuff that you want to last, maybe it's best to remember Linus Torvalds' advice: You should never make backups; you should make your stuff useful enough that others offer to back it up on their system.
If you do this, then you won't have to worry about what happens to your data when you're gone. It'll be part of humanity's heritage by that time.
Of course, if you want posthumous credit, you'll have to make sure that your name (and other id info like email addresses) are scattered liberally through all that stuff that others are backing up for you.
On the other hand, the last couple years of my mother-in-law's life, as she was dying of the usual effects of decades of smoking, we got her a computer and taught her to use email. She was able to communicate with most of her friends during those years. And when we got to organizing a memorial, it was very handy to have her address book on hand. We sent out the invitations from her computer, and most of the people showed up. We offered them any saved email that they wanted, but none took advantage of it.
A few months later, after determining that there really wasn't anything there that we should be keeping, so I formatted the disk and installed the latest RedHat. It's now my "crash and burn" machine for testing dangerous-looking new things, like a new distro.
I've gotta add some more memory and disk to that box...
... in K-12 education it's not cool to be smart...
To be fair to the school system, we should not that this attitude has little to do with the schools. It pervades American society. There has long been a strong anti-intellectual steak in this society, though the schools try to counter it. But they're fighting a losing battle with the political and commercial system, which mostly prefer a citizenry that knows nothing.
Scientific training has long been a special target of American know-nothings. It's not a recent development. When I was in high school in the 1960's, the biology teachers skipped over the chapter on evolution, and told us clearly that we could read it ourselves, but if they taught anything on that topic, they would probably lose their job. In most of the schools, the only change is that many of the textbooks no longer mention the subject at all. This is because of the power of the religious fundamentalists in American society.
Some years back, Theodosius Dobzhansky made the famous remark that Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Now that the basic biological sciences are starting to make a significant impact on the world, we can expect that America will be left behind, because our schools can't teach the basic concept of the entire subject area. As a result, at the college level we're faced with students who treat biology as a pure memory exercise, since nothing makes any sense to them. The world is just incomprehensible magic, decreed by God.
About the only way it could be worse would be if our engineering schools were forbidden to teach mathematics, and were only permitted to represent numbers with Roman notation. At least the religious folks don't consider Arabic notation a heresy (though there have been those funny incidents in which legislators tried to decree a rational value for pi;-).
It's similar in our favorite topic here. Despite the huge changes that computers and communications have brought to the world, the fact is that most of our schools don't teach these topics at all. Typically "computer literacy" means having watched the teacher use Internet Explorer and Outlook. It's rare for schools to allow anything more than token hands-on computer access, not enough to actually understand anything about the topic. And, of course, the few students to get interested in such topics usually become social outcasts. A kid who becomes knowledgeable in computer communications is invariably labelled a "hacker", and treated as a criminal.
American science and engineering has always strongly depended on immigrants and their children, because those are mostly the people who have a pro-education attitude. We can expect this to continue.
Of course, for us few weirdo nerds and geeks, it has been a pretty good deal. Better than slinging burgers for a living.
But we can expect that, as the rest of the world's education systems continue their improvement, America will probably be left behind. Well, it was fun while it lasted.
OTOH, maybe the rest of the world will commit economic and social suicide, as it did back in the 1940's. Stay tuned...
... good as Thunderbird is at blocking spam and viruses, if it starts deleting people's email...
Is there yet a way to get Thunderbird to steal things like email, newsgroup settings, and address-book data from mozilla? I've experimented with the Tool...Import stuff, but its behavior is totally baffling, and it doesn't seem to have ever nabbed any data from any competitor.
This is on both linux on OSX, where I have stuff in MacMail and MozMail that I'd really like to merge into the bird's files.
There's also the mess caused by the 7 browsers (at last count) on my OSX box. For testing web pages, of course; for real browsing I do mostly use firefox now. It would be really nice if I could somehow find a way for them to share at least the bookmarks. But I suppose that's a wild dream.
I don't think, that there is a big thread for Linux to become a monoculture or proriety. (This would be the thread, Jonathan Schwartz was bashed here a few days ago, right?).
Yeah, you're probably right. The linux landscape is the metaphoric "herd of cats".
But still, we should be aware of the potential problem, and we should discuss it. It's similar to how we shouldn't be too smug about the linux (and *BSD) security question. In both cases, we're muuch better off if we constantly harp on such problems, and point fingers at potential problems.
In the case of the monoculture, there is indeed a real potential for problems in the business arena. The business world has always favored a monoculture, as a way to simplify decision making (which can be costly in both money and careers). In the corporate linux market, RedHat has a strong lead, and there's a serious possibility that they could end up ruling the linux business world.
RedHat deserves a lot of credit and support for what they've done. But "winning" and vanquishing their competition could make them a target for the virus/worm plague that has infected the Windows user community. Granted, writing such software for linux is much more difficult than with Windows, but it's not impossible that a single distro would have an exploitable hole. Then we could see half the banking system or half the credit industry going offline simultaneously.
So we should be preaching to the business folks about the dangers of putting all their corporate eggs in the RedHat basket. We should teach them that part of the reason for all the Windows problems is the monoculture. They should intentionally use different distros, configure them differently, run different DBs, etc. They should look for ways to tailor their systems to their environment, so that they aren't too similar to other computers.
And we should be on the lookout for other such developments. We want a herd of cats, not a flock of sheep, to help prevent the single points of failure that results from widespread use of a single distro. If we make serious sales to the non-tech world, we should fight the widespread desire to have a single "one size fits all" computer that everyone is pressured to buy.
An explanation that I've found very effective over the years:
Way back in the 1980's, I worked on a number of projects that had teams building their software on a number of different kinds of small computer systems. The teams using Sun workstations often got a bit of flak for using a system with a fairly high price/performance ratio. But the Sun-based teams invariably had the last laugh.
What happened was that debugging would frequently lead into parts of "the system", i.e., system libraries and/or the kernel. When we asked the vendor for details of the low-level software, the answer would reduce to "We can't tell you; it's proprietary". The proprietary, closed-source parts of the systems were brick walls that blocked progress.
With Sun (SunOS or Solaris), if we couldn't get an immediate answer from Sun, we would just ask on one of the Sun newsgroups. Usually an answer would come back within hours, most often from an engineer within Sun. Very often, they would include a chunk of the source code as an explanation.
The result was that the teams developing on Suns would get answers to their technical questions, and would have a functioning product long before any of the other teams. There's a real advantage to having a working, marketable product, even if it's more expensive than a competitor that doesn't work yet.
Over the years, this Sun advantage has evaporated. It has slowly become more difficult to get accurate details on the inner working of Solaris and other Sun libraries and tools. They have gone the protective, proprietary route. And their market is slowly being eaten by linux, for exactly the same reasons as above.
It's possible that what is happening inside Sun is that the people who understand this are starting to be heard again. If they can make the innards of their system as open as it was 20 years ago, they stand a good chance of recovering their business.
Alternatively, if the protectionist factions inside Sun prevail, they could also start up a linux-based line. This would be a bit of an expense, but no more so than their switch from SunOS to Solaris (i.e., from BSD to Sys/V) 15 or so years ago. If they did this, a Sun linux would probably wipe out Solaris over a few years, for the same reasons of faster development times on an open system.
The cheapest would be to open-source Solaris. This would get them back into the good graces of software developers, and would restore their earlier status as a system on which you can bring a debugged, reliable product to market very quickly.
And it would probably be better for all of us, since it would avoid the growing threat of a linux "monoculture". The unix part of the industry has always been better off because it isn't a monoculture, and thus isn't susceptible to the virus/worm-type attacks of the "market leader".
But there are those elephants hiding in the middle of the room: patent and copyright. Can Sun legally open-source all of Solaris? If they try it, can they withstand the legal might of an SCO with behind-the-scene Microsoft support? Stay tuned...
A fellow programmer once called C++ a "write-only" language.
Compared to what, exactly? I've programmed in several languages and have found that it is relatively simple and only takes a bit of discipline to write comprehendable code in C++.
It's relatively simple and only takes a bit of discipline to write comprehendable code in most programming languages.
The problem is almost never with the language. It's with the culture of the language's users. I've seen lots of highly-readable C, perl, python, and even VB. Some of the most readable code I've ever seen has been in assembly language. This is because the programmer understood how cryptic assembly code could be, wanted it to be understandable, and took care to make it so.
The reason that C++ has such a bad rap is that a lot of its users seem to think "Hey, C++ is straightforward and self-documenting, so I don't need to bother with making it readable." The result, as in any language, is code that only the original programmer can understand.
I've more than once been hired to work on some C++ code, found it very slow going, and then learned that my predecessors had all resigned because of the incomprehensibility of the code. I don't blame the language, though; I blame the programmers.
Of course, there's a bit of a game in both the perl and C communities of trying to program something in the smallest amount of code. Both languages have annual "Obfuscated" programming contests. This usually leads to code that looks like line noise. But it's intended to be funny, so if you take it as a serious criticism of the language, YHBT.
In cases like DeCCS or the RSA algorithm in only a few lines of code, that's done to make a point. In this case, I suspect that Mr Valenti got the point. And, for those who still miss it, the point is that it's absurd to try to legally "protect" something that can be expressed in such a small piece of code. Just like it's absurd to try to own an English phrase like "fair and balanced".
I have one of those "munition" t-shirts with the RSA algorithm written in four lines of perl. (And one of those lines is a comment.;-) It makes the point quite well. And it's fun to try to decrypt the code itself...
What about the moon base that google is reportedly building?;-)
(Actually, this never did make much sense to me. The moon is about 1.3 light seconds from our planet, so the round trip time plus local network time would result in searches taking a minumum of 3 sec, and usually a lot longer. This would seriously impact their response time. I mean, would you want to use a search engine that took over 3 seconds to search N gazillion pages?)
Hmmm... I followed that link to search for Tetris, and I couldn't see anything like this. I got ten links to sites with the source. The first offered to sell it to me (for 6 or 7 dollars). The second (at MIT) has the source in java for download. I followed a couple of others, and downloaded source in several languages. Then I deleted them, because I don't really want Tetris. There was no mention of DMCA anywhere that I can see.
This has me puzzled. Why is everyone discussing this suppression of links, when all I get is links to the things that are supposed to be suppressed? Do I have some magical touch that undoes the suppression?
Maybe google figured out somehow that I wouldn't want to put Tetris on my machine, and I wouldn't bother keeping the source around to give to others, so it gave me a good link that it knew I wouldn't use? If that's what they do, I'm truly impressed.
Or maybe the machine with the "friendly information" is slashdotted, google has figured this out, so instead sends me to the source sites instead. That would be even more impressive.
I tried this with both mozilla and firefox, and neither got a page with the letters "DMCA" anywhere. The bottom of the page doesn't seem to have any links except the usual google boilerplate links. Other replies say something about a Chilling Effects Clearinghouse link, but I don't see anything like that, either.
What might I be doing wrong.
Oh, also, following this link seems to have done something that really hosed both mozilla and firefox. They became only semi-functional, unable to follow links or find strings in the text. The ^F "find" window didn't work at all, and couldn't be dismissed. Also, neither was able to raise their windows to the top of the stack. I had to kill them both and restart them to get them working again.
This was on OSX. Maybe I'll try in on linux and see what happens. I'm curious to see this thing that google has done, but I it doesn't seem to work at all with mozilla or firefox on OSX.
If only they were smart enough to fix it and do right in the future.
I suspect that MS has plenty of people who are that smart. But why should they? They're doing wonderfully well with their current strategy. The market is rewarding them very well for their current products. By every measure that means anything in the economic or business world, they are doing everything exactly right.
I'd like to know why everything is my fault as an American.
Well, from my experience in a few other countries, and from many other reports by many other people in many other countries, this really isn't true at all. It's true that some people blame you (and me) for the actions of the American government. But those are the radical, political extremists.
Most of the people in the world don't blame Russians for the actions of the Russian government. They don't blame Indians for the actions of the Indian government. They don't blame Chileans for the actions of the Chilean government. And most people can be quite friendly to visiting Americans while complaining loudly about the American government.
Fact is, even in the most democratic countries, it makes no sense at all to blame all the citizens for the government's actions. And almost everyone in the world understands this quite well.
Yeah, there will be people explaining why it's all your fault. But those are the extremists.
Of course, if someone's shooting at you, none of this much matters at the moment.
You'll need javascript turned on to use this. It tells me that I'm getting a bit over 2 Mbytes / sec after installing the upgrade. This is about the same number as before. However, the reported signal level is noticeably lower than before. So it's likely that the signal level doesn't mean the same thing as before.
Now to carry the PB outside and see what happens...
Anyone know of other good network speed tests?
One problem with the above site (and other such things that I've seen) is that the real meaning of their numbers isn't always obvious. They're transferring an unspecified chunk of data from an unspecified remote site and doing some sort of calculation. How this translates into numbers for other apps is a mystery.
One funny thing is that I've done this test a few times from both mozilla and firefox, and firefox regularly comes back with numbers about 10% higher than mozilla.
Re:Linux spreads it's wings, but not to the Deskto
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Linux Spreads its Wings
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· Score: 2, Insightful
But wouldn't taking control away from the user be the goal of such a distro?
Maybe, maybe not. I'm reminded of an observation I've read about the early days of unix. At the time (early 70's), it was common practice in the computer biz to have special-purpose install/config tools for every package, and their data was usually in a secret binary format. Every package had its own install/config tool, and if anything went wrong, you often couldn't fix it (because the config tool died while reading the files). One of the major technical advances of unix was that nearly everything was configured with files that could be edited with any editor. A major point was that the config data was also readable by humans. This made the system usable without long months or years of classes or apprenticeship. It also meant that, if the software shot itself in the foot, you could get in and fix the problem without a major reinstall.
If a linux distro takes care of all the configuration with a nice GUI, and puts all that data into plain-text files that can be read and edited, then control isn't taken away from the users. You just need to also tell them "To tell this app to reread its config files, type...."
For example, the netscape/mozilla browsers have always had a fancy GUI tool (the browser) to do all their configuration. But I've occasionally edited the bookmarks.html file and added or deleted things by hand, mostly to copy bookmarks from another machine. When I save the file, after a minute or three a little popup pops up telling me that "Bookmarks have changed on the disk" and do I want to reread them? I hit the obvious button, and the browser's bookmarks are changed. (It's easy; try it.;-)
This is how it should be done. Novices can use the GUI; an expert can edit the configuration directly. So if you do it that way, you can be nice and friendly to the novices, while allowing the experts to do things their own way.
Another nice example is the apache web server. It comes pre-configured on a lot of distros. On this Mac, the web server was installed very nicely during initial setup. But you can also edit httpd.conf (and apache comes with full docs for this). Then you run "apachectl restart", and your changes are loaded into all the running httpd processes. It's very nice for both novices and expert webmasters.
I've written a lot of apps that do this sort of thing. It's not at all difficult to program. And it's not some sort of sophisticated, radical approach. It has been part of the unix design philosophy from the start.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and a related topic is indexing files that are in some specialized format.
I run a search site that only indexes a few hundred other sites and around 170,000 files (today). What the files contain doesn't matter here. What's significant is that the data, while being (usually) plain ascii text, is not in any human language. If you saw it and didn't know the subject area, you wouldn't be able to make sense of it. It's very useful to a few thousand users, and of no interest whatsoever to anyone else.
One thing that could be feasible with an open-source search project is to discuss ways in which specialized search engine like mine can be incorporated. The data that I index can be related to several other kinds of online data that are in turn indexed by others. But my code doesn't make the connection, and neither do the search engines for the related types of data.
This strikes me as a significant problem that the big guys can't much work on (yet). And, like "orphan" drugs, they probably won't ever find it worthwhile to work on most kinds of data that only exist in a few thousand files.
But if we could define a way to interface search engines so that they can recognize each other and refer queries to each other, then these specialized data formats could be usefully searched and indexed.
Sounds worthwhile to me. I wonder if I could find someone to pay me a salary while I worked on it?
Heh, heh. Good point. I do like to use 2- and 3-letter names in perl, but the real perl hackers tend to disparage my code as readable.
Back in the 70's, I learned a language (whose name I've forgotten) whose syntax was entirely in the punctuation. You could use letters however you liked, with an interesting rule: Only upper-case letters were noticed by the compiler. Lower-case letters were stripped out (except inside quoted strings).
This had two interesting effects. One was that the language didn't need a comment syntax, since lower-case comments could be used anywhere outside of quotes. The other was that you could use names in any language, and insert "keyword" tokens anywhere by making them lower case. Typical variable names were mixed case, but you had to take care to make the upper-case letters unique in every name, because those were the only letters that counted.
I remember seeing "translations" of programs that were very readable in several languages. One example was presented in English, German and Hawaiian. Today, I suppose we'd see examples in languages from LOTR or Star Trek. Part of the fun of the language was that you could use the natural inflections in names, in lower case, so you could write things like plurals and tenses so they read naturally.
Or you could avoid lower-case letters and get code that looked like line noise.
It did occur to me once that you could almost make this work with C. For example, (...){...}{...} would be an if-then-else construct. You could write it "if (...) then {...} else {...} if you like. Or you could write it "bip (...) qix {...} glor {...} fow" if that makes more sense to you. Strip out the lower-case letters, and they're both the same. But to make it really work, you need to introduce more semicolons, and you need to somewhat modify other parts of the punctuation.
Does anyone remember the name of that language?
Well, if you want to get so nit picky about it, knowledge and information aren't interchangable either.
I'm often reminded of a comment by the instructor in a CompSci class I took back in the 60's, when there were still IBM punch cards easily on hand. He held up two of them, one with lots of holes punched out, and the other one without any holes. He commented that both contain exactly the same amount of "information". 960 bits of information, to be precise.
This did a lot to get across to the class just what "information" really means. And he didn't even have to make the distinction between true and false information, which is something at a higher level.
Of course, many people use the term "knowledge" when they mean "belief", and don't distinguish those terms, either. Sometimes this is from ignorance; sometimes the confusion qualifies as malice aforethought.
A few pictures change everything ... the military is going to ban cameras.
Probably true. But I've noticed that there is a growing suggestion in a lot of the world, including here in the US: Require cameras.
There are serious discussions in several US states and a number of other countries of the idea that all interactions of prisoners with police or military questioners should be videotaped. Part of the idea is that anything like a confession that isn't fully taped is considered to be coerced.
It doesn't take a lot of thought to come up with the further suggestion: Prisoners should be watched by web cams. This is getting to be quite feasible now. This would partially overcome the problems with videotapes in government vaults, unavailable to the public.
Imagine the effect if everything in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and other such places were visible real-time on the web.
And, of course, if the cameras were turned off, we'd have to assume the worst.
It's interesting to consider what effect this might have on the world.
A bit of advice that I've read from a number of people who deal with credit fraud and identity theft: If your signature is an unreadable squiggle, just about anyone can successfully forge it. If your signature is legible, it's difficult to forge. Most people have been reading for most of their lives, and they can easily spot tiny differences in handwriting or fonts. So successfully forging a legible signature is a lot more difficult than forging a squiggle.
OTOH, we now have a number of stores that ask you to sign credit receipts on those electronic signature readers. Those stores' computers can forge your signature exactly. So it's only a matter of time until someone with access to these signatures uses them to fake your signature. Eventually this could well end the usefulness of signatures.
Couldn't they disable any system on your network by MAC filtering?
How're they going to do that? The only MAC address they see is that of my linux masq/NATing firewall. Incoming packets from the ISP don't get past that machine without being rewritten.
I wonder if anyone is working on a cheap linux-based "ISP firewall in a box" that's really just the linux iptables stuff? I'd bet there would be a good commercial market for it. Mostly with the corporate world at first, of course, but it should also fit inside something the size of your hand, so it would be fairly practical as a home gateway.
All it takes is for an ISP to come along with no policies restricting what you can connect to the network and everyone with more than one machine or a wireless LAN will switch.
;-)
Most people have only one ISP available. And if you try to horn in with your own silly-assed upstart ISP, you'll quickly learn what "gentlemen's agreement" means.
Fact is, in most places outside of big cities, the ISP is a de-facto monopoly, often the same company that provides cable TV and telephone. And the local government will make sure that they keep their monopoly. A lot of people's side income depends on it.
(What, me cynical?
I also agree management has no one to blame but themselves for sticking with Microsoft. They get what they deserve.
;-)
Heh, no. You get what they deserve.
It's rarely the management that suffers from such things. They don't work with the computers. They hire people like you to do that. Management makes decisions. And they've arranged things so that you suffer the consequences of those decisions.
(What, me cynical?
Yeah; I realized that as I was typing it. Then, with an evil glint in my eye, I figured I'd just leave it that way, as a troll to see if anyone was actually reading. I guess one person did. So there are at least two of us here that know the difference.
literally: (adj) figuratively
... I couldn't find any of my passwords there. Not even the ones that were machine generated.
;-)
It was especially disappointed that the numeric section didn't include 17 or 42. Or 1742, for that matter. Where are they getting their lists.
And "mrroot" wasn't there, either. (A shout-out to my old Project Athena cohort.
For the stuff that you want to last, maybe it's best to remember Linus Torvalds' advice: You should never make backups; you should make your stuff useful enough that others offer to back it up on their system.
If you do this, then you won't have to worry about what happens to your data when you're gone. It'll be part of humanity's heritage by that time.
Of course, if you want posthumous credit, you'll have to make sure that your name (and other id info like email addresses) are scattered liberally through all that stuff that others are backing up for you.
On the other hand, the last couple years of my mother-in-law's life, as she was dying of the usual effects of decades of smoking, we got her a computer and taught her to use email. She was able to communicate with most of her friends during those years. And when we got to organizing a memorial, it was very handy to have her address book on hand. We sent out the invitations from her computer, and most of the people showed up. We offered them any saved email that they wanted, but none took advantage of it.
...
A few months later, after determining that there really wasn't anything there that we should be keeping, so I formatted the disk and installed the latest RedHat. It's now my "crash and burn" machine for testing dangerous-looking new things, like a new distro.
I've gotta add some more memory and disk to that box
... in K-12 education it's not cool to be smart ...
;-).
...
To be fair to the school system, we should not that this attitude has little to do with the schools. It pervades American society. There has long been a strong anti-intellectual steak in this society, though the schools try to counter it. But they're fighting a losing battle with the political and commercial system, which mostly prefer a citizenry that knows nothing.
Scientific training has long been a special target of American know-nothings. It's not a recent development. When I was in high school in the 1960's, the biology teachers skipped over the chapter on evolution, and told us clearly that we could read it ourselves, but if they taught anything on that topic, they would probably lose their job. In most of the schools, the only change is that many of the textbooks no longer mention the subject at all. This is because of the power of the religious fundamentalists in American society.
Some years back, Theodosius Dobzhansky made the famous remark that Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Now that the basic biological sciences are starting to make a significant impact on the world, we can expect that America will be left behind, because our schools can't teach the basic concept of the entire subject area. As a result, at the college level we're faced with students who treat biology as a pure memory exercise, since nothing makes any sense to them. The world is just incomprehensible magic, decreed by God.
About the only way it could be worse would be if our engineering schools were forbidden to teach mathematics, and were only permitted to represent numbers with Roman notation. At least the religious folks don't consider Arabic notation a heresy (though there have been those funny incidents in which legislators tried to decree a rational value for pi
It's similar in our favorite topic here. Despite the huge changes that computers and communications have brought to the world, the fact is that most of our schools don't teach these topics at all. Typically "computer literacy" means having watched the teacher use Internet Explorer and Outlook. It's rare for schools to allow anything more than token hands-on computer access, not enough to actually understand anything about the topic. And, of course, the few students to get interested in such topics usually become social outcasts. A kid who becomes knowledgeable in computer communications is invariably labelled a "hacker", and treated as a criminal.
American science and engineering has always strongly depended on immigrants and their children, because those are mostly the people who have a pro-education attitude. We can expect this to continue.
Of course, for us few weirdo nerds and geeks, it has been a pretty good deal. Better than slinging burgers for a living.
But we can expect that, as the rest of the world's education systems continue their improvement, America will probably be left behind. Well, it was fun while it lasted.
OTOH, maybe the rest of the world will commit economic and social suicide, as it did back in the 1940's. Stay tuned
... good as Thunderbird is at blocking spam and viruses, if it starts deleting people's email ...
Is there yet a way to get Thunderbird to steal things like email, newsgroup settings, and address-book data from mozilla? I've experimented with the Tool...Import stuff, but its behavior is totally baffling, and it doesn't seem to have ever nabbed any data from any competitor.
This is on both linux on OSX, where I have stuff in MacMail and MozMail that I'd really like to merge into the bird's files.
There's also the mess caused by the 7 browsers (at last count) on my OSX box. For testing web pages, of course; for real browsing I do mostly use firefox now. It would be really nice if I could somehow find a way for them to share at least the bookmarks. But I suppose that's a wild dream.
I don't think, that there is a big thread for Linux to become a monoculture or proriety. (This would be the thread, Jonathan Schwartz was bashed here a few days ago, right?).
Yeah, you're probably right. The linux landscape is the metaphoric "herd of cats".
But still, we should be aware of the potential problem, and we should discuss it. It's similar to how we shouldn't be too smug about the linux (and *BSD) security question. In both cases, we're muuch better off if we constantly harp on such problems, and point fingers at potential problems.
In the case of the monoculture, there is indeed a real potential for problems in the business arena. The business world has always favored a monoculture, as a way to simplify decision making (which can be costly in both money and careers). In the corporate linux market, RedHat has a strong lead, and there's a serious possibility that they could end up ruling the linux business world.
RedHat deserves a lot of credit and support for what they've done. But "winning" and vanquishing their competition could make them a target for the virus/worm plague that has infected the Windows user community. Granted, writing such software for linux is much more difficult than with Windows, but it's not impossible that a single distro would have an exploitable hole. Then we could see half the banking system or half the credit industry going offline simultaneously.
So we should be preaching to the business folks about the dangers of putting all their corporate eggs in the RedHat basket. We should teach them that part of the reason for all the Windows problems is the monoculture. They should intentionally use different distros, configure them differently, run different DBs, etc. They should look for ways to tailor their systems to their environment, so that they aren't too similar to other computers.
And we should be on the lookout for other such developments. We want a herd of cats, not a flock of sheep, to help prevent the single points of failure that results from widespread use of a single distro. If we make serious sales to the non-tech world, we should fight the widespread desire to have a single "one size fits all" computer that everyone is pressured to buy.
An explanation that I've found very effective over the years:
...
Way back in the 1980's, I worked on a number of projects that had teams building their software on a number of different kinds of small computer systems. The teams using Sun workstations often got a bit of flak for using a system with a fairly high price/performance ratio. But the Sun-based teams invariably had the last laugh.
What happened was that debugging would frequently lead into parts of "the system", i.e., system libraries and/or the kernel. When we asked the vendor for details of the low-level software, the answer would reduce to "We can't tell you; it's proprietary". The proprietary, closed-source parts of the systems were brick walls that blocked progress.
With Sun (SunOS or Solaris), if we couldn't get an immediate answer from Sun, we would just ask on one of the Sun newsgroups. Usually an answer would come back within hours, most often from an engineer within Sun. Very often, they would include a chunk of the source code as an explanation.
The result was that the teams developing on Suns would get answers to their technical questions, and would have a functioning product long before any of the other teams. There's a real advantage to having a working, marketable product, even if it's more expensive than a competitor that doesn't work yet.
Over the years, this Sun advantage has evaporated. It has slowly become more difficult to get accurate details on the inner working of Solaris and other Sun libraries and tools. They have gone the protective, proprietary route. And their market is slowly being eaten by linux, for exactly the same reasons as above.
It's possible that what is happening inside Sun is that the people who understand this are starting to be heard again. If they can make the innards of their system as open as it was 20 years ago, they stand a good chance of recovering their business.
Alternatively, if the protectionist factions inside Sun prevail, they could also start up a linux-based line. This would be a bit of an expense, but no more so than their switch from SunOS to Solaris (i.e., from BSD to Sys/V) 15 or so years ago. If they did this, a Sun linux would probably wipe out Solaris over a few years, for the same reasons of faster development times on an open system.
The cheapest would be to open-source Solaris. This would get them back into the good graces of software developers, and would restore their earlier status as a system on which you can bring a debugged, reliable product to market very quickly.
And it would probably be better for all of us, since it would avoid the growing threat of a linux "monoculture". The unix part of the industry has always been better off because it isn't a monoculture, and thus isn't susceptible to the virus/worm-type attacks of the "market leader".
But there are those elephants hiding in the middle of the room: patent and copyright. Can Sun legally open-source all of Solaris? If they try it, can they withstand the legal might of an SCO with behind-the-scene Microsoft support? Stay tuned
Compared to what, exactly? I've programmed in several languages and have found that it is relatively simple and only takes a bit of discipline to write comprehendable code in C++.
It's relatively simple and only takes a bit of discipline to write comprehendable code in most programming languages.
The problem is almost never with the language. It's with the culture of the language's users. I've seen lots of highly-readable C, perl, python, and even VB. Some of the most readable code I've ever seen has been in assembly language. This is because the programmer understood how cryptic assembly code could be, wanted it to be understandable, and took care to make it so.
The reason that C++ has such a bad rap is that a lot of its users seem to think "Hey, C++ is straightforward and self-documenting, so I don't need to bother with making it readable." The result, as in any language, is code that only the original programmer can understand.
I've more than once been hired to work on some C++ code, found it very slow going, and then learned that my predecessors had all resigned because of the incomprehensibility of the code. I don't blame the language, though; I blame the programmers.
Of course, there's a bit of a game in both the perl and C communities of trying to program something in the smallest amount of code. Both languages have annual "Obfuscated" programming contests. This usually leads to code that looks like line noise. But it's intended to be funny, so if you take it as a serious criticism of the language, YHBT.
In cases like DeCCS or the RSA algorithm in only a few lines of code, that's done to make a point. In this case, I suspect that Mr Valenti got the point. And, for those who still miss it, the point is that it's absurd to try to legally "protect" something that can be expressed in such a small piece of code. Just like it's absurd to try to own an English phrase like "fair and balanced".
I have one of those "munition" t-shirts with the RSA algorithm written in four lines of perl. (And one of those lines is a comment.
What about the moon base that google is reportedly building? ;-)
(Actually, this never did make much sense to me. The moon is about 1.3 light seconds from our planet, so the round trip time plus local network time would result in searches taking a minumum of 3 sec, and usually a lot longer. This would seriously impact their response time. I mean, would you want to use a search engine that took over 3 seconds to search N gazillion pages?)
Hmmm ... I followed that link to search for Tetris, and I couldn't see anything like this. I got ten links to sites with the source. The first offered to sell it to me (for 6 or 7 dollars). The second (at MIT) has the source in java for download. I followed a couple of others, and downloaded source in several languages. Then I deleted them, because I don't really want Tetris. There was no mention of DMCA anywhere that I can see.
This has me puzzled. Why is everyone discussing this suppression of links, when all I get is links to the things that are supposed to be suppressed? Do I have some magical touch that undoes the suppression?
Maybe google figured out somehow that I wouldn't want to put Tetris on my machine, and I wouldn't bother keeping the source around to give to others, so it gave me a good link that it knew I wouldn't use? If that's what they do, I'm truly impressed.
Or maybe the machine with the "friendly information" is slashdotted, google has figured this out, so instead sends me to the source sites instead. That would be even more impressive.
I tried this with both mozilla and firefox, and neither got a page with the letters "DMCA" anywhere. The bottom of the page doesn't seem to have any links except the usual google boilerplate links. Other replies say something about a Chilling Effects Clearinghouse link, but I don't see anything like that, either.
What might I be doing wrong.
Oh, also, following this link seems to have done something that really hosed both mozilla and firefox. They became only semi-functional, unable to follow links or find strings in the text. The ^F "find" window didn't work at all, and couldn't be dismissed. Also, neither was able to raise their windows to the top of the stack. I had to kill them both and restart them to get them working again.
This was on OSX. Maybe I'll try in on linux and see what happens. I'm curious to see this thing that google has done, but I it doesn't seem to work at all with mozilla or firefox on OSX.
If only they were smart enough to fix it and do right in the future.
I suspect that MS has plenty of people who are that smart. But why should they? They're doing wonderfully well with their current strategy. The market is rewarding them very well for their current products. By every measure that means anything in the economic or business world, they are doing everything exactly right.
I'd like to know why everything is my fault as an American.
Well, from my experience in a few other countries, and from many other reports by many other people in many other countries, this really isn't true at all. It's true that some people blame you (and me) for the actions of the American government. But those are the radical, political extremists.
Most of the people in the world don't blame Russians for the actions of the Russian government. They don't blame Indians for the actions of the Indian government. They don't blame Chileans for the actions of the Chilean government. And most people can be quite friendly to visiting Americans while complaining loudly about the American government.
Fact is, even in the most democratic countries, it makes no sense at all to blame all the citizens for the government's actions. And almost everyone in the world understands this quite well.
Yeah, there will be people explaining why it's all your fault. But those are the extremists.
Of course, if someone's shooting at you, none of this much matters at the moment.
Here's a URL that I stumbled across a while back:
...
http://www.speedtest.coxinet.net/
You'll need javascript turned on to use this. It tells me that I'm getting a bit over 2 Mbytes / sec after installing the upgrade. This is about the same number as before. However, the reported signal level is noticeably lower than before. So it's likely that the signal level doesn't mean the same thing as before.
Now to carry the PB outside and see what happens
Anyone know of other good network speed tests?
One problem with the above site (and other such things that I've seen) is that the real meaning of their numbers isn't always obvious. They're transferring an unspecified chunk of data from an unspecified remote site and doing some sort of calculation. How this translates into numbers for other apps is a mystery.
One funny thing is that I've done this test a few times from both mozilla and firefox, and firefox regularly comes back with numbers about 10% higher than mozilla.
But wouldn't taking control away from the user be the goal of such a distro?
...."
;-)
Maybe, maybe not. I'm reminded of an observation I've read about the early days of unix. At the time (early 70's), it was common practice in the computer biz to have special-purpose install/config tools for every package, and their data was usually in a secret binary format. Every package had its own install/config tool, and if anything went wrong, you often couldn't fix it (because the config tool died while reading the files). One of the major technical advances of unix was that nearly everything was configured with files that could be edited with any editor. A major point was that the config data was also readable by humans. This made the system usable without long months or years of classes or apprenticeship. It also meant that, if the software shot itself in the foot, you could get in and fix the problem without a major reinstall.
If a linux distro takes care of all the configuration with a nice GUI, and puts all that data into plain-text files that can be read and edited, then control isn't taken away from the users. You just need to also tell them "To tell this app to reread its config files, type
For example, the netscape/mozilla browsers have always had a fancy GUI tool (the browser) to do all their configuration. But I've occasionally edited the bookmarks.html file and added or deleted things by hand, mostly to copy bookmarks from another machine. When I save the file, after a minute or three a little popup pops up telling me that "Bookmarks have changed on the disk" and do I want to reread them? I hit the obvious button, and the browser's bookmarks are changed. (It's easy; try it.
This is how it should be done. Novices can use the GUI; an expert can edit the configuration directly. So if you do it that way, you can be nice and friendly to the novices, while allowing the experts to do things their own way.
Another nice example is the apache web server. It comes pre-configured on a lot of distros. On this Mac, the web server was installed very nicely during initial setup. But you can also edit httpd.conf (and apache comes with full docs for this). Then you run "apachectl restart", and your changes are loaded into all the running httpd processes. It's very nice for both novices and expert webmasters.
I've written a lot of apps that do this sort of thing. It's not at all difficult to program. And it's not some sort of sophisticated, radical approach. It has been part of the unix design philosophy from the start.