He's just trying to clear a nice approach eliptical for the mothership to come down and enslave mankind. Don't listen to a word of it. Space junk makes intraorbital navigation hazardous, and that hazard is our best unnatural defense against the alien overlords.
Yup. It's a fiat currency in a global economy. Early American history similar currencies, in the several states, guaranteed by a variety of banks. When the markets and commerce matured, generally speaking, it caused problems. It was useful before we established a single currency, though. Since I don't quite think we're ready for the "one world" currency yet, this works as a start up, so long as it doesn't become a widespread competitor to traditional money.
Only thing that bugs me is the guarantor of the currency. Microsoft is not a bank, and if they were a bank it would be illegal for them to hold on to your spare change.
There should be a law requiring them to cut you a check for the balance of your account at the current exchange rate, but only in cases where a member permanently terminated their account.
I'll see your Microsoft Points, and raise you my war chest of Confederate dollars. Given entirely imaginable conditions, they're fungible.
There is a reason we established a unit of currency valid "for all debts public and private." Our "Legal Tender" used to be redeemable for gold, but never mind. Making people convert universal US$ into Disney Dollars, or Target gift cards, or Wii Points just fragments trade, and clogs commerce. Right now, it's just for hobby games, but if it spreads to more vital areas of the economy, it doesn't bode well. People suddenly start engaging in arbitrage, as we saw in the gift card markets, and then valuation becomes volatile. Money's greatest advantage, beyond its being legal tender, is that it is generally not volatile. When it is, it is seen as a fiscal management failure.
Or, for another example, just ask anyone who's on Food Stamps, when what they needed was bus fare to get to their job interview.
Screw it. Let's see them try to trademark a dotted quad, or an IPv6 unicast addy. Too much to memorize? Most of us can run our own damned domain server on our LAN, and bypass this ICANNdy assed scheme. Hell, I'll hard code stuff into my hosts file if I have to. Or use a third party DNS, preferably with non-ICANN tlds, that are stable and not liable to being boarded by cutlass wielding trademark lawyers. (Arrr!)
If they wreck it, we can fork DNS. We can even ignore it. The Internet, so long as it isn't redesigned to behave otherwise, will still carry the traffic. To date, it doesn't really use domain names.
ICANN has already lost most of its relevance via Google, which is what most people use, every time they want to go to a site. People don't even use bookmarks any more. Making the.net TLD unstable, and unusable, sounds like a great first step, for ICANN to walk the plank.
I choose to blame this guy. It's about as accurate as targeting an umbrella group alias over a text file that provides no real identifying intelligence, and he's far more entertaining. IMHO, I would place this sort of thing under the heading of "fiddling while Rome burns." Sony needs to be reacquainted with the term FAIL, then they need to demonstrate that they know why they're a fail whale, and that they will fix whatever the hell went so desperately wrong with their information security.
Microsoft is a major player in the National Business Park, so it comes as no surprise that the "Windows" section reads like MS marketing copy.
In the document, they are seriously recommending that everyone update to Office 2007, at a minimum, with no mention of alternatives (Libre, OOO) whatsoever.
*sigh* Oh well, it's the best government money can buy.
Though I can't imagine ISPs are going to be happy about the NSA's frank assessment that their DNS servers "typically don't provide enhanced security services," and that home users should be using a third-party DNS, including open source.
(The cynic in me also wonders if they're trying to strong-arm the major ISPs into accepting some sort of "enhanced" DNS security package from the NSA. The best way to control Internet users, if they don't know about dotted quads (or IPv6 addresses), is to have backdoor control of DNS. If you can't reach the information, it doesn't exist.)
True. And some people believe there is a God, which is even less likely, and whose proof is less profitable to mankind. I hope for more.
I hope we're all proven utterly m-fing wrong, about many things, because despite everything we know and all that we can prove, the world is a mess. That is my God. God is the possibility of discovery. And if there is an actual God, He is clearly wrong on purpose, and enjoys the same things I do.
I want my surprises where they aren't expected to happen. It's fun, and entertaining, and once we figure out where we went wrong, always worth its weight in gold.
I don't want to calculate pi out to a uselessly precise decimal place because we just want to see the next, very limited (0 through 9) "surprise" that we know is coming.
So there we go folks: irony. Sorry if I originally sounded clueless, or now sound too condescending. It was a joke, guys, not a real, literal hope and wish.
I think it would be tremendously funny to find out, at some suitably ridiculous decimal place, that all subsequent places are zero repeating. It would utterly break some people's heads to find out that the number is only "very, very particular," rather than "irrational."
It is the one hope that holds my interest when I read about crunching these numbers.
Not to worry. Those dollars are coming right back to you good citizens. As a loan, to pay for our Medicare. It's all part of the circle of incompetence.
Bookmark this story, folks. Any time you hear someone talking about "innovation," this is what actual innovation looks like. Both Nintendo, for inventing new forms of input devs, and the enterprising people that found a use for that input device that was not indicated by its makers.
Innovation is simple. Turning off one's preconceptions to get to that point is hard. Turning off the usual legal battles that generally inhibit it, even harder.
The new version more explicitly emphasizes that the private sector will drive forward the trusted ID market, with government playing a coordinating role, administration officials said.
In other words, it's a Mussolini-style Fascism model.
Dead on with Mussolini. I think the concept you're looking for is corporatism. With this model of "trust," most members of the population are toes of the foot, and a select few us us get to be the big toe. Shakespeare made this joke about the body politic in Coriolanus, in fact. Disempowerment and control of "the rabble" is at least as old as him.
It is also an horrendous misapplication and misapprehension of what actually produces real trust, which is a functional, empowered community. My 2 cents, of course.
I misread this as "Why Google Should Bury the Music Industry," though I'm not sure there's a functional difference when you think through the consequences. Everything the labels do, which is 100% promotion for way too much overhead, Google could do cheaper, for less overhead, and give artists an actual fair shake.
If they do, though, I want them broken up into separate competing units. Google becoming everything is a real problem, whether they're evil or not.
Thank you so much for that wrap up. I have nearly the exact same concerns.
Add to it:
Profound lack of real optimistic outlook, and an unrealistic view of our current circumstances (mostly false optimism) -- Sure, we're in the worst rut since the Great Depression, but we need to put away the long knives. It seems like the outlook of everyone (not individuals, necessarily, but organizations) is to carve away the largest portion of what is presumed to be a limited resource. American industry has an outlook more akin to Mercantilism, where commerce is a zero-sum game. Workers/unions are terrified of making any sacrifice and are holding out for packages that were reasonable in a time of unprecedented growth, but hang like a millstone around the neck of everyone's prosperity in the current depression. To hell with who caused it, our various collective entities, without exception, are acting like a bunch of thieves because they are convinced that this is the last of what this nation has to offer, and that it's time to carve up the pie. Talk to individuals, and people are more optimistic. Deal with an organization, and its lawyers are already venue shopping for the most favorable court. The hell with arbitration and compromise, we're going to court or it's being decided by executive fiat.
And the more we argue, the more ordinary commerce and negotiations break down, the more we're asking for dictatorship.
I think it would be more productive to realize that this isn't the end, and if it is, no amount of bullying one another is going to save us. We either hang together or separately. Everyone will need to sacrifice, and we need start working with whatever good ideas we have left, when we, to paraphrase John Lovell, "Figure out what we've got on this thing that still works." Right now, America is in that broken Apollo 13 spacecraft, but amazingly most everyone is just doing the same things as if nothing is wrong with the ship, no one's worried about skipping off the atmosphere or even checking the CO2 gauge, and while we do this we're arguing about who deserves credit for the Apollo 11 mission, and whether we can afford Apollo 14. As if any of that matters if we don't get home.
Um, hell folks, we need to get this craft back to earth. That's a fact. We should be optimistic about our future, and not optimistic about the busted up ship, and plan to survive this. Instead, we are noisily discussing whether we should eat the Commander or the CM Pilot, lacking the insight to see that cannibalism is both unnecessary and unhelpful to that aim. We need to land.
It's go time. This is a great country. We need to work together at least until the crisis is over. At least until unemployment is single digits. This is how we got through the first Great Depression. We can get through this, but not if we keep glorifying a ship that just won't get us to the moon anymore.
Amazing. I had no idea, and yesterday I bought a 1TB external drive for backups. I'm looking at the Staples receipt as I type this.
What an astonishing coincidence.
As an April Fool's joke, I guess, Windows 7 backup decided to make a 500GB backup, with system image, of a computer that has only 358GB of actual used HD space. Can anyone recommend me a backup program that isn't complete skite? Or maybe just some real documentation for Windows Backup, so it doesn't make a backup that's 40% larger than my total data?
email address, date of birth, address or phone number
So if I divulged "mythrowawayaddress@hotmail.com" I'm sharing highly personal information? How do you determine if an email is actually "highly personal?" Even if it's an ISP hosted address it could be a throwaway, and leads nowhere but a server. To a lesser extent, same goes for a phone number. Some people actually chuck a pre-paid in the garbage on a regular basis, you know. It's easy to have a throwaway phone number.
What qualifies as "highly personal" shouldn't be based on a standard set in 1994. The times have changed.
In all those cases, you've done a thorough RCA, and you know that a reboot is a necessary part of the procedure, or is part of your RCA/auditing. (Checking that your services launch properly for disaster recovery purposes is a great example). IMO, you have met one bare minimum requirement for real competency as an admin. Not everyone who calls himself an "admin" meets that bar, however.
All I got from the article was "don't reboot until you've done an RCA and a reboot is actually indicated, either as part of the diagnostic process, or because it is necessary."
I don't understand why you're calling him a fool for giving sound, beginner advice. My reaction to the article was, "duh." I'm guessing he just had space to fill, and nothing interesting to write. If I were to get angry at anyone, it's whomever in the Firehose thought this was a suitable article for readers of Slashdot.
What is up with folks tagging this as a "troll?" Strawman? Really? There isn't a debate here, guys. It is not rhetoric. There is no strawman.
This article is sound advice. He's basically saying don't do a reboot without doing an RCA first. If you need to reboot as part of your root cause analysis, fine, but for god sakes don't just shut down everything until you know why, that you need to, and whether it's going to come back up.
This is good advice for Windows sysadmins too. Period. But Windows was not its focus. *nix was. This is because *nix is a bit more compliant to letting root completely hose the file system, on the fly (his "runaway script" example), and still be able to run.
IMO, it was written as a caution to new *nix admins, possibly migrating from a Windows environment, period. RTFA, and take it at face value. You'll learn something if you're a novice to *nix.
Slashdot Mirror
He's just trying to clear a nice approach eliptical for the mothership to come down and enslave mankind. Don't listen to a word of it. Space junk makes intraorbital navigation hazardous, and that hazard is our best unnatural defense against the alien overlords.
--
Toro
Which I for one do not welcome!
Yup. It's a fiat currency in a global economy. Early American history similar currencies, in the several states, guaranteed by a variety of banks. When the markets and commerce matured, generally speaking, it caused problems. It was useful before we established a single currency, though. Since I don't quite think we're ready for the "one world" currency yet, this works as a start up, so long as it doesn't become a widespread competitor to traditional money.
Only thing that bugs me is the guarantor of the currency. Microsoft is not a bank, and if they were a bank it would be illegal for them to hold on to your spare change.
There should be a law requiring them to cut you a check for the balance of your account at the current exchange rate, but only in cases where a member permanently terminated their account.
--
Toro
I'll see your Microsoft Points, and raise you my war chest of Confederate dollars. Given entirely imaginable conditions, they're fungible.
There is a reason we established a unit of currency valid "for all debts public and private." Our "Legal Tender" used to be redeemable for gold, but never mind. Making people convert universal US$ into Disney Dollars, or Target gift cards, or Wii Points just fragments trade, and clogs commerce. Right now, it's just for hobby games, but if it spreads to more vital areas of the economy, it doesn't bode well. People suddenly start engaging in arbitrage, as we saw in the gift card markets, and then valuation becomes volatile. Money's greatest advantage, beyond its being legal tender, is that it is generally not volatile. When it is, it is seen as a fiscal management failure.
Or, for another example, just ask anyone who's on Food Stamps, when what they needed was bus fare to get to their job interview.
--
Toro
Screw it. Let's see them try to trademark a dotted quad, or an IPv6 unicast addy. Too much to memorize? Most of us can run our own damned domain server on our LAN, and bypass this ICANNdy assed scheme. Hell, I'll hard code stuff into my hosts file if I have to. Or use a third party DNS, preferably with non-ICANN tlds, that are stable and not liable to being boarded by cutlass wielding trademark lawyers. (Arrr!)
If they wreck it, we can fork DNS. We can even ignore it. The Internet, so long as it isn't redesigned to behave otherwise, will still carry the traffic. To date, it doesn't really use domain names.
ICANN has already lost most of its relevance via Google, which is what most people use, every time they want to go to a site. People don't even use bookmarks any more. Making the .net TLD unstable, and unusable, sounds like a great first step, for ICANN to walk the plank.
I choose to blame this guy. It's about as accurate as targeting an umbrella group alias over a text file that provides no real identifying intelligence, and he's far more entertaining. IMHO, I would place this sort of thing under the heading of "fiddling while Rome burns." Sony needs to be reacquainted with the term FAIL, then they need to demonstrate that they know why they're a fail whale, and that they will fix whatever the hell went so desperately wrong with their information security.
Accept no substitutes.
Hook that puppy up to the "french kiss" appliance and nose kiss your sweetie.
Oops. Forgot to mention that they also recommend that you adopt OOXML for all documents, immediately. That's about when the coffee came out my nose.
Microsoft is a major player in the National Business Park, so it comes as no surprise that the "Windows" section reads like MS marketing copy.
In the document, they are seriously recommending that everyone update to Office 2007, at a minimum, with no mention of alternatives (Libre, OOO) whatsoever.
*sigh* Oh well, it's the best government money can buy.
I think this is pretty forward thinking advice.
Though I can't imagine ISPs are going to be happy about the NSA's frank assessment that their DNS servers "typically don't provide enhanced security services," and that home users should be using a third-party DNS, including open source.
On that topic: http://www.opennicproject.org/
I wonder how they feel about them?
(The cynic in me also wonders if they're trying to strong-arm the major ISPs into accepting some sort of "enhanced" DNS security package from the NSA. The best way to control Internet users, if they don't know about dotted quads (or IPv6 addresses), is to have backdoor control of DNS. If you can't reach the information, it doesn't exist.)
True. And some people believe there is a God, which is even less likely, and whose proof is less profitable to mankind. I hope for more.
I hope we're all proven utterly m-fing wrong, about many things, because despite everything we know and all that we can prove, the world is a mess. That is my God. God is the possibility of discovery. And if there is an actual God, He is clearly wrong on purpose, and enjoys the same things I do.
I want my surprises where they aren't expected to happen. It's fun, and entertaining, and once we figure out where we went wrong, always worth its weight in gold.
I don't want to calculate pi out to a uselessly precise decimal place because we just want to see the next, very limited (0 through 9) "surprise" that we know is coming.
So there we go folks: irony. Sorry if I originally sounded clueless, or now sound too condescending. It was a joke, guys, not a real, literal hope and wish.
I think it would be tremendously funny to find out, at some suitably ridiculous decimal place, that all subsequent places are zero repeating. It would utterly break some people's heads to find out that the number is only "very, very particular," rather than "irrational."
It is the one hope that holds my interest when I read about crunching these numbers.
No, because I actually care about what happens to people using Canonical's products. ;^)
--
Toro
Glad he doesn't have an iPhone
Not to worry. Those dollars are coming right back to you good citizens. As a loan, to pay for our Medicare. It's all part of the circle of incompetence.
It's a new technology.
Actually, the tech was invented in the 19th century. 1838, to be precise, if we believe Wikipedia.
Which will leave you with less profit due to legal encumbrances. The only people saying "Cha-CHING!" are lawyers.
Bookmark this story, folks. Any time you hear someone talking about "innovation," this is what actual innovation looks like. Both Nintendo, for inventing new forms of input devs, and the enterprising people that found a use for that input device that was not indicated by its makers.
Innovation is simple. Turning off one's preconceptions to get to that point is hard. Turning off the usual legal battles that generally inhibit it, even harder.
And why do we still use QWERTY keyboards?
We're used to it. The very recognizable pain of changing it outweighs the perceived benefit to most people.
All US scientists use SI. For the rest of us, we have as much right asking why all the other countries don't use the dollar as their currency.
Pride. Cultural inertia. No perceived need for it.
The new version more explicitly emphasizes that the private sector will drive forward the trusted ID market, with government playing a coordinating role, administration officials said.
In other words, it's a Mussolini-style Fascism model.
Dead on with Mussolini. I think the concept you're looking for is corporatism. With this model of "trust," most members of the population are toes of the foot, and a select few us us get to be the big toe. Shakespeare made this joke about the body politic in Coriolanus, in fact. Disempowerment and control of "the rabble" is at least as old as him.
It is also an horrendous misapplication and misapprehension of what actually produces real trust, which is a functional, empowered community. My 2 cents, of course.
--
Toro
I misread this as "Why Google Should Bury the Music Industry," though I'm not sure there's a functional difference when you think through the consequences. Everything the labels do, which is 100% promotion for way too much overhead, Google could do cheaper, for less overhead, and give artists an actual fair shake.
If they do, though, I want them broken up into separate competing units. Google becoming everything is a real problem, whether they're evil or not.
Thank you so much for that wrap up. I have nearly the exact same concerns.
Add to it:
Profound lack of real optimistic outlook, and an unrealistic view of our current circumstances (mostly false optimism) -- Sure, we're in the worst rut since the Great Depression, but we need to put away the long knives. It seems like the outlook of everyone (not individuals, necessarily, but organizations) is to carve away the largest portion of what is presumed to be a limited resource. American industry has an outlook more akin to Mercantilism, where commerce is a zero-sum game. Workers/unions are terrified of making any sacrifice and are holding out for packages that were reasonable in a time of unprecedented growth, but hang like a millstone around the neck of everyone's prosperity in the current depression. To hell with who caused it, our various collective entities, without exception, are acting like a bunch of thieves because they are convinced that this is the last of what this nation has to offer, and that it's time to carve up the pie. Talk to individuals, and people are more optimistic. Deal with an organization, and its lawyers are already venue shopping for the most favorable court. The hell with arbitration and compromise, we're going to court or it's being decided by executive fiat.
And the more we argue, the more ordinary commerce and negotiations break down, the more we're asking for dictatorship.
I think it would be more productive to realize that this isn't the end, and if it is, no amount of bullying one another is going to save us. We either hang together or separately. Everyone will need to sacrifice, and we need start working with whatever good ideas we have left, when we, to paraphrase John Lovell, "Figure out what we've got on this thing that still works." Right now, America is in that broken Apollo 13 spacecraft, but amazingly most everyone is just doing the same things as if nothing is wrong with the ship, no one's worried about skipping off the atmosphere or even checking the CO2 gauge, and while we do this we're arguing about who deserves credit for the Apollo 11 mission, and whether we can afford Apollo 14. As if any of that matters if we don't get home.
Um, hell folks, we need to get this craft back to earth. That's a fact. We should be optimistic about our future, and not optimistic about the busted up ship, and plan to survive this. Instead, we are noisily discussing whether we should eat the Commander or the CM Pilot, lacking the insight to see that cannibalism is both unnecessary and unhelpful to that aim. We need to land.
It's go time. This is a great country. We need to work together at least until the crisis is over. At least until unemployment is single digits. This is how we got through the first Great Depression. We can get through this, but not if we keep glorifying a ship that just won't get us to the moon anymore.
--
Toro
Amazing. I had no idea, and yesterday I bought a 1TB external drive for backups. I'm looking at the Staples receipt as I type this.
What an astonishing coincidence.
As an April Fool's joke, I guess, Windows 7 backup decided to make a 500GB backup, with system image, of a computer that has only 358GB of actual used HD space. Can anyone recommend me a backup program that isn't complete skite? Or maybe just some real documentation for Windows Backup, so it doesn't make a backup that's 40% larger than my total data?
All things are not equal:
email address, date of birth, address or phone number
So if I divulged "mythrowawayaddress@hotmail.com" I'm sharing highly personal information? How do you determine if an email is actually "highly personal?" Even if it's an ISP hosted address it could be a throwaway, and leads nowhere but a server. To a lesser extent, same goes for a phone number. Some people actually chuck a pre-paid in the garbage on a regular basis, you know. It's easy to have a throwaway phone number.
What qualifies as "highly personal" shouldn't be based on a standard set in 1994. The times have changed.
--
Toro
It is a "persistent myth" that the words "persistent myth" appear in TFA.
Perhaps it was redacted.
In all those cases, you've done a thorough RCA, and you know that a reboot is a necessary part of the procedure, or is part of your RCA/auditing. (Checking that your services launch properly for disaster recovery purposes is a great example). IMO, you have met one bare minimum requirement for real competency as an admin. Not everyone who calls himself an "admin" meets that bar, however.
All I got from the article was "don't reboot until you've done an RCA and a reboot is actually indicated, either as part of the diagnostic process, or because it is necessary."
I don't understand why you're calling him a fool for giving sound, beginner advice. My reaction to the article was, "duh." I'm guessing he just had space to fill, and nothing interesting to write. If I were to get angry at anyone, it's whomever in the Firehose thought this was a suitable article for readers of Slashdot.
What is up with folks tagging this as a "troll?" Strawman? Really? There isn't a debate here, guys. It is not rhetoric. There is no strawman.
This article is sound advice. He's basically saying don't do a reboot without doing an RCA first. If you need to reboot as part of your root cause analysis, fine, but for god sakes don't just shut down everything until you know why, that you need to, and whether it's going to come back up.
This is good advice for Windows sysadmins too. Period. But Windows was not its focus. *nix was. This is because *nix is a bit more compliant to letting root completely hose the file system, on the fly (his "runaway script" example), and still be able to run.
IMO, it was written as a caution to new *nix admins, possibly migrating from a Windows environment, period. RTFA, and take it at face value. You'll learn something if you're a novice to *nix.
--
Toro