Damn... Every time I run into something that John Gilmore has done I get this shivery feeling down the back of my neck. Here's a guy who has just got it all figured out, way ahead of the rest of us... or at least way ahead of me.
Err, but yeah. The reason I'm posting is because anyone who hasn't read Gilmore's letter to Vint Cerf really should... it's intelligent, funny and scathing. It's at http://www.icannwatch.org/article.php?sid=763 and it's brilliant.
Check out the briQ by Terra Soft Solutions (makers of Yellow Dog Linux).. Full specs are here. Pricey, but very cute. YDL sells a few other LinuxPPC hardware solutions.
Just make sure you're running a fixed version of ssh (OpenSSH 3.1p1). A malicious server is one of the few ways that the recent ssh bug is exploitable.
I would honestly take anything that Raskin says about Jobs with a grain of salt, and vice versa. According to Raskin, Jobs "stole" the Macintosh project from him during early development. It seems to have gone down like this: Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project by the Apple board, who felt he was too new-age and free-wheeling and hacker-ish (ie he wasn't a suit). So Jobs looked around and found Raskin's Macintosh project, bullied his way in, stole the best developers from the Lisa project, and finished development. Kinda sleazy, maybe, but in my opinion Raskin would never have shipped the Mac, and if he had it would have sucked shit. Raskin's vision of the Mac was the polar opposite of the Lisa (which was way overpowered, and thus too expensive, for the time). Raskin's vision was much more minimal... and it would have sucked ass. As it was, Jobs beefed up the Mac specs a fair amount and it _still_ wasn't enough... thus the need for the Fat Mac upgrade (from 128K to 521K of RAM) a few months after the release.
The other main thing to credit Jobs with was that he shipped. There's some question in my mind whether Raskin could have shipped any product at Apple at all. He was incredibly focused on his vision, to the exclusion of anything else. Jobs was the one who came up with the slogan "Real Artists Ship."
Check out the book Insanely Great (by Stephen Levy I think) for more details on the history of the Mac. There's pretty decent coverage of the Jobs vs Raskin battle.
telnet from one machine to another, and snoop/tcpdump that traffic. what you'll see is something like this: (sanitized for obvious reasons)
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957 login:
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957 a
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957 a
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957 l
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957 l
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957 e
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957 e
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957 x
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957 x
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957 Password:
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957 4
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957 2
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957
That's telnet, clear text. Note how each user input has it's own packet. If you use -v, you can get very precise timing on these packets.
Now with SSH, obviously, the user data is going to be encrypted. But the data is still going to be sent one keystroke at a time.
ssh, telnet, etc were all designed to be terminal emulation compatible (or something like that), which esentially means that they need to behave just like those old paper-based TTYs. think about it for a few minutes, why do you think linux assigns you a TTY when you telnet to it? because parts of the kernel think you're actually sitting at one of those TTYs. and those TTYs sent and returned each keystroke, because early usability studies noted that most users equate response time with speed.
compaq has tons of software engineers, and high-level support engineers, design engineers, etc.
why? because they already do huge support contracts for big companies... ie, compaq runs microsoft's big data center south of seattle (takes up an entire floor+ of exodus-2 seattle).
compaq also does premier support (ie support contracts for big ecommerce and it companies developing middleware and other apps on top of MS products) for MS customers... if you want to buy premier support, you can buy it from compaq. companies can also buy sun, apple, (maybe?) linux, etc premier (and other level) support contracts from compaq. these cost lots of money, on the order of millions+ for big development/IT companies.
err, the apple i was just a prototype. it only existed as a motherboard, in the garage. it was never sold, produced, or delivered. the apple ][ was apple's first product.
from a sales perspective, from a reach perspective, from the perspective of influencing the largest number of future computers, the apple ][ was definitely the beginning of something huge. whether it was the first PC, i dunno. but it was certainly much more important and influential than the TRS-80.
If anyone can spank the RIAA, the MPAA, and the archaic information control policies of places like China, Singapore and half of the middle east, all at the same time, it's cDc. They've got great hackers/coders, and a great publicity engine. This is gonna sound corny, but in the age of information security, control, and secrecy, people like the cDc are freedom fighters.
The BSD licenses have been around forever, and have been used forever to push good technology into the hands of corporations. How do you think Sun got started? By a couple of Berkely students that took the BSD code, made some modifications, and released them binary. What about the BSD tcp stack, which half of the internet uses? What about cisco IOS, which has a BSD base (altho it's pretty obscured nowdays)? What about all the vendors who sell black-box hardware (nokia firewall-1, etc) which are based on BSDi, which is just FreeBSD with some additional drivers and some other stuff like different SMP support? BSDi "steals" technology from FreeBSD and sells it to other people, and are the FreeBSD developers crying foul? Of course not, if they were really pissed they'd just start writing a GPL'd OS. What about all of the people selling Apache-based web servers? The developers who choose to release their code under BSD-style licenses do so EXPECTING that corporations will take that code, modify it and integrate it into a product, and release it binary only. Ce la vie. Grow up.
I do network engineering at a decent sized international company, and we have a two-tier on call structure. People who are on call all of the time get 10% of their monthly salary as a shift differential. People who are on call one week a month get 6% of their monthly salary as a shift differential. If you spend more than 3 hours in during off-hours or the weekend, you can usually get some comp time for it. Most of us are pretty happy about it.
everyone remember the challenger explosion? anyone remember that a couple of NASA scientists had done a bunch of research on o-rings and had determined that under specific conditions, that they wouldn't work as they were supposed to? but the challenger launch wasn't stopped, because the research was presented with such poor visualization that the managers of the projects (who didn't really understand the science) couldn't make informed decisions. part of visualization is helping really, really smart people show off their ideas to the rest of us.
Check out http://www.openpackages.org/ (hope this link prints correctly this time). There's already a project to unify the ports/packages collections across the various BSDs. Note that by ports/packages I mean FreeBSD-style ports and NetBSD-style packages (which are the same things, different names).
From what I've been able to gather from the FAQ and other stuff, you get:
a mach kernel
a bsd subsystem - regularly synched with freebsd (libraries, object interfaces, etc) and netbsd (some user commands)
and that's about it. you can run x-windows on it (which isn't all that easy to do on OS X), or whatever you want.
the directory structure isn't all that important (to me, anyways)... what is important is that you're getting an OS that's binary compatible with Mac OS X (except for the carbon and cocoa toolkits, Apple's GUI frameworks), and also happens to be very close to a FreeBSD reference platform. Pretty damn cool.
a better link is <a href="http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/dar win/1.3/release.html">http://www.opensource.app le.com/projects/darwin/1. 3/release.html</a>
My understanding of magnetic properties was that it's defined, created and controlled by the magnetic polarity of the earth. If you're not on the earth, do magnets still work the same way? Ie, if you're outside the Earth's magnetic field, do already magnetized materials still display magnetic properties? Also, is the space station outside of the Earth's magnetic field? Or if it's still within range of the Earth's magnetic field, is the magnetic force on the station less powerful because it's further from the Earth's core than we are?
Apologies if I'm asking stupid questions, but I'm curious.
"Your email must be treated just as you treat your paper mail. You discard messages of a transient nature and retain the official documents (if any) that are connected with the business of the University. Some of us receive (and therefore file) more business related documents than others. Committee chairs, department chairs, deans and administrators will, naturally, receive and file more paper and email official documents."
The same rules (more stringent) apply to government officials. Simply put, public records, whether they are official court documents or an email from the pres, are public records, and citizens have the legal right to request to see them (within reason). Because som e email from Bush might be public record, annoying lawyers could request all email "pertaining to Colin Powell" as public record, and the email between Prez Bush and his brother Jeb about how Colin Powell is a lousy golfer would have to be turned over and aired publicly.
Check out the UWired project at the University of Washington... we did some really interesting things with educational technology there, including some distance learning stuff. I left school two years ago, and as a student employee had to leave my job there at the same time, and haven't followed the program too closely, but at the time it was one of the premier educational technology programs in the country. The web site is UWired.
I don't mean to pick nits, but this Bruce Tognazzini makes some stupid mistakes in his analysis of OS X. For example, the statement:
"I don't need icons the size of small cars. What I do need, in this Windows-dominated world, are long file names. Reader Chris Hanson suggests that OS X will finally have long file names: NextStep has always had them and OS9 supports them within applications, but not in the Finder (go figure)."
While I agree with his sentiment, the idea that MacOS will "finally" have long file names is absurd. MacOS has supported file names up to 256 characters since day one.
Don't forget the PalmOS, which while certainly not terribly original, was (IMHO) a good move towards solving UI problems in a 3 by 5 inch (or so) space.
I think that GUIs _have_ been hard-coded into our brains. The Xerox PARC facility encountered that when they were designing their GUI/smalltalk stuff... people learn metaphor patterns, and tend to use those patterns (a paradigm, if you will) to interperet new information.
This is not OpenBSD specific, but the best firewall book I've ever read is Firewalls and Internet Security (Repelling the Wily Hacker) by Cheswick and Bellovin. Published by Addison-Wesley. Good luck.
I believe this is a positive move. As long as RedHat maintains Cygnus' attitude towards open source (develop, enhance, support), adding RedHat's revenue stream to support Cygnus' development effort makes good business, and I think makes good sense for the Open Source community. Of course, only time will tell. *shrug*
For more info, check out (this was jointly developed by RedHat and Cygnus, so it's obviously partisan):
I agree wholeheartedly with you, with one caveat. The Windows NT implementation of PPP server is provided by RAS (Remote Access Services), which can be configured to use Windows NT Challenge/Response for authentication, which means anyone not using a recent Windows product is SOL. I don't know of any ISPs who actually use this, it being primarily a mechanism to provide semi-secure login to corporate networks, where the IT people can easily enforce a 'one OS' policy.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn... Every time I run into something that John Gilmore has done I get this shivery feeling down the back of my neck. Here's a guy who has just got it all figured out, way ahead of the rest of us... or at least way ahead of me.
Err, but yeah. The reason I'm posting is because anyone who hasn't read Gilmore's letter to Vint Cerf really should... it's intelligent, funny and scathing. It's at http://www.icannwatch.org/article.php?sid=763 and it's brilliant.
Check out the briQ by Terra Soft Solutions (makers of Yellow Dog Linux).. Full specs are here. Pricey, but very cute. YDL sells a few other LinuxPPC hardware solutions.
Just make sure you're running a fixed version of ssh (OpenSSH 3.1p1). A malicious server is one of the few ways that the recent ssh bug is exploitable.
I would honestly take anything that Raskin says about Jobs with a grain of salt, and vice versa. According to Raskin, Jobs "stole" the Macintosh project from him during early development. It seems to have gone down like this: Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project by the Apple board, who felt he was too new-age and free-wheeling and hacker-ish (ie he wasn't a suit). So Jobs looked around and found Raskin's Macintosh project, bullied his way in, stole the best developers from the Lisa project, and finished development. Kinda sleazy, maybe, but in my opinion Raskin would never have shipped the Mac, and if he had it would have sucked shit. Raskin's vision of the Mac was the polar opposite of the Lisa (which was way overpowered, and thus too expensive, for the time). Raskin's vision was much more minimal... and it would have sucked ass. As it was, Jobs beefed up the Mac specs a fair amount and it _still_ wasn't enough... thus the need for the Fat Mac upgrade (from 128K to 521K of RAM) a few months after the release.
The other main thing to credit Jobs with was that he shipped. There's some question in my mind whether Raskin could have shipped any product at Apple at all. He was incredibly focused on his vision, to the exclusion of anything else. Jobs was the one who came up with the slogan "Real Artists Ship."
Check out the book Insanely Great (by Stephen Levy I think) for more details on the history of the Mac. There's pretty decent coverage of the Jobs vs Raskin battle.
telnet from one machine to another, and snoop/tcpdump that traffic. what you'll see is something like this: (sanitized for obvious reasons)
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957 login:
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957 a
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957 a
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957 l
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957 l
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957 e
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957 e
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957 x
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957 x
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957 Password:
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957 4
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957
host.from -> host.to TELNET C port=35957 2
host.to -> host.from TELNET R port=35957
That's telnet, clear text. Note how each user input has it's own packet. If you use -v, you can get very precise timing on these packets.
Now with SSH, obviously, the user data is going to be encrypted. But the data is still going to be sent one keystroke at a time.
ssh, telnet, etc were all designed to be terminal emulation compatible (or something like that), which esentially means that they need to behave just like those old paper-based TTYs. think about it for a few minutes, why do you think linux assigns you a TTY when you telnet to it? because parts of the kernel think you're actually sitting at one of those TTYs. and those TTYs sent and returned each keystroke, because early usability studies noted that most users equate response time with speed.
hth,
alex
compaq has tons of software engineers, and high-level support engineers, design engineers, etc.
why? because they already do huge support contracts for big companies... ie, compaq runs microsoft's big data center south of seattle (takes up an entire floor+ of exodus-2 seattle).
compaq also does premier support (ie support contracts for big ecommerce and it companies developing middleware and other apps on top of MS products) for MS customers... if you want to buy premier support, you can buy it from compaq. companies can also buy sun, apple, (maybe?) linux, etc premier (and other level) support contracts from compaq. these cost lots of money, on the order of millions+ for big development/IT companies.
err, the apple i was just a prototype. it only existed as a motherboard, in the garage. it was never sold, produced, or delivered. the apple ][ was apple's first product.
from a sales perspective, from a reach perspective, from the perspective of influencing the largest number of future computers, the apple ][ was definitely the beginning of something huge. whether it was the first PC, i dunno. but it was certainly much more important and influential than the TRS-80.
If anyone can spank the RIAA, the MPAA, and the archaic information control policies of places like China, Singapore and half of the middle east, all at the same time, it's cDc. They've got great hackers/coders, and a great publicity engine. This is gonna sound corny, but in the age of information security, control, and secrecy, people like the cDc are freedom fighters.
The BSD licenses have been around forever, and have been used forever to push good technology into the hands of corporations. How do you think Sun got started? By a couple of Berkely students that took the BSD code, made some modifications, and released them binary. What about the BSD tcp stack, which half of the internet uses? What about cisco IOS, which has a BSD base (altho it's pretty obscured nowdays)? What about all the vendors who sell black-box hardware (nokia firewall-1, etc) which are based on BSDi, which is just FreeBSD with some additional drivers and some other stuff like different SMP support? BSDi "steals" technology from FreeBSD and sells it to other people, and are the FreeBSD developers crying foul? Of course not, if they were really pissed they'd just start writing a GPL'd OS. What about all of the people selling Apache-based web servers? The developers who choose to release their code under BSD-style licenses do so EXPECTING that corporations will take that code, modify it and integrate it into a product, and release it binary only. Ce la vie. Grow up.
I do network engineering at a decent sized international company, and we have a two-tier on call structure. People who are on call all of the time get 10% of their monthly salary as a shift differential. People who are on call one week a month get 6% of their monthly salary as a shift differential. If you spend more than 3 hours in during off-hours or the weekend, you can usually get some comp time for it. Most of us are pretty happy about it.
well said, thanks for the info. i'll be sure to do some more reading on microkernels.
everyone remember the challenger explosion? anyone remember that a couple of NASA scientists had done a bunch of research on o-rings and had determined that under specific conditions, that they wouldn't work as they were supposed to? but the challenger launch wasn't stopped, because the research was presented with such poor visualization that the managers of the projects (who didn't really understand the science) couldn't make informed decisions. part of visualization is helping really, really smart people show off their ideas to the rest of us.
Check out http://www.openpackages.org/ (hope this link prints correctly this time). There's already a project to unify the ports/packages collections across the various BSDs. Note that by ports/packages I mean FreeBSD-style ports and NetBSD-style packages (which are the same things, different names).
From what I've been able to gather from the FAQ and other stuff, you get:
a mach kernel
a bsd subsystem - regularly synched with freebsd (libraries, object interfaces, etc) and netbsd (some user commands)
and that's about it. you can run x-windows on it (which isn't all that easy to do on OS X), or whatever you want.
the directory structure isn't all that important (to me, anyways)... what is important is that you're getting an OS that's binary compatible with Mac OS X (except for the carbon and cocoa toolkits, Apple's GUI frameworks), and also happens to be very close to a FreeBSD reference platform. Pretty damn cool.
a better link is <a href="http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/dar win/1.3/release.html">http://www.opensource.app le.com/projects/darwin/1. 3/release.html</a>
My understanding of magnetic properties was that it's defined, created and controlled by the magnetic polarity of the earth. If you're not on the earth, do magnets still work the same way? Ie, if you're outside the Earth's magnetic field, do already magnetized materials still display magnetic properties? Also, is the space station outside of the Earth's magnetic field? Or if it's still within range of the Earth's magnetic field, is the magnetic force on the station less powerful because it's further from the Earth's core than we are?
Apologies if I'm asking stupid questions, but I'm curious.
-alex
see:
g /c o1294.html
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/docs/Conlon_on_Computin
an exerpt:
"Your email must be treated just as you treat your paper mail. You discard messages of a transient nature and retain the official documents (if any) that are connected with the business of the University. Some of us receive (and therefore file) more business related documents than others. Committee chairs, department chairs, deans and administrators will, naturally, receive and file more paper and email official documents."
The same rules (more stringent) apply to government officials. Simply put, public records, whether they are official court documents or an email from the pres, are public records, and citizens have the legal right to request to see them (within reason). Because som e email from Bush might be public record, annoying lawyers could request all email "pertaining to Colin Powell" as public record, and the email between Prez Bush and his brother Jeb about how Colin Powell is a lousy golfer would have to be turned over and aired publicly.
At least, that's how I understand it all.
Check out the UWired project at the University of Washington... we did some really interesting things with educational technology there, including some distance learning stuff. I left school two years ago, and as a student employee had to leave my job there at the same time, and haven't followed the program too closely, but at the time it was one of the premier educational technology programs in the country. The web site is UWired.
I don't mean to pick nits, but this Bruce Tognazzini makes some stupid mistakes in his analysis of OS X. For example, the statement:
"I don't need icons the size of small cars. What I do need, in this Windows-dominated world, are long file names. Reader Chris Hanson suggests that OS X will finally have long file names: NextStep has always had them and OS9 supports them within applications, but not in the Finder (go figure)."
While I agree with his sentiment, the idea that MacOS will "finally" have long file names is absurd. MacOS has supported file names up to 256 characters since day one.
Don't forget the PalmOS, which while certainly not terribly original, was (IMHO) a good move towards solving UI problems in a 3 by 5 inch (or so) space.
I think that GUIs _have_ been hard-coded into our brains. The Xerox PARC facility encountered that when they were designing their GUI/smalltalk stuff... people learn metaphor patterns, and tend to use those patterns (a paradigm, if you will) to interperet new information.
This is not OpenBSD specific, but the best firewall book I've ever read is Firewalls and Internet Security (Repelling the Wily Hacker) by Cheswick and Bellovin. Published by Addison-Wesley. Good luck.
Check out: http://www.openbsd.org/ports.html for generat information on the ports, and http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ ports/ to browse (via cvs) the ports tree. Good luck.
Yes, there is such a document:
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/INSTALL.linux
OpenBSD does have ext2fs support as well.
I believe this is a positive move. As long as RedHat maintains Cygnus' attitude towards open source (develop, enhance, support), adding RedHat's revenue stream to support Cygnus' development effort makes good business, and I think makes good sense for the Open Source community. Of course, only time will tell. *shrug*
For more info, check out (this was jointly developed by RedHat and Cygnus, so it's obviously partisan):
http://www.cygnus.com/news/c-rh_faq.html
I agree wholeheartedly with you, with one caveat.
The Windows NT implementation of PPP server is provided by RAS (Remote Access Services), which can be configured to use Windows NT Challenge/Response for authentication, which means anyone not using a recent Windows product is SOL. I don't know of any ISPs who actually use this, it being primarily a mechanism to provide semi-secure login to corporate networks, where the IT people can easily enforce a 'one OS' policy.