As I was saying in the first days after the attacks, we needed to be careful and measured in our response. We needed to give ourselves time to cool off.
In the name of protecting the Constitution, we are in essence destroying it ourselves. We are making the fundamental error of valuing life over freedom. Our founding fathers would be horrified at what cowards we have become.
Personally, I'd rather live free of surveillance, even though my chance of losing my life to a terrorist act would be higher as a result. Freedom is more important that just staying alive.
As long as we fear death more than losing our core values, terrorists have us by our collective genitalia.
it's not like this is really news...
on
Science Faction
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· Score: 5, Interesting
SF authors have been doing this *forever*. This article did catch a few good recent ones, but there are some towering accomplishments in early SF, including:
The waterbed (Heinlein, I believe)
The microwave oven (Heinlein) (has a one-paragraph joke about how hard cooking and cleanup are.... something along the line of "I pushed the button, you toss the dishes in the disposer." For 1950s-era writing, this was a powerful insight just tossed away as a cute joke.)
Waldoes (Heinlein: the short story "Waldo", about a brilliant but incredibly weak man who lives in orbit and uses remote manipulators for everything) Even the modern *name* of these manipulators comes from the story.
Geostationary satellites (Clarke) -- This was an amazing insight for the time -- it's one of those things that's retroactively obvious, but exceedingly difficult to invent.
Virtual Reality -- I think possibly Clifford Simak had the first written version of something like a Holodeck. The book was "Way Station", published in 1963. Aliens had set up a waypost on Earth, and had hired an Earthling to run it. He got to play with some amazing technology. The virtual reality thing was a room-sized hunting simulator where he fired real shells at projected images on a wall, and they reacted appropriately. It was described as being extremely real and very frightening.
This story was also my first exposure to the concept of a frictionless surface, which obviously remains fantasy at this point. I imagine frictionless surfaces were done before this, but this is the earliest example I can remember for something holo-deckish.
Cell phones -- Dick Tracy, in the 1930s, had a pretty fair approximation. People wanted those wrist radios in the worst way. As it turns out, that form factor isn't too popular, but the fundamental idea has become indispensable for most first-world citizens, and the basic idea came from comics.
Submarines -- This is a little more of a stretch, but 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea showed just what submarines might someday be. It was published in 1870, which is a little after the first submersible warships were designed, so the concept wasn't quite as groundbreaking as some of these others, but the story is worth a nod when you consider they're STILL doing remakes of it -- 130 years later!
And, of course, there's the Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, another one that's a perennial favorite for remakes. This is one of my favorites, not because of the time machine (still unproven and most likely impossible), but because of the social commentary. We've had numerous Morlocks versus Eloi threads here on Slashdot, so it's not just me that finds the parallels a bit creepy. It was published in 1898 and is still quite relevant.
Most modern SF doesn't look very far ahead. It's rare for authors to invent things that are *really* amazing and inventive. Greg Bear's "Blood Music" was probably in this caliber, and Gene Wolfe wrote a disturbing book about a society where people encouraged themselves to become schizophrenic as a method of tapping into more of their brainpower. (I think it may have been called "The Book of the New Sun", but that might be another novel by the same author.) Both were fascinating books... but did they really change anything?
Perhaps I'm being unfair, too -- I'm picking out the very best of the old stuff and comparing it to the run-of-the-mill schlock today. But, even so, it seems that SF authors back in the 50s and 60s truly changed the world, and the ones nowadays don't do that. They entertain, they challenge, they make us think about things.... but they don't come up with things that change how we live anymore.
I'd love to be proven wrong on this -- counterexamples welcome.:-)
To be fair, you probably shouldn't automatically blame Windows when you're running it in a Virtual PC environment -- if there are problems, it could easily be the emulation, not Windows itself.
I believe it's because Speakeasy's model is to sell bandwidth, not seats. They are one of the only really honest providers in this regard.
Where you're thinking of seats (pay per connection), Speakeasy just cares about total bandwidth. In exchange for at least $10/mo (and maybe up to $50/mo) extra, they'll set up an account for someone to share over an existing DSL connection. They have *already sold* this bandwidth, so the extra customer fees are gravy. And signing up additional customers over the same pipe lowers their overall risk. If 5 people are sharing a line, they can only use 1 line's worth of bandwidth at maximum. So, even if all 5 are big file traders, it's not as big a hit to Speakeasy's bottom line. 5 separate lines would give them five times as much exposure to bandwidth hogs. (this really, really hurts cable network companies, which are oriented around selling you a service that you can't actually use due to AUPs and the like.) Speakeasy is less vulnerable to the hogs because they assume you're going to use the bandwidth they sell you, but it's still a cost for them.
So instead, Speakeasy piggybacks new customers on your circuit. You provide your local expertise for network support (which is very expensive for Speakeasy to provide), and Speakeasy provides the things that are cheap for them: email, news, and invoicing. They split the fees with you. In doing this, they incur minimal additional fixed costs with each customer, and get at least a normal dialup fee in exchange -- without actually having to provide dialup. And having them do the invoicing means you don't have to go knocking on anyone's doors, begging for money.
Seems like a win/win/win -- you sell off the bandwidth you don't need and offset your own costs (or maybe even make a profit), Speakeasy makes almost pure profit, and the new customer gets broadband a lot cheaper than they otherwise would. They also escape long-term service contracts and big upsell packages from the phone/cable companies, and may very well benefit from individual, specialized attention from a network administrator on getting them set up securely.
Seems very sensible to me.
As an aside, I'm also on Speakeasy and I'm very, very fond of them. Good latency, good throughput, awesome reliability, and excellent phone support. Their web-based support sucks rocks, but you can always pick up a phone and get near-instant service.
They're a highly competent, alternative-OS-friendly outfit, and one that should be on your short list for DSL service.
SCO could conceivably claim that their distribution of their own copyrighted code was inadvertent, because they simply didn't know it was in there. If they can show they didn't put it in there themselves, they can plausibly argue that they didn't know it was there. So, on that basis, they could possibly un-GPL the infringing code.
Stupidly, however, they *continued to distribute it for some time after filing the lawsuit*. It wasn't until someone here on Slashdot pointed out that it was still available that it was taken down.
So I think they've lost that defense; they can argue that they didn't know their code was in there, but after filing the lawsuit and CONTINUING to distribute the code, I think they shot themselves in the head. It seems extremely unlikely to me that they can prevail in this suit.
If someone out there can document that they downloaded the Linux source code from SCO after the date of filing the lawsuit, I believe they have an absolutely airtight case that the code was assigned to them under the GPL fully and irrevocably. If they then send that code back to Linus, it will rapidly propagate downstream, entirely 'clean'. But that can only be done if there are records of the download happening post-lawsuit.
IBM, if you're reading this, you should immediately subpoena their FTP logs.
C'mon, mods, quit wasting time suppressing ideas that aren't popular. Microsoft, whether you happen to like it or not, does make some software that's pretty good.
This was neither a troll nor a rant, and it should not have been suppressed, particularly not with the noxious 'overrated' mod, which isn't meta-moderated. Whoever did this didn't have the courage of his/her convictions.
People cite this '63,000 bugs!' statistic as if it's proof that the software is bad.
It isn't. It's proof that the software WAS bad.
Win3.1/95/98/ME were all total garbage. WinNT was better. Windows 2000 is *very good*; it is at least as stable as Linux is, and it is MORE stable as a desktop.
(I'm differentiating between "the operating system" and "the services" here; I think IIS is much less stable than is Apache, and Microsoft DNS sucks rocks. But the fundamental Win2K OS itself is as good or better than Linux, and enormously MORE stable as a desktop.)
Yet, this is the operating system that "has 63,000 bugs, so it must be crap!". Poor thinking. This means that they finally developed a method to CATCH and FIX the bugs. This means that PREVIOUS iterations of WIndows sucked, not that Win2K does.
This is a very cool feature in the new Intel 865 and 875 chipsets (the ones that support the 800Mhz front-side bus) -- the onboard gigabit LAN port is on the Northbridge, not the Southbridge, so it's not contending with PCI for bandwidth.
As far as I know, this is the only currently-shipping chipset that does this.
That's part of the point -- the reason jumper cables have to be so thick is because they must carry a great deal of power at low voltages. If you triple the voltage, the cables can carry three times the amount of power in the same thickness.
I'm assuming the pi*r^2 formula applies to power-carrying capacity; if you halve the diameter of a cable, the power-carrying capacity should drop by 4 times. You've increased voltage by only three times, so you can't cut quite that far.
This isn't really a direct answer to your question; it started out as one, but it gradually morphed into "what distro should I use" instead of "what Redhat should I use." At this point it's only tangentially related to the original question, but I'll go ahead and post it anyway. It may not help you specifically, but other people reading it may benefit.
**** I'm an RHCE (not an especially tough cert, btw, but someone who passes it is at least competent), but I don't overwhelmingly like their distro as a server. I should point out, however, that I have not run their Advanced Server, so I am unsure how valid my opinion is there. I have run quite a lot of RH boxes over the years; I stopped using their system around 7.0.
I'm presently running a network of about 80 machines. Most of them are Debian, and are incredibly easy to manage remotely. We have a few remaining old RH boxes, and they're very difficult to deal with in comparison -- hard to administer, hard to patch, just a royal PITA.
The support-contract option with RH can be a nice thing to have, but you say you have a lot of inhouse talent already, and Debian is very, very good as a server. I think it makes a rotten desktop client (personally I like Mandrake for that), but Debian stable is *extremely* stable, and Debian testing is just fine for most production servers. If you happen to want to run it as a desktop, you can use unstable for that, which is the bleeding-edge stuff that may break horribly.
Debian's entire emphasis is on two things: stability, and being managed remotely. They do not casually break things; by the time it gets even to 'testing' it's usually very solid. Their distributed community is really, really good. It's a great example of just how good truly free software can be.
It does, of course, have problems. My biggest gripe is probably that installation is always a new adventure. The installer is old, text-based, and not updated frequently. Getting it running on newer hardware can be a real pain, and once you have it running, you can run into weird dependency problems sometimes. (for awhile, as an example, when I did a base install, updated the source lines from 'stable' to 'testing', and then tried to install a recent kernel image, the install failed with a requirement for 'dash', but I couldn't install either dash or ash because both required ash! My solution was to drop back to stable, install ash [which had no dependency], and then switch back to testing. ) That particular problem may be gone, but every time I install a new batch of servers I run into a whole new batch of problems, be it unsupported hardware or what have you. I have never had a problem *once I have the server running*, but getting it up and stable in the first place is probably Debian's weakest point. RH has their wonderful Kickstart system, which is just lightyears better, one of the things I really, really like about their distro.
The cost in switching from RH to Debian is probably not trivial. It took me probably six months to learn, and I'm still picking up new tricks and tips. But I believe you will see an excellent ROI, as it's amazingly easy to script updates across vast numbers of machines very quickly. It's just a cleaner design, and it's easier to work with remotely. You don't really have to worry about intentional obsolescence.... there are people out there who, with great care, have been running their Debian servers for 5+ years without reinstalling. The Debian teams react very, very quickly to security issues. And it's both free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer.
RH, on the other hand, offers much better installation, and they have a custom version of the kernel that many people swear by. It's the best-supported of the Linux distros, and if you have a substantial investment in scripts and the RPM format, or if you need commercial application support (eg, Oracle) it's probably not worth switching. And it's easier to find people qualified in RH.
So what's best? Purely up to you. I can tell you that I'm extremely happy with a combo of Debian and Mandrake.
but those really aren't chickens....
on
Chicken Run
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· Score: 1
The experiment in the second link is very interesting, but not for the reason that the media picked it up. They're talking about this development as "they've turned the genes for teeth back on in chickens!", but that's not really true.
The scientists implanted mouse cells in chicken embryos. The mouse cells then migrated to the jaw and started growing teeth. This means that the creatures aren't really chickens, they are "chimeras" -- a combination of two species.
Despite the headlines, in other words, these are NOT CHICKENS. They're not even birds.
It is interesting, though, because it shows that the chicken genome still has the information for teeth in it. Apparently, chicken cells ignore the 'make teeth' command, and the mouse cells don't. (I don't know whether mouse cells had mouse DNA in them, or if they had the chicken DNA implanted.)
It's a long way from here to what the media seems to imply. REAL chickens-with-teeth are a heck of a lot harder than chimera-chickens-with-mouse-teeth.
Ergo, I can promise you that next week's KFC will have only bones left over.:-)
I don't see any language that claims that SCO has an exclusive right to relicense the UNIX IP, so presumably, IBM can merely approach Novell and get a license from the original holder. That won't stop the lawsuit from going forward (because the alleged contract violations will still have occurred), but IBM will still be able to ship all the AIX they want.
If Novell is as pissed at SCO as it appears, I'd suggest that they set up IBM as another vendor with the rights to sell the Unix IP, preferably so cheaply that SCO would derive no further benefit from their extortion.
It'd be even better if Novell released the UNIX IP to the public domain, but the stockholders would likely be unhappy at this.
This color is so horrid it's nauseating. I suppose I'm old by slashdot standards (35), but I think I would have despised it at 18.
Note to whoever made this particular decision: if this color is appealing to you, you shouldn't be doing anything but black and white graphic design.
Re:I was a stock analyst at Goldman Sachs for year
on
Wall Street Meat
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Absolutely. This is something you learn when you read Warren Buffet -- businesses, by their very nature, have 'lumpy' earnings. Given the choice between a 'smooth' 12% return and a 'lumpy' 15%, he'll go for 15% every time.
The stock market prefers 'smooth', predictable earnings, but they don't often exist in the real business world. A company that has books that are very smooth and predictable, like Cisco, GE, or IBM, is probably doing some serious monkeying with the numbers behind the scenes, and you should look on such companies with great distrust. Healthy companies don't look like that.
Example: Cisco wrote down something like 1.2 BILLION DOLLARS' worth of inventory a year or two ago. They were essentially claiming that this huge amount of inventory was worthless, and they took it off their books. But they still had the inventory, so they can sell this inventory and use it to prop up their numbers in later quarters. The philosophy seems to be 'take all the writedowns at once and then the investors will forget about them' -- investors don't seem to realize that that writedown erased a huge amount of profit that had been previously, and inaccurately, reported. So Cisco got the benefit of saying "We sold X amount this quarter, growing by X percent!" for years -- and then they take all those phantom profits away and admit that they were fake with the writedown, and then they get to inflate their numbers again by selling "worthless" equipment for anything above 0.
Folks, "one-time expenses" COUNT. Pro-forma earnings are utter hogwash and you should ignore them. In the words of Bill Fleckenstein, over at realmoney.com, "Pro-forma earnings should be required to start with 'Once upon a time' and end with the phrase 'and they lived happily ever after.'"
Another aside: "beat the numbers" is BS. The game that's going on now is 'drop estimates about two weeks before earnings, and then we beat the number!'. Doesn't matter whether or not the business is actually profitable, just whether it 'beat expectations.'
Problem is, it's hard to pay creditors with expectations....
Re:I was a stock analyst at Goldman Sachs for year
on
Wall Street Meat
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· Score: 2, Insightful
A lot of people are furious about losing so much money, and are looking for scapegoats. Everyone is conveniently forgetting just how thoroughly almost everyone believed this stuff, how the Internet was going to change everything, how the New Economy was going to make everyone wealthy overnight.
Thanks to sites like itulip.com (not really being updated any more) and prudentbear.com, I've been highly skeptical of the whole stock market thing since about 1999. (The dotcom I was working for at the time went public and was suddenly worth over a billion dollars; I KNEW this wasn't real, I KNEW something was horribly wrong, and started doing research.) But back in 99, these sites were practically the only source of real, solid information about what was happening, about the sheer insanity of the whole thing.
I'm not saying they were blameless, but it's not easy to dupe intelligent, informed people. Everyone wanted to get rich fast without working, and the madness of crowds is a powerful force. Wall Street alone couldn't possibly be to blame for a bubble of that size. It took the Fed's ridiculous money policies, Wall Street, a "world-changing invention", and lack of fear of debt, all working in combination, to cause the Great Bubble. (which I believe will lead to a Second Great Depression, just like the first one did -- it's just happening slower because the Fed is desperately, desperately trying to pump more greenbacks into the system -- more of the same medicine that got us sick in the first place.)
I can tell you from personal experience that this madness is nearly impossible to overcome. I tried and tried to tell my friends and family about what a dire mess we were getting into, and most of them thought I was nuts (not to mention a crashing bore:) ). They STILL think I'm nuts when I predict that the Nasdaq will see 500 before it sees 5000 again, and that the Dow will see 3000 before 30K.
Because I was so frustrated then, trying to warn people that this was insanity and couldn't possibly last, I really notice the global shift in thinking. Suddenly, "of course" Wall Street is corrupt, and "of course" we were in a bubble, and obviously it was all those Wall Street guys who were at fault.
It's easy to hold people responsible, retroactively, for not holding an opinion that is now 'obvious'. It's also grossly unfair. But that's how scapegoating works.
Yes, all of those things are true. And I imagine that eventually, Linux viruses may become a real problem.
But it is an extra layer of security; virus writers have to work harder to get around the inherent limitations. It's not a free lunch.
On a normal Linux/Unix machine, An HTML-code exploit is not, by itself, going to spawn a remote root shell to Joe Attacker's box; it's going to take either user foolishness ("Type in your root password for maintanance purposes") or a second local exploit to do it.
On a Lindows box, ALL you need is the HTML exploit, no additional stupidity required.
One of the key issues with both real-life and computer-based viruses is containment. You're seeing that now with SARS. If you can slow the rate of infection, you gain time to deploy a response.
Tens of thousands of run-as-root boxes directly attached to cablemodem make a very fertile environment for virus development. An extra layer of security, requiring additional stupidity on someone's part, will slow the spread and help contain the damage.
Any defense can be gotten around, given enough time and effort. That does not, however, imply that no defenses should be deployed. I stand behind my assertion that knowingly defeating one of the main lines of security in an operating system for 'convenience' is grossly stupid.
You know, one of his answers really bugs me.... the old 'security versus convenience' argument. He essentially says that Lindows runs as root to be convenient.
He talks, later, about how his customers are so traumatized by viruses that they'd never consider running a machine without some kind of protection. Windows, which has always been 'features before security', has horrific virus problems.
In essence, he's indirectly bashing his own way of doing business. One of the main reasons viruses don't spread as easily on Linux is simply that normal users don't have permission to mess with system files. Even if a virus DID infect your Linux box, the damage would most likely be contained to the user account's home directory, unless you did something stupid (or weren't patched up properly). Lindows is, in essence, being stupid by default. He's trying to make Lindows 'just like Windows' -- so you get all the design problems and fewer user-level features to boot. What a deal.
If he wants to make Linux BETTER than Microsoft, this is likely an area of key differentiation, and yet he's glossing over the whole issue for 'user convenience'. Instead, he should be investing resources into engineering a solution that preserves both ease of use AND security. It can be done, it just costs time and money. Mandrake has a decent solution to this problem. It could be improved, but it's not too bad. It would make a fine starting place.
A corollary of an old computer aphorism: "Cheap, secure, convenient. Pick any two."
Great move for them. Now they can break into the big leagues of Linux Gaming by releasing blockbusters like "Bowling USA" and "Family Collection", both 1 AND 2. Oooh.
If I understand what I read correctly, essentially the problem they're trying to solve is this: the Earth's rotation is slowing, but they can't predict exactly how much it's going to slow at any given time. It is a real, physical thing, and while they can model its orbit with extreme and unchanging accuracy (things are widely separated enough that the mathematical abstractions work fine), modeling its rotation isn't really possible. There's all sorts of liquid sloshing around everywhere, both liquid water on the surface and molten rock in the center. All they can do is measure it, and every once in awhile, determine that sunrise is happening just a little late.
There are two major timekeeping systems: TAI, which is "absolute time" and is never adjusted, and UTC, which is "civilian time". Because UTC is used by normal people, they try to keep it synced to the Earth's rotation, which in theory at least makes it more useful for us mere mortals. (knowing that the sun will rise at exactly X time on X date at sea level, for instance.). So, gradually, UTC diverges from TAI, because one rotation of the Earth is just a little longer than 24 hours, and over time this divergence adds up to be greater than a second. When it's getting close, they add a leap second. These additions are not at regular intervals, because they can't predict exactly when any given second should be added.
There are occasional problems when they add the leap seconds (programs that don't expect 61 seconds in a minute, for example), or programs that don't realize that there are X number of seconds (15 or so?) that simply didn't exist since 1970. (sometimes this stuff matters).
Thus, they're debating about doing away with leap seconds altogether. One possible substitute is a 'leap hour' every thousand years.
It seems like a rather anal-retentive thing to argue about, but these people are paid to be precise to a degree we can't even imagine.
A worthy slashdot story. This is serious geekery.:-)
Well, things have changed a little since then, too.
I was running Linux in a similar timeframe on very similar hardware. You essentially couldn't do web browsing with it (web browsing was very new at the time): Mosaic was slow as dirt on that hardware. I think the lack of a FP proc slowed it to unbearable levels -- it was something about rendering the fonts, I think. ANYTHING in X was DOG slow. It ran, which was pretty amazing, but it was sluggish as hell.
My Palm (16Mhz, 8mb) might be able to run 16 users on a 0.9 kernel, in text mode, with everyone running tin and pine. But it would be dog slow trying to do graphics, much less a heavy-overhead protocol like X -- AFAIK, there's no video acceleration. Dunno if you remember, but the S3 chips that did acceleration made a HUGE difference in how the machine felt.
Obviously, an 800mhz processor (as long as it's reasonably efficient per clock) with 128MB of RAM is going to run Linux quite nicely. The only limit would really be the amount of disk-like storage available.
But holding the designers of the Palm series responsible for not using Linux or QNX in the first place is wrongheaded, IMO -- those systems weren't a good fit at the time. Had they implemented one of those OSes as their kernel, they'd have had a gigantic flop, and some OTHER company with a small, simple OS would have prospered instead.
Designing for the future is great, but first you have to HAVE a future.
Slashdot Mirror
As I was saying in the first days after the attacks, we needed to be careful and measured in our response. We needed to give ourselves time to cool off.
In the name of protecting the Constitution, we are in essence destroying it ourselves. We are making the fundamental error of valuing life over freedom. Our founding fathers would be horrified at what cowards we have become.
Personally, I'd rather live free of surveillance, even though my chance of losing my life to a terrorist act would be higher as a result. Freedom is more important that just staying alive.
As long as we fear death more than losing our core values, terrorists have us by our collective genitalia.
lol -- damn, no mod points today. :-)
The waterbed (Heinlein, I believe)
The microwave oven (Heinlein) (has a one-paragraph joke about how hard cooking and cleanup are.... something along the line of "I pushed the button, you toss the dishes in the disposer." For 1950s-era writing, this was a powerful insight just tossed away as a cute joke.)
Waldoes (Heinlein: the short story "Waldo", about a brilliant but incredibly weak man who lives in orbit and uses remote manipulators for everything) Even the modern *name* of these manipulators comes from the story.
Geostationary satellites (Clarke) -- This was an amazing insight for the time -- it's one of those things that's retroactively obvious, but exceedingly difficult to invent.
Virtual Reality -- I think possibly Clifford Simak had the first written version of something like a Holodeck. The book was "Way Station", published in 1963. Aliens had set up a waypost on Earth, and had hired an Earthling to run it. He got to play with some amazing technology. The virtual reality thing was a room-sized hunting simulator where he fired real shells at projected images on a wall, and they reacted appropriately. It was described as being extremely real and very frightening. This story was also my first exposure to the concept of a frictionless surface, which obviously remains fantasy at this point. I imagine frictionless surfaces were done before this, but this is the earliest example I can remember for something holo-deckish.
Cell phones -- Dick Tracy, in the 1930s, had a pretty fair approximation. People wanted those wrist radios in the worst way. As it turns out, that form factor isn't too popular, but the fundamental idea has become indispensable for most first-world citizens, and the basic idea came from comics.
Submarines -- This is a little more of a stretch, but 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea showed just what submarines might someday be. It was published in 1870, which is a little after the first submersible warships were designed, so the concept wasn't quite as groundbreaking as some of these others, but the story is worth a nod when you consider they're STILL doing remakes of it -- 130 years later!
And, of course, there's the Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, another one that's a perennial favorite for remakes. This is one of my favorites, not because of the time machine (still unproven and most likely impossible), but because of the social commentary. We've had numerous Morlocks versus Eloi threads here on Slashdot, so it's not just me that finds the parallels a bit creepy. It was published in 1898 and is still quite relevant.
Most modern SF doesn't look very far ahead. It's rare for authors to invent things that are *really* amazing and inventive. Greg Bear's "Blood Music" was probably in this caliber, and Gene Wolfe wrote a disturbing book about a society where people encouraged themselves to become schizophrenic as a method of tapping into more of their brainpower. (I think it may have been called "The Book of the New Sun", but that might be another novel by the same author.) Both were fascinating books... but did they really change anything?
Perhaps I'm being unfair, too -- I'm picking out the very best of the old stuff and comparing it to the run-of-the-mill schlock today. But, even so, it seems that SF authors back in the 50s and 60s truly changed the world, and the ones nowadays don't do that. They entertain, they challenge, they make us think about things.... but they don't come up with things that change how we live anymore.
I'd love to be proven wrong on this -- counterexamples welcome. :-)
To be fair, you probably shouldn't automatically blame Windows when you're running it in a Virtual PC environment -- if there are problems, it could easily be the emulation, not Windows itself.
I believe it's because Speakeasy's model is to sell bandwidth, not seats. They are one of the only really honest providers in this regard.
Where you're thinking of seats (pay per connection), Speakeasy just cares about total bandwidth. In exchange for at least $10/mo (and maybe up to $50/mo) extra, they'll set up an account for someone to share over an existing DSL connection. They have *already sold* this bandwidth, so the extra customer fees are gravy. And signing up additional customers over the same pipe lowers their overall risk. If 5 people are sharing a line, they can only use 1 line's worth of bandwidth at maximum. So, even if all 5 are big file traders, it's not as big a hit to Speakeasy's bottom line. 5 separate lines would give them five times as much exposure to bandwidth hogs. (this really, really hurts cable network companies, which are oriented around selling you a service that you can't actually use due to AUPs and the like.) Speakeasy is less vulnerable to the hogs because they assume you're going to use the bandwidth they sell you, but it's still a cost for them.
So instead, Speakeasy piggybacks new customers on your circuit. You provide your local expertise for network support (which is very expensive for Speakeasy to provide), and Speakeasy provides the things that are cheap for them: email, news, and invoicing. They split the fees with you. In doing this, they incur minimal additional fixed costs with each customer, and get at least a normal dialup fee in exchange -- without actually having to provide dialup. And having them do the invoicing means you don't have to go knocking on anyone's doors, begging for money.
Seems like a win/win/win -- you sell off the bandwidth you don't need and offset your own costs (or maybe even make a profit), Speakeasy makes almost pure profit, and the new customer gets broadband a lot cheaper than they otherwise would. They also escape long-term service contracts and big upsell packages from the phone/cable companies, and may very well benefit from individual, specialized attention from a network administrator on getting them set up securely.
Seems very sensible to me.
As an aside, I'm also on Speakeasy and I'm very, very fond of them. Good latency, good throughput, awesome reliability, and excellent phone support. Their web-based support sucks rocks, but you can always pick up a phone and get near-instant service.
They're a highly competent, alternative-OS-friendly outfit, and one that should be on your short list for DSL service.
SCO could conceivably claim that their distribution of their own copyrighted code was inadvertent, because they simply didn't know it was in there. If they can show they didn't put it in there themselves, they can plausibly argue that they didn't know it was there. So, on that basis, they could possibly un-GPL the infringing code.
Stupidly, however, they *continued to distribute it for some time after filing the lawsuit*. It wasn't until someone here on Slashdot pointed out that it was still available that it was taken down.
So I think they've lost that defense; they can argue that they didn't know their code was in there, but after filing the lawsuit and CONTINUING to distribute the code, I think they shot themselves in the head. It seems extremely unlikely to me that they can prevail in this suit.
If someone out there can document that they downloaded the Linux source code from SCO after the date of filing the lawsuit, I believe they have an absolutely airtight case that the code was assigned to them under the GPL fully and irrevocably. If they then send that code back to Linus, it will rapidly propagate downstream, entirely 'clean'. But that can only be done if there are records of the download happening post-lawsuit.
IBM, if you're reading this, you should immediately subpoena their FTP logs.
C'mon, mods, quit wasting time suppressing ideas that aren't popular. Microsoft, whether you happen to like it or not, does make some software that's pretty good.
This was neither a troll nor a rant, and it should not have been suppressed, particularly not with the noxious 'overrated' mod, which isn't meta-moderated. Whoever did this didn't have the courage of his/her convictions.
People cite this '63,000 bugs!' statistic as if it's proof that the software is bad.
It isn't. It's proof that the software WAS bad.
Win3.1/95/98/ME were all total garbage. WinNT was better. Windows 2000 is *very good*; it is at least as stable as Linux is, and it is MORE stable as a desktop.
(I'm differentiating between "the operating system" and "the services" here; I think IIS is much less stable than is Apache, and Microsoft DNS sucks rocks. But the fundamental Win2K OS itself is as good or better than Linux, and enormously MORE stable as a desktop.)
Yet, this is the operating system that "has 63,000 bugs, so it must be crap!". Poor thinking. This means that they finally developed a method to CATCH and FIX the bugs. This means that PREVIOUS iterations of WIndows sucked, not that Win2K does.
This is a very cool feature in the new Intel 865 and 875 chipsets (the ones that support the 800Mhz front-side bus) -- the onboard gigabit LAN port is on the Northbridge, not the Southbridge, so it's not contending with PCI for bandwidth.
As far as I know, this is the only currently-shipping chipset that does this.
That's part of the point -- the reason jumper cables have to be so thick is because they must carry a great deal of power at low voltages. If you triple the voltage, the cables can carry three times the amount of power in the same thickness.
I'm assuming the pi*r^2 formula applies to power-carrying capacity; if you halve the diameter of a cable, the power-carrying capacity should drop by 4 times. You've increased voltage by only three times, so you can't cut quite that far.
I'd figure it out exactly but I"m lazy today.
I was actually thinking about posting the exact same question, and I'm even earlier than he is.
:-)
Either it's not as obvious as you thought, or (gasp!) low Slashdot ID is not a sign of intelligence.
This isn't really a direct answer to your question; it started out as one, but it gradually morphed into "what distro should I use" instead of "what Redhat should I use." At this point it's only tangentially related to the original question, but I'll go ahead and post it anyway. It may not help you specifically, but other people reading it may benefit.
****
I'm an RHCE (not an especially tough cert, btw, but someone who passes it is at least competent), but I don't overwhelmingly like their distro as a server. I should point out, however, that I have not run their Advanced Server, so I am unsure how valid my opinion is there. I have run quite a lot of RH boxes over the years; I stopped using their system around 7.0.
I'm presently running a network of about 80 machines. Most of them are Debian, and are incredibly easy to manage remotely. We have a few remaining old RH boxes, and they're very difficult to deal with in comparison -- hard to administer, hard to patch, just a royal PITA.
The support-contract option with RH can be a nice thing to have, but you say you have a lot of inhouse talent already, and Debian is very, very good as a server. I think it makes a rotten desktop client (personally I like Mandrake for that), but Debian stable is *extremely* stable, and Debian testing is just fine for most production servers. If you happen to want to run it as a desktop, you can use unstable for that, which is the bleeding-edge stuff that may break horribly.
Debian's entire emphasis is on two things: stability, and being managed remotely. They do not casually break things; by the time it gets even to 'testing' it's usually very solid. Their distributed community is really, really good. It's a great example of just how good truly free software can be.
It does, of course, have problems. My biggest gripe is probably that installation is always a new adventure. The installer is old, text-based, and not updated frequently. Getting it running on newer hardware can be a real pain, and once you have it running, you can run into weird dependency problems sometimes. (for awhile, as an example, when I did a base install, updated the source lines from 'stable' to 'testing', and then tried to install a recent kernel image, the install failed with a requirement for 'dash', but I couldn't install either dash or ash because both required ash! My solution was to drop back to stable, install ash [which had no dependency], and then switch back to testing. ) That particular problem may be gone, but every time I install a new batch of servers I run into a whole new batch of problems, be it unsupported hardware or what have you. I have never had a problem *once I have the server running*, but getting it up and stable in the first place is probably Debian's weakest point. RH has their wonderful Kickstart system, which is just lightyears better, one of the things I really, really like about their distro.
The cost in switching from RH to Debian is probably not trivial. It took me probably six months to learn, and I'm still picking up new tricks and tips. But I believe you will see an excellent ROI, as it's amazingly easy to script updates across vast numbers of machines very quickly. It's just a cleaner design, and it's easier to work with remotely. You don't really have to worry about intentional obsolescence.... there are people out there who, with great care, have been running their Debian servers for 5+ years without reinstalling. The Debian teams react very, very quickly to security issues. And it's both free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer.
RH, on the other hand, offers much better installation, and they have a custom version of the kernel that many people swear by. It's the best-supported of the Linux distros, and if you have a substantial investment in scripts and the RPM format, or if you need commercial application support (eg, Oracle) it's probably not worth switching. And it's easier to find people qualified in RH.
So what's best? Purely up to you. I can tell you that I'm extremely happy with a combo of Debian and Mandrake.
The experiment in the second link is very interesting, but not for the reason that the media picked it up. They're talking about this development as "they've turned the genes for teeth back on in chickens!", but that's not really true.
:-)
The scientists implanted mouse cells in chicken embryos. The mouse cells then migrated to the jaw and started growing teeth. This means that the creatures aren't really chickens, they are "chimeras" -- a combination of two species.
Despite the headlines, in other words, these are NOT CHICKENS. They're not even birds.
It is interesting, though, because it shows that the chicken genome still has the information for teeth in it. Apparently, chicken cells ignore the 'make teeth' command, and the mouse cells don't. (I don't know whether mouse cells had mouse DNA in them, or if they had the chicken DNA implanted.)
It's a long way from here to what the media seems to imply. REAL chickens-with-teeth are a heck of a lot harder than chimera-chickens-with-mouse-teeth.
Ergo, I can promise you that next week's KFC will have only bones left over.
I don't see any language that claims that SCO has an exclusive right to relicense the UNIX IP, so presumably, IBM can merely approach Novell and get a license from the original holder. That won't stop the lawsuit from going forward (because the alleged contract violations will still have occurred), but IBM will still be able to ship all the AIX they want.
If Novell is as pissed at SCO as it appears, I'd suggest that they set up IBM as another vendor with the rights to sell the Unix IP, preferably so cheaply that SCO would derive no further benefit from their extortion.
It'd be even better if Novell released the UNIX IP to the public domain, but the stockholders would likely be unhappy at this.
Yep, freedom is bad. People might misuse it to do things of which the government doesn't approve.
Maybe I'm being dumb here, but isn't this a GPL violation? Most of the Lindows software is based on GPL, is it not?
"you may not copy...or allow others to use".
Seems pretty blatant to me. Am I missing something?
This color is so horrid it's nauseating. I suppose I'm old by slashdot standards (35), but I think I would have despised it at 18.
Note to whoever made this particular decision: if this color is appealing to you, you shouldn't be doing anything but black and white graphic design.
Absolutely. This is something you learn when you read Warren Buffet -- businesses, by their very nature, have 'lumpy' earnings. Given the choice between a 'smooth' 12% return and a 'lumpy' 15%, he'll go for 15% every time.
The stock market prefers 'smooth', predictable earnings, but they don't often exist in the real business world. A company that has books that are very smooth and predictable, like Cisco, GE, or IBM, is probably doing some serious monkeying with the numbers behind the scenes, and you should look on such companies with great distrust. Healthy companies don't look like that.
Example: Cisco wrote down something like 1.2 BILLION DOLLARS' worth of inventory a year or two ago. They were essentially claiming that this huge amount of inventory was worthless, and they took it off their books. But they still had the inventory, so they can sell this inventory and use it to prop up their numbers in later quarters. The philosophy seems to be 'take all the writedowns at once and then the investors will forget about them' -- investors don't seem to realize that that writedown erased a huge amount of profit that had been previously, and inaccurately, reported. So Cisco got the benefit of saying "We sold X amount this quarter, growing by X percent!" for years -- and then they take all those phantom profits away and admit that they were fake with the writedown, and then they get to inflate their numbers again by selling "worthless" equipment for anything above 0.
Folks, "one-time expenses" COUNT. Pro-forma earnings are utter hogwash and you should ignore them. In the words of Bill Fleckenstein, over at realmoney.com, "Pro-forma earnings should be required to start with 'Once upon a time' and end with the phrase 'and they lived happily ever after.'"
Another aside: "beat the numbers" is BS. The game that's going on now is 'drop estimates about two weeks before earnings, and then we beat the number!'. Doesn't matter whether or not the business is actually profitable, just whether it 'beat expectations.'
Problem is, it's hard to pay creditors with expectations....
A lot of people are furious about losing so much money, and are looking for scapegoats. Everyone is conveniently forgetting just how thoroughly almost everyone believed this stuff, how the Internet was going to change everything, how the New Economy was going to make everyone wealthy overnight.
:) ). They STILL think I'm nuts when I predict that the Nasdaq will see 500 before it sees 5000 again, and that the Dow will see 3000 before 30K.
Thanks to sites like itulip.com (not really being updated any more) and prudentbear.com, I've been highly skeptical of the whole stock market thing since about 1999. (The dotcom I was working for at the time went public and was suddenly worth over a billion dollars; I KNEW this wasn't real, I KNEW something was horribly wrong, and started doing research.) But back in 99, these sites were practically the only source of real, solid information about what was happening, about the sheer insanity of the whole thing.
I'm not saying they were blameless, but it's not easy to dupe intelligent, informed people. Everyone wanted to get rich fast without working, and the madness of crowds is a powerful force. Wall Street alone couldn't possibly be to blame for a bubble of that size. It took the Fed's ridiculous money policies, Wall Street, a "world-changing invention", and lack of fear of debt, all working in combination, to cause the Great Bubble. (which I believe will lead to a Second Great Depression, just like the first one did -- it's just happening slower because the Fed is desperately, desperately trying to pump more greenbacks into the system -- more of the same medicine that got us sick in the first place.)
I can tell you from personal experience that this madness is nearly impossible to overcome. I tried and tried to tell my friends and family about what a dire mess we were getting into, and most of them thought I was nuts (not to mention a crashing bore
Because I was so frustrated then, trying to warn people that this was insanity and couldn't possibly last, I really notice the global shift in thinking. Suddenly, "of course" Wall Street is corrupt, and "of course" we were in a bubble, and obviously it was all those Wall Street guys who were at fault.
It's easy to hold people responsible, retroactively, for not holding an opinion that is now 'obvious'. It's also grossly unfair. But that's how scapegoating works.
Uh, install a rootkit?
Yes, all of those things are true. And I imagine that eventually, Linux viruses may become a real problem.
But it is an extra layer of security; virus writers have to work harder to get around the inherent limitations. It's not a free lunch.
On a normal Linux/Unix machine, An HTML-code exploit is not, by itself, going to spawn a remote root shell to Joe Attacker's box; it's going to take either user foolishness ("Type in your root password for maintanance purposes") or a second local exploit to do it.
On a Lindows box, ALL you need is the HTML exploit, no additional stupidity required.
One of the key issues with both real-life and computer-based viruses is containment. You're seeing that now with SARS. If you can slow the rate of infection, you gain time to deploy a response.
Tens of thousands of run-as-root boxes directly attached to cablemodem make a very fertile environment for virus development. An extra layer of security, requiring additional stupidity on someone's part, will slow the spread and help contain the damage.
Any defense can be gotten around, given enough time and effort. That does not, however, imply that no defenses should be deployed. I stand behind my assertion that knowingly defeating one of the main lines of security in an operating system for 'convenience' is grossly stupid.
You know, one of his answers really bugs me.... the old 'security versus convenience' argument. He essentially says that Lindows runs as root to be convenient.
He talks, later, about how his customers are so traumatized by viruses that they'd never consider running a machine without some kind of protection. Windows, which has always been 'features before security', has horrific virus problems.
In essence, he's indirectly bashing his own way of doing business. One of the main reasons viruses don't spread as easily on Linux is simply that normal users don't have permission to mess with system files. Even if a virus DID infect your Linux box, the damage would most likely be contained to the user account's home directory, unless you did something stupid (or weren't patched up properly). Lindows is, in essence, being stupid by default. He's trying to make Lindows 'just like Windows' -- so you get all the design problems and fewer user-level features to boot. What a deal.
If he wants to make Linux BETTER than Microsoft, this is likely an area of key differentiation, and yet he's glossing over the whole issue for 'user convenience'. Instead, he should be investing resources into engineering a solution that preserves both ease of use AND security. It can be done, it just costs time and money. Mandrake has a decent solution to this problem. It could be improved, but it's not too bad. It would make a fine starting place.
A corollary of an old computer aphorism: "Cheap, secure, convenient. Pick any two."
Great move for them. Now they can break into the big leagues of Linux Gaming by releasing blockbusters like "Bowling USA" and "Family Collection", both 1 AND 2. Oooh.
Me, I'm holding my breath for "Paintball Heroes".
If I understand what I read correctly, essentially the problem they're trying to solve is this: the Earth's rotation is slowing, but they can't predict exactly how much it's going to slow at any given time. It is a real, physical thing, and while they can model its orbit with extreme and unchanging accuracy (things are widely separated enough that the mathematical abstractions work fine), modeling its rotation isn't really possible. There's all sorts of liquid sloshing around everywhere, both liquid water on the surface and molten rock in the center. All they can do is measure it, and every once in awhile, determine that sunrise is happening just a little late.
:-)
There are two major timekeeping systems: TAI, which is "absolute time" and is never adjusted, and UTC, which is "civilian time". Because UTC is used by normal people, they try to keep it synced to the Earth's rotation, which in theory at least makes it more useful for us mere mortals. (knowing that the sun will rise at exactly X time on X date at sea level, for instance.). So, gradually, UTC diverges from TAI, because one rotation of the Earth is just a little longer than 24 hours, and over time this divergence adds up to be greater than a second. When it's getting close, they add a leap second. These additions are not at regular intervals, because they can't predict exactly when any given second should be added.
There are occasional problems when they add the leap seconds (programs that don't expect 61 seconds in a minute, for example), or programs that don't realize that there are X number of seconds (15 or so?) that simply didn't exist since 1970. (sometimes this stuff matters).
Thus, they're debating about doing away with leap seconds altogether. One possible substitute is a 'leap hour' every thousand years.
It seems like a rather anal-retentive thing to argue about, but these people are paid to be precise to a degree we can't even imagine.
A worthy slashdot story. This is serious geekery.
Well, things have changed a little since then, too.
I was running Linux in a similar timeframe on very similar hardware. You essentially couldn't do web browsing with it (web browsing was very new at the time): Mosaic was slow as dirt on that hardware. I think the lack of a FP proc slowed it to unbearable levels -- it was something about rendering the fonts, I think. ANYTHING in X was DOG slow. It ran, which was pretty amazing, but it was sluggish as hell.
My Palm (16Mhz, 8mb) might be able to run 16 users on a 0.9 kernel, in text mode, with everyone running tin and pine. But it would be dog slow trying to do graphics, much less a heavy-overhead protocol like X -- AFAIK, there's no video acceleration. Dunno if you remember, but the S3 chips that did acceleration made a HUGE difference in how the machine felt.
Obviously, an 800mhz processor (as long as it's reasonably efficient per clock) with 128MB of RAM is going to run Linux quite nicely. The only limit would really be the amount of disk-like storage available.
But holding the designers of the Palm series responsible for not using Linux or QNX in the first place is wrongheaded, IMO -- those systems weren't a good fit at the time. Had they implemented one of those OSes as their kernel, they'd have had a gigantic flop, and some OTHER company with a small, simple OS would have prospered instead.
Designing for the future is great, but first you have to HAVE a future.