I'm not really a programmer, more of a Sunday-afternoon hack, but I bought a copy of Delphi and spent about a month tinkering with it.
It felt like being led on a tour of what programming should really be like, by about ten of the smartest people in the world. I alternated between awe and excitement; I was blown away by how elegant things were. Programming in Delphi was closer to writing poetry than the grunt programming I'm used to. Everything was thought out well, top-to-bottom, no details left out. They abstract almost everything in powerful ways; you can just ignore the details and crank out some code attached to components, or you can dig into the components themselves and rewrite them to suit your exact needs. Don't like how they abstracted something? Just go back into the hierarchy until you find a level you do like/agree with, and rebuild from there. If you get the more expensive ($500?) version, like I did, you have all the VCL source sitting in front of you to serve as an excellent example.
Just like Visual Basic, you can get in and hack together apps in minutes after you open the box. If you start digging under the pretty facade, though, you'll find that the learning curve to real mastery is a LOT steeper than Visual Basic. A lot of that is simply that you can do so much more with Delphi. The VCL is just a pretty face on a massively powerful language. The VB facade hides an ancient compiler technology and the language itself is a fundamentally weak one.
I once compared Delphi to VB this way; VB is a flat, wide road that is easy to walk down, with lots of pretty little Disneyesque buildings scattered about. But if you look inside you tend to find that the houses are actually made of paperboard and are sitting on top of landfill. And that wide, easy road abruptly dead-ends into a nearly-vertical wall. Delphi, on the other hand, is like a twisty mountain road with some really lovely scenery. You have to do a lot more work to climb (learn) it -- but once you get over the top the road it turns into a superhighway that goes *anywhere* -- and through some of the prettiest country you could imagine.
You can do almost anything with Delphi. The compiled apps absolutely scream -- they build fast, rebuild even faster, and run like greased lightning. And you have all the source to the whole component library so you can tinker and rebuild to your heart's content. I don't think there's a software project you could name that would be too big to tackle with it, or at least with the fundamental compiler and language. I'm sure there are projects (particularly Linux-flavor) that wouldn't be well-suited to the Visual Component Library (VCL), but I can't imagine a problem that you couldn't tackle using Object Pascal itself.
If I were to become a full-time programmer (I'm a sysadmin now), Delphi is the language I would want to live in. I'm jazzed about it coming to Linux, finally. I had been yelling at Borland for years that they really needed to port it. It's a shame they waited until the edge of death to get a clue.
Like the author of the article, I also wonder a bit about the GPL issues. This will be a wonderful tool, and $500 is very reasonable for a compiler of this quality, but I will feel kind of bad about releasing source that will only build on a payware compiler. Note that it should be possible to compile/tinker with most released projects with the $100 model. The biggest difference between the low-end Delphi and the high-end one is the VCL source. If developers package their code carefully, the compiler cost to newbies/young programmers will be a lot less. It's an issue that needs thinking about. The really bad part is that you *need* that VCL source if you want to program seriously in this language. You're really crippled without it.
You know, I've been kind of thinking about this in the back of my head while I wrote the rest of this comment, and I really am starting to think that Borland should release the whole app for free, and attach a 'pay-us-for-commercial-use' license like QT. It's so powerful that it would be widely accepted in the Linux community, and I think they'd end up selling more commercial-use licenses than they otherwise would. Borland's big interest is going to be grabbing a big chunk of the Linux development environment -- if you are The Standard people will just throw money at you. RedHat seems to be doing pretty well at that game.... and Delphi is good enough that while it might never be The Standard for Linux, it has an excellent chance of becoming The Other Choice. I think not having a free version will hamper its ability to grow and thrive under Linux.
I was going to suggest the same thing, actually. Good standards never die. People are still using mainframes, television, and QWERTY keyboards. IPV4 will continue to exist in some form when your grandchildren are learning networking.
DHCP is just a tool, and like most tools can be used for good or evil. (heh)
It doesn't just set your IP address. It sets your default gateway, your DNS server(s), your WINS server(s), extra routes, time server(s), domain name... all sorts of things. From working quite a bit with Microsoft DHCP, I think that particular implementation offers about 80 possible settings that can be transmitted to the clients. This is most likely documented in an RFC, but I haven't a clue which one offhand.
It's EASIEST from a network-admin standpoint to have everyone use floating IPs. However, the existing DNS structure is not really set up to support the concept of hostnames that can change on an hourly basis. There are modifications to it that are starting to get into production, mostly spearheaded by Microsoft. (and I personally DO NOT suggest you trust your DNS infrastructure to that company -- any foothold you give them into your central infrastructure will someday be used against you as they fight to eliminate all other operating systems from your network.) BIND, the gold standard of DNS, does now support dynamic updates, but I haven't tried to get this working yet.
If you don't have an updateable DNS server, you can get around that problem by using DHCP reservations. I use them a LOT. They do take a bit more work, but I think the payoff is worthwhile. You end up mapping a particular IP address to a particular MAC address -- essentially tying an IP address to an Ethernet card. (which means that IP addresses follow cards, not machines, which you have to be aware of.) But you set the client to full-automatic DHCP. It THINKS it's a floating client. It doesn't know that it will always get the same IP number.
This lets you push big changes out in X/2 time, where X is your DHCP renewal interval. (clients renew their lease when 50% of the duration expires). Instead of having to visit every client to adjust their WINS settings if a server goes down, you just adjust it at the server and the whole network soon knows about it without you needing to do anything else. You can also tell everyone to do an 'ipconfig/release' and an 'ipconfig/renew' if you need to push the settings out faster.
Because of all these niceties, it's unlikely DHCP will go away as we transition to IPV6. The concept of automatically-configured network settings is just too useful to go away. It will undoubtedly morph over time, and Microsoft will probably rename it at some point to make it sound new so they can sell it to you again, but the basic concept is here to stay.
Re:thoughts on Katz, Eugenics, and such
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Frankenstein Time
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I just realized I got the names backwards in the key paragraph here. *doh*
What I should have said was: If we enhance Baby Sue to match Baby Jane, aren't we losing the natural variety of genetic expression?
I also said 'five billion years of evolution' -- I think, looking back, that this is wrong. Isn't it believed that life on Earth started around 1 billion years ago?
Whatever the exact number of billions, we have been evolving for a LONG time. It strikes me that doing much more than trying to read and understand what's going on could be very dangerous indeed.
It's a bit like cavemen having just been given the keys to a nuclear reactor. We can go running in there, hooting and hollering, and start pushing all the buttons and fiddling with the dials -- or we can go slow, and figure out *exactly* what the buttons and dials do before we start adjusting things.
If we are truly cavemen in this area, it might take another century or so to develop a solid understanding of what we're doing. I assume 100,000 years won't be necessary.:-) Our understanding will never be perfect... but, if you accept that we've been given the keys to a nuclear reactor, wouuldn't it be prudent to develop the ability to read the manuals first?
Hopefully the scientists involved aren't too geeky... they'd never RTFM.:-)
Re:thoughts on Katz, Eugenics, and such
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Frankenstein Time
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· Score: 2
Nothing is so humbling as to step back and realize that no small measure of your own success is due to gifts given you in a grand game of chance, which you did nothing to deserve. Genetics gives us the chance to equalize the luck of birth for all people.
This is possibly one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Equality doesn't exist. It never did. It's a made-up concept. Our pattern-seeking brains try to divide and judge and measure and declare things as being equal, even when it's wildly inappropriate.
It's pretty easy to measure the size of the steak you got off the tribe's hunt, or to figure out how much food your family will need to survive a winter. It's easy to look at two trees and figure out which one is taller. The brain is wonderfully well-suited for that.
But if you look at two people, how can you really tell which one is absolutely more beautiful? Or intelligent? I might prefer person A in both cases; you might think person A is smarter but uglier than person B; a third party might disagree with us both. And there is no way to know who is right. There have been attempts to quantify subjects like intelligence, but despite the widespread acceptance of IQ as a measure of intelligence, it is actually a lot more complex than most folks realize. One widely-respected theory holds that there are seven kinds of intelligence, of which verbal and mathematical are only two. Some of the others are social intelligence, artistic skills, and kinesthetic talent (the knowledge of where one's body is in space). How are you going to measure these things by looking at potentials in a gene strand?
You're trying to map ideals based on objective goals ('everyone should be equal') to a fundamentally subjective area, genetics. Which gene sequence is better, blue eyes or brown eyes? If Baby Johnny is going to be inclined to be highly artistic but very poor verbally and mathematically (ie, "not too bright"), do we trade away some of one for another? And what if Baby Jane is better at *everything* than Baby Sue is, and we reprogram Baby Jane by giving her some of Baby Sue's genes, so as to make them 'equal'? Aren't we losing something here?
Our cultural values have absolutely nothing to do with the viability of the species. You are trying to replace the accumulated wisdom of about five billion years' worth of evolution with transient value judgements.
I was going to post a complaint, but then I saw yours. I'm sure the Slashdot staffer meant well, but this was such poor headline generation that, were *I* the executive editor of the site, I'd pull that staffer from article-posting until he/she showed better judgement.
Slashdot: you guys need better QC on your editors. This headline/alert was just blatantly wrong and, if you want to retain your credibility, you'd better start taking steps to make sure this doesn't happen again.
Considering that credibility is really all you have, you're being awfully careless with it.
First, realize that I was one of the very first Amigans, way back when. My family bought an Amiga 1000 in December of 1985 -- the machine had been out a month.
I have no way of really describing the sheer impact that computer had on almost everyone who touched it. It was a vision of what computing would eventually become. Great graphics, multitasking, tons of memory, and wild expandability. It was, quite literally, 10 years ahead of its time. And those of us using it at the time *knew this* and evangelized it ceaselessly. Commodore sold millions of these machines based solely on word-of-mouth.
If Apple had had this machine instead of the Macintosh, we would all be running Motorola chips on our desks now instead of PCs. Seriously. It was that good. It just needed clever execution and management.
Commodore, on the other hand, didn't just shoot themselves in the foot on this one, they shot themselves in the head. They had the finest system-design team that had ever been assembled, didn't know it, treated them like dirt, and were somehow surprised when they all left. The Amiga never really moved forward because C= lost the resource that really mattered, the brains that had originally invented it. Had they preserved that team and kept them motivated, today's computing landscape would be far different.
But... christ. That was FIFTEEN YEARS AGO and the system hasn't made much progress in that time. The Amiga itself is dead. There is *nothing* that operating system does that modern OSes like Linux and NT don't do, and far better. (moment of epiphany for me was booting up Linux in late 1993 or early 1994 and realizing that, for the first time in eight or nine years, I could finally work with my PC the way I used to work on my Amiga -- more than one thing at a time.)
The look and feel is easy to duplicate with modern window managers. I can make Enlightenment work almost exactly like the Amiga's desktop did, and it is one hell of a lot more stable. Amiga just didn't have that great a desktop, folks -- it was nice enough for the time, but compared to what we're driving now it looks like GEOS on the C64.
I'm not sure what the Amiga team is doing. They may be doing something really neat. But it has no more relation to the Amiga than Battlezone 2 had to Atari's Battlezone or id's Wolfenstein 3D had to Wolfenstein on the Apple 2.
They are just capitalizing on the Amiga name and trying to redefine it to mean something other than what it really DOES mean -- an impossibly brilliant operating system design that dead-ended and died due to incompetent management.
The Amiga is dead and gone. Let's lay roses on its grave and think good thoughts about it -- and move on with our lives. Enough, already. Run an emulator if you're really nostalgic, but it's time to update to something modern and start over. There is nothing left worth salvaging in the AmigaOS.
I don't think the cancer argument holds -- pre Industrial Revolution, I believe lifespans were still short enough that cancer wasn't usually an issue. You were far more likely to die of pneumonia or a runaway infection from a fairly trivial wound.
I suspect the loss of technology would be far more disastrous to first-world countries than you believe. The food issue alone would probably kill 50% of the population. We don't have much land in crop production anymore, but we extract truly vast amounts of food out of that relatively small amount of land. If we were suddenly back to the by-hand days of farming, well... it wouldn't be pretty, that's for damn sure.
I also suspect you may be over-rating the impact of technology on the third-world countries. Life is pretty miserable there. I suspect there wouldn't be much difference in medical care or life expectancy. However, the food issue raises its head again there -- many of those countries are dependent on food imports, which would go away. So in that regard, it might be even worse than you are supposing.
This would be mildly interesting to dig into a bit, if anyone reading has any particular expertise in this field.
Jerry Pournelle defined a 'dullard' as being someone who could pick up an encyclopedia, look up the entry in which they were interested, read just that one entry, and put the encyclopedia away again without reading anything else.
All ideas relate to one another. Any medium that doesn't promote this idea is inferior to one that does. Hypertext is better for learning than static pages.
Some folks seem to think that Learning is something Sacrosanct that happens in Institutions Of Knowledge. I beg to differ. Learning is something that happens when you're splashing through mud puddles and cleaning out sinks, not just reading books. Lighten up -- go play a game. You might learn something.:)
The Internet isn't directly an agent of all THAT MUCH change. It's more of a... meta-change.
I'm going to assume I'm a pretty typical/. geek (older than most, perhaps.) In trying to imagine life without the Internet, the biggest difference in my life is this: I would know a LOT less than I do. I have learned (and continue to) as much in a few years on the Internet as probably my entire life pre-Internet. It hasn't made me any smarter, but with the additional information available to work with, I function as though I were smarter than I was before.
The Internet is speeding and decentralizing the flow of information. Advances happen when people put things together that haven't been combined before. The increased speed at which ideas can move around, combined with the much lowered degree of filtering on what ideas are considered 'publishable', will result in those new combinations coming faster than ever before.
Basically, the Internet is overhauling the communications infrastructore of knowledge workers. It is a meta-change: it improves the speed of other improvements without doing all that much by itself. Its impact will be indirect but immense. We are already seeing it;/. is a very real part of this phenomenon.
The researchers wanting to see direct effects of the Internet just aren't going to see much yet. If you took Victorian England and suddenly raised the IQ of a large fraction of its population by 10 or 20 points, that wouldn't be a very visible change either, if you were looking for signs of material progress.
Had that happened, you couldn't have pointed at anything directly that was changed. Consider: even historians, looking back, wouldn't consider the fact that we reached the Moon in 1925 to be a 'result'.
IF you can run a debugger on the code, then you can break any encryption that any program can come up with. I believe this is a variant of the class of problems known as NP-Hard. I have only heard about this in passing (I'm not really a programmer, I just dabble a bit occasionally), but as far as I know, NP-Hard is jargon for 'provably impossible'.
No matter what a program attempts to do, if you can sit on top of it and watch its internal functioning and code, you can duplicate its responses, spoof the other side, and crack the encryption. All encryption does is protect data IN TRANSIT.
Basically, to make this kind of file-sharing work, SightSound will need to go to some kind of tamper-proof hardware encryption/decryption. This can certainly be done (and often is), but it is very expensive. Intel is in the process of designing tamper-proof encryption into its next generation of video cards and digital display devices. Those will be HARD to crack.
But as far as I know, ANY software encryption is breakable. If you can see how the decode process works, you can duplicate it.
They haven't had a chance to mesh IE completely with Office yet. If they succeed there, they will pretty much destroy the browser market. (it has already been plenty damaged, mind you.)
If it stays with the OS, it can't really get any worse than it is already.
BTW, the character's name was 'Hari' Seldon. Fortunately, however, I don't think spelling counts in psychohistory. *grin*
Open-and-secure is admittedly WAY better than secure-now-but-with-bugs-later-on. However, there are a HUGE number of exploits available now for Linux, far more than there are for Windows. The Open Source ethos is making Linux *less* secure than Windows for your average overworked admin, not more.
Now, over the long term, I think this will change. Gradually, people will learn how to write secure code and will beter grasp security implications of the things they do. Linux and the other Open Source apps will get more and more secure, where closed-source apps like Windows will never improve very much.
Eventually, code that is open to inspection will be a critical component to assuring that a system is actually secure (at least in terms of exploits and not human engineering.)
But that doesn't change things now. Linux has bazillions of exploits, far more than what I've seen in Windows. I've been watching both over the last two years and I have to actively patch my Linux boxes a lot more often than my Windows ones.
So why is this? I think it's because people don't yet know how to write secure software, and all that code is available to easy inspection. It's a lot harder to reverse engineer something through a debugger and packet sniffer. In REAL terms, Windows is probably a lot less secure than any of the Open Source apps, but in terms of actual available exploits, it's a lot safer than Linux is for the moment. (assuming best practices on the part of the admins running the boses -- an out-of-box Windows machine is a joke. But if you harden both a Linux and a Windows box 'properly', chances are there's going to be a new root exploit for the Linux box first.)
I have arrived at the pet theory that ALL software is HORRIBLY insecure. I think in twenty years we will be laughing at the state of our networks today.
For the moment, closed source may actually be better for many companies. Their apps are insecure anyway -- why make it easier on the guys in black hats? I am really starting to think that a good chunk of the full-disclosure-of-exploits, open-source crowd isn't pushing that idea for MY benefit but for THEIRS -- because they can spend more time studying new exploits and figuring out ways to get into my machines than I can.
As the knowledge of how-to-program-apps-securely proliferates, it will be safer to gradually transition to a TRULY secure environment. But right now, opening apps written by desktop-trained programmers is just not a very good idea.
I suspect that it'll take one more generation of programs and programmers before we can safely make the transition to a truly open-code environment. Once we get there, we'll be nearing the realm of 'real' security.
But until then, the false security of no-working-exploits-for-my-machines will have to do -- and Windows has fewer exploits available.
One of the side effects of open sourcing a product is that you get an unintentional security audit.
If your app is net-based, and it hasn't been written with security in mind from the very start, there are going to be holes in it. By publishing your source, you have just advertised those holes to people who know how to exploit this sort of thing.
Unless you happen to be scratching an itch that a lot of programmers (not COMPANIES, PROGRAMMERS) have, chances are that open sourcing your product won't give you many new contributors. You need to evaluate the benefits versus risks carefully; is your app of such compelling interest that you're going to get loads of contributors? And does that offset the security risks?
There is definitely room in the world still for closed-source apps. A custom-written business app is one of the best candidates, IMO.
I figure this is fair. If you have the technical savvy to modify the source to remove these messages (and believe me, it doesn't take very much), then you don't get advertising.
If you don't have the tech savvy, chances are you spend $$$ on your system to make it work, and an understated plea for more $$ is probably pretty reasonable.
One of the main benefits of open source is that you can make your system work any damn way you want, if you're willing to spend the time.
I'm pretty tech-savvy, and I often have no clue what's running on my Windows box; there's so many buried processes and components that God only knows what the system is actually DOING while I'm sitting here typing. Many popular programs have been found to have hidden 'features' that transmit user data back to the mothership. You can stop this with a firewall, of course, but how many Average Joes are going to know how to run one?
I'm not arguing that this is ethically correct (it most emphatically IS NOT, IMO), but considering that most people are being snooped on bigtime by many of the programs they have trustingly installed, a couple of lines of text as credit seem pretty damn innocuous. And if you have any shred of a clue, you can get rid of even that much.
If you want to use an Open Source product, you are taking on the responsibility of making things work *yourself* instead of trading money for someone else to do it for you. Whining about cosmetic behaviors of a program when you have the source code right in front of you is pretty dumb, IMO. Make it work how *you* want it to. That is probably the single largest reason why you would choose an open source product over a commercial one.
There's a whole lot of words up there. They can be boiled down, I think, to just three: "we don't know." Lots of opinion and bombast, but very few facts.
Okay: we don't know, but surely SOMEONE does. Doesn't anyone have links to related info? Does the United Way have any information about computer company donations? I don't, unfortunately, have time to do the legwork today.:(
Despite the protestations of the A/C above, claiming that any such thinking is a threat to freedom, etc. etc, this stuff matters . Much of the code you write will be thrown away -- the environmental damage you do while writing it will last forever.
One thing we're realizing, in our search of the cosmos with the Hubble, is that planets like Earth may be impossibly rare; there might not be five planets like this in the whole Galaxy. We are probably sitting atop a treasure trove of literally Galactic proportions and using it as a toilet... in fact, we're actively painting the treasure room with feces.
So, again, this stuff matters a lot. Pay attention. Pick this out over the background noise; most other concerns are less important, even if they are more urgent.
I thought the later books in that series were an utter disappointment. It felt to me like Brin had been 'poisoned' by Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. It felt like he was trying to retell that same story/idea from a different angle, but it just didn't work for me.
Brin is quoted on the dust jacket for A Deepness in the Sky, the prequel (but which was written second). So I'm fairly sure he did read the first book, and I think it completely wrecked his own series. Really a shame -- the Sundiver universe was a hell of a lot more interesting before it was 'invaded'.:-)
Asimov named his characters the way he did because he found it funny. He would usually choose a complex first name with an absolutely ordinary surname. 'Ishtar Smith' was an example he used when he discussed it once.
It does sound odd, but he did it very consciously -- it's sort of a running joke.:-)
Snow Crash has some really violent, gory scenes in it. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to a kid that young. I was disturbed by some of the images at 28 or so.
Simmons is indeed a master. If you like his work, and haven't yet seen it, read Carrion Comfort. It is horror, and you will remember it forever -- it's not at all traditional.
Every time you think you know what's going on, the author reaches out and slaps you upside the head. You WILL NOT guess the ending ahead of time.
I don't like horror but I liked this one. My roommate at the time, who was very into horror, was almost willing to hold a gun to my head to make me read it. I'm glad he twisted my arm so hard. It was an experience.
Probably not suitable for the 13-year-old in question, but Dad might like it a lot.
True Names stands out as one of the most amazing short stories I read in my my youth -- and I read A LOT. What is particularly eerie about it now, in reading it, is that the setting seems quite ordinary. And I see no reason at all why the basic plot premise couldn't come true -- and soon.
It is an example of either eerily good prognostication, or of science fiction molding the future in its own image, or some combination of the two. Whatever it is, it is worth reading -- the story is interesting by itself, and when you realize that it was written before most people even had modems, it becomes a work of staggering brilliance.
A Fire Upon the Deep is also great fun. It is a space-opera-ish sort of book, but intelligently written and full of exceedingly interesting ideas. It amazes me how he managed to interweave two tales -- a 'small' one about a castaway human trying to survive on an alien planet, and a 'big' one about a galaxy-threatening menace -- into one book, seamlessly.
Vinge, btw, is definitely not a subscriber to the Tragic View of Technology.:-)
I was using the version just before it changed to ArcServeIT, though we did get the first version of ArcServeIT. It is poorly programmed and unstable as hell. I nevercould rely on it. Restores were always a scary experience. It wouldn't recover crashed machines at all (apparently you were supposed to pay extra for this very basic capability, and my predecessor hadn't bought this feature). I could get back data files USUALLY. However, I had endless trouble with the catalog. Doing restores on that system was a constant series of barely-dodged bullets. I have never, in my life, dealt with software that was so horrible. I fought it for MONTHS. I almost always managed to do restores when I needed them, but that was mostly due to ingenuity on my part.
Eventually, in desperation, I called up support (which is actually decent) and complained at them about the endless trouble we were having with it. Turns out that the Raima database that they use internally can only support 16 million records. I had over a million files on one server ALONE, and I was backing up over fifty machines to DLT tape. The catalogs were silently corrupting themselves within a few days of being rebuilt. This is NOT DOCUMENTED ANYWHERE in the manuals. And I asked them about this. "Oh, Arcserve isn't meant to handle that much data." Excuse me? This is a multi-thousand dollar package, and I don't remember seeing anything on the box about how much data I could back up with it???
They did tell me I could use SQL Server to store the database files. I went through the whole process of buying a new drive, setting up SQL Server, and configuring ARCServe to talk to it. It did work, and it didn't lose catalog data. However, after a backup, it would take somewhere around TWENTY HOURS to update the catalog in the database. When it was time for the next daily backup, it often wouldn't be finished updating the catalog from the PRIOR one 24 hours before! And if I wanted a restore, even a simple query would take twenty minutes to run (as in, browsing the files that had been backed up the night before from a specific server).
At that point, we just dumped it and bought a real solution, Legato Networker. Networker on NT has a few odd wrinkles but it is mostly solid, and it has saved my rear end several times. When I do a restore with Networker, I get back a perfect machine. Users can actually restore their own recent files without any intervention on my part. And it works. Every time.
Caveat re: Legato: An earlier build of Networker totally ate itself and destroyed the server installation. I was able to rebuild the server from its 'bootstrap' tapes, but bugs in the restore process make it very slow and tedious to recover the catalogs from multiple machines. I don't know if this has been fixed yet. It has not crashed since I went to a more recent patch rev, and has been almost painless. Light years difference from ArcServe, which was a constant, constant hassle.
Conclusion: Don't touch this software with a ten-meter pole. It won't be any better on Linux than it was on NT. Go with something you can trust; both BRU and Arkeia have pretty good reputations.
This advance should allow great strides in reality simulation. At last, we can show kids what it's really like to become a Serious Hacker.
The simulation would simply require a screen full of indecipherable gibberish, complete with the following smells:
unwashed underarms
Jolt cola
pizza
Penguin mints
leftover Chinese food
musty room
To get the full experience, one must sit for hours, though constant staring is not required. Squinting, looking pained, holding one's head in one's hands, and possibly cursing or throwing things are all highly encouraged to complete the experience.
Afterward, the simulator would go on a virtual vacation to Hawaii, Tahiti, Jamaica, or some other exotic location.:-)
Frankly, even posting this particular thread was kind of dumb; anyone with any understanding of licensing at all would see that this particular 'hole' was simply a misunderstanding by someone who doesn't really understand how corporations work in a legal sense.
I really get the impression that some days, Slashdot is really grasping for news. This particular article needed more research before being posted.
If there isn't any news in a given day, if there is no "stuff that matters" -- don't post anything. If you review several thousand submissions and none are appropriate News for Nerds, then you are doing a better job. Choosing three or four items to run every day, no matter what, is resulting in a lot of stuff getting posted that shouldn't be.
This has been my home page for a long time, but I am getting tired of it. I would much prefer zero items to four items of minor-to-no interest.
Slashdot Mirror
It felt like being led on a tour of what programming should really be like, by about ten of the smartest people in the world. I alternated between awe and excitement; I was blown away by how elegant things were. Programming in Delphi was closer to writing poetry than the grunt programming I'm used to. Everything was thought out well, top-to-bottom, no details left out. They abstract almost everything in powerful ways; you can just ignore the details and crank out some code attached to components, or you can dig into the components themselves and rewrite them to suit your exact needs. Don't like how they abstracted something? Just go back into the hierarchy until you find a level you do like/agree with, and rebuild from there. If you get the more expensive ($500?) version, like I did, you have all the VCL source sitting in front of you to serve as an excellent example.
Just like Visual Basic, you can get in and hack together apps in minutes after you open the box. If you start digging under the pretty facade, though, you'll find that the learning curve to real mastery is a LOT steeper than Visual Basic. A lot of that is simply that you can do so much more with Delphi. The VCL is just a pretty face on a massively powerful language. The VB facade hides an ancient compiler technology and the language itself is a fundamentally weak one.
I once compared Delphi to VB this way; VB is a flat, wide road that is easy to walk down, with lots of pretty little Disneyesque buildings scattered about. But if you look inside you tend to find that the houses are actually made of paperboard and are sitting on top of landfill. And that wide, easy road abruptly dead-ends into a nearly-vertical wall. Delphi, on the other hand, is like a twisty mountain road with some really lovely scenery. You have to do a lot more work to climb (learn) it -- but once you get over the top the road it turns into a superhighway that goes *anywhere* -- and through some of the prettiest country you could imagine.
You can do almost anything with Delphi. The compiled apps absolutely scream -- they build fast, rebuild even faster, and run like greased lightning. And you have all the source to the whole component library so you can tinker and rebuild to your heart's content. I don't think there's a software project you could name that would be too big to tackle with it, or at least with the fundamental compiler and language. I'm sure there are projects (particularly Linux-flavor) that wouldn't be well-suited to the Visual Component Library (VCL), but I can't imagine a problem that you couldn't tackle using Object Pascal itself.
If I were to become a full-time programmer (I'm a sysadmin now), Delphi is the language I would want to live in. I'm jazzed about it coming to Linux, finally. I had been yelling at Borland for years that they really needed to port it. It's a shame they waited until the edge of death to get a clue.
Like the author of the article, I also wonder a bit about the GPL issues. This will be a wonderful tool, and $500 is very reasonable for a compiler of this quality, but I will feel kind of bad about releasing source that will only build on a payware compiler. Note that it should be possible to compile/tinker with most released projects with the $100 model. The biggest difference between the low-end Delphi and the high-end one is the VCL source. If developers package their code carefully, the compiler cost to newbies/young programmers will be a lot less. It's an issue that needs thinking about. The really bad part is that you *need* that VCL source if you want to program seriously in this language. You're really crippled without it.
You know, I've been kind of thinking about this in the back of my head while I wrote the rest of this comment, and I really am starting to think that Borland should release the whole app for free, and attach a 'pay-us-for-commercial-use' license like QT. It's so powerful that it would be widely accepted in the Linux community, and I think they'd end up selling more commercial-use licenses than they otherwise would. Borland's big interest is going to be grabbing a big chunk of the Linux development environment -- if you are The Standard people will just throw money at you. RedHat seems to be doing pretty well at that game.... and Delphi is good enough that while it might never be The Standard for Linux, it has an excellent chance of becoming The Other Choice. I think not having a free version will hamper its ability to grow and thrive under Linux.
I was going to suggest the same thing, actually. Good standards never die. People are still using mainframes, television, and QWERTY keyboards. IPV4 will continue to exist in some form when your grandchildren are learning networking.
DHCP is just a tool, and like most tools can be used for good or evil. (heh)
/release' and an 'ipconfig /renew' if you need to push the settings out faster.
It doesn't just set your IP address. It sets your default gateway, your DNS server(s), your WINS server(s), extra routes, time server(s), domain name... all sorts of things. From working quite a bit with Microsoft DHCP, I think that particular implementation offers about 80 possible settings that can be transmitted to the clients. This is most likely documented in an RFC, but I haven't a clue which one offhand.
It's EASIEST from a network-admin standpoint to have everyone use floating IPs. However, the existing DNS structure is not really set up to support the concept of hostnames that can change on an hourly basis. There are modifications to it that are starting to get into production, mostly spearheaded by Microsoft. (and I personally DO NOT suggest you trust your DNS infrastructure to that company -- any foothold you give them into your central infrastructure will someday be used against you as they fight to eliminate all other operating systems from your network.) BIND, the gold standard of DNS, does now support dynamic updates, but I haven't tried to get this working yet.
If you don't have an updateable DNS server, you can get around that problem by using DHCP reservations. I use them a LOT. They do take a bit more work, but I think the payoff is worthwhile. You end up mapping a particular IP address to a particular MAC address -- essentially tying an IP address to an Ethernet card. (which means that IP addresses follow cards, not machines, which you have to be aware of.) But you set the client to full-automatic DHCP. It THINKS it's a floating client. It doesn't know that it will always get the same IP number.
This lets you push big changes out in X/2 time, where X is your DHCP renewal interval. (clients renew their lease when 50% of the duration expires). Instead of having to visit every client to adjust their WINS settings if a server goes down, you just adjust it at the server and the whole network soon knows about it without you needing to do anything else. You can also tell everyone to do an 'ipconfig
Because of all these niceties, it's unlikely DHCP will go away as we transition to IPV6. The concept of automatically-configured network settings is just too useful to go away. It will undoubtedly morph over time, and Microsoft will probably rename it at some point to make it sound new so they can sell it to you again, but the basic concept is here to stay.
I just realized I got the names backwards in the key paragraph here. *doh*
:-) Our understanding will never be perfect... but, if you accept that we've been given the keys to a nuclear reactor, wouuldn't it be prudent to develop the ability to read the manuals first?
:-)
What I should have said was: If we enhance Baby Sue to match Baby Jane, aren't we losing the natural variety of genetic expression?
I also said 'five billion years of evolution' -- I think, looking back, that this is wrong. Isn't it believed that life on Earth started around 1 billion years ago?
Whatever the exact number of billions, we have been evolving for a LONG time. It strikes me that doing much more than trying to read and understand what's going on could be very dangerous indeed.
It's a bit like cavemen having just been given the keys to a nuclear reactor. We can go running in there, hooting and hollering, and start pushing all the buttons and fiddling with the dials -- or we can go slow, and figure out *exactly* what the buttons and dials do before we start adjusting things.
If we are truly cavemen in this area, it might take another century or so to develop a solid understanding of what we're doing. I assume 100,000 years won't be necessary.
Hopefully the scientists involved aren't too geeky... they'd never RTFM.
This is possibly one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Equality doesn't exist. It never did. It's a made-up concept. Our pattern-seeking brains try to divide and judge and measure and declare things as being equal, even when it's wildly inappropriate.
It's pretty easy to measure the size of the steak you got off the tribe's hunt, or to figure out how much food your family will need to survive a winter. It's easy to look at two trees and figure out which one is taller. The brain is wonderfully well-suited for that.
But if you look at two people, how can you really tell which one is absolutely more beautiful? Or intelligent? I might prefer person A in both cases; you might think person A is smarter but uglier than person B; a third party might disagree with us both. And there is no way to know who is right. There have been attempts to quantify subjects like intelligence, but despite the widespread acceptance of IQ as a measure of intelligence, it is actually a lot more complex than most folks realize. One widely-respected theory holds that there are seven kinds of intelligence, of which verbal and mathematical are only two. Some of the others are social intelligence, artistic skills, and kinesthetic talent (the knowledge of where one's body is in space). How are you going to measure these things by looking at potentials in a gene strand?
You're trying to map ideals based on objective goals ('everyone should be equal') to a fundamentally subjective area, genetics. Which gene sequence is better, blue eyes or brown eyes? If Baby Johnny is going to be inclined to be highly artistic but very poor verbally and mathematically (ie, "not too bright"), do we trade away some of one for another? And what if Baby Jane is better at *everything* than Baby Sue is, and we reprogram Baby Jane by giving her some of Baby Sue's genes, so as to make them 'equal'? Aren't we losing something here?
Our cultural values have absolutely nothing to do with the viability of the species. You are trying to replace the accumulated wisdom of about five billion years' worth of evolution with transient value judgements.
This is not a step to take lightly.
Slashdot: you guys need better QC on your editors. This headline/alert was just blatantly wrong and, if you want to retain your credibility, you'd better start taking steps to make sure this doesn't happen again.
Considering that credibility is really all you have, you're being awfully careless with it.
I have no way of really describing the sheer impact that computer had on almost everyone who touched it. It was a vision of what computing would eventually become. Great graphics, multitasking, tons of memory, and wild expandability. It was, quite literally, 10 years ahead of its time. And those of us using it at the time *knew this* and evangelized it ceaselessly. Commodore sold millions of these machines based solely on word-of-mouth.
If Apple had had this machine instead of the Macintosh, we would all be running Motorola chips on our desks now instead of PCs. Seriously. It was that good. It just needed clever execution and management.
Commodore, on the other hand, didn't just shoot themselves in the foot on this one, they shot themselves in the head. They had the finest system-design team that had ever been assembled, didn't know it, treated them like dirt, and were somehow surprised when they all left. The Amiga never really moved forward because C= lost the resource that really mattered, the brains that had originally invented it. Had they preserved that team and kept them motivated, today's computing landscape would be far different.
But... christ. That was FIFTEEN YEARS AGO and the system hasn't made much progress in that time. The Amiga itself is dead. There is *nothing* that operating system does that modern OSes like Linux and NT don't do, and far better. (moment of epiphany for me was booting up Linux in late 1993 or early 1994 and realizing that, for the first time in eight or nine years, I could finally work with my PC the way I used to work on my Amiga -- more than one thing at a time.)
The look and feel is easy to duplicate with modern window managers. I can make Enlightenment work almost exactly like the Amiga's desktop did, and it is one hell of a lot more stable. Amiga just didn't have that great a desktop, folks -- it was nice enough for the time, but compared to what we're driving now it looks like GEOS on the C64.
I'm not sure what the Amiga team is doing. They may be doing something really neat. But it has no more relation to the Amiga than Battlezone 2 had to Atari's Battlezone or id's Wolfenstein 3D had to Wolfenstein on the Apple 2.
They are just capitalizing on the Amiga name and trying to redefine it to mean something other than what it really DOES mean -- an impossibly brilliant operating system design that dead-ended and died due to incompetent management.
The Amiga is dead and gone. Let's lay roses on its grave and think good thoughts about it -- and move on with our lives. Enough, already. Run an emulator if you're really nostalgic, but it's time to update to something modern and start over. There is nothing left worth salvaging in the AmigaOS.
I don't think the cancer argument holds -- pre Industrial Revolution, I believe lifespans were still short enough that cancer wasn't usually an issue. You were far more likely to die of pneumonia or a runaway infection from a fairly trivial wound.
I suspect the loss of technology would be far more disastrous to first-world countries than you believe. The food issue alone would probably kill 50% of the population. We don't have much land in crop production anymore, but we extract truly vast amounts of food out of that relatively small amount of land. If we were suddenly back to the by-hand days of farming, well... it wouldn't be pretty, that's for damn sure.
I also suspect you may be over-rating the impact of technology on the third-world countries. Life is pretty miserable there. I suspect there wouldn't be much difference in medical care or life expectancy. However, the food issue raises its head again there -- many of those countries are dependent on food imports, which would go away. So in that regard, it might be even worse than you are supposing.
This would be mildly interesting to dig into a bit, if anyone reading has any particular expertise in this field.
Jerry Pournelle defined a 'dullard' as being someone who could pick up an encyclopedia, look up the entry in which they were interested, read just that one entry, and put the encyclopedia away again without reading anything else.
:)
All ideas relate to one another. Any medium that doesn't promote this idea is inferior to one that does. Hypertext is better for learning than static pages.
Some folks seem to think that Learning is something Sacrosanct that happens in Institutions Of Knowledge. I beg to differ. Learning is something that happens when you're splashing through mud puddles and cleaning out sinks, not just reading books. Lighten up -- go play a game. You might learn something.
I'm going to assume I'm a pretty typical /. geek (older than most, perhaps.) In trying to imagine life without the Internet, the biggest difference in my life is this: I would know a LOT less than I do. I have learned (and continue to) as much in a few years on the Internet as probably my entire life pre-Internet. It hasn't made me any smarter, but with the additional information available to work with, I function as though I were smarter than I was before.
The Internet is speeding and decentralizing the flow of information. Advances happen when people put things together that haven't been combined before. The increased speed at which ideas can move around, combined with the much lowered degree of filtering on what ideas are considered 'publishable', will result in those new combinations coming faster than ever before.
Basically, the Internet is overhauling the communications infrastructore of knowledge workers. It is a meta-change: it improves the speed of other improvements without doing all that much by itself. Its impact will be indirect but immense. We are already seeing it; /. is a very real part of this phenomenon.
The researchers wanting to see direct effects of the Internet just aren't going to see much yet. If you took Victorian England and suddenly raised the IQ of a large fraction of its population by 10 or 20 points, that wouldn't be a very visible change either, if you were looking for signs of material progress.
Had that happened, you couldn't have pointed at anything directly that was changed. Consider: even historians, looking back, wouldn't consider the fact that we reached the Moon in 1925 to be a 'result'.
IF you can run a debugger on the code, then you can break any encryption that any program can come up with. I believe this is a variant of the class of problems known as NP-Hard. I have only heard about this in passing (I'm not really a programmer, I just dabble a bit occasionally), but as far as I know, NP-Hard is jargon for 'provably impossible'.
No matter what a program attempts to do, if you can sit on top of it and watch its internal functioning and code, you can duplicate its responses, spoof the other side, and crack the encryption. All encryption does is protect data IN TRANSIT.
Basically, to make this kind of file-sharing work, SightSound will need to go to some kind of tamper-proof hardware encryption/decryption. This can certainly be done (and often is), but it is very expensive. Intel is in the process of designing tamper-proof encryption into its next generation of video cards and digital display devices. Those will be HARD to crack.
But as far as I know, ANY software encryption is breakable. If you can see how the decode process works, you can duplicate it.
They haven't had a chance to mesh IE completely with Office yet. If they succeed there, they will pretty much destroy the browser market. (it has already been plenty damaged, mind you.)
If it stays with the OS, it can't really get any worse than it is already.
BTW, the character's name was 'Hari' Seldon. Fortunately, however, I don't think spelling counts in psychohistory. *grin*
Open-and-secure is admittedly WAY better than secure-now-but-with-bugs-later-on. However, there are a HUGE number of exploits available now for Linux, far more than there are for Windows. The Open Source ethos is making Linux *less* secure than Windows for your average overworked admin, not more.
Now, over the long term, I think this will change. Gradually, people will learn how to write secure code and will beter grasp security implications of the things they do. Linux and the other Open Source apps will get more and more secure, where closed-source apps like Windows will never improve very much.
Eventually, code that is open to inspection will be a critical component to assuring that a system is actually secure (at least in terms of exploits and not human engineering.)
But that doesn't change things now. Linux has bazillions of exploits, far more than what I've seen in Windows. I've been watching both over the last two years and I have to actively patch my Linux boxes a lot more often than my Windows ones.
So why is this? I think it's because people don't yet know how to write secure software, and all that code is available to easy inspection. It's a lot harder to reverse engineer something through a debugger and packet sniffer. In REAL terms, Windows is probably a lot less secure than any of the Open Source apps, but in terms of actual available exploits, it's a lot safer than Linux is for the moment. (assuming best practices on the part of the admins running the boses -- an out-of-box Windows machine is a joke. But if you harden both a Linux and a Windows box 'properly', chances are there's going to be a new root exploit for the Linux box first.)
I have arrived at the pet theory that ALL software is HORRIBLY insecure. I think in twenty years we will be laughing at the state of our networks today.
For the moment, closed source may actually be better for many companies. Their apps are insecure anyway -- why make it easier on the guys in black hats? I am really starting to think that a good chunk of the full-disclosure-of-exploits, open-source crowd isn't pushing that idea for MY benefit but for THEIRS -- because they can spend more time studying new exploits and figuring out ways to get into my machines than I can.
As the knowledge of how-to-program-apps-securely proliferates, it will be safer to gradually transition to a TRULY secure environment. But right now, opening apps written by desktop-trained programmers is just not a very good idea.
I suspect that it'll take one more generation of programs and programmers before we can safely make the transition to a truly open-code environment. Once we get there, we'll be nearing the realm of 'real' security.
But until then, the false security of no-working-exploits-for-my-machines will have to do -- and Windows has fewer exploits available.
One of the side effects of open sourcing a product is that you get an unintentional security audit.
If your app is net-based, and it hasn't been written with security in mind from the very start, there are going to be holes in it. By publishing your source, you have just advertised those holes to people who know how to exploit this sort of thing.
Unless you happen to be scratching an itch that a lot of programmers (not COMPANIES, PROGRAMMERS) have, chances are that open sourcing your product won't give you many new contributors. You need to evaluate the benefits versus risks carefully; is your app of such compelling interest that you're going to get loads of contributors? And does that offset the security risks?
There is definitely room in the world still for closed-source apps. A custom-written business app is one of the best candidates, IMO.
I figure this is fair. If you have the technical savvy to modify the source to remove these messages (and believe me, it doesn't take very much), then you don't get advertising.
If you don't have the tech savvy, chances are you spend $$$ on your system to make it work, and an understated plea for more $$ is probably pretty reasonable.
One of the main benefits of open source is that you can make your system work any damn way you want, if you're willing to spend the time.
I'm pretty tech-savvy, and I often have no clue what's running on my Windows box; there's so many buried processes and components that God only knows what the system is actually DOING while I'm sitting here typing. Many popular programs have been found to have hidden 'features' that transmit user data back to the mothership. You can stop this with a firewall, of course, but how many Average Joes are going to know how to run one?
I'm not arguing that this is ethically correct (it most emphatically IS NOT, IMO), but considering that most people are being snooped on bigtime by many of the programs they have trustingly installed, a couple of lines of text as credit seem pretty damn innocuous. And if you have any shred of a clue, you can get rid of even that much.
If you want to use an Open Source product, you are taking on the responsibility of making things work *yourself* instead of trading money for someone else to do it for you. Whining about cosmetic behaviors of a program when you have the source code right in front of you is pretty dumb, IMO. Make it work how *you* want it to. That is probably the single largest reason why you would choose an open source product over a commercial one.
Okay: we don't know, but surely SOMEONE does. Doesn't anyone have links to related info? Does the United Way have any information about computer company donations? I don't, unfortunately, have time to do the legwork today. :(
Despite the protestations of the A/C above, claiming that any such thinking is a threat to freedom, etc. etc, this stuff matters . Much of the code you write will be thrown away -- the environmental damage you do while writing it will last forever.
One thing we're realizing, in our search of the cosmos with the Hubble, is that planets like Earth may be impossibly rare; there might not be five planets like this in the whole Galaxy. We are probably sitting atop a treasure trove of literally Galactic proportions and using it as a toilet... in fact, we're actively painting the treasure room with feces.
So, again, this stuff matters a lot. Pay attention. Pick this out over the background noise; most other concerns are less important, even if they are more urgent.
That's BILLIONS of light years, not millions. Ol' Carl would be so disappointed in you. :-)
I thought the later books in that series were an utter disappointment. It felt to me like Brin had been 'poisoned' by Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. It felt like he was trying to retell that same story/idea from a different angle, but it just didn't work for me.
:-)
Brin is quoted on the dust jacket for A Deepness in the Sky, the prequel (but which was written second). So I'm fairly sure he did read the first book, and I think it completely wrecked his own series. Really a shame -- the Sundiver universe was a hell of a lot more interesting before it was 'invaded'.
Asimov named his characters the way he did because he found it funny. He would usually choose a complex first name with an absolutely ordinary surname. 'Ishtar Smith' was an example he used when he discussed it once.
:-)
It does sound odd, but he did it very consciously -- it's sort of a running joke.
Snow Crash has some really violent, gory scenes in it. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to a kid that young. I was disturbed by some of the images at 28 or so.
Simmons is indeed a master. If you like his work, and haven't yet seen it, read Carrion Comfort. It is horror, and you will remember it forever -- it's not at all traditional.
Every time you think you know what's going on, the author reaches out and slaps you upside the head. You WILL NOT guess the ending ahead of time.
I don't like horror but I liked this one. My roommate at the time, who was very into horror, was almost willing to hold a gun to my head to make me read it. I'm glad he twisted my arm so hard. It was an experience.
Probably not suitable for the 13-year-old in question, but Dad might like it a lot.
True Names stands out as one of the most amazing short stories I read in my my youth -- and I read A LOT. What is particularly eerie about it now, in reading it, is that the setting seems quite ordinary. And I see no reason at all why the basic plot premise couldn't come true -- and soon.
:-)
It is an example of either eerily good prognostication, or of science fiction molding the future in its own image, or some combination of the two. Whatever it is, it is worth reading -- the story is interesting by itself, and when you realize that it was written before most people even had modems, it becomes a work of staggering brilliance.
A Fire Upon the Deep is also great fun. It is a space-opera-ish sort of book, but intelligently written and full of exceedingly interesting ideas. It amazes me how he managed to interweave two tales -- a 'small' one about a castaway human trying to survive on an alien planet, and a 'big' one about a galaxy-threatening menace -- into one book, seamlessly.
Vinge, btw, is definitely not a subscriber to the Tragic View of Technology.
Arcserve is HORRIBLE.
I was using the version just before it changed to ArcServeIT, though we did get the first version of ArcServeIT. It is poorly programmed and unstable as hell. I nevercould rely on it. Restores were always a scary experience. It wouldn't recover crashed machines at all (apparently you were supposed to pay extra for this very basic capability, and my predecessor hadn't bought this feature). I could get back data files USUALLY. However, I had endless trouble with the catalog. Doing restores on that system was a constant series of barely-dodged bullets. I have never, in my life, dealt with software that was so horrible. I fought it for MONTHS. I almost always managed to do restores when I needed them, but that was mostly due to ingenuity on my part.
Eventually, in desperation, I called up support (which is actually decent) and complained at them about the endless trouble we were having with it. Turns out that the Raima database that they use internally can only support 16 million records. I had over a million files on one server ALONE, and I was backing up over fifty machines to DLT tape. The catalogs were silently corrupting themselves within a few days of being rebuilt. This is NOT DOCUMENTED ANYWHERE in the manuals. And I asked them about this. "Oh, Arcserve isn't meant to handle that much data." Excuse me? This is a multi-thousand dollar package, and I don't remember seeing anything on the box about how much data I could back up with it???
They did tell me I could use SQL Server to store the database files. I went through the whole process of buying a new drive, setting up SQL Server, and configuring ARCServe to talk to it. It did work, and it didn't lose catalog data. However, after a backup, it would take somewhere around TWENTY HOURS to update the catalog in the database. When it was time for the next daily backup, it often wouldn't be finished updating the catalog from the PRIOR one 24 hours before! And if I wanted a restore, even a simple query would take twenty minutes to run (as in, browsing the files that had been backed up the night before from a specific server).
At that point, we just dumped it and bought a real solution, Legato Networker. Networker on NT has a few odd wrinkles but it is mostly solid, and it has saved my rear end several times. When I do a restore with Networker, I get back a perfect machine. Users can actually restore their own recent files without any intervention on my part. And it works. Every time.
Caveat re: Legato: An earlier build of Networker totally ate itself and destroyed the server installation. I was able to rebuild the server from its 'bootstrap' tapes, but bugs in the restore process make it very slow and tedious to recover the catalogs from multiple machines. I don't know if this has been fixed yet. It has not crashed since I went to a more recent patch rev, and has been almost painless. Light years difference from ArcServe, which was a constant, constant hassle.
Conclusion: Don't touch this software with a ten-meter pole. It won't be any better on Linux than it was on NT. Go with something you can trust; both BRU and Arkeia have pretty good reputations.
ArcServe SUCKS.
The simulation would simply require a screen full of indecipherable gibberish, complete with the following smells:
unwashed underarms
Jolt cola
pizza
Penguin mints
leftover Chinese food
musty room
:-)
To get the full experience, one must sit for hours, though constant staring is not required. Squinting, looking pained, holding one's head in one's hands, and possibly cursing or throwing things are all highly encouraged to complete the experience.
Afterward, the simulator would go on a virtual vacation to Hawaii, Tahiti, Jamaica, or some other exotic location.
Frankly, even posting this particular thread was kind of dumb; anyone with any understanding of licensing at all would see that this particular 'hole' was simply a misunderstanding by someone who doesn't really understand how corporations work in a legal sense.
I really get the impression that some days, Slashdot is really grasping for news. This particular article needed more research before being posted.
If there isn't any news in a given day, if there is no "stuff that matters" -- don't post anything. If you review several thousand submissions and none are appropriate News for Nerds, then you are doing a better job. Choosing three or four items to run every day, no matter what, is resulting in a lot of stuff getting posted that shouldn't be.
This has been my home page for a long time, but I am getting tired of it. I would much prefer zero items to four items of minor-to-no interest.
Stuff that Matters. Not just stuff.