Is this the first day we could acquire W2K? No, it's been released to OEMs for weeks.
Is this the first day we could get a peek at W2K? No, release candidates have been out for many months. I'm tempted to say years.
Does Win2K redefine the fundamental paradigms used by software? Nope, it's a incremental change from NT4, but it doesn't have true innovations like GUIs or a NOS, and it doesn't even have false invocations like doing everything through the fully integrated (but still available as a separate product in stores!) web browser.
On the other hand, the inclusion of devfs *will* go a long way to heading off a critical problem. Users notice that devfs eliminates the need to have thousands of files in/dev. Kernel developers know that one of the *real* wins with devfs is that we can have more than 256 major devices and 256 minor devices. That will make it *much* easier to provide fine-grained support to SCSI, USB, and similar devices, to implement "volume" managers where you associate each removable media object with a unique "minor device number," etc.
The fact that I can get Win2K "in a box" instead of "OEM'd" today does not really change my life. If I really needed Win2K, I would already have it. The fact that Linux now includes devfs *does* significantly change my life because some very cool kernel modules and applications are now much easier to write without requiring the end user know how to apply a kernel patch.
Give me a break. (And yes, I know you're joking but I speaking to the PHBs looking for some reason to restrict employee web access.) I have no problem keeping up with Slashdot et al during compilations, (batch) program runs, and similar dead times. I also have no problem discussing it - and getting one or two "aha!" insights per week - with my coworkers during the dead time waiting for meetings to start, for elevators to arrive, etc.
There is a *lot* of dead time in our life, but we generally don't notice it because it comes in 30- and 60-second bites. Personally, I think it's better to click over to the web browser and check a headline or two then click back to the compiler than sit there drooling into your keyboard. Besides, slashdot is at least job related - unlike Joe who always has Sports Illustrated on his desktop, or Susan who is always daytrading.
The answer to this is trivial. Take the battle into their own meme-space.
Listen to me brothers, this person is doing Satan's evil work! He takes the results of hard, clean labor and twists it for his own evil ends. Take that site which discusses PGP cryptology. Now don't you think Satan may want to prevent people of good faith from communicating out of the sight of his minions? (The Lord always sees what Satan's little helpers are up to, of course.) What other sites does Satan want banned... sites that we might also find objectionable until the Lord gives us the sight to see the real reason why they strike fear into Satan's dark soul?
And what about these people who claim to be doing the Lord's work while speaking with forked tongues? Brothers and sisters, have you ever heard of *anyone* being lead to the truth by a lie? These people might not even realize how they are doing the work of the Great Deceiver in these petty lies, but we all know how the road to Hell is paved by good intentions... and how easy it is to find ourself on that dark road if we don't commit to a life of integrity in the service of our Lord.
Brothers, let me close with a single observation. These filters have blocked the Good Book. Oh, that block was removed once the error was pointed out, but it took a lot of hard effort to find that error. Who gains by the widespread adoption of software that blocks the Bible, even "in error"?
Years ago many cable TV systems charged per outlet. "Cable ready" TVs and VCRs existed, but you had a pay a modest premium to avoid the hassles of a separate set-top box.
Laws and technology changed, and now most cable TV systems charge per household and most TVs and VCRs are "cable ready." My household has a couple TVs and a video card which I often use to keep a small video feed on my computer monitor.
So why am I paying $10/month for HBO which I can't view? Because TCI/AT&T decided to get eliminate hardware cable scrambling when it rebuilt my neighborhood for digital cable. My big TV has a digital cable box so it can also handle software decryption of the analog premium channels, but I can't do that upstairs with the TV/VCR/BTTV/camcorder setup. (The camcorder is an occasional webcam on the adjacent bikepath, you pervs!:-) If I put the BTTV upstream of the cable box, I lose the ability to watch or capture from my VCR or scrambled channels. If I put the BTTV downstream I lose the ability to watch monitor two channels at the same time, or play with geek toys like a program that scans a dozen channels and displays snapshots of each.
A software bttv decoder won't allow me to view the digital cable TV channels I can legally view, but it might allow me to view the analog premium channels that I've paid for.
The government will only accept bids from companies that are certified as capable of satisfying the contract. This is a *huge* contract, and it's no coincidence that the companies listed include IBM, CSC, and a couple other large companies whose name escapes me at the moment.
This means that not only is no "young" company eligible to place a bid, even the senior project management is likely to be "highly experienced" at federal contracts. Read: expect everyone to have spent twenty years in the military, then another decade or two in defense contracts on the other side of the fence. I've known a few very cool project managers, but most of them seem stuck in the past century. Make that *two* centuries ago, now. Where you see a neat new technology, they will see buddies killed because the new-fangled M-16 rifle jammed in Vietnam.
(Just wait until a BoI finds that a ship was lost, with all hands, due to a stupid software error....)
That said, some groups might want to experiment with the hardware you describe. But this sounds more like a DARPA-funded research project than a billion dollar multi-year contract.
He wasn't trying to knock down the price, he wasn't even warning the bidders that the days of "nobody was ever fired for buying Microsoft" are over.
The key is in the final paragraph of the story. There are four companies bidding on this job, and all have indicated they intend to use Microsoft products. Pure chance, of course, since everyone knows that Microsoft is not a monopoly (*cough*).
Since all bidders will use the same product, this is essentially a "single source" bid. Single source bids tend to make government agencies very nervous, esp. when that single source has a history of successful government prosecution for misdeeds. But the companies each fear that breaking from the non-opoly will is equivalent to voting for the libertarian candidate - it may make you feel better, but you don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of winning.
Enter the gentlemen and his comments. He is sending a clear signal to the companies that it is not immediate suicide to announce a plan that doesn't include set-asides for the impoverished communities outside Seattle. To retain credibility, the nature of the game requires that at least one of the two finalists include non-MS products (assuming it isn't *totally* DOA), otherwise the military will be getting straight MS bids for the next 30 years.
Just for comparison, a quick check of the Debian bug tracking system shows over 10,000 items. I might be reading the wrong table, but I'm not surprised by that count in a 2 GB distro. Assuming the bugs are evenly distributed, that's perhaps 1,000 potential defects in the packages that I actually install.
65,000 outstanding items for W2K seems high, but it's not outrageously high - it's two or three times higher than I would have expected, but that could simply indicate very enthusiastic testers.
I'm *far* more concerned by the hints that suggests the bugs are no longer seem to be orthogonal - service packs are introducing as many bugs as they fix. *That* suggests that the code is on the brink of becoming totally unmaintainable, a very real possibility with a large code base that pretends to be tightly integrated.
Just so we're all talking about the same thing, a corporation talking about political issues is political speech, not commercial speech. Many of us are concerned at non-natural people getting involved in the political process, but that's another matter.
The issue of commercial speech comes up when you're discussing the right of some bozo to call you during dinner every night. Or the right of his friend to cross your fence and walk onto your property to leave a flyer on your door. Or the right of another chum to start up a loud rally next door to your house.
If the purpose of that those acts is to collect like minded people to march down to the next town council meeting to air their grievance, that's the heart of democracy. If the purpose of the acts is to remind you that Billy Bob's Bag 'o Boots is having a special 9/10th price sale for only one more week (just like the sales they've had for the past three years), then that speech is interfering with your right to "peaceful enjoyment" of your property to such an extent that most jurisdictions say "enough!"
Never forget: nobody went out looking for reasons to restrict commercial speech until the local equivalent of Herb Tarlek made it clear that it would take a court order to make him shut up and go away. It's easy to ignore a newspaper that's nothing but ads, ditto a tv or radio station. It's a damn slight harder to ignore the ringing phone, jammed email box, or minivan with loudspeakers on top.
California has a brand spanking new law protecting customers because of abuses of the frequent shopper cards by stores.
The most notorious case, which was discussed in the _Privacy Journal_, involved a gentleman who slipped on a wet floor and was injured. This being California he sued, and the store started asking all of his friends and acquaintances about his drinking problem. Obviously, they sought to show that he fell because he was drunk ("'falling down' drunk").
Where did the store get the idea that he was an alcoholic? From their own records. The lawyers pulled up his purchasing details and jumped on the fact that he purchased something like a case of beer every week or two. Perhaps they were legitimately investigating the possibility that he was drunk at the time (and nobody in the store or medical staff noticed it)... or perhaps they seized on this as a way to embarass the plantiff sufficiently that he would drop a justified complaint.
Other abuses have involved stores checking up on customers (and staff), individuals checking up on customers, the government checking up on customers (IIRC the search seemed tuned to home gardeners, not murderers), etc.
And *that* does worry me. I don't want to have to worry about a no-knock DEA raid as a suspected pot farmer for no reason other than the fact I bought a bunch of full spectrum bulbs to treat my seasonal affective disorder.
That brief isn't about something interesting like how people without a driver's license is supposed to board a commercial flight in our brave new world.
It's about how the public roads are "really" private property since they're paid for with taxes, and therefore the state can't ban people from driving their car on these "private" roads for minor issues like multiple convictions for drunk driving resulting in death.
N.B., even this paper doesn't try to argue that this mass murderer isn't allowed to freely travel public roads - *as a passenger*, or perhaps on a bicycle.
Instead the focus is on some silly "business"/"personal" use distiction which is completely irrelevant and utterly impossible to enforce.
One reason for requiring SGML is that it makes it easy to produce different types of documents. You can produce web pages, nicely formatted printed documents (for your PHB), simple ASCII (if you insist on using an ancient daisywheel printer), whatever.
Also, as a multiple HOWTO author I think you're overstating the difficulty of using this flavor of SGML. There's a bit of boilerplate at the top of the document that you can lift from any other HOWTO, then it's mostly just the nesting sections (<sect>, <sect1>, <sect2>), the <p> to mark the end of the title, and <tscreen><code>... </code></tscreen> to bracket code samples. There are many other tags, of course, but this is enough to get something that will work with the tools and it doesn't take more than a minutes to convert a text document.
The cops were flying at the legal minimum, 1000' above terrain. I don't know the altitude of the satellite, but it can't be below 100 miles up and I wouldn't be surprised if it's 200 miles up. For convenience, let's call it a shade under 200 miles up - 1,000,000 feet up. That's a nice round factor of 1000x. Also, if I did my math right that works out to an angular resolution of around 1/2 arc second.
The average human eye has an angular resolution of something like 1 arc second, so the camera is a bit better than the human eye. But the cops in the aircraft were only 1000 feet up, so even with their poorer eyes they had resolution of around 1.5 mm (again, if I did my math right). I don't recall the size of the average marijuana leaf off the top of my head, but at a guess let's call it 150 mm - large enough that the plant would be easily recognized by eye.
I don't like the idea of cops buzzing property to peek over fences, but if I did my math right they could have still identified the plants from far higher than that.
But orbit? If you assume classic optics it seems unlikely that any satellite could ever recognize objects as well as a cop in a helicopter. Even if we assume a ten-fold improvement in the resolution (to 0.1 m), the leaves will still be an indistinct blur. This might be fine enough resolution to recognize the plant via remote sensing techniques, but this violates the "naked eye" test.
Please don't let your biases lead to you making stupid statements. *Any* system with the complexity of Motif, Qt, KDE, or MS Windows will require extensive documentation. The only real question is if you'll have thick documents describing what each widget/object/fuzzball allows, or if you'll have thick documents describing what each widget/object/fuzzball does when you give it a canonical "one-size-fits-all" instruction.
The former is a little harder to code the first time, but the latter is far harder to maintain. IMHO, of course, but I have tried both. Motif has a track record, and while it's not pretty it's also clearly not a dead end.
But Qt and GTK? Many people report it's easier to get the first version out the door with these toolkits instead of Motif, but how easy are they to maintain? Where's the persistent documentation that I can put on the shelf and hand off to a maintenance programmer in five year? I don't want web pages which could go away or be changed to show only the documentation for a version major revs away from my legacy program. The O'Reilly X books set very high standard for documentation, and (I believe) are a large reason why O'Reilly is held in such high esteem. After all, many of us were introduced to O'Reilly by those books.
Motif may be a pain to work with, but it has one outstanding quality which Qt and GTK both lack: exhaustive O'Reilly references. Give me something comparable to volumes 6A and 6B, and libraries that don't have major changes every time I upgrade my system, and I'll consider switching.
But in the meanwhile I'll stay with Motif. It has a steep learning curve, and it forces me to do a lot of stuff myself (or use third-party widgets), but at least I have good documentation targeted at me as a developer. I also have the QT book, but it's probably less than 1/4 the material of the Motif books - *and* it wastes a lot of time telling me why I want a widget, not how to use it.
Something else the CNN article covered in the same segment (because it's in the same bill?) would allow companies to substitute email notification for pmail notification.
There would be no requirement to send a paper copy of the document.
There would be no requirement to obtain proof of delivery.
The segment then had several talking heads - always from the industry - assuring us that only a few crackpots afraid of technology they don't understand were upset by the provisions of this bill. Most people *wanted* to be able to visit a web site and sign a contract for, oh, health insurance and get an immediate email confirmation.
The critics raised dire (but always "unsubstantiated") fears that people would get nailed by late fees or policy cancellations because they never received the email notifications. In the worst case, they could lose their house to foreclosure.
N.B., this is not something which only people who aren't making payments need to worry about, nor are these fears unsubstantiated by experience. It's a significant problem today - ask any victim of identity fraud.
While a company should theoretically verify the digitial signature of all documents regarding change of address and change of signature, history shows that the companies will bend over backwards to "help" the customer who lost his information due to a disk crash while moving, lost it due to a virus, or a dozen increasingly more bizarre reasons.
Considering the fact that I write so few checks (prefering direct payment) that I often forget to sign the laser-printed jets -- yet they are still accepted without a problem -- and the funny look I got from one bank rep who was critical of home printed checks because they were too easy to fake ("but that's why you have a sample of my signature!"), I doubt companies would ever check the signatures until the lawyers get involved in a dispute.
I've read of one decent long-term solution. It's not particularly convenient, but it *is* known to be capable of surviving hundreds of years.
Print the data on acid-free paper. Use an impact printer, not a laser printer. (Are you sure that the toner binding agents will last hundreds of years?)
You could print textual material in an OCR-friendly manner (e.g., the source listings in the "Cracking DES" book). This will obviously take a lot of paper and space, but it could be read by a human.
Or you could print the material in a "barcode" type style with plenty of embedded checksums. If you use 1 mm square cells (which should be large enough to allow scanners to adjust for paper warp, water damage, etc.), the amount of data which fits onto a single sheet of paper isn't much more than you get with raw text... until you consider that this is true 8-bit data with error recovery, not 7-bit text.
I think it goes without saying that this format is not intended for frequent use. But if you had information that you *had* to archive for centuries and you had unlimited access to vast underground storage vaults, this is probably the most stable media known today.
A closely related problem is the question of whether you're storing data in the first place.
This question has come up twice in the past decade. In the first case, a tape backup drive quietly failed and there was no indication of a problem until they attempted to retrieve a file.
In the second case, the person responsible for performing backups carefully ticked off the paperwork... but as far as anyone could tell he never actually swapped any tapes. The company discovered this after he (intentionally) corrupted the Netware database and then walked out the door.
Both problems can be solved by simple procedural changes (e.g., always "verify" tapes after writing, have someone else run "verify" or rotate the duty).
Yet... twice in the past decade I have direct knowledge of data loss. In one of case this happened despite a competent and dedicated IT staff. Assuming this wasn't just a statistical fluke, it follows that there must be a significant risk that archival data is bad at the moment it's produced - perhaps somewhere between 5-20% of one or more bad media per year per backup group.
It doesn't make much sense to invest in premium media if you're saving garbage.
Moon landing was a fluke due to cold war
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 3
PBS (I believe) recently aired an excellent documentary on the *real* history of the "space race." That history explains why the "66 years from Kitty Hawk to lunar landing" is totally irrelevant -- and highly misleading.
I tell you three times: the lunar landing was a military act in the third phase of the 20th Century War. After the second phase (fighting National Socialism) both the US and USSR were aware of the potential of using missiles to lob the new nuclear weapons, but the captured V-2 missiles weren't close to being able to lob nukes across intercontinental distances. Both countries dragged their feet, but one Soviet scientist did manage to get enough resources to launch Sputnik. The Soviet leadership didn't think much of it... until it saw the shockwave it sent through the free and third worlds. The *next* day the stunning superiority of Soviet science was the lead story on Pravda.
N.B., a lot of revisionist history says that everyone was shocked at the idea of a man-made moon, just like everyone was shocked when Columbus "proved" the world was round. Both are lies. People were deeply disturbed because if you can launch something into orbit, you have the ability to put the missile down anywhere below that orbit. The only questions were the weight of the payload and the accuracy of the targeting.
Over the next few years the Soviets had a long run of public triumphs. First dog in man in space _and_ orbit. First woman in space. The first man-made object to land on the moon was designed to shatter and spread little hammer-and-sickles across the surface. (The Soviets also had failures, but they were quietly airbrushed out of the picture.) The Americans had a series of widely seen failures. The Soviets were relentless in using this clear evidence of the superiority of the Soviet system to bring neutral countries into their fold. The US had to do something, but the rules of the "cold war" limited the options.
*That* is why JFK announced a manned lunar program. It was arrogance writ large, and a tremendous gamble, but if successful it would eliminate the growing perception that the west couldn't handle modern science. Nobody in power cared about science - but they *did* care about ICBMs and the newly developed thermonuclear weapons. If the Soviets have Q-bombs (whatever follows "H-") and ICBMs, and the US doesn't, the 20th Century War would be over.
So JFK got an incredible level of funding for the Apollo missions (a trick Reagan later repeated with an overt military buildup, but by then the world had already soiled its pants over Cuban missiles), why the Soviets had their own manned lunar program -- and buried it once it was clear the US would beat them -- and why the US lost official interest so soon afterwards.
Unfortunately, this means that many arguments for going to Mars make a fatal assumption - in many important ways we haven't been to the moon yet! The grand total of time spent on the lunar surface is still measured in days, as is the total time spent by humans outside of LEO. To use this as "proof" that Mars is the next goal is ludicrous.
Before we even begin to think about heading to Mars, we need to have lunar experience, not just LEO experience, that lasts at least as long as the first Mars missions. Preferably several times as long. We need to have experience with people having major medical emergencies in space. (Even healthy young adults have a significant risk of a major medical event during a two-year mission.) Then, and only then, can we make an informed decision about what we need for a Mars mission.
IANAL, but IIRC the sealed documents are still open to the opposing counsel and can be discussed in court, but unlike most of the court papers you can't subsequently review the material in the courthouse library.
Also, a court seal isn't automatic. The judge has a right to ask how public disclosure of the information will harm the company, and he can't be overwhelmed by thousands of irrelevant claims. If he feels that the lawyers are trying to pull a fast one, he can start focusing their attention on the task by threatening sanctions against the lawyers individually or their client. (An example of the latter is a flat assertion that he'll only seal 100 documents, so the client should choose wisely.)
Judges are (wisely) hesitant to invoke these sanctions without overwhelming need, but they can consider a company's previous actions. If a company has had 80+% of its classified papers opened in previous cases, many judges will be hesitant to rubberstamp subsequent requests.
I'm in the minority, but I found the later Dune books far *more* interesting than the first book.
The original trilogy (which was really one book, but split due to market constraints) was the classic Hero's Journey, as discussed by Joseph Campbell. The hero has divine birth (Royalty, Bene Gesserit genetic experiment), is unjustly deprived of his rightful position, successfully fights to regains it, then ultimately fails due to his hubris.
The fourth book is the necessary conclusion of Leto's story.
The last book (published in two pieces, due to market constraints), is the first book outside of the Hero arcs set in motion by the first volume. That leaves most people used to the first book feeling a bit put out, and the other people who would prefer the more contemplative nature of these books are unlikely to read them after the poor reviews from Dune fans.
For anyone interested, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune are set 1500(?) years after Leto's death. Our heroes are the Bene Gesserit - *very* different than what you would expect from the first few books. They are locked in mortal struggle with the "Honored Matres" - a distorted echo of the BG returned from the scattering. The surface conflict mirrors the inner conflict faced by all affluent societies - when is it enough?
I would recommend the first few books of the Uplift Series, specifically Startide Rising and The Uplift War, by David Brin. They are complex stories that affirm good values, but they also make fun of the clueless adults (the other "patron races" in the five galaxies). The importance of the latter to a teenager can't be overstated, nor the fact that not all 'adults' are their enemy.
The first book in the series, often overlooked, is Sundiver. It has some interesting concepts and lays the groundwork, but it's a bit more adult. (Or hyper-adult, since most adults I know would be "probates".)
The last three books in the series, actually a single work split for market reasons, follow the Streaker's attempt to get home. They are not light reading, but by the time she get's through everyone else's list she'll be a HS senior or in college and can appreciate these books.:-)
Don?t forget ðe use of non-standard character encoding. MS knows ðat ðe ?real? lesson from IBM is ðey lost ðeir non?opoly only after ðey allowed ðe users, curse ðeir black hearts, to use ASCII instead of EBCDIC.
ðat?s why all commercially successful OSes will use special characters for ?smart quotes,? display kerning, and the like.
Linux, of course, supports ðe stupid ISO-8859-x and CJK standards. ðat means any system can edit any file. Ffools.
IIRC, many people questioned that survey because it measured the time between a company acknowledging the existence of a bug and its patch. That gave an advantage to the decidedly user-hostile approach of denying a bug exists unless a solution is in sight.
I'm not claiming that MS does this, but Red Hat obviously can't drag its feet when other distros acknowledge the existence of the bug in their releases. So RH will always be forced to be honest, and any company that admits to year-long lags is obviously fairly honest.
As for "scrounging the net" for fixes, you're either using the wrong distro or not using it correctly. Depending on your connnectivity, you should be automatically notified within hours or days of any upgrade on your distro's security site.
The size of Win2K is not a mitigating circumstance ("Let's give MS a break since this job is so big"), it's an aggrievating circumstance ("What the hell were they thinking?!")
It is an undisputed fact that the increase in your bug count climbs far faster than the increase in your LOC count. Sometimes far faster, depending upon how "tightly integrated" you want to make the system. It's a simple matter of combinatorical explosion - 2N objects can interact in (2N)! - N! more ways than N objects can interact.
That's why everyone on the planet... with one notable exception... has tried to maintain firm barricades between subsystems. At first glance it isn't as "user friendly," but many of us feel that nothing is more user-hostile than programs ridden by an interminal series of bugs and general flakiness.
Many critics have publically stated they doubt that Win2K will *ever* be stable. The sheer size of the code base means it's impossible for any one person to really understand what's going on, and that means it will be extremely difficult to avoid breaking Peter to fix Paul. That's why the reports that one of the two bug fixes introduced a third bug are so disturbing - this is exactly what you would expect to see from software that is simply too large to maintain.
It's still early in the game, but it looks like the critics won the first round. The real test in the next few months isn't the total number of bugs announced, it's the percentage of bug fixes which break something else. NT4 was notorious for requiring service packs to fix prior service packs, and there's now evidence (however thin) that Win2K will be far worse.
Why don't you think about your "solution" for a bit, then get back to us? It wouldn't hurt to read a few well-known cases under British law (both in the home country and the colonies) to know exactly what happens when the state has the power to detain people indefinitely while "collecting evidence."
Hint: this rule is intended to protect political prisoners, not common criminals, and is tightly coupled with the presumption of innocence.
Slashdot Mirror
Have a sense of perspective.
/dev. Kernel developers know that one of the *real* wins with devfs is that we can have more than 256 major devices and 256 minor devices. That will make it *much* easier to provide fine-grained support to SCSI, USB, and similar devices, to implement "volume" managers where you associate each removable media object with a unique "minor device number," etc.
We do. You're the one with things out of balance.
Is this the first day we could acquire W2K? No, it's been released to OEMs for weeks.
Is this the first day we could get a peek at W2K? No, release candidates have been out for many months. I'm tempted to say years.
Does Win2K redefine the fundamental paradigms used by software? Nope, it's a incremental change from NT4, but it doesn't have true innovations like GUIs or a NOS, and it doesn't even have false invocations like doing everything through the fully integrated (but still available as a separate product in stores!) web browser.
On the other hand, the inclusion of devfs *will* go a long way to heading off a critical problem. Users notice that devfs eliminates the need to have thousands of files in
The fact that I can get Win2K "in a box" instead of "OEM'd" today does not really change my life. If I really needed Win2K, I would already have it.
The fact that Linux now includes devfs *does* significantly change my life because some very cool kernel modules and applications are now much easier to write without requiring the end user know how to apply a kernel patch.
Give me a break. (And yes, I know you're joking but I speaking to the PHBs looking for some reason to restrict employee web access.) I have no problem keeping up with Slashdot et al during compilations, (batch) program runs, and similar dead times. I also have no problem discussing it - and getting one or two "aha!" insights per week - with my coworkers during the dead time waiting for meetings to start, for elevators to arrive, etc.
There is a *lot* of dead time in our life, but we generally don't notice it because it comes in 30- and 60-second bites. Personally, I think it's better to click over to the web browser and check a headline or two then click back to the compiler than sit there drooling into your keyboard. Besides, slashdot is at least job related - unlike Joe who always has Sports Illustrated on his desktop, or Susan who is always daytrading.
The answer to this is trivial. Take the battle into their own meme-space.
Listen to me brothers, this person is doing Satan's evil work! He takes the results of hard, clean labor and twists it for his own evil ends. Take that site which discusses PGP cryptology. Now don't you think Satan may want to prevent people of good faith from communicating out of the sight of his minions? (The Lord always sees what Satan's little helpers are up to, of course.) What other sites does Satan want banned... sites that we might also find objectionable until the Lord gives us the sight to see the real reason why they strike fear into Satan's dark soul?
And what about these people who claim to be doing the Lord's work while speaking with forked tongues? Brothers and sisters, have you ever heard of *anyone* being lead to the truth by a lie? These people might not even realize how they are doing the work of the Great Deceiver in these petty lies, but we all know how the road to Hell is paved by good intentions... and how easy it is to find ourself on that dark road if we don't commit to a life of integrity in the service of our Lord.
Brothers, let me close with a single observation. These filters have blocked the Good Book. Oh, that block was removed once the error was pointed out, but it took a lot of hard effort to find that error. Who gains by the widespread adoption of software that blocks the Bible, even "in error"?
Years ago many cable TV systems charged per outlet. "Cable ready" TVs and VCRs existed, but you had a pay a modest premium to avoid the hassles of a separate set-top box.
:-) If I put the BTTV upstream of the cable box, I lose the ability to watch or capture from my VCR or scrambled channels. If I put the BTTV downstream I lose the ability to watch monitor two channels at the same time, or play with geek toys like a program that scans a dozen channels and displays snapshots of each.
Laws and technology changed, and now most cable TV systems charge per household and most TVs and VCRs are "cable ready." My household has a couple TVs and a video card which I often use to keep a small video feed on my computer monitor.
So why am I paying $10/month for HBO which I can't view? Because TCI/AT&T decided to get eliminate hardware cable scrambling when it rebuilt my neighborhood for digital cable. My big TV has a digital cable box so it can also handle software decryption of the analog premium channels, but I can't do that upstairs with the TV/VCR/BTTV/camcorder setup. (The camcorder is an occasional webcam on the adjacent bikepath, you pervs!
A software bttv decoder won't allow me to view the digital cable TV channels I can legally view, but it might allow me to view the analog premium channels that I've paid for.
The government will only accept bids from companies that are certified as capable of satisfying the contract. This is a *huge* contract, and it's no coincidence that the companies listed include IBM, CSC, and a couple other large companies whose name escapes me at the moment.
This means that not only is no "young" company eligible to place a bid, even the senior project management is likely to be "highly experienced" at federal contracts. Read: expect everyone to have spent twenty years in the military, then another decade or two in defense contracts on the other side of the fence. I've known a few very cool project managers, but most of them seem stuck in the past century. Make that *two* centuries ago, now. Where you see a neat new technology, they will see buddies killed because the new-fangled M-16 rifle jammed in Vietnam.
(Just wait until a BoI finds that a ship was lost, with all hands, due to a stupid software error....)
That said, some groups might want to experiment with the hardware you describe. But this sounds more like a DARPA-funded research project than a billion dollar multi-year contract.
He wasn't trying to knock down the price, he wasn't even warning the bidders that the days of "nobody was ever fired for buying Microsoft" are over.
The key is in the final paragraph of the story. There are four companies bidding on this job, and all have indicated they intend to use Microsoft products. Pure chance, of course, since everyone knows that Microsoft is not a monopoly (*cough*).
Since all bidders will use the same product, this is essentially a "single source" bid. Single source bids tend to make government agencies very nervous, esp. when that single source has a history of successful government prosecution for misdeeds. But the companies each fear that breaking from the non-opoly will is equivalent to voting for the libertarian candidate - it may make you feel better, but you don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of winning.
Enter the gentlemen and his comments. He is sending a clear signal to the companies that it is not immediate suicide to announce a plan that doesn't include set-asides for the impoverished communities outside Seattle. To retain credibility, the nature of the game requires that at least one of the two finalists include non-MS products (assuming it isn't *totally* DOA), otherwise the military will be getting straight MS bids for the next 30 years.
Just for comparison, a quick check of the Debian bug tracking system shows over 10,000 items. I might be reading the wrong table, but I'm not surprised by that count in a 2 GB distro. Assuming the bugs are evenly distributed, that's perhaps 1,000 potential defects in the packages that I actually install.
65,000 outstanding items for W2K seems high, but it's not outrageously high - it's two or three times higher than I would have expected, but that could simply indicate very enthusiastic testers.
I'm *far* more concerned by the hints that suggests the bugs are no longer seem to be orthogonal - service packs are introducing as many bugs as they fix. *That* suggests that the code is on the brink of becoming totally unmaintainable, a very real possibility with a large code base that pretends to be tightly integrated.
Just so we're all talking about the same thing, a corporation talking about political issues is political speech, not commercial speech. Many of us are concerned at non-natural people getting involved in the political process, but that's another matter.
The issue of commercial speech comes up when you're discussing the right of some bozo to call you during dinner every night. Or the right of his friend to cross your fence and walk onto your property to leave a flyer on your door. Or the right of another chum to start up a loud rally next door to your house.
If the purpose of that those acts is to collect like minded people to march down to the next town council meeting to air their grievance, that's the heart of democracy. If the purpose of the acts is to remind you that Billy Bob's Bag 'o Boots is having a special 9/10th price sale for only one more week (just like the sales they've had for the past three years), then that speech is interfering with your right to "peaceful enjoyment" of your property to such an extent that most jurisdictions say "enough!"
Never forget: nobody went out looking for reasons to restrict commercial speech until the local equivalent of Herb Tarlek made it clear that it would take a court order to make him shut up and go away. It's easy to ignore a newspaper that's nothing but ads, ditto a tv or radio station. It's a damn slight harder to ignore the ringing phone, jammed email box, or minivan with loudspeakers on top.
California has a brand spanking new law protecting customers because of abuses of the frequent shopper cards by stores.
The most notorious case, which was discussed in the _Privacy Journal_, involved a gentleman who slipped on a wet floor and was injured. This being California he sued, and the store started asking all of his friends and acquaintances about his drinking problem. Obviously, they sought to show that he fell because he was drunk ("'falling down' drunk").
Where did the store get the idea that he was an alcoholic? From their own records. The lawyers pulled up his purchasing details and jumped on the fact that he purchased something like a case of beer every week or two. Perhaps they were legitimately investigating the possibility that he was drunk at the time (and nobody in the store or medical staff noticed it)... or perhaps they seized on this as a way to embarass the plantiff sufficiently that he would drop a justified complaint.
Other abuses have involved stores checking up on customers (and staff), individuals checking up on customers, the government checking up on customers (IIRC the search seemed tuned to home gardeners, not murderers), etc.
And *that* does worry me. I don't want to have to worry about a no-knock DEA raid as a suspected pot farmer for no reason other than the fact I bought a bunch of full spectrum bulbs to treat my seasonal affective disorder.
That brief isn't about something interesting like how people without a driver's license is supposed to board a commercial flight in our brave new world.
It's about how the public roads are "really" private property since they're paid for with taxes, and therefore the state can't ban people from driving their car on these "private" roads for minor issues like multiple convictions for drunk driving resulting in death.
N.B., even this paper doesn't try to argue that this mass murderer isn't allowed to freely travel public roads - *as a passenger*, or perhaps on a bicycle.
Instead the focus is on some silly "business"/"personal" use distiction which is completely irrelevant and utterly impossible to enforce.
Also, as a multiple HOWTO author I think you're overstating the difficulty of using this flavor of SGML. There's a bit of boilerplate at the top of the document that you can lift from any other HOWTO, then it's mostly just the nesting sections (<sect>, <sect1>, <sect2>), the <p> to mark the end of the title, and <tscreen><code> ... </code></tscreen> to bracket code samples. There are many other tags, of course, but this is enough to get something that will work with the tools and it doesn't take more than a minutes to convert a text document.
Let's keep this in perspective (no pun intended)
The cops were flying at the legal minimum, 1000' above terrain. I don't know the altitude of the satellite, but it can't be below 100 miles up and I wouldn't be surprised if it's 200 miles up. For convenience, let's call it a shade under 200 miles up - 1,000,000 feet up. That's a nice round factor of 1000x. Also, if I did my math right that works out to an angular resolution of around 1/2 arc second.
The average human eye has an angular resolution of something like 1 arc second, so the camera is a bit better than the human eye. But the cops in the aircraft were only 1000 feet up, so even with their poorer eyes they had resolution of around 1.5 mm (again, if I did my math right). I don't recall the size of the average marijuana leaf off the top of my head, but at a guess let's call it 150 mm - large enough that the plant would be easily recognized by eye.
I don't like the idea of cops buzzing property to peek over fences, but if I did my math right they could have still identified the plants from far higher than that.
But orbit? If you assume classic optics it seems unlikely that any satellite could ever recognize objects as well as a cop in a helicopter. Even if we assume a ten-fold improvement in the resolution (to 0.1 m), the leaves will still be an indistinct blur. This might be fine enough resolution to recognize the plant via remote sensing techniques, but this violates the "naked eye" test.
Please don't let your biases lead to you making stupid statements. *Any* system with the complexity of Motif, Qt, KDE, or MS Windows will require extensive documentation. The only real question is if you'll have thick documents describing what each widget/object/fuzzball allows, or if you'll have thick documents describing what each widget/object/fuzzball does when you give it a canonical "one-size-fits-all" instruction.
The former is a little harder to code the first time, but the latter is far harder to maintain. IMHO, of course, but I have tried both. Motif has a track record, and while it's not pretty it's also clearly not a dead end.
But Qt and GTK? Many people report it's easier to get the first version out the door with these toolkits instead of Motif, but how easy are they to maintain? Where's the persistent documentation that I can put on the shelf and hand off to a maintenance programmer in five year? I don't want web pages which could go away or be changed to show only the documentation for a version major revs away from my legacy program. The O'Reilly X books set very high standard for documentation, and (I believe) are a large reason why O'Reilly is held in such high esteem. After all, many of us were introduced to O'Reilly by those books.
Motif may be a pain to work with, but it has one outstanding quality which Qt and GTK both lack: exhaustive O'Reilly references. Give me something comparable to volumes 6A and 6B, and libraries that don't have major changes every time I upgrade my system, and I'll consider switching.
But in the meanwhile I'll stay with Motif. It has a steep learning curve, and it forces me to do a lot of stuff myself (or use third-party widgets), but at least I have good documentation targeted at me as a developer. I also have the QT book, but it's probably less than 1/4 the material of the Motif books - *and* it wastes a lot of time telling me why I want a widget, not how to use it.
Something else the CNN article covered in the same segment (because it's in the same bill?) would allow companies to substitute email notification for pmail notification.
There would be no requirement to send a paper copy of the document.
There would be no requirement to obtain proof of delivery.
The segment then had several talking heads - always from the industry - assuring us that only a few crackpots afraid of technology they don't understand were upset by the provisions of this bill. Most people *wanted* to be able to visit a web site and sign a contract for, oh, health insurance and get an immediate email confirmation.
The critics raised dire (but always "unsubstantiated") fears that people would get nailed by late fees or policy cancellations because they never received the email notifications. In the worst case, they could lose their house to foreclosure.
N.B., this is not something which only people who aren't making payments need to worry about, nor are these fears unsubstantiated by experience. It's a significant problem today - ask any victim of identity fraud.
While a company should theoretically verify the digitial signature of all documents regarding change of address and change of signature, history shows that the companies will bend over backwards to "help" the customer who lost his information due to a disk crash while moving, lost it due to a virus, or a dozen increasingly more bizarre reasons.
Considering the fact that I write so few checks (prefering direct payment) that I often forget to sign the laser-printed jets -- yet they are still accepted without a problem -- and the funny look I got from one bank rep who was critical of home printed checks because they were too easy to fake ("but that's why you have a sample of my signature!"), I doubt companies would ever check the signatures until the lawyers get involved in a dispute.
I've read of one decent long-term solution. It's not particularly convenient, but it *is* known to be capable of surviving hundreds of years.
Print the data on acid-free paper. Use an impact printer, not a laser printer. (Are you sure that the toner binding agents will last hundreds of years?)
You could print textual material in an OCR-friendly manner (e.g., the source listings in the "Cracking DES" book). This will obviously take a lot of paper and space, but it could be read by a human.
Or you could print the material in a "barcode" type style with plenty of embedded checksums. If you use 1 mm square cells (which should be large enough to allow scanners to adjust for paper warp, water damage, etc.), the amount of data which fits onto a single sheet of paper isn't much more than you get with raw text... until you consider that this is true 8-bit data with error recovery, not 7-bit text.
I think it goes without saying that this format is not intended for frequent use. But if you had information that you *had* to archive for centuries and you had unlimited access to vast underground storage vaults, this is probably the most stable media known today.
A closely related problem is the question of whether you're storing data in the first place.
This question has come up twice in the past decade. In the first case, a tape backup drive quietly failed and there was no indication of a problem until they attempted to retrieve a file.
In the second case, the person responsible for performing backups carefully ticked off the paperwork... but as far as anyone could tell he never actually swapped any tapes. The company discovered this after he (intentionally) corrupted the Netware database and then walked out the door.
Both problems can be solved by simple procedural changes (e.g., always "verify" tapes after writing, have someone else run "verify" or rotate the duty).
Yet... twice in the past decade I have direct knowledge of data loss. In one of case this happened despite a competent and dedicated IT staff. Assuming this wasn't just a statistical fluke, it follows that there must be a significant risk that archival data is bad at the moment it's produced - perhaps somewhere between 5-20% of one or more bad media per year per backup group.
It doesn't make much sense to invest in premium media if you're saving garbage.
PBS (I believe) recently aired an excellent documentary on the *real* history of the "space race." That history explains why the "66 years from Kitty Hawk to lunar landing" is totally irrelevant -- and highly misleading.
I tell you three times: the lunar landing was a military act in the third phase of the 20th Century War. After the second phase (fighting National Socialism) both the US and USSR were aware of the potential of using missiles to lob the new nuclear weapons, but the captured V-2 missiles weren't close to being able to lob nukes across intercontinental distances. Both countries dragged their feet, but one Soviet scientist did manage to get enough resources to launch Sputnik. The Soviet leadership didn't think much of it... until it saw the shockwave it sent through the free and third worlds. The *next* day the stunning superiority of Soviet science was the lead story on Pravda.
N.B., a lot of revisionist history says that everyone was shocked at the idea of a man-made moon, just like everyone was shocked when Columbus "proved" the world was round. Both are lies. People were deeply disturbed because if you can launch something into orbit, you have the ability to put the missile down anywhere below that orbit. The only questions were the weight of the payload and the accuracy of the targeting.
Over the next few years the Soviets had a long run of public triumphs. First dog in man in space _and_ orbit. First woman in space. The first man-made object to land on the moon was designed to shatter and spread little hammer-and-sickles across the surface. (The Soviets also had failures, but they were quietly airbrushed out of the picture.) The Americans had a series of widely seen failures. The Soviets were relentless in using this clear evidence of the superiority of the Soviet system to bring neutral countries into their fold. The US had to do something, but the rules of the "cold war" limited the options.
*That* is why JFK announced a manned lunar program. It was arrogance writ large, and a tremendous gamble, but if successful it would eliminate the growing perception that the west couldn't handle modern science. Nobody in power cared about science - but they *did* care about ICBMs and the newly developed thermonuclear weapons. If the Soviets have Q-bombs (whatever follows "H-") and ICBMs, and the US doesn't, the 20th Century War would be over.
So JFK got an incredible level of funding for the Apollo missions (a trick Reagan later repeated with an overt military buildup, but by then the world had already soiled its pants over Cuban missiles), why the Soviets had their own manned lunar program -- and buried it once it was clear the US would beat them -- and why the US lost official interest so soon afterwards.
Unfortunately, this means that many arguments for going to Mars make a fatal assumption - in many important ways we haven't been to the moon yet! The grand total of time spent on the lunar surface is still measured in days, as is the total time spent by humans outside of LEO. To use this as "proof" that Mars is the next goal is ludicrous.
Before we even begin to think about heading to Mars, we need to have lunar experience, not just LEO experience, that lasts at least as long as the first Mars missions. Preferably several times as long. We need to have experience with people having major medical emergencies in space. (Even healthy young adults have a significant risk of a major medical event during a two-year mission.) Then, and only then, can we make an informed decision about what we need for a Mars mission.
IANAL, but IIRC the sealed documents are still open to the opposing counsel and can be discussed in court, but unlike most of the court papers you can't subsequently review the material in the courthouse library.
Also, a court seal isn't automatic. The judge has a right to ask how public disclosure of the information will harm the company, and he can't be overwhelmed by thousands of irrelevant claims. If he feels that the lawyers are trying to pull a fast one, he can start focusing their attention on the task by threatening sanctions against the lawyers individually or their client. (An example of the latter is a flat assertion that he'll only seal 100 documents, so the client should choose wisely.)
Judges are (wisely) hesitant to invoke these sanctions without overwhelming need, but they can consider a company's previous actions. If a company has had 80+% of its classified papers opened in previous cases, many judges will be hesitant to rubberstamp subsequent requests.
I'm in the minority, but I found the later Dune books far *more* interesting than the first book.
The original trilogy (which was really one book, but split due to market constraints) was the classic Hero's Journey, as discussed by Joseph Campbell. The hero has divine birth (Royalty, Bene Gesserit genetic experiment), is unjustly deprived of his rightful position, successfully fights to regains it, then ultimately fails due to his hubris.
The fourth book is the necessary conclusion of Leto's story.
The last book (published in two pieces, due to market constraints), is the first book outside of the Hero arcs set in motion by the first volume. That leaves most people used to the first book feeling a bit put out, and the other people who would prefer the more contemplative nature of these books are unlikely to read them after the poor reviews from Dune fans.
For anyone interested, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune are set 1500(?) years after Leto's death. Our heroes are the Bene Gesserit - *very* different than what you would expect from the first few books. They are locked in mortal struggle with the "Honored Matres" - a distorted echo of the BG returned from the scattering. The surface conflict mirrors the inner conflict faced by all affluent societies - when is it enough?
I would recommend the first few books of the Uplift Series, specifically Startide Rising and The Uplift War, by David Brin. They are complex stories that affirm good values, but they also make fun of the clueless adults (the other "patron races" in the five galaxies). The importance of the latter to a teenager can't be overstated, nor the fact that not all 'adults' are their enemy.
:-)
The first book in the series, often overlooked, is Sundiver. It has some interesting concepts and lays the groundwork, but it's a bit more adult. (Or hyper-adult, since most adults I know would be "probates".)
The last three books in the series, actually a single work split for market reasons, follow the Streaker's attempt to get home. They are not light reading, but by the time she get's through everyone else's list she'll be a HS senior or in college and can appreciate these books.
Don?t forget ðe use of non-standard character encoding. MS knows ðat ðe ?real? lesson from IBM is ðey lost ðeir non?opoly only after ðey allowed ðe users, curse ðeir black hearts, to use ASCII instead of EBCDIC.
ðat?s why all commercially successful OSes will use special characters for ?smart quotes,? display kerning, and the like.
Linux, of course, supports ðe stupid ISO-8859-x and CJK standards. ðat means any system can edit any file. Ffools.
IIRC, many people questioned that survey because it measured the time between a company acknowledging the existence of a bug and its patch. That gave an advantage to the decidedly user-hostile approach of denying a bug exists unless a solution is in sight.
I'm not claiming that MS does this, but Red Hat obviously can't drag its feet when other distros acknowledge the existence of the bug in their releases. So RH will always be forced to be honest, and any company that admits to year-long lags is obviously fairly honest.
As for "scrounging the net" for fixes, you're either using the wrong distro or not using it correctly. Depending on your connnectivity, you should be automatically notified within hours or days of any upgrade on your distro's security site.
The size of Win2K is not a mitigating circumstance ("Let's give MS a break since this job is so big"), it's an aggrievating circumstance ("What the hell were they thinking?!")
It is an undisputed fact that the increase in your bug count climbs far faster than the increase in your LOC count. Sometimes far faster, depending upon how "tightly integrated" you want to make the system. It's a simple matter of combinatorical explosion - 2N objects can interact in (2N)! - N! more ways than N objects can interact.
That's why everyone on the planet... with one notable exception... has tried to maintain firm barricades between subsystems. At first glance it isn't as "user friendly," but many of us feel that nothing is more user-hostile than programs ridden by an interminal series of bugs and general flakiness.
Many critics have publically stated they doubt that Win2K will *ever* be stable. The sheer size of the code base means it's impossible for any one person to really understand what's going on, and that means it will be extremely difficult to avoid breaking Peter to fix Paul. That's why the reports that one of the two bug fixes introduced a third bug are so disturbing - this is exactly what you would expect to see from software that is simply too large to maintain.
It's still early in the game, but it looks like the critics won the first round. The real test in the next few months isn't the total number of bugs announced, it's the percentage of bug fixes which break something else. NT4 was notorious for requiring service packs to fix prior service packs, and there's now evidence (however thin) that Win2K will be far worse.
Why don't you think about your "solution" for a bit, then get back to us? It wouldn't hurt to read a few well-known cases under British law (both in the home country and the colonies) to know exactly what happens when the state has the power to detain people indefinitely while "collecting evidence."
Hint: this rule is intended to protect political prisoners, not common criminals, and is tightly coupled with the presumption of innocence.