The "space game" isn't heating up, just Slashdot's coverage of it is. I'd given up last year on submitting space stories to be ignored by "News for Computer Nerds", but the change of pace this summer is pretty nice. But frankly, with the progress of past years in mind, the current news is pretty depressing.
Rotary Rocket has been gutted of engineers and CEO, and their current progress is destined to be mothballed unless they find a magic money tree somewhere.
Ok, so they were a long shot. But Kistler was playing it relatively safe with their design (after ditching an initial wacky idea), didn't hit any big technical or political snags, but simply is in limbo now trying to raise the last third of their funding.
Did Timothy not read the last SAS newsletter when it got posted to Slashdot? (Big thanks to whomever did that one, by the way; I'd advise interested readers to check out the archives too). The SAS seems to be the group most interested in low cost access to space, rather than in lobbying for a larger NASA budget. And they hit the mark right on with that last article; it takes a billion dollar initial investment to develop a new launch system, there are only two aerospace companies left who can afford that kind of investment, and they've both got good reason to love the status quo.
Oh, but what about government research? The X-33 is a joke. It was never designed as a simple, cheap launch vehicle, just as a way to be a "technology demonstrator" for as much flashy stuff as necessary to win a NASA contract. Of course, except for the aerospike engine, most of that flashy stuff is looking worse and worse. The lifting body shape may need control fins the size of wings, or ballast (yes, ballast on a spacecraft) to keep the center of gravity ahead of the center of pressure. They've just about given up on a high-tech composite tank after discovering it damaged in tests, and will probably have to use plain old aluminum for their wacky, multilobed design.
And did I mention that they're running years behind schedule, over budget, and despite previous agreements that Lockheed-Martin would pay budget overruns, they may renegotiate or scrap the project anyway?
Sea Launch's success isn't even in the same class as these failures. They're trying to squeeze a few extra pounds onto the usual work-intensive expendable rocket, not to reduce the gross costs of space launch by an order of magnitude.
My last glimmer of hope is Beal Aerospace, not because they have any groundbreaking new ideas in their design, but because they've got a sugar daddy financer who can afford all the capital investment before they get up and running. And even if they get started with tried and true booster technologies, they'll be a profitable new space company with no vested interest in squeezing the largest launch prices out of the government as possible. And that might actually heat things up.
There are recording engineers that need to be paid. And everyone at the studio, including the janitors, managers, and security guards, need to be paid.
These people are paid, by the record company, with a flat fee for services rendered. The janitor doesn't get per-CD royalties, bugg...
That includes the company who delivers the CDs, the company that presses the CDs, the record store
But with music downloaded over the internet, none of those companies provide any service at all, and should be paid accordingly.
It's not as if the head of the RIAA pockets $11 with every purchase, you know.
Right; the janitor gets per-CD royalties, but the record company doesn't?
Does the NSA, or other TLA-agencies for that matter, have incentive programs that would interest the kind of people that you want working for you?
The chance to uncover and join conspiracies at the very highest levels of our government? C'mon, do you think that "The Man" (also know as "they", "Big Brother", etc.) is immortal? No! Even with the incredible genetic longevity treatments that they won't release to the general public, The Man can only expect to live two, three centuries, tops. They need fresh blood to firmly grasp the puppeteer's strings that our society dances to!
Think about the chicks you could pick up, if you could have their current boyfriends' reputations destroyed with a phone call.
Think about the perks you could be treated to, when you had the inside dirt that The Man's omnipresent surveillance systems have collected on every political and corporate leader in the world!
Sure, you would have to undergo their powerful classified psychotherapy techniques to keep you from revealing The Man's secrets, and to make sure you suicide before cracking under torture. But really, is torture by foreign counteragents really a worry anymore in a world where the Russian mafia is in bed with the NSA and the Chinese Communist party, in a global conspiracy to squeeze control ever tighter around the minds and hearts of men?
And really, wouldn't be worth it, the first time some clueless hippie-wannabe bitches to you that The Man is trying to keep him down, and you get to reply,
Before other C programmers who haven't seen Duff's Device get thoroughly confused, someone should point out:
The "to" register in Duff's system was a special I/O register, so copying different bytes to it over and over without reading from it made sense.
If you use the postincrement operator each time you assign to it, instead (*to++), then you get a pretty good memcpy. But basically the idea is that Duff's device unrolls an arbitrary length loop, without having an "extra" chunk of code to handle the remainder instructions when count isn't evenly divisible.
I know, you're thinking, "but Fox shows Simpsons reruns every hour where I come from", but some backwards affiliates have cut down to showing the Simpsons only 11 (or even as few as 6!) times per week.
So don't be silly; the cracker was probably working from another timezone where the Simpsons had already ended or hadn't yet begun. I mean, just because he's an immature criminal vandal doesn't mean he's a complete monster!
I challenge any slashdot user to name one configuration that can not be accomplished with Unix security.
I have a project that I work on with three other students/employees, with files stored on a University/company system. I want to make my files read/write for just us four, but there is no group in/etc/group that has exactly us in it.
What do I do? Make three hard links to each file, with different permissions on each one? Beg root to make a new group every time some situation like this comes up? Those are workarounds, not solutions.
Unix follows the first rule of security: Simplicity!
Translation: "I only use Linux". Commercial Unices have had ACLs for longer than Linux has been around. There's a Posix ACL standard API, in fact, which one or two beta extensions to the ext2 filesystem allow you to use in Linux.
Wait a minute now, what does "removal of rights from a minority of society by an ignorant majority" mean?
It means that, while still inexcusable, racism was at least comprehensible; it's hard to avoid a "tyranny of the majority" in a democracy, except by making sure that the majority of people respect each other's individual rights, and that's not an easy process. The ability for corporations to exert excessive control over consumers and workers, on the other hand, is a tyranny exerted by a small minority; when that becomes possible it's a good sign that the distribution of wealth and power are seriously fubarred.
Wow. I think of myself as a libertarian, mostly, but you'd never know it to read the above paragraph...
You had just claimed that Banning DeCSS wasn't about "the right to watch a movie", and then equated it "the right to get a drink of water".
In the sense that both are gross underestimations of the rights involved, yes. Want some more similarities?
"Movies" aren't something that the government owns. They don't throw you in jail for watching a DVD on Linux because the government mandated that Linux users can't watch DVDs.
Um.. the judge here is presiding over a trial, not a philosophical debate. The MPAA wants it to be illegal for you to view movies in ways they don't allow, whether you paid for the movie and are exercising fair use rights or not, and they have a law (a government mandate) on the books now which will make it possible for you to go to jail if you resist.
Sure, I could buy properly licensed players for each region I wanted to view DVDs from; and blacks could go to colored schools. Just because there's an alternative available doesn't mean that unfair restrictions are suddenly OK.
If I didn't make this clear enough before, I don't think the DeCSS case in particular, or even the IP rights war in general, are as worrysome as segregation was. But they are both about rights, not trivialities like what operating system you can play DVDs with or what restaurant you can eat at.
I'm skipping your weird analogy; I'm still trying to figure out exactly who "Ford" is analogous to, and where the "volunteers who implemented improved Super Tires, gave the design away, and then got their asses sued off" are.
Specifically, what kinds of patterns? If they're looking for most types of non-random signals that you'd find on a digital file, I'm not optimistic. At least one other person here's already pointed out that compressed (or even encrypted) data should look like random noise. And it will all be compressed digital data; the analog period of our civilization may look long from our perspective, but it's already coming to an end.
I'd be hunting for something that would look superficially like random noise, but which can be demodulated and fitted to some block error correction code or another. Even our hard media like CDs (and especially CD-ROMs), hard drives, etc, are all using ECC to prevent byte errors; transmitting digital data across even interplanetary distances makes ECC coding a must.
And error correction encodings aren't like a random file format; they're designed by mathematical principles to correct as many errors as possible given the number of data words and parity words. Of course, those numbers (as well as the number of bits in a word) are open to variation, and there's more than one block encoding algorithm out there, but what I'm saying is there's a limited number of encodings that should be checked; it's not an intractable task.
Of course, if we actually want to pick up interstellar transmissions, we need to be searching not just for error correcting codes, but for wavelengths much longer than anything we currently receive; a space faring civilization would probably have an antenna hundreds or thousands of km long in each stellar system, transmitting in wavelengths designed to be recieved by similar systems...
I find it kind of frightening that people's comprehension of the pre-segregation world is so confused that they can equate violating fundamental rights of movement and association with the right to watch a movie.
Banning DeCSS isn't about "the right to watch a movie", any more than segregated water fountains are about "the right to get a drink of water".
The latter is about discrimination, restricting freedom of association, and the removal of rights from a minority of society by an ignorant majority. The former is about maintaining a stranglehold on intellectual property, restricting freedom of speech (If I can't tell someone, in English or in C, how to bypass a broken encryption scheme, yes, it's restricting freedom of speech), and the removal of rights from a majority of society (the hundreds of millions of consumers who *used* to have "fair use rights" guaranteed by the supreme court) by a minority (the IP providers who can make more money off of restricting content distribution channels, controlling content player manufacturers, and moving even digital data to read-only and pay-per-use systems).
Granted, segregation was grossly worse, but with centuries of evil tradition to back it up and a subtle (and often too unsubtle) population-wide bigotry, that wasn't surprising. And racial relations improved, and are still gradually (too gradually for some) improving.
On the other hand, intellectual property controls are getting worse, and fast. The court cases that made VCRs, dubbing between media formats, personal MP3 players, etc. illegal are all pretty much moot now, since we've got this shiny new DMCA law that wasn't around back then. Even EULAs (you know, those "contracts" you "agreed to" without signing or reading anything) may become binding, and all the ridiculous restrictions therein take effect. The idea being fought here is the idea that you can purchase a data disc, "own" that disc, entertain yourself or run your company using the data on that disc, but have no control whatsoever over it except what the previous owner gives you, revokable at any time you try to move that data to a new medium, play it with an unauthorized system, publish incriminating benchmarks, or do anything else the previous owner doesn't like. Does that not worry you a little bit?
I said, "Well, in that case...in that case, what do you have?"
He says, "All I got right now is this box of one dozen starving crazed weasels."
I said, "OK, I'll take that."
So he hands me the box, and I open up the lid, and the weasels jump out and they immediately latch onto my face and start bitin' me all over. Oh, man, they were just goin' nuts! They were tearin' me apart! You know, I think it was just about that time that a little ditty started goin' through my head. I believe it went a little somethin' like this:
DOH! Get 'em off me! Get 'em off me! Ohhh! No, get 'em off, get 'em off! Oh, oh God, oh God! Oh, get 'em off me! Oh, oh God! Ah, Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh Ohhhhhhhhhh!
Because of that standardization, that's why most of the world's commercial software for desktop machines -are- being written for Windows
No, most of the world's commercial desktop software was written for Windows, because *big drum roll here*... most of the world's commercial desktops run Windows!
And that's not because of API standardization, or you would have seen people fleeing in droves at the Win16->Win32 switch which forced everyone to rewrite all their software. Borland's OWL libraries and Microsoft's MFC would have destroyed the Windows programming "community".
That's simply because Microsoft managed to get contracts which put their software on the majority of clone computers, because clone computers, and because Microsoft allowed (some might say forced) network effects to turn that majority into a monopoly.
The problem with Linux above the kernel level is that you can run into a situation of multiple competing API's for most everything, which can become a bit of a programming nightmare.
Bullshit. Name one GUI Linux program you've written. Did you try to write it using two toolkits? If not, then exactly how did the existance of whatever toolkits you didn't use make your life a "nightmare". All it did was give you extra choices to find an API you liked best before you started to program.
Remember, if programmers were forced to use one toolkit, we might be stuck using Xaw, Motif, or even Win32...
If I'm playing a video file, why should the cache and processor be deluged with data being routed to the sound card and the video card?
Subject says it all. Sure most video cards will do MPEG-2 in hardware nowadays; maybe you'd save something by getting the CPU out of the way there (although it's not actually in the way very much when you're just doing a memcpy of compressed data). But then here comes MPEG-4, and suddenly you need to do all that decoding work in software again. Which sucks if you're concerned about your SETI@Home performance, but it sure beats buying a new video card.
Anyone can form sentences using those first couple product names as generic nouns/verbs:
"Do you want a coke?" "Do you have any kleenex?" "Would you go xerox these?"
But how do you use Microsoft in a sentence like that?
"My car was in the shop for a week the last time it Microsofted!"
"Do you think NASA's going to Microsoft their next Mars probe, too?"
I've only seen someone use "Microsoft" as a synonym for "Operating System" once, and the sentence was, "Would you help me get this Microsoft off my hard drive?"
I'm sure the CDC (that's "center for disease control", not "cult of the dead cow") would have a lot of useful input on this "ubervirus" problem.
Not to knock the Center for Disease Control, but I think the other CDC would have a lot more useful input. In real life, "ubervirii" can't download DLLs with new 'sploits off the net, can't insert trojan kernel modules or wrapper DLLs to hide their own existance (Ok, I guess there are analogies for that), and can't insert a remote "backdoor" into your brainstem for the biowarfare script kiddies to play with.
Keep program files local, data files global. With a package based distribution like Red Hat or Debian this shouldn't be a problem; just mount home directories over NFS, and find a tool (or write your own 5 line ssh-all script) to keep package installs consistent across all systems. And *only* do package installs; if there's a tarball you want to install (even a binary tarball), write your own spec file (or whatever the Debian equivalent is) for it and install it as a package. Sure, it makes the first install more of a pain, but by the 2400th install (or more importantly, the 2400th upgrade/uninstall) you'll be glad you did.
Oh, I can't stress NFS/NIS enough. You could use LDAP or Kerberos (or NT domain, I think) based authentication with Linux, too, but NIS is the easiest to set up, and may not be as sexy as LDAP but is just as good. Also, I'd suggest using autofs for all the NFS mounts. And splurge on the servers; NFS/NIS will make your desktops trivial to swap/repair without interrupting work if something goes wrong, but you want 99.999% uptime on the servers.
I don't like Caldera. To be fair, I haven't used it since 1998 or so; it may have improved.
NFS is a fine filesystem, by the way, as long as you have root on all the machines using it and don't have to worry about packet sniffers in between those machines.
Make sure you've got 10/100 NICs in all the machines. The cards aren't more expensive than plain 10baseT, really, and the hub prices are dropping quickly enough that if you don't start with a 100baseT network you'll want one soon. You'll definitely want 100baseT connections to the servers from the start.
32MB should be fine for WindowMaker (although you'll want lots of swap with an office suite and Netscape running); 64MB (still with 64+MB swap) would probably be perfect with any desktop. I've got 128MB on my home machine, but that's cause if I close Netscape I want it to reopen entirely from disk cache.;-)
Why pick your users' desktop? It's not like you're going to have 1GB drives on the clients, so install 'em all, set whatever you prefer as the display manager default option, and make sure the desktops boot to kdm or gdm.
I assume you're worried about security? I would turn off most network services (on Linux boxes in front of the firewall at my work, there are no UDP ports and only the ssh TCP port open); you won't need them on clients, but most distros will default with them on anyway. Also, make sure you have the BIOS set to boot only from HDD, a BIOS administrator password, a LILO restricted password, and go-rw permissions on lilo.conf. It's shocking how few people do this; I'd say 99+% of Linux computers in the world let you get root with no password by simply rebooting.
P.S.: Anyone who thinks that a video game(console, PC, or arcade) is a training simulator has either never played one, or never been on an actual killing spree.
That was the DC-X (DC-XA, after a set of upgrades); one of it's proposed followons, the "Delta Clipper", was a bid for the X-33. It lost the bid for the X-33, because Lockheed-Martin made a proposal that would try out all sorts of new shiny technologies, whereas all the Delta Clipper would do was get to space and back.
It was paid for (and was over budget IIRC, but on a remarkably cheap budget) by the ballistic missile defense people, who flew it twice in one day (by comparison, each shuttle might fly twice in one year). The program was turned over to NASA, who promptly crashed it and didn't want to build any more.
It is still available today; Texas Instruments uses it in their calculators that cost about US $80 for the entire thing.
Funny you should mention that; I'd love to replace my TI-85 with something running Linux.
Their calculators cost US $80... but they still cost $80, after being out for 8 years!!! Show me any personal computer that hasn't improved 10 fold in speed and memory or dropped 75% of it's price in the past 8 years, and I'll show you a ripoff. Yet we put up with stagnation in calculators?
A good Linux PDA should be able to (finally!) replace my calculator, and replace it with Matlab (or octave for the price-conscious, or Maple for people with more symbolic-oriented needs, etc.) to blow it away functionally.
I don't want Linux in my clock radio (although an X10 interface to control my clock from would be nice), but there are a lot of places where it would be nice to see Linux, but where it isn't there yet.
Both Slot connections were just Intel and AMDs way of packing cache chips on a special connection to the CPU. Now that they've both got on-die, full speed cache, it's just not necessary anymore, and I suppose having one more PCB/case/larger heatsink in the slot design adds $5+ to its cost.
With AMD, at least, you can still get their newest CPUs in slot or socket form, though, so you don't have too much to complain about.
To the people who want a "common backplane" - great, but whose? K7 based chips and PIII based chips use totally different bus designs now. Someone would have to heavily retool their chip designs to make them work on common motherboards.
Ok, granted, 32 bits wasn't quite enough.. but what is the point of a 128 bit IP address? 64 bits would be more efficient to deal with (since we're getting 64 bit CPUs a plenty, whereas we may never see a 128 bit desktop chip) and would still provide us with 16 quintillion possible addresses. Is 16 quintillion not enough?
I don't understand how many people say this ruling makes sense.
Well, many people believe that the consumer has rights ("first sale", "fair use", etc.) that they cannot be asked to give up as a condition of buying a product.
As mentioned by many other posters, it is nearly akin to being able to sell just the shampoo from a shampoo/conditioner pair sold shrinkwrapped together.
Sounds good to me. Think about it: How many things do you own which you are legally obligated to never resell? Do you really "own" them in that case?
Then again, what's to prevent the retailers from installing their OEM copies of the software, selling those systems without the OEM Software CD's, and then turning around and selling the OEM Software?
What's to prevent the retailers today from installing one OEM copy of the software, selling that system without the OEM software CD, and then using that same CD to install on every other computer they sell?
Allowing OEM software resales doesn't make committing crimes easier; even if it did, is that a reason to make those resales illegal? We need laws against doing bad things, not against doing reasonable things which make other laws harder to prosecute.
I'm guessing that to launch a craft of any reasonale size you would probably need a huge solar sail.
No, to launch a craft of any size a solar sail wouldn't work. We're talking accelerations of a thousandth of a gee here; that won't get you off the ground.
Even in low earth orbit a solar sail wouldn't work; atmospheric drag would outweight light pressure.
Where a solar sail would work great would be, say, ferrying nonperishable cargo over interplanetary distances. It may take you a couple years to get the cargo there, but the fact that you didn't need any fuel for the trip and can send the sail back for more makes up for that.
Now i've got no evidence whatsoever to back this up but personally i'd imagine huge football pitch sized things.
Imagine larger. A square kilometer of sail would be required to give a 10 ton payload good acceleration.
With all the crap floating about in space surely the chance that these would rupture is unacceptably high
There actually isn't all that much crap floating about in space, except in low earth orbit where we put it there. And with a sail, floating crap isn't a problem. So a micrometeorite hits your sail? It'll go right through; the sail will become.0001% weaker, and you won't even notice.
Or even more terrifying, that's 625 trillion ergs!
Of course, if you look at it as 17 kilowatt hours, or a couple bucks electricity, it's less worrisome. If you leave a light bulb on for a day, you've just expended enough energy to put that light bulb in space.
Even if you can't use electricity to get off the Earth's surface (and we can't, yet), rocket fuel isn't that much more expensive; you'll be paying $20 a kilogram instead of $1. That'd be $2000 (well, $5000 after you add in life support and overhead costs) for a vacation in orbit; I'd happily buy a ticket.
Instead, getting into orbit costs $5000 to $10000 per kilogram. There are differing ideas about how to reduce this (reduce the "standing army" of ground crew, don't throw away a rocket with each flight, turn around and fly again every few days instead of months), but reducing energy costs isn't among them.
Slashdot Mirror
The "space game" isn't heating up, just Slashdot's coverage of it is. I'd given up last year on submitting space stories to be ignored by "News for Computer Nerds", but the change of pace this summer is pretty nice. But frankly, with the progress of past years in mind, the current news is pretty depressing.
Rotary Rocket has been gutted of engineers and CEO, and their current progress is destined to be mothballed unless they find a magic money tree somewhere.
Ok, so they were a long shot. But Kistler was playing it relatively safe with their design (after ditching an initial wacky idea), didn't hit any big technical or political snags, but simply is in limbo now trying to raise the last third of their funding.
Did Timothy not read the last SAS newsletter when it got posted to Slashdot? (Big thanks to whomever did that one, by the way; I'd advise interested readers to check out the archives too). The SAS seems to be the group most interested in low cost access to space, rather than in lobbying for a larger NASA budget. And they hit the mark right on with that last article; it takes a billion dollar initial investment to develop a new launch system, there are only two aerospace companies left who can afford that kind of investment, and they've both got good reason to love the status quo.
Oh, but what about government research? The X-33 is a joke. It was never designed as a simple, cheap launch vehicle, just as a way to be a "technology demonstrator" for as much flashy stuff as necessary to win a NASA contract. Of course, except for the aerospike engine, most of that flashy stuff is looking worse and worse. The lifting body shape may need control fins the size of wings, or ballast (yes, ballast on a spacecraft) to keep the center of gravity ahead of the center of pressure. They've just about given up on a high-tech composite tank after discovering it damaged in tests, and will probably have to use plain old aluminum for their wacky, multilobed design.
And did I mention that they're running years behind schedule, over budget, and despite previous agreements that Lockheed-Martin would pay budget overruns, they may renegotiate or scrap the project anyway?
Sea Launch's success isn't even in the same class as these failures. They're trying to squeeze a few extra pounds onto the usual work-intensive expendable rocket, not to reduce the gross costs of space launch by an order of magnitude.
My last glimmer of hope is Beal Aerospace, not because they have any groundbreaking new ideas in their design, but because they've got a sugar daddy financer who can afford all the capital investment before they get up and running. And even if they get started with tried and true booster technologies, they'll be a profitable new space company with no vested interest in squeezing the largest launch prices out of the government as possible. And that might actually heat things up.
There are recording engineers that need to be paid. And everyone at the studio, including the janitors, managers, and security guards, need to be paid.
These people are paid, by the record company, with a flat fee for services rendered. The janitor doesn't get per-CD royalties, bugg...
That includes the company who delivers the CDs, the company that presses the CDs, the record store
But with music downloaded over the internet, none of those companies provide any service at all, and should be paid accordingly.
It's not as if the head of the RIAA pockets $11 with every purchase, you know.
Right; the janitor gets per-CD royalties, but the record company doesn't?
Does the NSA, or other TLA-agencies for that matter, have incentive programs that would interest the kind of people that you want working for you?
The chance to uncover and join conspiracies at the very highest levels of our government? C'mon, do you think that "The Man" (also know as "they", "Big Brother", etc.) is immortal? No! Even with the incredible genetic longevity treatments that they won't release to the general public, The Man can only expect to live two, three centuries, tops. They need fresh blood to firmly grasp the puppeteer's strings that our society dances to!
Think about the chicks you could pick up, if you could have their current boyfriends' reputations destroyed with a phone call.
Think about the perks you could be treated to, when you had the inside dirt that The Man's omnipresent surveillance systems have collected on every political and corporate leader in the world!
Sure, you would have to undergo their powerful classified psychotherapy techniques to keep you from revealing The Man's secrets, and to make sure you suicide before cracking under torture. But really, is torture by foreign counteragents really a worry anymore in a world where the Russian mafia is in bed with the NSA and the Chinese Communist party, in a global conspiracy to squeeze control ever tighter around the minds and hearts of men?
And really, wouldn't be worth it, the first time some clueless hippie-wannabe bitches to you that The Man is trying to keep him down, and you get to reply,
"No I'm not."
Before other C programmers who haven't seen Duff's Device get thoroughly confused, someone should point out:
The "to" register in Duff's system was a special I/O register, so copying different bytes to it over and over without reading from it made sense.
If you use the postincrement operator each time you assign to it, instead (*to++), then you get a pretty good memcpy. But basically the idea is that Duff's device unrolls an arbitrary length loop, without having an "extra" chunk of code to handle the remainder instructions when count isn't evenly divisible.
I know, you're thinking, "but Fox shows Simpsons reruns every hour where I come from", but some backwards affiliates have cut down to showing the Simpsons only 11 (or even as few as 6!) times per week.
So don't be silly; the cracker was probably working from another timezone where the Simpsons had already ended or hadn't yet begun. I mean, just because he's an immature criminal vandal doesn't mean he's a complete monster!
I challenge any slashdot user to name one configuration that can not be accomplished with Unix security.
/etc/group that has exactly us in it.
I have a project that I work on with three other students/employees, with files stored on a University/company system. I want to make my files read/write for just us four, but there is no group in
What do I do? Make three hard links to each file, with different permissions on each one? Beg root to make a new group every time some situation like this comes up? Those are workarounds, not solutions.
Unix follows the first rule of security: Simplicity!
Translation: "I only use Linux". Commercial Unices have had ACLs for longer than Linux has been around. There's a Posix ACL standard API, in fact, which one or two beta extensions to the ext2 filesystem allow you to use in Linux.
Wait a minute now, what does "removal of rights from a minority of society by an ignorant majority" mean?
It means that, while still inexcusable, racism was at least comprehensible; it's hard to avoid a "tyranny of the majority" in a democracy, except by making sure that the majority of people respect each other's individual rights, and that's not an easy process. The ability for corporations to exert excessive control over consumers and workers, on the other hand, is a tyranny exerted by a small minority; when that becomes possible it's a good sign that the distribution of wealth and power are seriously fubarred.
Wow. I think of myself as a libertarian, mostly, but you'd never know it to read the above paragraph...
You had just claimed that Banning DeCSS wasn't about "the right to watch a movie", and then equated it "the right to get a drink of water".
In the sense that both are gross underestimations of the rights involved, yes. Want some more similarities?
"Movies" aren't something that the government owns. They don't throw you in jail for watching a DVD on Linux because the government mandated that Linux users can't watch DVDs.
Um.. the judge here is presiding over a trial, not a philosophical debate. The MPAA wants it to be illegal for you to view movies in ways they don't allow, whether you paid for the movie and are exercising fair use rights or not, and they have a law (a government mandate) on the books now which will make it possible for you to go to jail if you resist.
Sure, I could buy properly licensed players for each region I wanted to view DVDs from; and blacks could go to colored schools. Just because there's an alternative available doesn't mean that unfair restrictions are suddenly OK.
If I didn't make this clear enough before, I don't think the DeCSS case in particular, or even the IP rights war in general, are as worrysome as segregation was. But they are both about rights, not trivialities like what operating system you can play DVDs with or what restaurant you can eat at.
I'm skipping your weird analogy; I'm still trying to figure out exactly who "Ford" is analogous to, and where the "volunteers who implemented improved Super Tires, gave the design away, and then got their asses sued off" are.
Specifically, what kinds of patterns? If they're looking for most types of non-random signals that you'd find on a digital file, I'm not optimistic. At least one other person here's already pointed out that compressed (or even encrypted) data should look like random noise. And it will all be compressed digital data; the analog period of our civilization may look long from our perspective, but it's already coming to an end.
I'd be hunting for something that would look superficially like random noise, but which can be demodulated and fitted to some block error correction code or another. Even our hard media like CDs (and especially CD-ROMs), hard drives, etc, are all using ECC to prevent byte errors; transmitting digital data across even interplanetary distances makes ECC coding a must.
And error correction encodings aren't like a random file format; they're designed by mathematical principles to correct as many errors as possible given the number of data words and parity words. Of course, those numbers (as well as the number of bits in a word) are open to variation, and there's more than one block encoding algorithm out there, but what I'm saying is there's a limited number of encodings that should be checked; it's not an intractable task.
Of course, if we actually want to pick up interstellar transmissions, we need to be searching not just for error correcting codes, but for wavelengths much longer than anything we currently receive; a space faring civilization would probably have an antenna hundreds or thousands of km long in each stellar system, transmitting in wavelengths designed to be recieved by similar systems...
Yeah, yeah, should have hit Preview...
I find it kind of frightening that people's comprehension of the pre-segregation world is so confused that they can equate violating fundamental rights of movement and association with the right to watch a movie.
Banning DeCSS isn't about "the right to watch a movie", any more than segregated water fountains are about "the right to get a drink of water".
The latter is about discrimination, restricting freedom of association, and the removal of rights from a minority of society by an ignorant majority. The former is about maintaining a stranglehold on intellectual property, restricting freedom of speech (If I can't tell someone, in English or in C, how to bypass a broken encryption scheme, yes, it's restricting freedom of speech), and the removal of rights from a majority of society (the hundreds of millions of consumers who *used* to have "fair use rights" guaranteed by the supreme court) by a minority (the IP providers who can make more money off of restricting content distribution channels, controlling content player manufacturers, and moving even digital data to read-only and pay-per-use systems).
Granted, segregation was grossly worse, but with centuries of evil tradition to back it up and a subtle (and often too unsubtle) population-wide bigotry, that wasn't surprising. And racial relations improved, and are still gradually (too gradually for some) improving.
On the other hand, intellectual property controls are getting worse, and fast. The court cases that made VCRs, dubbing between media formats, personal MP3 players, etc. illegal are all pretty much moot now, since we've got this shiny new DMCA law that wasn't around back then. Even EULAs (you know, those "contracts" you "agreed to" without signing or reading anything) may become binding, and all the ridiculous restrictions therein take effect. The idea being fought here is the idea that you can purchase a data disc, "own" that disc, entertain yourself or run your company using the data on that disc, but have no control whatsoever over it except what the previous owner gives you, revokable at any time you try to move that data to a new medium, play it with an unauthorized system, publish incriminating benchmarks, or do anything else the previous owner doesn't like. Does that not worry you a little bit?
I said, "Well, in that case...in that case, what do you have?"
He says, "All I got right now is this box of one dozen starving crazed weasels."
I said, "OK, I'll take that."
So he hands me the box, and I open up the lid, and the weasels jump out and they immediately latch onto my face and start bitin' me all over. Oh, man, they were just goin' nuts! They were tearin' me apart! You know, I think it was just about that time that a little ditty started goin' through my head. I believe it went a little somethin' like
this:
DOH! Get 'em off me! Get 'em off me! Ohhh! No, get 'em off, get 'em off! Oh, oh God, oh God! Oh, get 'em off me! Oh, oh God! Ah, Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh Ohhhhhhhhhh!
Because of that standardization, that's why most of the world's commercial software for desktop machines -are- being written for Windows
No, most of the world's commercial desktop software was written for Windows, because *big drum roll here*... most of the world's commercial desktops run Windows!
And that's not because of API standardization, or you would have seen people fleeing in droves at the Win16->Win32 switch which forced everyone to rewrite all their software. Borland's OWL libraries and Microsoft's MFC would have destroyed the Windows programming "community".
That's simply because Microsoft managed to get contracts which put their software on the majority of clone computers, because clone computers, and because Microsoft allowed (some might say forced) network effects to turn that majority into a monopoly.
The problem with Linux above the kernel level is that you can run into a situation of multiple competing API's for most everything, which can become a bit of a programming nightmare.
Bullshit. Name one GUI Linux program you've written. Did you try to write it using two toolkits? If not, then exactly how did the existance of whatever toolkits you didn't use make your life a "nightmare". All it did was give you extra choices to find an API you liked best before you started to program.
Remember, if programmers were forced to use one toolkit, we might be stuck using Xaw, Motif, or even Win32...
If I'm playing a video file, why should the cache and processor be deluged with data being routed to the sound card and the video card?
Subject says it all. Sure most video cards will do MPEG-2 in hardware nowadays; maybe you'd save something by getting the CPU out of the way there (although it's not actually in the way very much when you're just doing a memcpy of compressed data). But then here comes MPEG-4, and suddenly you need to do all that decoding work in software again. Which sucks if you're concerned about your SETI@Home performance, but it sure beats buying a new video card.
"are em space dash eff capital arr space slash enter."
No worries; your computer will dutifully add to the command line:
bash$ Our imps pace the chef cap a dull ours pace lashing turn.
which may give the grammar checker fits but which won't erase your hard drive.
Anyone can form sentences using those first couple product names as generic nouns/verbs:
"Do you want a coke?"
"Do you have any kleenex?"
"Would you go xerox these?"
But how do you use Microsoft in a sentence like that?
"My car was in the shop for a week the last time it Microsofted!"
"Do you think NASA's going to Microsoft their next Mars probe, too?"
I've only seen someone use "Microsoft" as a synonym for "Operating System" once, and the sentence was, "Would you help me get this Microsoft off my hard drive?"
I'm sure the CDC (that's "center for disease control", not "cult of the dead cow") would have a lot of useful input on this "ubervirus" problem.
Not to knock the Center for Disease Control, but I think the other CDC would have a lot more useful input. In real life, "ubervirii" can't download DLLs with new 'sploits off the net, can't insert trojan kernel modules or wrapper DLLs to hide their own existance (Ok, I guess there are analogies for that), and can't insert a remote "backdoor" into your brainstem for the biowarfare script kiddies to play with.
At least, I hope they can't...
Keep program files local, data files global. With a package based distribution like Red Hat or Debian this shouldn't be a problem; just mount home directories over NFS, and find a tool (or write your own 5 line ssh-all script) to keep package installs consistent across all systems. And *only* do package installs; if there's a tarball you want to install (even a binary tarball), write your own spec file (or whatever the Debian equivalent is) for it and install it as a package. Sure, it makes the first install more of a pain, but by the 2400th install (or more importantly, the 2400th upgrade/uninstall) you'll be glad you did.
;-)
Oh, I can't stress NFS/NIS enough. You could use LDAP or Kerberos (or NT domain, I think) based authentication with Linux, too, but NIS is the easiest to set up, and may not be as sexy as LDAP but is just as good. Also, I'd suggest using autofs for all the NFS mounts. And splurge on the servers; NFS/NIS will make your desktops trivial to swap/repair without interrupting work if something goes wrong, but you want 99.999% uptime on the servers.
I don't like Caldera. To be fair, I haven't used it since 1998 or so; it may have improved.
NFS is a fine filesystem, by the way, as long as you have root on all the machines using it and don't have to worry about packet sniffers in between those machines.
Make sure you've got 10/100 NICs in all the machines. The cards aren't more expensive than plain 10baseT, really, and the hub prices are dropping quickly enough that if you don't start with a 100baseT network you'll want one soon. You'll definitely want 100baseT connections to the servers from the start.
32MB should be fine for WindowMaker (although you'll want lots of swap with an office suite and Netscape running); 64MB (still with 64+MB swap) would probably be perfect with any desktop. I've got 128MB on my home machine, but that's cause if I close Netscape I want it to reopen entirely from disk cache.
Why pick your users' desktop? It's not like you're going to have 1GB drives on the clients, so install 'em all, set whatever you prefer as the display manager default option, and make sure the desktops boot to kdm or gdm.
I assume you're worried about security? I would turn off most network services (on Linux boxes in front of the firewall at my work, there are no UDP ports and only the ssh TCP port open); you won't need them on clients, but most distros will default with them on anyway. Also, make sure you have the BIOS set to boot only from HDD, a BIOS administrator password, a LILO restricted password, and go-rw permissions on lilo.conf. It's shocking how few people do this; I'd say 99+% of Linux computers in the world let you get root with no password by simply rebooting.
P.S.: Anyone who thinks that a video game(console, PC, or arcade) is a training simulator has either never played one, or never been on an actual killing spree.
Does this sentence not scare anyone else?
That was the DC-X (DC-XA, after a set of upgrades); one of it's proposed followons, the "Delta Clipper", was a bid for the X-33. It lost the bid for the X-33, because Lockheed-Martin made a proposal that would try out all sorts of new shiny technologies, whereas all the Delta Clipper would do was get to space and back.
It was paid for (and was over budget IIRC, but on a remarkably cheap budget) by the ballistic missile defense people, who flew it twice in one day (by comparison, each shuttle might fly twice in one year). The program was turned over to NASA, who promptly crashed it and didn't want to build any more.
It is still available today; Texas Instruments uses it in their calculators that cost about US $80 for the entire thing.
Funny you should mention that; I'd love to replace my TI-85 with something running Linux.
Their calculators cost US $80... but they still cost $80, after being out for 8 years!!! Show me any personal computer that hasn't improved 10 fold in speed and memory or dropped 75% of it's price in the past 8 years, and I'll show you a ripoff. Yet we put up with stagnation in calculators?
A good Linux PDA should be able to (finally!) replace my calculator, and replace it with Matlab (or octave for the price-conscious, or Maple for people with more symbolic-oriented needs, etc.) to blow it away functionally.
I don't want Linux in my clock radio (although an X10 interface to control my clock from would be nice), but there are a lot of places where it would be nice to see Linux, but where it isn't there yet.
Both Slot connections were just Intel and AMDs way of packing cache chips on a special connection to the CPU. Now that they've both got on-die, full speed cache, it's just not necessary anymore, and I suppose having one more PCB/case/larger heatsink in the slot design adds $5+ to its cost.
With AMD, at least, you can still get their newest CPUs in slot or socket form, though, so you don't have too much to complain about.
To the people who want a "common backplane" - great, but whose? K7 based chips and PIII based chips use totally different bus designs now. Someone would have to heavily retool their chip designs to make them work on common motherboards.
Ok, granted, 32 bits wasn't quite enough.. but what is the point of a 128 bit IP address? 64 bits would be more efficient to deal with (since we're getting 64 bit CPUs a plenty, whereas we may never see a 128 bit desktop chip) and would still provide us with 16 quintillion possible addresses. Is 16 quintillion not enough?
I don't understand how many people say this ruling makes sense.
Well, many people believe that the consumer has rights ("first sale", "fair use", etc.) that they cannot be asked to give up as a condition of buying a product.
As mentioned by many other posters, it is nearly akin to being able to sell just the shampoo from a shampoo/conditioner pair sold shrinkwrapped together.
Sounds good to me. Think about it: How many things do you own which you are legally obligated to never resell? Do you really "own" them in that case?
Then again, what's to prevent the retailers from installing their OEM copies of the software, selling those systems without the OEM Software CD's, and then turning around and selling the OEM Software?
What's to prevent the retailers today from installing one OEM copy of the software, selling that system without the OEM software CD, and then using that same CD to install on every other computer they sell?
Allowing OEM software resales doesn't make committing crimes easier; even if it did, is that a reason to make those resales illegal? We need laws against doing bad things, not against doing reasonable things which make other laws harder to prosecute.
I'm guessing that to launch a craft of any reasonale size you would probably need a huge solar sail.
.0001% weaker, and you won't even notice.
No, to launch a craft of any size a solar sail wouldn't work. We're talking accelerations of a thousandth of a gee here; that won't get you off the ground.
Even in low earth orbit a solar sail wouldn't work; atmospheric drag would outweight light pressure.
Where a solar sail would work great would be, say, ferrying nonperishable cargo over interplanetary distances. It may take you a couple years to get the cargo there, but the fact that you didn't need any fuel for the trip and can send the sail back for more makes up for that.
Now i've got no evidence whatsoever to back this up but personally i'd imagine huge football pitch sized things.
Imagine larger. A square kilometer of sail would be required to give a 10 ton payload good acceleration.
With all the crap floating about in space surely the chance that these would rupture is unacceptably high
There actually isn't all that much crap floating about in space, except in low earth orbit where we put it there. And with a sail, floating crap isn't a problem. So a micrometeorite hits your sail? It'll go right through; the sail will become
It's still a cool idea though.
Definitely.
Or even more terrifying, that's 625 trillion ergs!
Of course, if you look at it as 17 kilowatt hours, or a couple bucks electricity, it's less worrisome. If you leave a light bulb on for a day, you've just expended enough energy to put that light bulb in space.
Even if you can't use electricity to get off the Earth's surface (and we can't, yet), rocket fuel isn't that much more expensive; you'll be paying $20 a kilogram instead of $1. That'd be $2000 (well, $5000 after you add in life support and overhead costs) for a vacation in orbit; I'd happily buy a ticket.
Instead, getting into orbit costs $5000 to $10000 per kilogram. There are differing ideas about how to reduce this (reduce the "standing army" of ground crew, don't throw away a rocket with each flight, turn around and fly again every few days instead of months), but reducing energy costs isn't among them.