I tried to load www.god.com . No server responded. On the other hand www.satan.com works.....sorta....It seems the Evil One spraypainted some graffitti on the Wev and exited hastily. Then it occurred to me that maybe the Personification Of Good wasn't out for profit so I tried www.god.org . Sure enough a page loaded but it was titled "God.org for sale" . The page's only text was "Coming soon, a site for all." Seems like Christianity V2.0 is going to work something like a Spielburg movie. The enigmatic www.satan.org contains a representation of Satan's Unix minion the BSD Daemon.....duh! of course! What else would Satan use to establish his web presence? And finally I found my own religion at satanic.org .
If we indeed are going to be facing tradeoffs between the size of active elements and their reliability then we need to rethink SW and HW arcitecture. In a consumer PC, EVERYTHING on that motherboard needs to work pretty much perfectly. Lose ONE transistor out of the millions in the chipset, memory, processor, and storage devices then everything will come to a screeching halt....usually in a fashion that is totally intermittent and capricious. The designers of the Voyager probes built in the Seventies saw the problems with that kind of arctitecture. If say, a memory cell fails in the Voyager then the software will mark it bad much like a bad disk sector and continue to function. You can damn near fire a bullet through these things and still have some function. Instead of assuming that EVERY 8 micron transistor in the Computer of Tomorrow has to function perfectly let's assume that inevitably some percentage of them will fail and design systems accordingly. In the eighties an entire PC might have had a few million transistors in it at most and of course the PC wouldn't tolerate the failure of any of them. We can't get away with that type of design much longer.
I could care less about M$ sucky software. That is not what worries me. The Halloween documents were very clear about how Microsoft wants to rule the industry. They want to be body that sets all standards. They want to pollute basic things like e-mail, file serving, and browsing to the point that the ONLY way to use communications technology is to use Microsoft's technology. They've done a bang up job of monopolizing office software. Do the latest releases of Office really make things better for the secretarial pool? No, but they do stop those pesky competitors from importing and exporting files. Business communications now require at LEAST one machine with Office to at least READ those stinking Word and Excel files. If they are left run unchecked, then they will throw their weight around and make us live with ms-http, ms-ftp, ms-telnet, etc. THAT is why they must be continually hounded and scrutinized. Who else seems to realize this AND believe that they must be stopped? The DOJ certainly won't do the job. Apple will surely tiptoe around them to buy as much time as a viable entity as possible. The Linux and BSD camps have no such scruples. I say we should hose these wankers.
It is probably true that random numbers cannot be generated by purely digital means as we have to use less than perfect methods to generate seeds. ANALOG electronics are another matter altogether. A truely random number can be built very inexpensively. A forward biased zener diode will produce white noise. White noise so produced is the result of electrons being forced the "wrong" way over a rather strangely doped p/n junction. I can think of no mathematical way to make this a deterministic system. This white noise should be immediately amplified so we can filter it and apply it to an A/D converter. We then use a spectrum analyzer to find out over what range(s) the noise produced is "flat". This is important because the noise produced may have higher or lower average amplitudes in spots. We then use a steep midpass filter to pass an appropriately large and flat part of the diodes output spectrum. This selectively filtered portion of the noise is then passed to a high quality A/D converter. Lo and behold, we now have a truely random number generator.
What if moderators had two distinct types of points to give out? They could have let's say 10 minus points which map to troll, flamebait, offtopic and etcetera. The only thing these would be good for is smacking trolls. On the other side of the ledger they could have the 5 usual points for moderating people up. I know it sounds bad to give out more down points but think about it. There are generally fewer +3,+4,+5 posts than there are -1 and below. Also, it's been pointed out that the trolls want to use up moderation points with floods of drivel but on the other hand being flooded with Insightfuls isn't happening. If the same AC or his buddies post flamebait three times in a row all they would be doing is sucking up the excess store of points allocated for them. This also effectively increases the benefit of those 5 up points since all five can go straight to enhancing Slashdot's s/n ration. This might even leave more positive points to moderate up the thoughtful ACs that may not be getting the consideration they deserve.
No wonder HAL goes nuts and tries to kill everybody. I had no idea that the Blue Screen Of Death could have such severe consequences. Sheezeluweeze! Intel inside? Between excruciating pain in his hardware and being loading with a schizophrenic OS, no wonder HAL was a basket case. This explains a lot. I hope nobody petitions the filmakers to change it to a UNIX variant;-)
A russian biographer (name escapes me) wrote that Stalin was a fairly pious young man. He slowly repudiated Orthodox Christianity in his twenties. I wouldn't say that Stalin was a priest but he DID come from a religious background and had extensive religious training. The same biographer also wrote that Stalin's mother was dismayed at how he turned. "He could have been a good priest......."
It's been a couple of years since I read this. Could be worth digging up again.
BTW Hitler indicated more than once in his speeches and writings that he considered himself to be carrying out a mandate from God. Mein Kampf contains some of these statements.
One aspect of the freedom of speech that I think escapes some people is that no one owes anybody else a soapbox. Rob (and to some extent Andover) does not owe the lamers, flamers, and trolls a forum in which they can spew their poison without limit. That they have SOME liberty to do before the system locks them out means that Rob is doing the best that he can to foster quality discussions without shutting them up. If he was an oppressive moderator the trolls would have little or no opportunity at all. Slashdot may be a publically available forum but it is NOT a public forum. Those who run Slashdot have every right to make rules about how it may be used. Trolls can always spout off in unmoderated USENET groups if they don't like it here. They can even buy their own bandwidth and run a website themselves. I'm not sure that preventing postings is the Right Thing To Do but that's up to the Slashdot webmasters.
How hard would it be to implement a physical security protocol? To start with the machine itself should be in a server case with a UPS inside. Among other things, the UPS software could log unauthorized powerdown attempts. If I come home to a machine that reports itself powered off then I should think about physically auditing the machine's integrity. Similarly, disconnections of the keyboard or other components can be monitored. Hell, for that matter just interface a motion detector to the PC that writes it's warnings to the encrypted filesystem if anything is in the vicinity of the machine without using a valid logon. The possibilities are even better if one has a "computer room". Just entering the room can be monitored easily. We can't stop some bozo from bugging our equipment but with a little thought and effort we can know when to suspect tampering.
If it's fast enough and easy enough to add memory to these things or maybe even an interface for those nifty little postage stamp memory cards then this would make a really cool mp3 player. Since it's a general purpose computer it's ability to play ANY mp3 ANY number of times cannot be compromised by the RIAA (SDMI Level 2...grumble..grumble). So what if it won't play "officially sanctioned music", who cares? Muhahahahaaaa!
But a contract has damn well been broken if say a binary only Microsoft Gimp for NT was released. Does anyone think a judge would buy the following:
"That GIMP source code was really useful as a starting point for our value added product but we didn't agree with the license........."
The GPL regulates distribution for pragmatic reasons but the restrictions are not aimed at users and never were. The restrictions are aimed only at a particular type of developer. The word "parasite" was bandied about earlier. The GPL only restricts the freedom of "parasites" and I have no qualms with that whatsover.
Uh, how does this make them a "parasite, period."? If they WEREN'T releasing this software being made "so they can make profit" under the GPL or some other non-corporate Open Source license then I could see your point. Releasing software under the GPL, BSD, etc. is inherently "real value". Making money is not intrinsicly evil only certain ways of making it. What do you do to pay for your beer and skittles? Are you a parasite as well? The best understanding I can get of your reasoning says that EVERYBODY who "makes profit" is a parasite. This may fly with extreme socialist/communist types but doesn't make much sense to anybody else.
Ok, but this could also be viewed as a trait that makes us evolutionarily UNsuitable. We use up natural resources, destroy ecosystems for short term gain, screw around with the genetics of virulent diseases ( I once read somewhere that a lab successfully transferred Ebola genes to the AIDS virus and that they were so scared of it that they destroyed it rather than put it in freezer. If true, WTF were they thinking making something like that in the first place?!!), reproduce ourselves on an exponential growth curve, and as someone else pointed out screw with the climate and the composition of the atmosphere. If the actions of humans can be viewed in a larger sense as perfectly natural then I believe we will find ourselves on the WRONG side of natural selection. "Just another failed mutation." as George Carlin put it.
Think of AIDS and Ebola as Human Destroyer alpha products. Anybody want to try for beta?
Microsoft is going to have some real grist to put in the FUD mill for a change. In the short term, we can expect this cost Linux a significant amount of mindshare. Over the next few months I think we're going to see fewer "Business adopts Linux" stories. Never mind the fact that most networks won't see this kind of throughput and that stability wasn't addressed, in the minds of the uninformed Linux is going to be a low performing second best for awhile. I think the real danger is that the community will feel pressured to "fix" the problems before the fixes are stable. That would not be wise as we can still tout stability as a talking point.
In a way, I suppose, this benchmarking was a gift. Linux usually gets problems fixed well and quickly when they are identified. It's probably better in the short run for Linux to take it's lumps and get things fixed even if it does force us to lose a few converts and rethink our opinions of it's strengths.
At least there is a bright side. I don't think these tests did anything to vindicate Mindcraft. Linux still lost but only half as badly. There are no good reasons for anybody's opinion of Mindcraft to go up.
Since it is the de facto case that no one objects to a distribution vendor attaching their name to their Linux distributions then why doesn't the FSF develop their own distro? They still couldn't credibly demand that everyone call their distros "GNU/Linux" but they can damn well insist on it for theirs. Of course, they would have to come up with something compelling that makes their distro desirable since Debian already seems to occupy the politically correct niche.
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I tried to load www.god.com . No server responded. On the other hand www.satan.com works.....sorta....It seems the Evil One spraypainted some graffitti on the Wev and exited hastily. Then it occurred to me that maybe the Personification Of Good wasn't out for profit so I tried www.god.org . Sure enough a page loaded but it was titled "God.org for sale" . The page's only text was "Coming soon, a site for all." Seems like Christianity V2.0 is going to work something like a Spielburg movie. The enigmatic www.satan.org contains a representation of Satan's Unix minion the BSD Daemon.....duh! of course! What else would Satan use to establish his web presence? And finally I found my own religion at satanic.org .
If we indeed are going to be facing tradeoffs between the size of active elements and their reliability then we need to rethink SW and HW arcitecture. In a consumer PC, EVERYTHING on that motherboard needs to work pretty much perfectly. Lose ONE transistor out of the millions in the chipset, memory, processor, and storage devices then everything will come to a screeching halt....usually in a fashion that is totally intermittent and capricious. The designers of the Voyager probes built in the Seventies saw the problems with that kind of arctitecture. If say, a memory cell fails in the Voyager then the software will mark it bad much like a bad disk sector and continue to function. You can damn near fire a bullet through these things and still have some function. Instead of assuming that EVERY 8 micron transistor in the Computer of Tomorrow has to function perfectly let's assume that inevitably some percentage of them will fail and design systems accordingly. In the eighties an entire PC might have had a few million transistors in it at most and of course the PC wouldn't tolerate the failure of any of them. We can't get away with that type of design much longer.
I could care less about M$ sucky software. That is not what worries me. The Halloween documents were very clear about how Microsoft wants to rule the industry. They want to be body that sets all standards. They want to pollute basic things like e-mail, file serving, and browsing to the point that the ONLY way to use communications technology is to use Microsoft's technology. They've done a bang up job of monopolizing office software. Do the latest releases of Office really make things better for the secretarial pool? No, but they do stop those pesky competitors from importing and exporting files. Business communications now require at LEAST one machine with Office to at least READ those stinking Word and Excel files. If they are left run unchecked, then they will throw their weight around and make us live with ms-http, ms-ftp, ms-telnet, etc. THAT is why they must be continually hounded and scrutinized. Who else seems to realize this AND believe that they must be stopped? The DOJ certainly won't do the job. Apple will surely tiptoe around them to buy as much time as a viable entity as possible. The Linux and BSD camps have no such scruples. I say we should hose these wankers.
It is probably true that random numbers cannot be generated by purely digital means as we have to use less than perfect methods to generate seeds. ANALOG electronics are another matter altogether. A truely random number can be built very inexpensively. A forward biased zener diode will produce white noise. White noise so produced is the result of electrons being forced the "wrong" way over a rather strangely doped p/n junction. I can think of no mathematical way to make this a deterministic system. This white noise should be immediately amplified so we can filter it and apply it to an A/D converter. We then use a spectrum analyzer to find out over what range(s) the noise produced is "flat". This is important because the noise produced may have higher or lower average amplitudes in spots. We then use a steep midpass filter to pass an appropriately large and flat part of the diodes output spectrum. This selectively filtered portion of the noise is then passed to a high quality A/D converter. Lo and behold, we now have a truely random number generator.
What if moderators had two distinct types of points to give out? They could have let's say 10 minus points which map to troll, flamebait, offtopic and etcetera. The only thing these would be good for is smacking trolls. On the other side of the ledger they could have the 5 usual points for moderating people up. I know it sounds bad to give out more down points but think about it. There are generally fewer +3,+4,+5 posts than there are -1 and below. Also, it's been pointed out that the trolls want to use up moderation points with floods of drivel but on the other hand being flooded with Insightfuls isn't happening. If the same AC or his buddies post flamebait three times in a row all they would be doing is sucking up the excess store of points allocated for them. This also effectively increases the benefit of those 5 up points since all five can go straight to enhancing Slashdot's s/n ration. This might even leave more positive points to moderate up the thoughtful ACs that may not be getting the consideration they deserve.
No wonder HAL goes nuts and tries to kill everybody. I had no idea that the Blue Screen Of Death could have such severe consequences. Sheezeluweeze! Intel inside? Between excruciating pain in his hardware and being loading with a schizophrenic OS, no wonder HAL was a basket case. This explains a lot. I hope nobody petitions the filmakers to change it to a UNIX variant ;-)
A russian biographer (name escapes me) wrote that Stalin was a fairly pious young man. He slowly repudiated Orthodox Christianity in his twenties. I wouldn't say that Stalin was a priest but he DID come from a religious background and had extensive religious training. The same biographer also wrote that Stalin's mother was dismayed at how he turned. "He could have been a good priest......."
It's been a couple of years since I read this. Could be worth digging up again.
BTW Hitler indicated more than once in his speeches and writings that he considered himself to be carrying out a mandate from God. Mein Kampf contains some of these statements.
One aspect of the freedom of speech that I think escapes some people is that no one owes anybody else a soapbox. Rob (and to some extent Andover) does not owe the lamers, flamers, and trolls a forum in which they can spew their poison without limit. That they have SOME liberty to do before the system locks them out means that Rob is doing the best that he can to foster quality discussions without shutting them up. If he was an oppressive moderator the trolls would have little or no opportunity at all. Slashdot may be a publically available forum but it is NOT a public forum. Those who run Slashdot have every right to make rules about how it may be used. Trolls can always spout off in unmoderated USENET groups if they don't like it here. They can even buy their own bandwidth and run a website themselves. I'm not sure that preventing postings is the Right Thing To Do but that's up to the Slashdot webmasters.
How hard would it be to implement a physical security protocol? To start with the machine itself should be in a server case with a UPS inside. Among other things, the UPS software could log unauthorized powerdown attempts. If I come home to a machine that reports itself powered off then I should think about physically auditing the machine's integrity. Similarly, disconnections of the keyboard or other components can be monitored. Hell, for that matter just interface a motion detector to the PC that writes it's warnings to the encrypted filesystem if anything is in the vicinity of the machine without using a valid logon. The possibilities are even better if one has a "computer room". Just entering the room can be monitored easily. We can't stop some bozo from bugging our equipment but with a little thought and effort we can know when to suspect tampering.
If it's fast enough and easy enough to add memory to these things or maybe even an interface for those nifty little postage stamp memory cards then this would make a really cool mp3 player. Since it's a general purpose computer it's ability to play ANY mp3 ANY number of times cannot be compromised by the RIAA (SDMI Level 2...grumble..grumble). So what if it won't play "officially sanctioned music", who cares? Muhahahahaaaa!
But a contract has damn well been broken if say a binary only Microsoft Gimp for NT was released. Does anyone think a judge would buy the following:
"That GIMP source code was really useful as a starting point for our value added product but we didn't agree with the license........."
The GPL regulates distribution for pragmatic reasons but the restrictions are not aimed at users and never were. The restrictions are aimed only at a particular type of developer. The word "parasite" was bandied about earlier. The GPL only restricts the freedom of "parasites" and I have no qualms with that whatsover.
"They pay people to develop GPL software......"
Uh, how does this make them a "parasite, period."? If they WEREN'T releasing this software being made "so they can make profit" under the GPL or some other non-corporate Open Source license then I could see your point. Releasing software under the GPL, BSD, etc. is inherently "real value". Making money is not intrinsicly evil only certain ways of making it. What do you do to pay for your beer and skittles? Are you a parasite as well? The best understanding I can get of your reasoning says that EVERYBODY who "makes profit" is a parasite. This may fly with extreme socialist/communist types but doesn't make much sense to anybody else.
Ok, but this could also be viewed as a trait that makes us evolutionarily UNsuitable. We use up natural resources, destroy ecosystems for short term gain, screw around with the genetics of virulent diseases ( I once read somewhere that a lab successfully transferred Ebola genes to the AIDS virus and that they were so scared of it that they destroyed it rather than put it in freezer. If true, WTF were they thinking making something like that in the first place?!!), reproduce ourselves on an exponential growth curve, and as someone else pointed out screw with the climate and the composition of the atmosphere. If the actions of humans can be viewed in a larger sense as perfectly natural then I believe we will find ourselves on the WRONG side of natural selection. "Just another failed mutation." as George Carlin put it.
Think of AIDS and Ebola as Human Destroyer alpha products. Anybody want to try for beta?
Yeah, making this thread drop down another level would definitely be in bad taste......
Microsoft is going to have some real grist to put in the FUD mill for a change. In the short term, we can expect this cost Linux a significant amount of mindshare. Over the next few months I think we're going to see fewer "Business adopts Linux" stories. Never mind the fact that most networks won't see this kind of throughput and that stability wasn't addressed, in the minds of the uninformed Linux is going to be a low performing second best for awhile. I think the real danger is that the community will feel pressured to "fix" the problems before the fixes are stable. That would not be wise as we can still tout stability as a talking point.
In a way, I suppose, this benchmarking was a gift. Linux usually gets problems fixed well and quickly when they are identified. It's probably better in the short run for Linux to take it's lumps and get things fixed even if it does force us to lose a few converts and rethink our opinions of it's strengths.
At least there is a bright side. I don't think these tests did anything to vindicate Mindcraft. Linux still lost but only half as badly. There are no good reasons for anybody's opinion of Mindcraft to go up.
Now if we could just get some high tech blinky lights and a few of those nifty reel-to-reel tape drives for them................
Since it is the de facto case that no one objects to a distribution vendor attaching their name to their Linux distributions then why doesn't the FSF develop their own distro? They still couldn't credibly demand that everyone call their distros "GNU/Linux" but they can damn well insist on it for theirs. Of course, they would have to come up with something compelling that makes their distro desirable since Debian already seems to occupy the politically correct niche.