If they see that an attacker ran the command "wget http://download.insecure.org/nmap/dist/nmap-3.77.t gz " from a compromised host, they assume that she might have obtained that URL by visiting the Nmap download page from her home computer".
Verses cut'n' past from a popular Geek website, perhaps?
I don't think anyone can work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. You need some time to refresh,recycle,renew. What's a reasonable amount of time to recuperate?
Ask an Amish. Your bosses grew up in a post-industrial society that still has a lot of funky industrial/pre-industrial ideas. Historically, sharecroppers and subsitence famers worked from Sun up to Sun down - usually 12 - 16 hours for 6 days a week during the Spring, Summer and Fall in temperate climates. The only motivation they had was starvation (if they were smart) or cultural obligations to 'look busy.' However, most of the work on a farm is menial and not intelectual. Before the rise of computer-assisted industry, a borderline functional intellect in our post-industrial world could find ready work doing slow, repetative tasks that at one time required only a strong back and good arms/legs. Today, work such as programming requires mental, verses phsycial, prowess. While anyone will eventually hit the 'Wall' physically, you can also hit one mentally. (Often long before your body wears out.) Your employers need to learn the Death-March lesson in a bad way.
I knew guys who would feel guilty about going home to see their kids when crunch was on.
It's good to love your work. But, normally you trade your time and effort to someone so they can (hopefully adequately) pay you. You're trading part of your life so you can live the other part better. It's not you or your cow-orkers responsibility to make up for management or reality, and such attitudes (while vainfully heroic) are the reason projects fail. If it can't be done on time, either cancel it or move the dealine. Don't kill yourself for a 'consensual hallucination.'
As a long time gamers, what is this sleep stuff I keep hearing about?
I it something that comes in can form? Or do I have to stop playing for 5 minutes to pop a pill?
From what I hear, as long as it tastes better than 'instant' coffee, this *sleep* stuff might just be worth trying. But I gotta go, too many spawns to camp.
That's nice, but I think the main advantage Windows has over Linux is that in Windows it's very easy to transport data from one program to another using the Copy and Paste functions.
It is more easy for me to transport data over a network connection in Linux/GNU/UNIX (rsync, nfs mounts, remoted X ssh session) than it is locally over an X11 gui, I belive this is becuase of the historically broken way cut-n-past has been implemented by X11 and X11 applications.
I think that the 'buffer+metadata' technique is a valuable one, as Microsoft has proven. However, it takes a lot of work. Microsoft didn't invent Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE,) they had to buy the company that did. The Object Linking and Embeddin (OLE) that lets you past Excel documents into Word and MP3s into $FAVORITE_PLAYER is just DDE with objects. ActiveX is just OLE in JavaBean-like containers over the network (in a very general sense.) However, Microsoft has worked for over twenty years at this and it still can get messed up if you're using 3rd party applications written by time-crunched, under-trained and/or slave-wage programmers.
Linux, riding on the thiry-plus coat-tails of UNIX, has a great way to share information amoung applications: the port and FIFO abstrations. Instead of defining a standard way for an application to publish ports or FIFOs on which out-of-band metadata and content could be exchanged, X11 tried to re-invent the DDE wheel. Since XFree and X.Org are just now where M$ was fifteen (!) years ago on cut-n-paste, I think the 'buffer+metadata' technique is and will continue to be a long waste of time.
However, it would take a huge effort to get all the little application developers to use a different design for sharing data. Even if it is more network-like or file-abstraction-like and thus Linux/UNIX native feeling, toolkit teams and independent developers are 'doing their own thing' for a variety of reasons. Unless a way to add teeth to things like FreeDesktop.org exist, much like the teeth of history pushes the old XFree86 buffer+metadata style techniques, it will stay busienss as usual until enough kludges are added to make cut-n-paste in X11 look functional.
At least someone could take the effort to do a cool cut-n-past server (like gpm) for this. Preferably one that worked.
such a program does make other programs run slightly slower (and increases overall latency of the system.) Also, by keeping the CPU busy, the OS cannot execute the HLT (basically a nap of a few nanoseconds) operations, which allow it to save some energy and reduce the heat generated. A system running Seti uses more power than the same system being idle.
To be fair, you would need to know:
What was the corporate policy under which that programmer was employeed? Not everyone is allowed to do everything. If he was allowed to install such prorgams (unlikely) then his termination was baseless (if only based on this reasoning.)
What was the type of that server? Not all systems do HLT - those i386 boxen without ACPI, such as old dev or test systems, don't support power save features or may have such turned off for compatability (with MS Windows which doesn't play well with older powersave features and will not generate HLTs anyway.) Furthermore, the reduction in heat and energy is negligable on server grade hardware - it can add seconds your laptop battery but you're not gonna dent the BTUs comming off your rack with a 'nap of a few nanoseconds' every few cycles. Remember: in a big installation you will spend most (>60%) of your money on always-on cooling, not computation.
What was the use of that server? As mentioned above, idleware programs can be used to raise the load on a machine. (If the server was used for seti on purpose, then again the termination was baseless.) If the box, as mentioned in the article, was not being used at the time (i.e. not being a 'server') but was being used as a development box then the programmer may have been
What was the personal environment surrounding the termination? Usually good employee-manager releationships don't result in termination on first discovery of many 'terminate immedate' issues. I would not be surpised to find a workplace conflict between Tom Hayes and the fired programmer. Without knowing the situation, one cannot determine if this mearly a 'single bad apple' or a 'showpeice fire' to keep the 'stupid programmers' in line (with 'intellegent manglement policies.')
I would say, from Tom Hayes's immature comments, that this sounds like a personal vendatta. This can be seen as personal win for that slandering manager who may have only had a negative opinion of SETI. However, without much more detail from the sources this is just pissing in the wind.
The main problemw ith a GUI is that you can't script them (or not trivially anyway).
Okay, this is a pet peve of mine and (surprise) it does relate to arch, subversion, et al. The problems Tom Lord mentions are found everywhere in open source, and that is why X.org, arch and other 'duplicative works' or 'hateful forkings' exist.
It is very trivial to script a properly built GUI. Now the deifintion of a 'properly built GUI' goes beyond being able to be scripted, but does include this feature.
How? Why? From HCI and study of disability access we know that every action possible in a GUI should be performable with out a mouse. On Microsoft Certified Software this usually means everything has a contextually unique hotkey.
Windows 3.1 included a nifty tool called Recorder. Recorder is a lot like UNIX typescript, i.e. type 'script' and it records all the stuff in your command line session until ^D, except it only recorded your inputs to the computer. ALL GUI. No Terminal. Using the run box and keyboard (hot-key) only commands you could record a fairly portable script to automate your task. Given that the script (macro) was in textual format (IIRC) basic text editing skill was all you needed to turn a simple script into whatever you wanted (including being driven by command line scripts.)
The utter lack of standards compliance in Linux GUIs contrasts with the impresively standards-compliant command line applications (that are often definitive or reference implementations.) Let alone the lack of support for something like uniform contextual keyboard hot-keys.
A GUI for arch or CVS or subversion could be made with scripting in mind. And not just via embedding LUA or another 'lighweight' language. However, proper GUI scripting would take a project on the order of the Ximian Desktop to make it work even as well as a cheesy under-utilized program from 1980's Microsoft.
(Oh, and scripted GUI + decent version control GUI + automation tool = 100% developer envrionment matched automated test setup. Which can potentially be very cool if a bug is due to how a naughty newbie code monkey setup his little development cage. It's happened. And I've had to clean that monkey's cage one time too many.)
----- Ugh. That's two pointless rants in one day. I need caffine.
I use Windows XP and related windows software because it just works, and I'd rather actually use the PC than constantly fight it.
A lot of people just use computers. (Some people might call them end-users.) Some people also just drive cars.
I got into computing as a profession because I didn't want it as a hobby. I'd rather spend my *copious amounts of free time* sketching, painting, stargazing or playing with model rockets. Likewise, lot of my old friends became mechanics, auto-detailers, etc so they could play with cars all day and go home to something else.
I've basically given up or more accurately abandoned the desire to use Linux because XP does pretty everything I need, and the software availability and stability meet or exceed what I need (graphic design, web development, 3D modeling and animation, games)
However, for both my and my old friends something interesting happened. Most of my friends have one or two old cars that sit in their garage. Often in pieces, these vehicles are contantly being tweaked, improved and tricked out. I have a workstation in my home network. Both hardware and sotfware are contently in a state of flux.
I love everything about Firefox, and as more extensions become available, I love that I can make it work EXACTLY how I want it to work.
I could leave well enough alone. I could go to the store and shell out $X for M$ X-whatever and then play games and surf the web with very little hassle. Unforunetely, even when my workstation was just stock Wintel, I accumulated piles of customizations, uber shareware trinkets, kernel and usermode tools. Some people are just end-users. Both me and my old friends still drive to work using normal cars. Both me and my old friends still use the same generic corporate PC's from Dell in the office.
The above spout was just to give background that I'm not an OS freak, nor a complete luser.
Sometimes, though, you want a little bit more. Not just safety. Not just convenice. When one of my old friends built a 1950's style kit car he included a lot of saftey features (like seatbelts) that didn't exist in a 1950's stock automobile. When I put a PC together, I like to include a lot of saftey features regardless of whether the user will be running Wintel, Lintel, something on AMD, etc - like replacing IE with Mozilla (when on Windows, of course.)
Anyway, that's my story. I would love to see an extension that spellchecked text boxes in online forms though...
She had enough trouble learning XP - I wouldn't dare put Linux in front of her.
My grandmother complained that her (realtively) locked down WIndows 2000 box was shutting down randomly on her. Since I had spent quite a few hours maintaining that system every week I was amazed at how nasty it had gotten with only a month of not keeping up with the patches, virus updates and etc.
She only uses it to play solitaire and get to her yahoo email account. After fighting with that machine for almost a whole day, I offered my grandmother a deal: I put Debian stable on that box. If she didn't like it I'd go back and put Windows back on her box.
Two weeks later and she's still playing Gnome solitaire and browsing with Mozilla.
84 year-old homebound women can't waste their time with faulty software. To my grandmother every hour of breath is precious. She can't waste it rebooting and re-installing Windows when she should be emailing her great-grand children about their birthdays.
Re:When did the Communists take over outer space?
on
Lawyers In Space...
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· Score: 1
Any reasonable scenario for inhabiting another planet will probably involve robotic fabrication long before humans show up.
This brings up a very intersting aspect of ownership in space.
Consider that I have a large space factory that consumes asteroids of 1000 km^3 size and outputs processed materials and space craft of comparable volume.
What is the difference between your claim to an asteroid as a 'place to land' or my claim to an asteroid as a 'whole resource?'
What happens if you put up a homestead and fence off a claim on said asteroid? Do I leave you a 4x4 km patch 1 km deep or just kick you off of the now non-existent asteroid and provide you with a compensatory ship?
Who pays whom for mineral rights?
To complicate maters, consider the difference between a spaceship and a 'world.' If I build a house on an asteroid I might be able to fence off a homestead and call that part mine. Instead, I could put a controlled rocket motor on the surface and claim the whole asteroid as my 'spaceship.'
It may be obvious that I own my own spaceship (a piece of property similar to a car.) But it is also so clear if I bury a rocket upside down in California I should not be able to start charging the U.N. for rental on Spaceship Earth(tm).
--------------- For the Communists, think about this: Suppose that I was the only one able to process asteroids into an essential material (i.e. comets -> nitrogen gas.) Would it be fair to force me to do that, or could I abandon that line of processing for one more profitable?
How would you force me to do so if I could just pack up and leave?
None of the cars are turning left or right. Theories and math and simulations work great and are often impressive. But real world factors will almost always mess them up.
Human beings, with their *superior* driving skills, don't fare very well in turning a motor vehicle, either.
This is why major intersections feature dedicated turn lanes and turn out lanes. Unforuntately, this leads to the creation of mix-master style Interstate Exchanges. In the American Southwest these still have quite a poor accident record (given how much more controlled the environment is for turning vs. an uncontrolled intersection.)
---------
"Welcome to the Future of Urban Living as brought to you by your Peronal Motor Carriage," said 1940's Ford.
"Welcome to Traffic Jams and Smog," said the 1960's Real World.
...Mozilla, Netscape 5 and higher, Galeon and Firefox, as well as Opera, Amaya, Camino, Chimera, DocZilla, iCab, Safari, and all browsers on mobile phones that accept WAP2... Does Microsoft Internet Explorer accept the media type application/xhtml+xml? No.
"Also assuming that all intelligent life evolves along a similar timeline, we can assume that these other planets will emit radio signals for only a brief period of time."
We can't assume anything, we haven't met anybody else. Besides, even if we invent sub-space inverse tachyon communicators, who's to say radio would ever die out? It'll always be useful for something.
The reason that linux usage continues to hover around 2% is no longer due to Microsofy bullying, but because Linux is still quite hard for non-geeks to use.
Bullshit. It's because the pirates precieve that either
If you have the best Desktop in the business, it won't matter becuase of what that person preceives as important. For Everyday Joe that means either being a good sheep[1] or getting his pr0n, w4r3z, etc to work out of the box.
If you'd every ran a Linux install-fest for a local Linux User's Group you would have learned this first hand. Those two things are number 1 and number 2 on the LUG FAQ for every Install-fest I've ran or attended.
------------ 1. As racist as it sounds, every Oriental-culture teacher (foreign language, historian, etc.) I have met at University mentioned that this was a very large part of Chinese and Japanese culture. Being a good cog is more important that being a good person. Frankly I think it's also B.S., but then I'm from the USA and not allowed to hold balanced or informed opinions of other cultures.
It sort of looks like the submitter just googled for "reverse firewall" and posted the first match
Yes, I'd have to disambiguate between the links as well. A "Personal Firewall" is a full Microsoft style system to stop an application from opening up ports for which you didn't ask to be opened. It is local to the individual PC and a very good idea in the World of Trojans/'spl0its/et al. A full Demillitarized Zone (DMZ) is more than a router with an extra port that has holes in the firewall for services. A full DMZ is a complete network between two firewalls - one that doesn't trust upsream 'Internet' traffic and one that doesn't trust downstream 'intranet' traffic. The (usually private) network between these two firewalls [1] is where your servers (and hopefully proxies) live.
With a reasonable full DMZ, you can really slow down the affect of the Boss's infected laptop on your IIS boxes. With Personal Firewalls you can slow down that affect to other workstations on your network as well. Both are common in meduim to large companies, while the DMZ-hanging off one interface is common in SOHO environments.
-----
1. i.e. the internal-to-outside firewall is a machine in the private network served by the outside-firewall, often on a dedicated interface with it's own IP network. That way adding a secure WiFI bridge is as simple as adding a new inside-DMZ box with some form of VPN and some form of 802.11.
At least I can gather that if there's a hole in Windows that M$ is to blame for the bad code, not a class project from MIT!
C:\Windows\Desktop>strings.exe "c:\windows\system32\ftp.exe"
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved.
Of course there wouldn't be any MIT class project code. It's (the Window$ TCP/IP stack and tools) mostly Berkely class project code (i.e. BSD.)
Strange bedfellows indeed.
As Linus Torvalds will assure you, open source without good attribution tracking can be. . . interesting. . . come Intellectual Property and shift-the-blame/pass-the-buck time.
Try to find the person you get along the best with.
I cannot emphasize this factor enough. All the problems I have had at a workplace have stemmed from a bad immediate-manager/immidiate-employee relationsihp.
The number one thing I would ask is "Are you a good communicator?"
Then make them prove it. Get them to write a spec and another type of tehcnical memo. Get the canidate(s) to write a non-technical memo. Run them through some real world scenarios, creating a policy and dealing with customers (upper-managent, etc.) Try to find out how much effective communication they will/would/could do on your behalf - e.g. with other managers at their level and above.
Find out how they behave when communicating sensitive issues. Ask them to do a mock discipling of a mock employee. If they can't hack a fake discussion of a bad situation, then the don't cut the mustard.
Most of a manager's job is shuffling information from one person to another in the best possible way. This is why a lot of manager's lost their jobs to tools like computers, post-it notes, et al. If they can't communicate in a style that is appropriate for you, your team and your upper managment then they fail at the most basic requirement of the job.
Microsoft is known for producing a very advanced and usable IDE. Visual Studio usually showcases GUI enhancements and other niftiness that doesn't make it into Office or the win.exe shell for one or more product cycles. (If only the HTML editing suite had recieved such attention...)
However, I have had the joy of using slick|edit. It shows what a world class IDE should look like. Of course, the place at which I worked with this tool had seriously abused the interoperability of slick|edit With other systems. It was nice to have been running 5 or 6 commercial development tools from specialty vendors, like Rational Clearcase and Clearquest, right there with me. I felt like an EMACS zelot who had just grokked his first meta-command.
Of course, I could pay to use slick|edit, and pay for a Windows Operating system on which to run it. But I'd rather spend my money[1] supporting a Linux distributor and use a very nice editor/development tool like eclipse for free.
----- 1. Besides, which would you rather have: a shiny new Windows XP install, or a shiny new Linux install and enough money to buy a cheap hooker^H^H^H^H^H^Hdate? Although, either way you are risking getting some nasty viruses.
Now, maybe someone could create a knoppix type distro that has some super cool video game that only works on linux. It might work as an inroad into the gaming market.
You laugh, but I dropped a 3.3 Knoppix CD into my mother's Windows XP box and rebooted to do some remote X via ssh sessions. My mother came home and saw it. She wanted to try seom of the stuff out and I directed her to this, ahem, addictive game. At 2:00a.m. the next day she, still playing Fozen Bubble and up to level 105 or something, asked if there was a Windows version. There is, but it only for up to level 70.
Then she asked if I could install Linux on her PC.
I would have. However,
she has NOTHING backed up [1]
the guy who 'fixes' her PC is an M$-certified fanboy and would wipe the machine in 10 mintues if Linux found it's way onto the Windows XP boot menu[2].
the PC is technically her husband's gaming (Bonzi buddy and other crapware) PC.
While I would have junmped at the chance to hook her on stuff like oo.org's PDF exporter[3], I must demure to the wishes of my step-dad and not mess up his Deer Hunter gamming experience.
----- 1. Sometimes telling data-loss horror stories to people and cautioning them to burn CD's of personal information other than MP3's doesn't sink in
2. There is a nifty way to boot Linux from a Windows Menu option with loadln and a kernel file on the Windows partition. But you have to edit 'scary M$ boot files'(tm) to do it.
3. Besides which, the guy who built the PC for them apparently installed pirated M$ Office XP and Adobe Studio. Being able to export and work with PDF''s on Linux is not a selling point here.
Fortunately, if - this is a BIG if - someone did make nukes and wipe themselves out, those nukes would have had to be pretty clean. That is, the would have to not leave obvious traces in the mineral record like WWII did. Of course, there are always biological WMDs and good ol' genocide by knife, a.k.a. one stab wound at a time.
Overuse of absolutes can lead to their deterioration. As an American I couldn't feel more turgid: now when the Europeans get ready to yell HITLER!!!! in IRC, I can just pre-emptively yell 9/11!!!!!!! and lose/end the conversation.
To be fair, the difference between these 'blog abusing 'minor annoyances' and the large scale deaths/destruction of 9/11 can be seen as just a matter of scale. To some people I know, the economic impact of terrorism keeps them awake at night: the value of human life be damned, watch that bottom line! (Not the most civicly minded people, IMHO.)
Being respected members of polite business society, these people and their defective outlook just as dangerous to you and I as the wiki 'blog abusers and 9/11 baby killers. To them, you are either a customer, employee or garbage to be taken out by security.
This, by the way, is how we treat anybody who we have successfully alienated. Look at these 'blog spammers. Would anyone have cried if Al Queda had blown up a spammer's house?
Both sides of this argument stand at the top of a moral mountain with a very slippery slope and are trying to make the other fall off as far and as fast as possible. I'm waiting to see who tumbles first.
Like they say on bash.org: I will become rich and famous when I invent a device to punch people in the face through the Internet.
I haven't gotten around to it yet, but I plan to purchase the full media.
I did purchase the full version. And I got a notice that CDs of SuSE 9.1 Professional is on back order.
I was hoping to download the FTP version to pre-load my test system since the CD's won't arrive for who knows how long [1].
Thank's to slashdot, now the CD's may arrive before I can get any iso's downloaded[2].
1. I could have ordered the on-line donwload only, but I like being able to install new software on machines while they are offline. (Doing IT with M$ products has taught me this is a very important thing to do in far too many cases.)
2. When a server dies in a slashdotting, does it make a sound? Or does it implode into nothingness forevermore? Thank you slashdot.
Actually, we have an OC12 to our service provider's PoP
Sweet! What's you IP block again?
with commodity Internet capped at 45Mb/s
Darn. Here I was hoping to setup the monster of all zombie-host farms. I guess all those clueless freshmen and their (University Approved) WinTel PC's are going to have to live without a little slammer action.
You've broke my little Win32 worm's heart with all that talk of bandwidth. Do you even know how much it costs to pay for counciling for emotionally-challenged software? Poor thing will be depressed for weeks.
There are many other experimental devices attached to the bottom of the probe which are beautifully elegant in design that will tell us about just what it hits when it gets to the surface ice...liquid hydrocarbons...etc
I would love to see NASA slap a standard interface on the back of these devices. A standard probe framework would be nice too.
Then anybody could just grab a NASA catalouge and order up a probe for their X Prize launch.
I mean, many of these sensor systems were on the bleeding edge of design for their time. Now may are probably just cutting edge. If it's anything that IBM and Compaq taught us about computers, it's that Henry Ford was right: mass produced, standard parts beat one-off custom jobs most of the time.
There must be a market for cheap (relatively) space probe hardware, isn't there?
I mean, how can all that knowledge that will be discovered and awe that will be inspired and general benefit to mankind be weighted against the value of a mint collectable like this?
Just think of the money! After all, that's what is most important. Just think of the risk that a launch presents to the museum value: would you rather go visit a fresh, in-the-box space probe or one that had been on a unique mission of exploration the edge of the last frontier?
THINK OF THE CHILDREN! Now, they won't have Cassini around with which to play.
This message brought to you by the Ludite community - stopping "dangerous" progress since Ug the Caveman invented fire.
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If they see that an attacker ran the command "wget http://download.insecure.org/nmap/dist/nmap-3.77.t gz " from a compromised host, they assume that she might have obtained that URL by visiting the Nmap download page from her home computer".
Verses cut'n' past from a popular Geek website, perhaps?
I don't think anyone can work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. You need some time to refresh,recycle,renew. What's a reasonable amount of time to recuperate?
Ask an Amish. Your bosses grew up in a post-industrial society that still has a lot of funky industrial/pre-industrial ideas. Historically, sharecroppers and subsitence famers worked from Sun up to Sun down - usually 12 - 16 hours for 6 days a week during the Spring, Summer and Fall in temperate climates. The only motivation they had was starvation (if they were smart) or cultural obligations to 'look busy.' However, most of the work on a farm is menial and not intelectual. Before the rise of computer-assisted industry, a borderline functional intellect in our post-industrial world could find ready work doing slow, repetative tasks that at one time required only a strong back and good arms/legs. Today, work such as programming requires mental, verses phsycial, prowess. While anyone will eventually hit the 'Wall' physically, you can also hit one mentally. (Often long before your body wears out.) Your employers need to learn the Death-March lesson in a bad way.
I knew guys who would feel guilty about going home to see their kids when crunch was on.
It's good to love your work. But, normally you trade your time and effort to someone so they can (hopefully adequately) pay you. You're trading part of your life so you can live the other part better. It's not you or your cow-orkers responsibility to make up for management or reality, and such attitudes (while vainfully heroic) are the reason projects fail. If it can't be done on time, either cancel it or move the dealine. Don't kill yourself for a 'consensual hallucination.'
As a long time gamers, what is this sleep stuff I keep hearing about?
I it something that comes in can form? Or do I have to stop playing for 5 minutes to pop a pill?
From what I hear, as long as it tastes better than 'instant' coffee, this *sleep* stuff might just be worth trying. But I gotta go, too many spawns to camp.
That's nice, but I think the main advantage Windows has over Linux is that in Windows it's very easy to transport data from one program to another using the Copy and Paste functions.
It is more easy for me to transport data over a network connection in Linux/GNU/UNIX (rsync, nfs mounts, remoted X ssh session) than it is locally over an X11 gui, I belive this is becuase of the historically broken way cut-n-past has been implemented by X11 and X11 applications.
I think that the 'buffer+metadata' technique is a valuable one, as Microsoft has proven. However, it takes a lot of work. Microsoft didn't invent Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE,) they had to buy the company that did. The Object Linking and Embeddin (OLE) that lets you past Excel documents into Word and MP3s into $FAVORITE_PLAYER is just DDE with objects. ActiveX is just OLE in JavaBean-like containers over the network (in a very general sense.) However, Microsoft has worked for over twenty years at this and it still can get messed up if you're using 3rd party applications written by time-crunched, under-trained and/or slave-wage programmers.
Linux, riding on the thiry-plus coat-tails of UNIX, has a great way to share information amoung applications: the port and FIFO abstrations. Instead of defining a standard way for an application to publish ports or FIFOs on which out-of-band metadata and content could be exchanged, X11 tried to re-invent the DDE wheel. Since XFree and X.Org are just now where M$ was fifteen (!) years ago on cut-n-paste, I think the 'buffer+metadata' technique is and will continue to be a long waste of time.
However, it would take a huge effort to get all the little application developers to use a different design for sharing data. Even if it is more network-like or file-abstraction-like and thus Linux/UNIX native feeling, toolkit teams and independent developers are 'doing their own thing' for a variety of reasons. Unless a way to add teeth to things like FreeDesktop.org exist, much like the teeth of history pushes the old XFree86 buffer+metadata style techniques, it will stay busienss as usual until enough kludges are added to make cut-n-paste in X11 look functional.
At least someone could take the effort to do a cool cut-n-past server (like gpm) for this. Preferably one that worked.
To be fair, you would need to know:
I would say, from Tom Hayes's immature comments, that this sounds like a personal vendatta. This can be seen as personal win for that slandering manager who may have only had a negative opinion of SETI. However, without much more detail from the sources this is just pissing in the wind.
The main problemw ith a GUI is that you can't script them (or not trivially anyway).
Okay, this is a pet peve of mine and (surprise) it does relate to arch, subversion, et al. The problems Tom Lord mentions are found everywhere in open source, and that is why X.org, arch and other 'duplicative works' or 'hateful forkings' exist.
It is very trivial to script a properly built GUI. Now the deifintion of a 'properly built GUI' goes beyond being able to be scripted, but does include this feature.
How? Why? From HCI and study of disability access we know that every action possible in a GUI should be performable with out a mouse. On Microsoft Certified Software this usually means everything has a contextually unique hotkey.
Windows 3.1 included a nifty tool called Recorder. Recorder is a lot like UNIX typescript, i.e. type 'script' and it records all the stuff in your command line session until ^D, except it only recorded your inputs to the computer. ALL GUI. No Terminal. Using the run box and keyboard (hot-key) only commands you could record a fairly portable script to automate your task. Given that the script (macro) was in textual format (IIRC) basic text editing skill was all you needed to turn a simple script into whatever you wanted (including being driven by command line scripts.)
The utter lack of standards compliance in Linux GUIs contrasts with the impresively standards-compliant command line applications (that are often definitive or reference implementations.) Let alone the lack of support for something like uniform contextual keyboard hot-keys.
A GUI for arch or CVS or subversion could be made with scripting in mind. And not just via embedding LUA or another 'lighweight' language. However, proper GUI scripting would take a project on the order of the Ximian Desktop to make it work even as well as a cheesy under-utilized program from 1980's Microsoft.
(Oh, and scripted GUI + decent version control GUI + automation tool = 100% developer envrionment matched automated test setup. Which can potentially be very cool if a bug is due to how a naughty newbie code monkey setup his little development cage. It's happened. And I've had to clean that monkey's cage one time too many.)
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Ugh. That's two pointless rants in one day. I need caffine.
I use Windows XP and related windows software because it just works, and I'd rather actually use the PC than constantly fight it.
A lot of people just use computers. (Some people might call them end-users.) Some people also just drive cars.
I got into computing as a profession because I didn't want it as a hobby. I'd rather spend my *copious amounts of free time* sketching, painting, stargazing or playing with model rockets. Likewise, lot of my old friends became mechanics, auto-detailers, etc so they could play with cars all day and go home to something else.
I've basically given up or more accurately abandoned the desire to use Linux because XP does pretty everything I need, and the software availability and stability meet or exceed what I need (graphic design, web development, 3D modeling and animation, games)
However, for both my and my old friends something interesting happened. Most of my friends have one or two old cars that sit in their garage. Often in pieces, these vehicles are contantly being tweaked, improved and tricked out. I have a workstation in my home network. Both hardware and sotfware are contently in a state of flux.
I love everything about Firefox, and as more extensions become available, I love that I can make it work EXACTLY how I want it to work.
I could leave well enough alone. I could go to the store and shell out $X for M$ X-whatever and then play games and surf the web with very little hassle. Unforunetely, even when my workstation was just stock Wintel, I accumulated piles of customizations, uber shareware trinkets, kernel and usermode tools. Some people are just end-users. Both me and my old friends still drive to work using normal cars. Both me and my old friends still use the same generic corporate PC's from Dell in the office.
The above spout was just to give background that I'm not an OS freak, nor a complete luser.
Sometimes, though, you want a little bit more. Not just safety. Not just convenice. When one of my old friends built a 1950's style kit car he included a lot of saftey features (like seatbelts) that didn't exist in a 1950's stock automobile. When I put a PC together, I like to include a lot of saftey features regardless of whether the user will be running Wintel, Lintel, something on AMD, etc - like replacing IE with Mozilla (when on Windows, of course.)
Anyway, that's my story. I would love to see an extension that spellchecked text boxes in online forms though...
And this is part of mine. Try this zillatweaks or Webforms checking for Mozilla for speling fnu.
She had enough trouble learning XP - I wouldn't dare put Linux in front of her.
My grandmother complained that her (realtively) locked down WIndows 2000 box was shutting down randomly on her. Since I had spent quite a few hours maintaining that system every week I was amazed at how nasty it had gotten with only a month of not keeping up with the patches, virus updates and etc.
She only uses it to play solitaire and get to her yahoo email account. After fighting with that machine for almost a whole day, I offered my grandmother a deal: I put Debian stable on that box. If she didn't like it I'd go back and put Windows back on her box.
Two weeks later and she's still playing Gnome solitaire and browsing with Mozilla.
84 year-old homebound women can't waste their time with faulty software. To my grandmother every hour of breath is precious. She can't waste it rebooting and re-installing Windows when she should be emailing her great-grand children about their birthdays.
Any reasonable scenario for inhabiting another planet will probably involve robotic fabrication long before humans show up.
This brings up a very intersting aspect of ownership in space.
Consider that I have a large space factory that consumes asteroids of 1000 km^3 size and outputs processed materials and space craft of comparable volume.
What is the difference between your claim to an asteroid as a 'place to land' or my claim to an asteroid as a 'whole resource?'
What happens if you put up a homestead and fence off a claim on said asteroid? Do I leave you a 4x4 km patch 1 km deep or just kick you off of the now non-existent asteroid and provide you with a compensatory ship?
Who pays whom for mineral rights?
To complicate maters, consider the difference between a spaceship and a 'world.' If I build a house on an asteroid I might be able to fence off a homestead and call that part mine. Instead, I could put a controlled rocket motor on the surface and claim the whole asteroid as my 'spaceship.'
It may be obvious that I own my own spaceship (a piece of property similar to a car.) But it is also so clear if I bury a rocket upside down in California I should not be able to start charging the U.N. for rental on Spaceship Earth(tm).
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For the Communists, think about this: Suppose that I was the only one able to process asteroids into an essential material (i.e. comets -> nitrogen gas.) Would it be fair to force me to do that, or could I abandon that line of processing for one more profitable?
How would you force me to do so if I could just pack up and leave?
None of the cars are turning left or right. Theories and math and simulations work great and are often impressive. But real world factors will almost always mess them up.
Human beings, with their *superior* driving skills, don't fare very well in turning a motor vehicle, either.
This is why major intersections feature dedicated turn lanes and turn out lanes. Unforuntately, this leads to the creation of mix-master style Interstate Exchanges. In the American Southwest these still have quite a poor accident record (given how much more controlled the environment is for turning vs. an uncontrolled intersection.)
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"Welcome to the Future of Urban Living as brought to you by your Peronal Motor Carriage," said 1940's Ford.
"Welcome to Traffic Jams and Smog," said the 1960's Real World.
Does Microsoft Internet Explorer accept the media type application/xhtml+xml? No.
So what you're saying is that 86.6% of all (installed) web browser's don't support XHTML?
And I so loved my Karma.
We can't assume anything, we haven't met anybody else. Besides, even if we invent sub-space inverse tachyon communicators, who's to say radio would ever die out? It'll always be useful for something.
Like setting up giant, solar-powered, solar-obiting transmitters to communicate a message to emerging alien civilizations?
Bullshit. It's because the pirates precieve that either
or
If you have the best Desktop in the business, it won't matter becuase of what that person preceives as important. For Everyday Joe that means either being a good sheep[1] or getting his pr0n, w4r3z, etc to work out of the box.
If you'd every ran a Linux install-fest for a local Linux User's Group you would have learned this first hand. Those two things are number 1 and number 2 on the LUG FAQ for every Install-fest I've ran or attended.
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1. As racist as it sounds, every Oriental-culture teacher (foreign language, historian, etc.) I have met at University mentioned that this was a very large part of Chinese and Japanese culture. Being a good cog is more important that being a good person. Frankly I think it's also B.S., but then I'm from the USA and not allowed to hold balanced or informed opinions of other cultures.
It sort of looks like the submitter just googled for "reverse firewall" and posted the first match
Yes, I'd have to disambiguate between the links as well. A "Personal Firewall" is a full Microsoft style system to stop an application from opening up ports for which you didn't ask to be opened. It is local to the individual PC and a very good idea in the World of Trojans/'spl0its/et al. A full Demillitarized Zone (DMZ) is more than a router with an extra port that has holes in the firewall for services. A full DMZ is a complete network between two firewalls - one that doesn't trust upsream 'Internet' traffic and one that doesn't trust downstream 'intranet' traffic. The (usually private) network between these two firewalls [1] is where your servers (and hopefully proxies) live.
With a reasonable full DMZ, you can really slow down the affect of the Boss's infected laptop on your IIS boxes. With Personal Firewalls you can slow down that affect to other workstations on your network as well. Both are common in meduim to large companies, while the DMZ-hanging off one interface is common in SOHO environments.
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1. i.e. the internal-to-outside firewall is a machine in the private network served by the outside-firewall, often on a dedicated interface with it's own IP network. That way adding a secure WiFI bridge is as simple as adding a new inside-DMZ box with some form of VPN and some form of 802.11.
It means young artists will have to search harder for their inspirations, but the results will be better for it.
,tons of money and corporate backing! So, unlike a new starting atrist she can buy herself access to these works.
Yes, to think that if Britney Spears had access to such works as American Revival Gospal of the 20s or Alternative Rock of the 70s the public might have been spared such wonderful corprate^H^H^H^H^creative acts such as Oops!... I Did It Again.
Oh, wait a minute, she's got
At least I can gather that if there's a hole in Windows that M$ is to blame for the bad code, not a class project from MIT!
C:\Windows\Desktop>strings.exe "c:\windows\system32\ftp.exe"
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved.
Of course there wouldn't be any MIT class project code. It's (the Window$ TCP/IP stack and tools) mostly Berkely class project code (i.e. BSD.)
Strange bedfellows indeed.
As Linus Torvalds will assure you, open source without good attribution tracking can be. . . interesting. . . come Intellectual Property and shift-the-blame/pass-the-buck time.
Try to find the person you get along the best with.
I cannot emphasize this factor enough. All the problems I have had at a workplace have stemmed from a bad immediate-manager/immidiate-employee relationsihp.
The number one thing I would ask is "Are you a good communicator?"
Then make them prove it. Get them to write a spec and another type of tehcnical memo. Get the canidate(s) to write a non-technical memo. Run them through some real world scenarios, creating a policy and dealing with customers (upper-managent, etc.) Try to find out how much effective communication they will/would/could do on your behalf - e.g. with other managers at their level and above.
Find out how they behave when communicating sensitive issues. Ask them to do a mock discipling of a mock employee. If they can't hack a fake discussion of a bad situation, then the don't cut the mustard.
Most of a manager's job is shuffling information from one person to another in the best possible way. This is why a lot of manager's lost their jobs to tools like computers, post-it notes, et al. If they can't communicate in a style that is appropriate for you, your team and your upper managment then they fail at the most basic requirement of the job.
Which other IDE's have you used?
There are a lot of commercial and free Integrated Development Environments.
I love Eclipse as the next guy. Hell, I use buggy and sometimes unsupported Perl mods to edit big Perl programs with the CVS integration turned on.
In Windows, I have used various professional tools like the Boreland Compiler and free tools like Programmer's File Editor.
Microsoft is known for producing a very advanced and usable IDE. Visual Studio usually showcases GUI enhancements and other niftiness that doesn't make it into Office or the win.exe shell for one or more product cycles. (If only the HTML editing suite had recieved such attention...)
However, I have had the joy of using slick|edit. It shows what a world class IDE should look like. Of course, the place at which I worked with this tool had seriously abused the interoperability of slick|edit With other systems. It was nice to have been running 5 or 6 commercial development tools from specialty vendors, like Rational Clearcase and Clearquest, right there with me. I felt like an EMACS zelot who had just grokked his first meta-command.
Of course, I could pay to use slick|edit, and pay for a Windows Operating system on which to run it. But I'd rather spend my money[1] supporting a Linux distributor and use a very nice editor/development tool like eclipse for free.
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1. Besides, which would you rather have: a shiny new Windows XP install, or a shiny new Linux install and enough money to buy a cheap hooker^H^H^H^H^H^Hdate? Although, either way you are risking getting some nasty viruses.
Knoppix already shipped with Frozen Bubble on the LiveCD.
You laugh, but I dropped a 3.3 Knoppix CD into my mother's Windows XP box and rebooted to do some remote X via ssh sessions. My mother came home and saw it. She wanted to try seom of the stuff out and I directed her to this, ahem, addictive game. At 2:00a.m. the next day she, still playing Fozen Bubble and up to level 105 or something, asked if there was a Windows version. There is, but it only for up to level 70.
Then she asked if I could install Linux on her PC.
I would have. However,
While I would have junmped at the chance to hook her on stuff like oo.org's PDF exporter[3], I must demure to the wishes of my step-dad and not mess up his Deer Hunter gamming experience.
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1. Sometimes telling data-loss horror stories to people and cautioning them to burn CD's of personal information other than MP3's doesn't sink in
2. There is a nifty way to boot Linux from a Windows Menu option with loadln and a kernel file on the Windows partition. But you have to edit 'scary M$ boot files'(tm) to do it.
3. Besides which, the guy who built the PC for them apparently installed pirated M$ Office XP and Adobe Studio. Being able to export and work with PDF''s on Linux is not a selling point here.
I've pondered this many times and I keep coming to the same conclusion: If this was true, we would have found SOME evidence of their existence by now.
Even heard of the Mysterious Pyraminds of the Gobi Desert? This discussion reminds me of them.
Considering how friendly the natural world has been to our artifacts, the 'leaves no trace' problem is a hard argument to make. We are now designing things that *should* last 10,000 years, but most of Western Civilization (and presumably any other human society besides the Egyptian and Mayans) has not built on that time scale.
Fortunately, if - this is a BIG if - someone did make nukes and wipe themselves out, those nukes would have had to be pretty clean. That is, the would have to not leave obvious traces in the mineral record like WWII did. Of course, there are always biological WMDs and good ol' genocide by knife, a.k.a. one stab wound at a time.
No, 9/11 was pure evil
Overuse of absolutes can lead to their deterioration. As an American I couldn't feel more turgid: now when the Europeans get ready to yell HITLER!!!! in IRC, I can just pre-emptively yell 9/11!!!!!!! and lose/end the conversation.
To be fair, the difference between these 'blog abusing 'minor annoyances' and the large scale deaths/destruction of 9/11 can be seen as just a matter of scale. To some people I know, the economic impact of terrorism keeps them awake at night: the value of human life be damned, watch that bottom line! (Not the most civicly minded people, IMHO.)
Being respected members of polite business society, these people and their defective outlook just as dangerous to you and I as the wiki 'blog abusers and 9/11 baby killers. To them, you are either a customer, employee or garbage to be taken out by security.
This, by the way, is how we treat anybody who we have successfully alienated. Look at these 'blog spammers. Would anyone have cried if Al Queda had blown up a spammer's house?
Both sides of this argument stand at the top of a moral mountain with a very slippery slope and are trying to make the other fall off as far and as fast as possible. I'm waiting to see who tumbles first.
Like they say on bash.org: I will become rich and famous when I invent a device to punch people in the face through the Internet.
I haven't gotten around to it yet, but I plan to purchase the full media.
I did purchase the full version. And I got a notice that CDs of SuSE 9.1 Professional is on back order.
I was hoping to download the FTP version to pre-load my test system since the CD's won't arrive for who knows how long [1].
Thank's to slashdot, now the CD's may arrive before I can get any iso's downloaded[2].
1. I could have ordered the on-line donwload only, but I like being able to install new software on machines while they are offline. (Doing IT with M$ products has taught me this is a very important thing to do in far too many cases.)
2. When a server dies in a slashdotting, does it make a sound? Or does it implode into nothingness forevermore? Thank you slashdot.
Actually, we have an OC12 to our service provider's PoP
Sweet! What's you IP block again?
with commodity Internet capped at 45Mb/s
Darn. Here I was hoping to setup the monster of all zombie-host farms. I guess all those clueless freshmen and their (University Approved) WinTel PC's are going to have to live without a little slammer action.
You've broke my little Win32 worm's heart with all that talk of bandwidth. Do you even know how much it costs to pay for counciling for emotionally-challenged software? Poor thing will be depressed for weeks.
There are many other experimental devices attached to the bottom of the probe which are beautifully elegant in design that will tell us about just what it hits when it gets to the surface ice...liquid hydrocarbons...etc
I would love to see NASA slap a standard interface on the back of these devices. A standard probe framework would be nice too.
Then anybody could just grab a NASA catalouge and order up a probe for their X Prize launch.
I mean, many of these sensor systems were on the bleeding edge of design for their time. Now may are probably just cutting edge. If it's anything that IBM and Compaq taught us about computers, it's that Henry Ford was right: mass produced, standard parts beat one-off custom jobs most of the time.
There must be a market for cheap (relatively) space probe hardware, isn't there?
What people disagreed on was the cost should such an accident acctually occur.
I heartily agree about the risk/cost issues. The Cassini Probe was worth $1.5 billion before launch. Now that it's been taken out of the package, the value to collectors will go WAY down. As anybody who collects pristine government space probes knows, once you turn it on, it's never like new again. And you know that nodoby's gonna put out another limited edition big science probe like Cassini.
I mean, how can all that knowledge that will be discovered and awe that will be inspired and general benefit to mankind be weighted against the value of a mint collectable like this?
Just think of the money! After all, that's what is most important. Just think of the risk that a launch presents to the museum value: would you rather go visit a fresh, in-the-box space probe or one that had been on a unique mission of exploration the edge of the last frontier?
THINK OF THE CHILDREN! Now, they won't have Cassini around with which to play.
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