From a Terminal.app window $ osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to get the name of the front window of the current application' 44:48: execution error: Can't get name of window 1. (-1728)
I hate the "application" view of their version of alt-tab. It breaks my concentration because I have to change my task view. An example of this is say I have 2 word processing documents open. One I'm writing in and one I'm plagiarising stuff from. Then I'll have a few web pages open with pages for research. To switch from the document I'm editing to the other word processing document is an apple-~ but switching to the browser is an apple-tab. And in this scheme the whole breaks a "most recently used" stack with apple-number. That is the only major UI flaw that I keep running into.
The other major request is a way to get the current active window title. There is no efficient documented way to tell me that my current window is application Safari with title "Slashdot Independent Human Interface Guidelines"... that feature is handy for employer spying but even more useful for automatic billing based on projects I'm working on.
I have sol 9 production machines with less on their hard drive than the what SUNWCrnet provides and I can still do patches and admin the boxes.
As far as the blog... If I had a coder that was given those specs that came up with smf they wouldn't be working for me anymore. 1) kill -9 never kills init on real unix. Its protected. It will respond nicely to a SIGHUP. 1a) Many of my servers do what they want with just a kill -1 -1. I've been doing it with bsd and solaris for ages. 2) man sh.... learn it, use it. Init doesn't need linked to a buggy xml library so you can say "syntax error" init(1M,God) doesn't need to issue a warning when I remove a and smf line from its config either. 3) Dude, its unix. The core tool to change a config is ed (or vi or emacs or some gui add on) 4) sudo? Maybe even hiding in a shell script wrapper? 5) Many of us got this to work with text files since there are tons of tools to do the job 6) The seem to be talking about two major topics there. One of the is very clean on freebsd systems and the other has an example that proves its a bad concept call the Widnows Registry 7) Roolback? On text files? Oh thats so hard but a royal pain in binary files. 8) People have been doing that in unix for 30 years. See Solaris pre 10 9) They are kidding about speed aren't they? Every config file needed to start up all of my machines combined will fit in the L2 cache of just one of my oldest machines. It takes more time to search a binary tree that scans a non-preread disk block than it does to do the worst kind of linear search in a shell on a modern computer. See Alan Perlis' comments about optimisation please. 10) Endian-neutral? So they pick xml over text files? I've never seen an inittab or rc script that isn't endian-neutral yet. in fact I don't think I've ever seen a text config file that isn't. I do however see xml files that aren't way too often. 11) Embeddable? So they link in a ton of bugg libraryes that need patches every single release just to keep this cruft running? My embedded stuff all uses a shell (which has to be there anyway), and its fast and isn't buggy so it doesn't need to be updated.
After reading that blog, I'm even more underwhelmed with their implementation. It was just this kind of stupid junk that allowed me to get lots of AIX machines replaced and sun is running out of time to get back on course.
The sqllite database is a very old version thats had some patches applied so the standard tools just wont cut it. The svc tools appear to look in different places to show you what it thinks the system is doing or will do in a specifc state but that info isn't always correct which is why you can edit some of the files with a binary editor and for example have it run a command at shutdown.
Putting it back together once scanned is easy. The hard part is scanning it. You start by run length encoding all the edges. If you do it right, you get the same 32 bit number even if your scaling is off by a bit. Then you build a data mesh and match up all the edges that have the same edge code. You can also build edge codes using a technique much like how computers recognise Morse code. The real trick is the scanning each bit clearly without any overlay. There are places that will do this for you. A few years ago it was about $10k per cubic foot for fine cross cut.
I've been using sunos and Solaris and sun hardware since '86. I can build a very security solaris 9 server that ends up with about 5 packages and a few things from a few other packages so it results in a nice simple stripped down system that is just enough to run the application and its great for systems that live in data centers.
Then sun comes along with Solaris 10 and adds in a ton of complexity with out providing any additional services. The new things like zones and zfs don't need all the new extra crud but its nearly impossible to build a lean system with solaris 10. There are also a number of issues that are just plain wrong and reeks of security the Microsoft way. Why does live update look inside zones? If its in a zone, its not to be trusted outside the zone. Thats covered in Security layers 101 so back to school guys. (you can purge one file inside a zone that breaks doing patches in the global zone). The new admin tools remove the rc scripts... except that most of them are just moved and hidden by layers of config files. Then it uses a binary file to figure out what to run at shutdown, and it keeps changing the file when servers start and stop and you can't get an accurate picture of the data its going to use when it shuts down the system. Since the file is a binary file, you can't checksum it and you can't dump it so you've got no clue if someone has put a Trojan in it. The data in the file could have just gone in a nice plane text file but I guess the coders missed the Windows registry too much. The appear to be handing the keys to the source castle to any old hack. Someone "fixed" telnetd and added a new feature in one of the worst security lapses I've seen in a long time.
I just bought 3 new netra 210 because 1) they run SPACR Solaris 9, 2) they fit in my racks and 3) are one RU. I'll stop buying Sun hardware the day I can't run Solaris 9 because there is no way I'm putting Sol 10 on a production machine.
The idea with the 8 char max is that you could copy encrypted/etc/passwd files from one machine to another and still have things work. That broke if you changed the number of characters that "crypt" worked on since it would encrypt "Foo" with "Foo\0\0\0\0\0" and would get different results if you feed it more nulls at the end.
A windows botnet can cost as little as $.10 a host. A Solaris botnet can be worth hundreds of dollars per machine because the compromised systems are tend to be better connected and if the initial controller hasn't woken up the sysadmin, there is a good chance the machine might have a good long run. I expect that an os x botnet will be worth several dollars per machines since mac users are more likely to have fast unlimited broadband than your average window users. Linux users are harder to fit into the demographic slots but they are just as likely to have a machine on a 100 meg connection as a dailup connection. Since there is more money in hacking the other systems and less competition, why aren't more of them attacked?
The only ones who can sue Microsoft are the ones who don't agree to their terms anymore. There are plenty of consumer product protection laws that are clear that Microsoft's failure to recall their buggy software is illegal. Its just going to take someone who wants to be the next the next Ralph Nader to take the case.
A worm attacked my server through an exploit and M$ took care of my bandwidth bills.
The mercury in the coal argument loses its strength when you look at the power factor of the bulbs combined with the fact that most of them only produce 1/3 of their "equivalent" light on the end.
Maybe its too much to ask the/. crowd to actually measure a bulb but the ones I have all have a power factor of less than.62 and when you plot the total light produced over 180 degrees, you will find that a power plant will need to produce more power to light up cheap CFL than the old resistor element lights.
I bought an HP 2550L at a discount since it was one of the last ones in stock after the new model came out. I bought a 1/2 ream paper tray that cost nearly as much as the printer and the 4000 page color toners cost 1/2 the price I paid for the printer. I haven't replaced the toner yet but all 3 low toner lights are on and I'm not going to replace it until after a page I care about comes out ugly. The thing is big and noisy and not real quick but it does seem to always print even when its been ignored for a few months which is better than many ink printers and fits my printing needs better.
Has anyone else noticed that the ink for the point of sale printers is far cheaper than the ink for cheap home printers yet is better quality?
If the DA's did their job, why aren't they out busting people for offering illegal drugs to children? There are laws on the books in nearly every state that makes it a very serious crime to offer drugs to children at school and I'm betting there is at least one kid who got an email offer to buy a viagra clone. So why no busts?
Don't dis the auto-compression.... it keeps people from ever having to adjust the big scary knob on the stereo. Sure it takes the energy and emotional feeling out of music but think about the remote control batteries it saves. Its good for the environment.
Your forgetting that the record industry is not about Music. Its about selling little plastic things and they have a huge inventory problem. Stores only want to stock a few hundred titles and some might be in a few thousand but the industry is trying very hard to reduce that amount of different bits of plastic.
Based on some local stats, I figure for each 1000 people in modern countries, you can find enough bands to produce a new album per year. Thats a bunch of new albums every year and the music industry just can't cope with that many different bits of plastic even if you remove all the bad albums.
90% of my cd collection was under $10 (plus tax). There are a few imports that costs far more but I stopped buying albums for the most part once they hit $12.
The solution is to issue everyone that as a.com the same.xxx and tell them that they have 30 days to decided which one to use but owning one locks out the other. If porn is found a.com after 60 days, then both domains are de-registered. You define porn as what is defined that way in the country of the hosting.
Its amazing how many Hollywood movies aren't shot in the US at all anymore. Many of the creative shows are now written and shot in Canada with post processing done in Australia or New Zealand. About the only TV shows that are shot in the US are game shows, talk shows and the reality crud. The US lost its auto business decades ago and it won't have a movie or tv industry left in a few years at the current rate. So what does America make these days?
There is some pricing data out on the web with the Pelamis system and right now it appears to cost almost 2x what a wind farm would cost. There are also some issues that costal wave power plants aren't every efficient and may end up creating the need to more dredging depending on the site but the off shore ones should always have enough waves to provide power.
But XML is a great interchange format for all those coders who couldn't pass Comp Sci 201. There are plenty of great papers on why XML style parsing was bad and some of them even have mathematical proofs and predate any *ML implementation. D. Knuth and A. Perlis both had nasty things to say about that type of parsing long before it existed but I guess their books aren't fashionable for modern coders.
/usr meaning Unix System Resources came out of the System V rewrite where they threw out all the code and started over. Lots of older non-crtical to boot stuff lived on the larger User partition/usr but the new system had it a completely different place for Unix System Resources which also happened to be/usr
The "Tool Chest" name comes from some of the cool toys that came out of the AT&T and/or Bell Labs over the years. Some examples are the Software Tool Chest and I think they had an Audio Tool Chest as well as some nice tools that expanded the Documenters Workbench called the Documenters Tool Chest. There also was an FTP (or was it uucp) server that called the Tool Box or Tool Chest. I could see a BOFH confusing someone with/etc standing for extended tool chest.
Slashdot Mirror
From a Terminal.app window
$ osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to get the name of the front window of the current application'
44:48: execution error: Can't get name of window 1. (-1728)
No, you got that wrong.
Red circle closes nextstep programs.
Red circle closes mac window but leaves program eating up memory.
I hate the "application" view of their version of alt-tab. It breaks my concentration because I have to change my task view. An example of this is say I have 2 word processing documents open. One I'm writing in and one I'm plagiarising stuff from. Then I'll have a few web pages open with pages for research. To switch from the document I'm editing to the other word processing document is an apple-~ but switching to the browser is an apple-tab. And in this scheme the whole breaks a "most recently used" stack with apple-number. That is the only major UI flaw that I keep running into.
The other major request is a way to get the current active window title. There is no efficient documented way to tell me that my current window is application Safari with title "Slashdot Independent Human Interface Guidelines"... that feature is handy for employer spying but even more useful for automatic billing based on projects I'm working on.
I have sol 9 production machines with less on their hard drive than the what SUNWCrnet provides and I can still do patches and admin the boxes.
As far as the blog...
If I had a coder that was given those specs that came up with smf they wouldn't be working for me anymore.
1) kill -9 never kills init on real unix. Its protected. It will respond nicely to a SIGHUP.
1a) Many of my servers do what they want with just a kill -1 -1. I've been doing it with bsd and solaris for ages.
2) man sh.... learn it, use it. Init doesn't need linked to a buggy xml library so you can say "syntax error" init(1M,God) doesn't
need to issue a warning when I remove a and smf line from its config either.
3) Dude, its unix. The core tool to change a config is ed (or vi or emacs or some gui add on)
4) sudo? Maybe even hiding in a shell script wrapper?
5) Many of us got this to work with text files since there are tons of tools to do the job
6) The seem to be talking about two major topics there. One of the is very clean on freebsd systems and the other has an example that proves its a bad concept call the Widnows Registry
7) Roolback? On text files? Oh thats so hard but a royal pain in binary files.
8) People have been doing that in unix for 30 years. See Solaris pre 10
9) They are kidding about speed aren't they? Every config file needed to start up all of my machines combined will fit in the L2 cache of just one of my oldest machines. It takes more time to search a binary tree that scans a non-preread disk block than it does to do the worst kind of linear search in a shell on a modern computer. See Alan Perlis' comments about optimisation please.
10) Endian-neutral? So they pick xml over text files? I've never seen an inittab or rc script that isn't endian-neutral yet. in fact I don't think I've ever seen a text config file that isn't. I do however see xml files that aren't way too often.
11) Embeddable? So they link in a ton of bugg libraryes that need patches every single release just to keep this cruft running? My embedded stuff all uses a shell (which has to be there anyway), and its fast and isn't buggy so it doesn't need to be updated.
After reading that blog, I'm even more underwhelmed with their implementation. It was just this kind of stupid junk that allowed me to get lots of AIX machines replaced and sun is running out of time to get back on course.
The sqllite database is a very old version thats had some patches applied so the standard tools just wont cut it. The svc tools appear to look in different places to show you what it thinks the system is doing or will do in a specifc state but that info isn't always correct which is why you can edit some of the files with a binary editor and for example have it run a command at shutdown.
Putting it back together once scanned is easy. The hard part is scanning it.
You start by run length encoding all the edges. If you do it right, you get the same 32 bit number even if your scaling is off by a bit. Then you build a data mesh and match up all the edges that have the same edge code. You can also build edge codes using a technique much like how computers recognise Morse code.
The real trick is the scanning each bit clearly without any overlay.
There are places that will do this for you. A few years ago it was about $10k per cubic foot for fine cross cut.
I've been using sunos and Solaris and sun hardware since '86. I can build a very security solaris 9 server that ends up with about 5 packages and a few things from a few other packages so it results in a nice simple stripped down system that is just enough to run the application and its great for systems that live in data centers.
Then sun comes along with Solaris 10 and adds in a ton of complexity with out providing any additional services. The new things like zones and zfs don't need all the new extra crud but its nearly impossible to build a lean system with solaris 10. There are also a number of issues that are just plain wrong and reeks of security the Microsoft way. Why does live update look inside zones? If its in a zone, its not to be trusted outside the zone. Thats covered in Security layers 101 so back to school guys. (you can purge one file inside a zone that breaks doing patches in the global zone). The new admin tools remove the rc scripts... except that most of them are just moved and hidden by layers of config files. Then it uses a binary file to figure out what to run at shutdown, and it keeps changing the file when servers start and stop and you can't get an accurate picture of the data its going to use when it shuts down the system. Since the file is a binary file, you can't checksum it and you can't dump it so you've got no clue if someone has put a Trojan in it. The data in the file could have just gone in a nice plane text file but I guess the coders missed the Windows registry too much. The appear to be handing the keys to the source castle to any old hack. Someone "fixed" telnetd and added a new feature in one of the worst security lapses I've seen in a long time.
I just bought 3 new netra 210 because 1) they run SPACR Solaris 9, 2) they fit in my racks and 3) are one RU. I'll stop buying Sun hardware the day I can't run Solaris 9 because there is no way I'm putting Sol 10 on a production machine.
It changes authentication from something you know to something you have.
The idea with the 8 char max is that you could copy encrypted /etc/passwd files from one machine to another and still have things work. That broke if you changed the number of characters that "crypt" worked on since it would encrypt "Foo" with "Foo\0\0\0\0\0" and would get different results if you feed it more nulls at the end.
A windows botnet can cost as little as $.10 a host. A Solaris botnet can be worth hundreds of dollars per machine because the compromised systems are tend to be better connected and if the initial controller hasn't woken up the sysadmin, there is a good chance the machine might have a good long run. I expect that an os x botnet will be worth several dollars per machines since mac users are more likely to have fast unlimited broadband than your average window users. Linux users are harder to fit into the demographic slots but they are just as likely to have a machine on a 100 meg connection as a dailup connection. Since there is more money in hacking the other systems and less competition, why aren't more of them attacked?
The only ones who can sue Microsoft are the ones who don't agree to their terms anymore. There are plenty of consumer product protection laws that are clear that Microsoft's failure to recall their buggy software is illegal. Its just going to take someone who wants to be the next the next Ralph Nader to take the case.
A worm attacked my server through an exploit and M$ took care of my bandwidth bills.
The mercury in the coal argument loses its strength when you look at the power factor of the bulbs combined with the fact that most of them only produce 1/3 of their "equivalent" light on the end.
/. crowd to actually measure a bulb but the ones I have all have a power factor of less than .62 and when you plot the total light produced over 180 degrees, you will find that a power plant will need to produce more power to light up cheap CFL than the old resistor element lights.
Maybe its too much to ask the
I bought an HP 2550L at a discount since it was one of the last ones in stock after the new model came out. I bought a 1/2 ream paper tray that cost nearly as much as the printer and the 4000 page color toners cost 1/2 the price I paid for the printer. I haven't replaced the toner yet but all 3 low toner lights are on and I'm not going to replace it until after a page I care about comes out ugly. The thing is big and noisy and not real quick but it does seem to always print even when its been ignored for a few months which is better than many ink printers and fits my printing needs better.
Has anyone else noticed that the ink for the point of sale printers is far cheaper than the ink for cheap home printers yet is better quality?
If the DA's did their job, why aren't they out busting people for offering illegal drugs to children? There are laws on the books in nearly every state that makes it a very serious crime to offer drugs to children at school and I'm betting there is at least one kid who got an email offer to buy a viagra clone. So why no busts?
Don't dis the auto-compression.... it keeps people from ever having to adjust the big scary knob on the stereo.
Sure it takes the energy and emotional feeling out of music but think about the remote control batteries it saves.
Its good for the environment.
Your forgetting that the record industry is not about Music. Its about selling little plastic things and they have a huge inventory problem. Stores only want to stock a few hundred titles and some might be in a few thousand but the industry is trying very hard to reduce that amount of different bits of plastic.
Based on some local stats, I figure for each 1000 people in modern countries, you can find enough bands to produce a new album per year. Thats a bunch of new albums every year and the music industry just can't cope with that many different bits of plastic even if you remove all the bad albums.
90% of my cd collection was under $10 (plus tax). There are a few imports that costs far more but I stopped buying albums for the most part once they hit $12.
The syntax for the name field for inittab included a make like dependency filed sometime before 1981.
So why does everyone want to do it the hard way?
The solution is to issue everyone that as a .com the same .xxx and tell them that they have 30 days to decided which one to use but owning one locks out the other. If porn is found a .com after 60 days, then both domains are de-registered. You define porn as what is defined that way in the country of the hosting.
How much of that TV and movie content is made in Canada? The US movie industry needs Canada for production more than they need it to buy stuff.
Its amazing how many Hollywood movies aren't shot in the US at all anymore. Many of the creative shows are now written and shot in Canada with post processing done in Australia or New Zealand. About the only TV shows that are shot in the US are game shows, talk shows and the reality crud. The US lost its auto business decades ago and it won't have a movie or tv industry left in a few years at the current rate. So what does America make these days?
There is some pricing data out on the web with the Pelamis system and right now it appears to cost almost 2x what a wind farm would cost. There are also some issues that costal wave power plants aren't every efficient and may end up creating the need to more dredging depending on the site but the off shore ones should always have enough waves to provide power.
But XML is a great interchange format for all those coders who couldn't pass Comp Sci 201. There are plenty of great papers on why XML style parsing was bad and some of them even have mathematical proofs and predate any *ML implementation. D. Knuth and A. Perlis both had nasty things to say about that type of parsing long before it existed but I guess their books aren't fashionable for modern coders.
/usr meaning Unix System Resources came out of the System V rewrite where they threw out all the code and started over. Lots of older non-crtical to boot stuff lived on the larger User partition /usr but the new system had it a completely different place for Unix System Resources which also happened to be /usr
The "Tool Chest" name comes from some of the cool toys that came out of the AT&T and/or Bell Labs over the years. Some examples are the Software Tool Chest and I think they had an Audio Tool Chest as well as some nice tools that expanded the Documenters Workbench called the Documenters Tool Chest. There also was an FTP (or was it uucp) server that called the Tool Box or Tool Chest. I could see a BOFH confusing someone with /etc standing for extended tool chest.