There are several timescales. There is already one that does not have leap seconds, and one that does. What is important for the average person is that when the beep, beep, beeeeeeeeep goes beeeeeeeep it's the same for *all* people. While 22 seconds isn't a big deal for most people, it's a huge difference in a lot of other areas from financial trading to shipping. There's a hint of the fact that a USBN (submarine) hit something because a leap second got inserted in to a clock that no one was prepared to handle and they went a second to far.
The leap second reconizes the fact that the "second" is defined in terms of particle physics (a quantity of state changes) which is very stable (it's always going to take the same amount of time for the same quantity of state changes), where as the idea of time really comes from the cosmos. When the sun is directly overhead it's 12:00.
Where the earths orbit around the sun is very stable, 265.24 days, the rotation of the earth is very unstable. In fact, there's a provision (though never used) to remove a second from the day! The speed of the rotation is constantly changing. Over the long term it's pretty stable with a stable decay, but in the short it could be necessary to add a second rather quickly to keep the civil time within.9 seconds of cosmic time.
The long term average is that we need to add a second to the day about every 18 months, but we haven't needed a leap second since the end of 1998 (over four years!) so in the short term the stability of the earths rotation is low compared to the order of magnitude we measure.
In order to handle this a desicion is made every six months as to a new leap second at the end of June or December (or to remove a second). This is a problem because some systems can't handle the addition of a second on six months notice such as the submarine!
One proposed solution is to allow UT1 (cosmic time) and UTC (civil time) to be out of sync by as many as 10 seconds. This would allow for ample time for warnings to be produced and everyone to know exactly what is going to happen and how to handle it. I don't know if the protocol would add 10 seconds at once, or warn everyone a few years in advance that a second is going to be added at several different points in time.
One interesting side note. Most computer systems don't handle leap seconds. Time keeping software slows the computers clock down (since it's important not to have events which have happened (past) in the future (future). This means that if your measuring anything else based on time that measurement is going to be wrong. The theory being that the accuracy in what time it *is* is more important than what time it *was*. The reason I bring this up is that time is something that can be measured with amazing percision, where as other things can't be measured as well. If you can convert one measurement to time you can measure it more percisely. For example, how fast does the ISS move? If you know it's altitude by measuring how long it takes to bounce a light off of it, and you know how long it takes to get from A to B (or from A to A again), you know how far it moved and how long it took to move and voila, speed, all by measuring time. If a leap second got thrown in while you weren't paying attetion during your measurement, your speed will be wrong.
Maybe we should create a list of "books of interest" and everyone goes and checks one of them out each month. One way to really screw with information systems is to throw useless data at it. If the government is collecting this information in legal or non legal ways, let's throw a wrench in it. After they find the 1000th person they have investigated for checking out "Leaving the 21st Century", "Lipstick Traces", "Days of War, Nights of Love", or any of the thousands of other subversive books out there, they will have to get more creative with things and stop looking at what I read as an idicator.
Go ask your library for a copy of "Leaving the 21st Century." There's two books of that title, one is about music, you want the other one if they can find it.
The government definetly will be interested to know why your reading this book and will be interested in monitoring people who read it.
I don't want the government being too curious about this.
If you don't want the public viewing your site, or linking to it, secure it. If you put up a public website, expect the public to view it and link to it. That was kind of the point of html and httpd. Don't blame your lack of thought on security on slashdot.
The truth about online piracy is that if your sending your MP3s to everyone and their brother it's easy to find out about......this happened with Napster. MP3s were not that popular until Napster got going. Before then for those of us who really wanted to find free music we found MP3 search sites and so forth. It is easy to track and it's ease is in direct relation to how much piracy is going on.
I'd concentrate on the findings of congress, which are important to the law being upheld and why they are just plain wrong.
I understood the law originally proposed to have a grandfather clause. This may get/have been removed and I'm not aware of it, but I remember talking about the black market for those old 100 GB hard drives and old P4 PCs going for 5 times the (then) current 4 Petabyte drives and so on...
This article simply grazed the important point in all this (IMHO), which is that the industry is attempting to make it illegal to own something which *could* be used for legal purposes. The law currently says that substantial noninfringing use is good enough not to be held liable for infringement, so they are changing the law, but lets see how the philosophy of this new law would work in the future.
Handguns are illegal because they could be used to kill
butter knives are illegal because they could be used to kill or at the very least commit battery
cars are illegal because they could be used to kill
alcohol is illegal because it could be given to a minor, which is illegal
rope is illegal because it could be used to hang someone with
The philosophy of this law points out the idea behind the statement "live free or die!" We might as well kill our selves because we are not living our own lives, we would be living the lives the media companies would want us to live, which is the lives that the major advertisers wants us to live. We would all be dudes owning Dells, drinking coke, wearing gap jeans, etc. This law should not be fought on technical grounds, but on philosophical grounds.
If God does exist the way the church would have had him belive then God would have known the difference between someone who belived in God and someone who went to church because it could not hurt. Pascal only thought he was smarter then God, and that's quite an ego.
So, by this logic, I should go to church and worship God and Jesus, because it doesn't hurt?
Can we "not pollute"? No, pollution happens, it's a byproduct of physical existance (we shit, we die and decompose, etc). We also have a strong tendency to progress. Progression has risks. Should we be mindfull of the risks? Yes, but we are going to do harm no matter what. The question is what do we get in return? Nash showed that action with respect to self interest in not as good as action with respect to the interest of the whole, and that is how we should act (I think.) Is the world a better place for me doing something? If so, let's do it.
Blizzards objections are real, and should be appricated, however is there a solution. I remember reading in Applied Cryptography about protocols that use an untrusted third party (the bnetd server). Could Blizzard in the future design the clients (games) and the server such that the client needs to authenticate through the third party to the Blizzard server to play the game while at the same time the bnetd server authenticates that the client authenticated properly? This would allow Blizzard to do what they want and the bnetd people to do their work as well.
Near where I live they breed steril mosquitos to release in to the area to control the population......and you can not underestimate the power of the mosquito......they are nasty. Specific techniques to control population may be questionable though
There's one thing I look for in a PHB, strong leadership. People need leaders, and strong willed intelligent people need a strong leader. If not your group all does whatever they think needs to be done, but since your the filter for the politics and company goals your going to be the one in a position to know where to go. Set the goals, motivate your people and lead them there. If you can be a strong leader with a group of coders you can probably lead anyone, but it's a hard skill to learn.
several......you should see my squid logs. It's amazing. Pr0n is a serious issue in it's own right. If someone comes in to work and discovers something offensive on their desktop that they didn't put there, it's best you have a way to figure out what happened so you can do something about it. Doing nothing about it because "I can't" isn't a good answer to the person who just found out what scat is the hard way.
One of Robert Heinlein's books (Stranger in a Strange Land possibly?) contained the idea of the waterbed in it. Because it was published before anyone could "invent" the waterbed there was no way for anyone to get a patent on it. Eventually people started making them. This is one example of real life imitating art.
This article is just plain wrong. Most of the time the artist is responsible for the money spent to produce the album. Even if the record company makes money the money spent to produce the album (one of their $250,000 numbers) comes out of the royalties. The Goo Goo Dolls sold a ton of albums (over a million) and still ended up in debt to the record companies because they got a bad deal and low royalties.
well, once you have loop invariants down you could always go for a Ph.D. (Piled Higher and Deeper) in Computer Science, there lies the wonders of computational theory, game theory, pebbles and spiders, and so on......Having been in the "real world" for a while I'm thinking of dropping out of life and going to school......something about the quality of the greeness of the grass somewhere else...
The problem I run in to is in initial estimates. You have no idea how your team is going to perform with the given languages and technologies. On the other hand, if you have a system that has been in development for five years, you have been using something like CMM and PSP (see Software Engineering Institute) all this time so you can take objective measurements of development times, and you have a well planned software project with obvious milestones and releases then figuring out the time for some new feature or change is easy, though very expensive and takes a lot of time. I would imagine that a project like Windows XP could not be developed by a CMM level 5 shop. The money and man power it would take just aren't there to do it.
On the other hand once you have some history you can come up with very good numbers. They aren't numbers you might be able to prove, but your going to be very, very close (3 9's maybe), the same way that despite large holes in theoretical math I can still add 1 and 1 and get 2.
Here's the solution, but accounting isn't going to go for it...
You need a machine to read email, write documents, surf the web, etc. You need to have this machine 100% as much as possible.
You need *another* machine to develop on and do basic testing, and you need *another* machine to do full testing. that has what you expect your end users to have on their machines and not your development environment.
This way you can have your IT controlled system, your developer controlled system, and your end users system......and who doesn't like three computers on the desk...
The difference between the water and the Internet is that it's possible to be at different places at the same time, and over a peroid of time on the Internet to intercept trafic.
I'm curious why the FSF got involved in this at all. They have nothing to do with the Linux kernel. That's someone elses IP. I think this is another example of the FSF sticking it's nose in to other peoples business and making it theirs. I just don't like that.
If the owners of the IP had issues with what was going on they could have handled this.
A little research in to what I want in a contract to do security work without being arrested for hacking led me to discover that the law is very strict and straight forward. The point? These guys broke the law big time, did it hundreds of times, and advertised it in the media. If someone wanted to charge them there is no doubt they could be convicted.
As for the morals of what they did, I'll leave that up to you.
Hey barely have the money for what they are supposed to do for the ISS. I don't think the US would let them get away with it after all the financial problems they have caused us already. This is just politico's talking it up at best.
Wasn't there an old story in the book Hackers about a convention/conference where one of the video game development companies was showing off their new game for the Apple II, except because the graphics weren't that good they hid a C=64 under the table to run it?
I wonder what the legal definition of liberty is, and if this voilates Article XIV of the constitution.
The difference between this technology and ways of finding criminals in the past is that this technology has memory that lasts forever, and I don't trust the Tampa police to forget. --
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
I've done plenty of the basic stuff, it's when I get in to doing three or four dimentional arrays. The tables get just plain nasty. I'm making use of copy and paste like it's going out of style, but after a few weeks of typing my eyes are starting to go blurry and I wake up at night in a cold sweat chanting
pagesOut OBJECT-TYPE
SYNTAX Integer32
MAX-ACCESS read-only
STATUS current
DESCRIPTION
"The pages paged out" ::= { vminfo 1 }
over and over and over and over agian...
The thing about all this is that the data structures are already defined for me in C. I'm pulling kernel structures out of a Solaris box using the kstat interface. I should at least have a skeleton of a MIB created.
I guess I'll just have to write it and convince my employer to let me release it in the wild.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several timescales. There is already one that does not have leap seconds, and one that does. What is important for the average person is that when the beep, beep, beeeeeeeeep goes beeeeeeeep it's the same for *all* people. While 22 seconds isn't a big deal for most people, it's a huge difference in a lot of other areas from financial trading to shipping. There's a hint of the fact that a USBN (submarine) hit something because a leap second got inserted in to a clock that no one was prepared to handle and they went a second to far.
.9 seconds of cosmic time.
The leap second reconizes the fact that the "second" is defined in terms of particle physics (a quantity of state changes) which is very stable (it's always going to take the same amount of time for the same quantity of state changes), where as the idea of time really comes from the cosmos. When the sun is directly overhead it's 12:00.
Where the earths orbit around the sun is very stable, 265.24 days, the rotation of the earth is very unstable. In fact, there's a provision (though never used) to remove a second from the day! The speed of the rotation is constantly changing. Over the long term it's pretty stable with a stable decay, but in the short it could be necessary to add a second rather quickly to keep the civil time within
The long term average is that we need to add a second to the day about every 18 months, but we haven't needed a leap second since the end of 1998 (over four years!) so in the short term the stability of the earths rotation is low compared to the order of magnitude we measure.
In order to handle this a desicion is made every six months as to a new leap second at the end of June or December (or to remove a second). This is a problem because some systems can't handle the addition of a second on six months notice such as the submarine!
One proposed solution is to allow UT1 (cosmic time) and UTC (civil time) to be out of sync by as many as 10 seconds. This would allow for ample time for warnings to be produced and everyone to know exactly what is going to happen and how to handle it. I don't know if the protocol would add 10 seconds at once, or warn everyone a few years in advance that a second is going to be added at several different points in time.
One interesting side note. Most computer systems don't handle leap seconds. Time keeping software slows the computers clock down (since it's important not to have events which have happened (past) in the future (future). This means that if your measuring anything else based on time that measurement is going to be wrong. The theory being that the accuracy in what time it *is* is more important than what time it *was*. The reason I bring this up is that time is something that can be measured with amazing percision, where as other things can't be measured as well. If you can convert one measurement to time you can measure it more percisely. For example, how fast does the ISS move? If you know it's altitude by measuring how long it takes to bounce a light off of it, and you know how long it takes to get from A to B (or from A to A again), you know how far it moved and how long it took to move and voila, speed, all by measuring time. If a leap second got thrown in while you weren't paying attetion during your measurement, your speed will be wrong.
Maybe we should create a list of "books of interest" and everyone goes and checks one of them out each month. One way to really screw with information systems is to throw useless data at it. If the government is collecting this information in legal or non legal ways, let's throw a wrench in it. After they find the 1000th person they have investigated for checking out "Leaving the 21st Century", "Lipstick Traces", "Days of War, Nights of Love", or any of the thousands of other subversive books out there, they will have to get more creative with things and stop looking at what I read as an idicator.
Go ask your library for a copy of "Leaving the 21st Century." There's two books of that title, one is about music, you want the other one if they can find it.
The government definetly will be interested to know why your reading this book and will be interested in monitoring people who read it.
I don't want the government being too curious about this.
If you don't want the public viewing your site, or linking to it, secure it. If you put up a public website, expect the public to view it and link to it. That was kind of the point of html and httpd. Don't blame your lack of thought on security on slashdot.
The truth about online piracy is that if your sending your MP3s to everyone and their brother it's easy to find out about... ...this happened with Napster. MP3s were not that popular until Napster got going. Before then for those of us who really wanted to find free music we found MP3 search sites and so forth. It is easy to track and it's ease is in direct relation to how much piracy is going on.
I'd concentrate on the findings of congress, which are important to the law being upheld and why they are just plain wrong.
I understood the law originally proposed to have a grandfather clause. This may get/have been removed and I'm not aware of it, but I remember talking about the black market for those old 100 GB hard drives and old P4 PCs going for 5 times the (then) current 4 Petabyte drives and so on...
This article simply grazed the important point in all this (IMHO), which is that the industry is attempting to make it illegal to own something which *could* be used for legal purposes. The law currently says that substantial noninfringing use is good enough not to be held liable for infringement, so they are changing the law, but lets see how the philosophy of this new law would work in the future.
Handguns are illegal because they could be used to kill
butter knives are illegal because they could be used to kill or at the very least commit battery
cars are illegal because they could be used to kill
alcohol is illegal because it could be given to a minor, which is illegal
rope is illegal because it could be used to hang someone with
The philosophy of this law points out the idea behind the statement "live free or die!" We might as well kill our selves because we are not living our own lives, we would be living the lives the media companies would want us to live, which is the lives that the major advertisers wants us to live. We would all be dudes owning Dells, drinking coke, wearing gap jeans, etc. This law should not be fought on technical grounds, but on philosophical grounds.
If God does exist the way the church would have had him belive then God would have known the difference between someone who belived in God and someone who went to church because it could not hurt. Pascal only thought he was smarter then God, and that's quite an ego.
So, by this logic, I should go to church and worship God and Jesus, because it doesn't hurt?
Can we "not pollute"? No, pollution happens, it's a byproduct of physical existance (we shit, we die and decompose, etc). We also have a strong tendency to progress. Progression has risks. Should we be mindfull of the risks? Yes, but we are going to do harm no matter what. The question is what do we get in return? Nash showed that action with respect to self interest in not as good as action with respect to the interest of the whole, and that is how we should act (I think.) Is the world a better place for me doing something? If so, let's do it.
Blizzards objections are real, and should be appricated, however is there a solution. I remember reading in Applied Cryptography about protocols that use an untrusted third party (the bnetd server). Could Blizzard in the future design the clients (games) and the server such that the client needs to authenticate through the third party to the Blizzard server to play the game while at the same time the bnetd server authenticates that the client authenticated properly? This would allow Blizzard to do what they want and the bnetd people to do their work as well.
Near where I live they breed steril mosquitos to release in to the area to control the population... ...and you can not underestimate the power of the mosquito... ...they are nasty. Specific techniques to control population may be questionable though
There's one thing I look for in a PHB, strong leadership. People need leaders, and strong willed intelligent people need a strong leader. If not your group all does whatever they think needs to be done, but since your the filter for the politics and company goals your going to be the one in a position to know where to go. Set the goals, motivate your people and lead them there. If you can be a strong leader with a group of coders you can probably lead anyone, but it's a hard skill to learn.
several... ...you should see my squid logs. It's amazing. Pr0n is a serious issue in it's own right. If someone comes in to work and discovers something offensive on their desktop that they didn't put there, it's best you have a way to figure out what happened so you can do something about it. Doing nothing about it because "I can't" isn't a good answer to the person who just found out what scat is the hard way.
One of Robert Heinlein's books (Stranger in a Strange Land possibly?) contained the idea of the waterbed in it. Because it was published before anyone could "invent" the waterbed there was no way for anyone to get a patent on it. Eventually people started making them. This is one example of real life imitating art.
This article is just plain wrong. Most of the time the artist is responsible for the money spent to produce the album. Even if the record company makes money the money spent to produce the album (one of their $250,000 numbers) comes out of the royalties. The Goo Goo Dolls sold a ton of albums (over a million) and still ended up in debt to the record companies because they got a bad deal and low royalties.
well, once you have loop invariants down you could always go for a Ph.D. (Piled Higher and Deeper) in Computer Science, there lies the wonders of computational theory, game theory, pebbles and spiders, and so on... ...Having been in the "real world" for a while I'm thinking of dropping out of life and going to school... ...something about the quality of the greeness of the grass somewhere else...
The problem I run in to is in initial estimates. You have no idea how your team is going to perform with the given languages and technologies. On the other hand, if you have a system that has been in development for five years, you have been using something like CMM and PSP (see Software Engineering Institute) all this time so you can take objective measurements of development times, and you have a well planned software project with obvious milestones and releases then figuring out the time for some new feature or change is easy, though very expensive and takes a lot of time. I would imagine that a project like Windows XP could not be developed by a CMM level 5 shop. The money and man power it would take just aren't there to do it.
On the other hand once you have some history you can come up with very good numbers. They aren't numbers you might be able to prove, but your going to be very, very close (3 9's maybe), the same way that despite large holes in theoretical math I can still add 1 and 1 and get 2.
Here's the solution, but accounting isn't going to go for it...
...and who doesn't like three computers on the desk...
You need a machine to read email, write documents, surf the web, etc. You need to have this machine 100% as much as possible.
You need *another* machine to develop on and do basic testing, and you need *another* machine to do full testing. that has what you expect your end users to have on their machines and not your development environment.
This way you can have your IT controlled system, your developer controlled system, and your end users system...
The difference between the water and the Internet is that it's possible to be at different places at the same time, and over a peroid of time on the Internet to intercept trafic.
I'm curious why the FSF got involved in this at all. They have nothing to do with the Linux kernel. That's someone elses IP. I think this is another example of the FSF sticking it's nose in to other peoples business and making it theirs. I just don't like that.
If the owners of the IP had issues with what was going on they could have handled this.
A little research in to what I want in a contract to do security work without being arrested for hacking led me to discover that the law is very strict and straight forward. The point? These guys broke the law big time, did it hundreds of times, and advertised it in the media. If someone wanted to charge them there is no doubt they could be convicted.
As for the morals of what they did, I'll leave that up to you.
Hey barely have the money for what they are supposed to do for the ISS. I don't think the US would let them get away with it after all the financial problems they have caused us already. This is just politico's talking it up at best.
Wasn't there an old story in the book Hackers about a convention/conference where one of the video game development companies was showing off their new game for the Apple II, except because the graphics weren't that good they hid a C=64 under the table to run it?
I wonder what the legal definition of liberty is, and if this voilates Article XIV of the constitution.
The difference between this technology and ways of finding criminals in the past is that this technology has memory that lasts forever, and I don't trust the Tampa police to forget.
--
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
I've done plenty of the basic stuff, it's when I get in to doing three or four dimentional arrays. The tables get just plain nasty. I'm making use of copy and paste like it's going out of style, but after a few weeks of typing my eyes are starting to go blurry and I wake up at night in a cold sweat chanting
::= { vminfo 1 }
pagesOut OBJECT-TYPE
SYNTAX Integer32
MAX-ACCESS read-only
STATUS current
DESCRIPTION
"The pages paged out"
over and over and over and over agian...
The thing about all this is that the data structures are already defined for me in C. I'm pulling kernel structures out of a Solaris box using the kstat interface. I should at least have a skeleton of a MIB created.
I guess I'll just have to write it and convince my employer to let me release it in the wild.
--
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect