You know, you're missing the point. A well set up UN*X box takes very little administration. The cost of administering a UN*X box will normally be lower than a Windows box doing the same job, because although the administrator costs more, you need h[im|er] for fewer hours.
There are an aweful lot of machines which were produced for quite short periods or in quite small numbers in the seventies and eighties; many of them were of interesting or influential design. I started actually hunting for specific machines to add to my collection about five years ago. Some of my machines have been tracked down through contacts, some have been donated by friends, one or two have come through interested antique dealers. But the majority now come through eBay.
I believe these old machines are important parts of our history. They are certainly rare and there aren't going to be any more produced, so they may well be good investments. But if we, as geeks, don't conserve our own history no-one else is going to.
In contracts I am writing up at the moment, there are standard confidentiality clauses. This means, that for anyone to be released from a confidentiality clause, then teh information has to be legally published. Even if EVERYONE knows about it because ofa virus or a leak, anyone using it is doing so illegally and may be prosecuted for stealing trade secrets.
And I am writing contracts which say 'all your base are belong to us'.
You can write 'em how you like. Just don't expect a court to enforce 'em.
He tried to distribute and sell a circumvention device at a convention in the United States of America.
No, as I understand it he didn't. The comapny which employed him did, but that's a very different thing. Furthermore, the principal of the company was present at the conference. There'd be some logic in arresting the principal, none in aresting a mere employee.
One very concrete way we could show support for Dmitry is to send him postcards. This is a technique used by Amnesty International to show support for political prisoners. There are something like half a million registered Slashdot users, and if half a million postcards from all over the world landed up at San Whatever-it-is Penitentiary next week it would get noticed.
So: anyone got the surface mail address of the place he's in, and how you write to a prisoner there?
Let's remember something: we may not agree with the DMCA, but it's the law. It's the prosecution's job to bring law breakers in front of the court. It's exclusively the job of the court to interpret the laws and also to determine if they are unconstitutional.
Hang on, there, guy. Sklyarov was an employee of a company (and, incidentally, the principal of the company was in the US at the same time he was). Prima Facie, the company may have broken US law - but they broke it in Russia, where it wasn't illegal. Sklyarov did not sell or distribute the software he's alleged to have co-written anywhere - the company that employed him did. And he wrote it, not as a private individual, but as an agent of a company under the direction of that company. So whether the company is guilty or not, Sklyarov does not personally have any case to answer - and how you prosecute a Russian company for doing in Russia something which is legal in Russia I don't know.
Sorry to upset the apple-cart, but might a combination of XML and XSL challenge the dominance of Perl? I'm afraid I am not suffinciently advanced in these languages to bet on them, but I reckon they would give the other contenders a run for their money.
No.
XML is not a programming language, it's a markup language. You can't use it to compute anything. XSL-FO is not a programming language, it's a page description language. You can't use it to compute anything. XSL-Tis a programming language, and a very elegant one, but it isn't (IMHO) well suited to this task, and certainly would not produce a compact output.
Slashdot would mirror things it's linking to onto a very fast server on a very fast link before posting important stories... yes, I know you can't do this for all sorts of very good copyright reasons, but...
Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome to life. All life, human or otherwise, is governed by the rules of evolution (except in certain states, see your local laws for details). In evolution, we have this thing called survival of the fittest. Therefore, if you are not fit, you don't survive. How are you fit? By looking out for yourself first, and everyone else last.
Human beings are social animals. We live in groups, and are protected by the group we live in. If we piss off the group we live in, then our survival chances go way down. That's less true now than it was in more 'primitive' societies, but it's still true.
People who put themselves first and everyone else second have, historically, had a very poor chance of passing their genes on, and a very good chance of dying young. Which (IMHO) is a very good thing.
I'd be interested to see them take this a step further. Add an additional servo controlled element at the foot of each foil. When the boat starts to heel over the servo reduces the lift on the upwind side and increases lift on the downwind side.
The beauty of the canted main foils is that they automatically counter heeling. As the boat heels, the lee foil is immersed further and consequently generate more lift; meantime the weather foil is immersed less deeply, and generates less lift. Additionally, leeway causes the lee foil to have an increased angle of attack and the weather foil a decreased, or even negative, angle (although lift from the lee foil acts counter to leeway, and it's possible to tune a hydrofoil to sail with very little leeway at all).
For totally neutral heeling the resultant vectors of the lateral foils should cross at exactly the centre of effort of the rig; if the resultant vectors cross above the centre of effort, you'll get negative heeling!
So, sorry, your Linux box isn't needed - not for that anyway!
Sailing hydrofoils were one of my first real technical engagements - I was following developments (and experimenting myself) thirty years ago. The places for information about these things are
Even ocean going sailing hydrofoils aren't new, and they are a lot harder to design than 'round the bouys' boats. Dave Keiper's Williwaw did a number of offshore passages in the 1960s - my memory is he did San Francisco - Hawaii, but I can't find any confirmation of this just now.
For me the problem with the Hydroptere design is rear steering. The risk is that with the centre of effort of the rig being high, the stern of the boat will be lifted out of the water leading to a forwards capsize - this is why, for example, ice yachts and land yachts no longer rear steer. Still, lovely boat.
I've installed several instances of multiple SQL Server 7 databases, usually as a temp-store in a DMZ with automagic replication to a main server, and I've never seen so much as a bit of data disappear.
Admitedly the code was written by professional coders and not hacked together in 20 minutes, but the data was & is still there.
And you can prove this how?
Remember the nuclear materials accounting system was in use at Los Alamos for several years and they never detected thec error; the Russians were only able to detect the error because they had duplicate paper records. Do you have a papertrail (a real one, on real flattened dead trees) covering all your transactions? If not
start sweating
crawl over your data looking for potential problems, but do not use 'ORDER BY'
warn your senior management that you may have a data loss problem now
start working ouot whether and how you can do a full data audit.
Because, face it, man. If you are using SQL Server 6.5 (or have done in the past), and you use (or any software you use uses) ORDER BY, you have lost data. Like the guys at LANL, you just don't know it yet.
Also, if it is just a bug in SELECT statements, no data is actually being lost - its just not showing up where it should be.
Have you ever used an RDBMS in anger? Your statement is analogous to saying 'if you delete a file from your file system, no data is actually lost - it's just not showing up where it should be'. That's true, of course. If you go and inspect the inode, you'll find the data is still there - at least until it gets overwritten by something else. But it's not good to you because, without doing esoteric things in the bottom of the file system, you can't get at it.
The SELECT statement is the principal way of getting data out of an RDBMS. If it doesn't work, that RDBMS is broke. If it doesn't work and it doesn't barf, that RDBMS is not just broke, it's dangerous. I've spent twenty minutes this morning writing a heads-up to all my customers who use MS SQL Server, advising them of the problem.
They're all still working today, so presumably they're banning their own people from reading other people's Web sites, not banning other people from reading their Web sites...
OK, maybe this isn't so much an argument for dual processor servers. But I'm now absolutely sold on dual processor machines for desktops, and won't go back to singles. Why?
Every so often a process dies horribly, and camps on one of your processors chewing up cycles like there's no tomorrow. Depending on what sort of development you do this may be a rare experience or a common one. And on a single processor machine, sorting it out can be painful, because everything is responding like thick treacle.
On a dual processor machine, everything still works just fine, and you go in, identify the messed up process, and kill it.
When I'm working I normally have
Oracle
Postgres
Apache
JServ
Tomcat
Weblogic
XEmacs
assorted java compiles
all going at the same time. My twin processor PII/300 definitely feels a lot more responsive under this sort of load than the Athlon 500 on the next desk. Mind you, the Athlon box was a lot cheaper!
Regardless of platforms or competing or profits, Adobe owns the name. It's not a matter of "huzzah huzzah intellectual property" or anything.
Uh, we've seen evidence that Adobe owns the name in the United States of America. We've seen no evidence that Adobe owns the name in the Federal Republic of Germany. Until we do, it's a bit careless to say that 'Adobe owns the name'. Some parts of the world are not yet part of the Pax Amerikana.
After seeing too many of htese sotries, i would suggest that any independant programmer form a LLC (limited liability corporation) to be the legal representation of your work. This way, if you are sued, the LLC will be named in the suite and any dmages they manage to collect will be the comanyies, not your personal assets.
Yup. And then you have no profits, so they can just take your product. Thanks for the all the hardwork Fellas!
And if your product was released under an open source license, all you need to do is fork the code and carry on, so so what?
One thing I am hoping to see in Debian sooner (rather than later) is a way to blend stable and frozen/testing packages in a single package management system in such a way that the entire machine isn't automatically and horrifically upgraded for the sake of a few packages.
In the last five years I've visited Iceland, Sweden, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Malaysia, Japan, and Silicon Valley, Callifornia. Guess the one place my mobile phone didn't just work?
And when I say 'just work', I mean people dialling my ordinary number (in Scotland) got through to me, my SMS messages got through, I was able to call everyone...
The United States is about seven years behind the rest of the world on phone networks. You were seven years behind us switching from analogue to digital, so you aren't catching up at any noticable rate.
So a dictionary attack will destroy every password you've ever used. Nice.
Sure. There are something over 2,000 natural languages, with an average of 250,000 words in each. That's 5*10^8, which will take you a while. And, although the method I gave is analogous to my method, this attack still won't get you any of my passwords.
I'm really getting fed up with the need to memorize giant lists of passwords, pins, etc.
If you have giant lists of different passwords, you're insane. I have (at any one time, changed regularly) just three:
Root password on machines I'm
responsible for
Personal password on machines I
trust implicitly, where that password
never passes over the network in
unencrypted form
Personal password for machines (like
slashdot) where the password will pass
over the network in unencrypted form,
and/or where I don't trust the
conpetence of the admins
In fifteen years you will be 30. And you will remember the day when you had forgotten a password for the first time.
Amen to that. I remember a time when I was phoned up by a former employer nine months after I had left their employ, what the root password for a particular machine was (because the person I had handed over to had also left and was unreachable).
You need a systematic way of generating passwords, where the key knowledge is the system, not the individual password. Then, if you forget a past password, you can work progressively back through the system until you recover it.
As an example, you might choose a particular book, ideally in a foreign language, and use the longest word in the fifth line of each successive right hand page as successive passwords (that isn't my system, but it's analogous to my system). If you forget your current password, just look in the book. If you forget an earlier password, work progressively backwards though the book.
You can, if you want, substitute some letters with some numbers in a systematic fashion known to yourself, but IMHO that trick is now so well known as to add little extra value. I know some good geeks who always systematically replace all vowels with numbers... so if you were trying to crack their passwords, you would do the same.
And yes, I was able to tell my former employer their password, there and then on the phone, although I had changed all my passwords several times since then. Systems are good provided only you know the logic of the system.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, you're missing the point. A well set up UN*X box takes very little administration. The cost of administering a UN*X box will normally be lower than a Windows box doing the same job, because although the administrator costs more, you need h[im|er] for fewer hours.
Here it is (I did this quite a while ago)
r i=%22 + window.location))
...
g i?url=%22 + window.location))
javascript:void(window.open( %22http://www.netcraft.co.uk/whats/?host=%22 + window.location))
On the same subject, check HTML validity:
javascript:void(window.open( %22http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=%22 + window.location))
... CSS validity...
javascript:void(window.open( %22http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?u
... links
javascript:void(window.open( %22http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/valet/linktest.c
... bookmarklets are fun!
I believe these old machines are important parts of our history. They are certainly rare and there aren't going to be any more produced, so they may well be good investments. But if we, as geeks, don't conserve our own history no-one else is going to.
Oh, first post, by the way.
And I am writing contracts which say 'all your base are belong to us'.
You can write 'em how you like. Just don't expect a court to enforce 'em.
No, as I understand it he didn't. The comapny which employed him did, but that's a very different thing. Furthermore, the principal of the company was present at the conference. There'd be some logic in arresting the principal, none in aresting a mere employee.
One very concrete way we could show support for Dmitry is to send him postcards. This is a technique used by Amnesty International to show support for political prisoners. There are something like half a million registered Slashdot users, and if half a million postcards from all over the world landed up at San Whatever-it-is Penitentiary next week it would get noticed.
So: anyone got the surface mail address of the place he's in, and how you write to a prisoner there?
Hang on, there, guy. Sklyarov was an employee of a company (and, incidentally, the principal of the company was in the US at the same time he was). Prima Facie, the company may have broken US law - but they broke it in Russia, where it wasn't illegal. Sklyarov did not sell or distribute the software he's alleged to have co-written anywhere - the company that employed him did. And he wrote it, not as a private individual, but as an agent of a company under the direction of that company. So whether the company is guilty or not, Sklyarov does not personally have any case to answer - and how you prosecute a Russian company for doing in Russia something which is legal in Russia I don't know.
No.
XML is not a programming language, it's a markup language. You can't use it to compute anything. XSL-FO is not a programming language, it's a page description language. You can't use it to compute anything. XSL-T is a programming language, and a very elegant one, but it isn't (IMHO) well suited to this task, and certainly would not produce a compact output.
I'd really like to be able to check those graphs!
Human beings are social animals. We live in groups, and are protected by the group we live in. If we piss off the group we live in, then our survival chances go way down. That's less true now than it was in more 'primitive' societies, but it's still true.
People who put themselves first and everyone else second have, historically, had a very poor chance of passing their genes on, and a very good chance of dying young. Which (IMHO) is a very good thing.
The beauty of the canted main foils is that they automatically counter heeling. As the boat heels, the lee foil is immersed further and consequently generate more lift; meantime the weather foil is immersed less deeply, and generates less lift. Additionally, leeway causes the lee foil to have an increased angle of attack and the weather foil a decreased, or even negative, angle (although lift from the lee foil acts counter to leeway, and it's possible to tune a hydrofoil to sail with very little leeway at all).
For totally neutral heeling the resultant vectors of the lateral foils should cross at exactly the centre of effort of the rig; if the resultant vectors cross above the centre of effort, you'll get negative heeling!
So, sorry, your Linux box isn't needed - not for that anyway!
Even ocean going sailing hydrofoils aren't new, and they are a lot harder to design than 'round the bouys' boats. Dave Keiper's Williwaw did a number of offshore passages in the 1960s - my memory is he did San Francisco - Hawaii, but I can't find any confirmation of this just now.
For me the problem with the Hydroptere design is rear steering. The risk is that with the centre of effort of the rig being high, the stern of the boat will be lifted out of the water leading to a forwards capsize - this is why, for example, ice yachts and land yachts no longer rear steer. Still, lovely boat.
And you can prove this how?
Remember the nuclear materials accounting system was in use at Los Alamos for several years and they never detected thec error; the Russians were only able to detect the error because they had duplicate paper records. Do you have a papertrail (a real one, on real flattened dead trees) covering all your transactions? If not
Because, face it, man. If you are using SQL Server 6.5 (or have done in the past), and you use (or any software you use uses) ORDER BY, you have lost data. Like the guys at LANL, you just don't know it yet.
Have you ever used an RDBMS in anger? Your statement is analogous to saying 'if you delete a file from your file system, no data is actually lost - it's just not showing up where it should be'. That's true, of course. If you go and inspect the inode, you'll find the data is still there - at least until it gets overwritten by something else. But it's not good to you because, without doing esoteric things in the bottom of the file system, you can't get at it.
The SELECT statement is the principal way of getting data out of an RDBMS. If it doesn't work, that RDBMS is broke. If it doesn't work and it doesn't barf, that RDBMS is not just broke, it's dangerous. I've spent twenty minutes this morning writing a heads-up to all my customers who use MS SQL Server, advising them of the problem.
Are here:
They're all still working today, so presumably they're banning their own people from reading other people's Web sites, not banning other people from reading their Web sites...
Every so often a process dies horribly, and camps on one of your processors chewing up cycles like there's no tomorrow. Depending on what sort of development you do this may be a rare experience or a common one. And on a single processor machine, sorting it out can be painful, because everything is responding like thick treacle.
On a dual processor machine, everything still works just fine, and you go in, identify the messed up process, and kill it.
When I'm working I normally have
all going at the same time. My twin processor PII/300 definitely feels a lot more responsive under this sort of load than the Athlon 500 on the next desk. Mind you, the Athlon box was a lot cheaper!
Watch the rate of roll on that Cobra III, Commander Jameson...
Yes, I too had a mis-spent youth.
P.S.: I wonder how many Merkins will understand any of this?
Uh, we've seen evidence that Adobe owns the name in the United States of America. We've seen no evidence that Adobe owns the name in the Federal Republic of Germany. Until we do, it's a bit careless to say that 'Adobe owns the name'. Some parts of the world are not yet part of the Pax Amerikana.
And if your product was released under an open source license, all you need to do is fork the code and carry on, so so what?
So write it.
Indeed.
In the last five years I've visited Iceland, Sweden, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Malaysia, Japan, and Silicon Valley, Callifornia. Guess the one place my mobile phone didn't just work?
And when I say 'just work', I mean people dialling my ordinary number (in Scotland) got through to me, my SMS messages got through, I was able to call everyone...
The United States is about seven years behind the rest of the world on phone networks. You were seven years behind us switching from analogue to digital, so you aren't catching up at any noticable rate.
Sure. There are something over 2,000 natural languages, with an average of 250,000 words in each. That's 5*10^8, which will take you a while. And, although the method I gave is analogous to my method, this attack still won't get you any of my passwords.
If you have giant lists of different passwords, you're insane. I have (at any one time, changed regularly) just three:
Amen to that. I remember a time when I was phoned up by a former employer nine months after I had left their employ, what the root password for a particular machine was (because the person I had handed over to had also left and was unreachable).
You need a systematic way of generating passwords, where the key knowledge is the system, not the individual password. Then, if you forget a past password, you can work progressively back through the system until you recover it.
As an example, you might choose a particular book, ideally in a foreign language, and use the longest word in the fifth line of each successive right hand page as successive passwords (that isn't my system, but it's analogous to my system). If you forget your current password, just look in the book. If you forget an earlier password, work progressively backwards though the book.
You can, if you want, substitute some letters with some numbers in a systematic fashion known to yourself, but IMHO that trick is now so well known as to add little extra value. I know some good geeks who always systematically replace all vowels with numbers... so if you were trying to crack their passwords, you would do the same.
And yes, I was able to tell my former employer their password, there and then on the phone, although I had changed all my passwords several times since then. Systems are good provided only you know the logic of the system.