I use UNIX, because it is 30+ years old. What other software has aged so gracefully to be:
1) Understandable and predictable from the kernel on up.
2) Immensely useful with a uniform and powerful set of interfaces.
3) Scalable so that my programs work without recompilation from my dinky workstation to that new Sun Fire 15K.
4) Solid as a rock. The only time I have seen Solaris crash was due to a diagnosable and easily fixed mismatch between the video driver and the kernel version.
5) Rewarding. There is always something new to explore in UNIX.
6) Smart. The basic prinicples of UNIX make it a joy to work with (see #7, below).
I aggree with you. It is better to teach fashionable stuff like Java and XML to highly-experienced employees than to hire college-students who happened to learn Java in college. Why? In my office, the old fogies have already learned from the graduate school of hard knocks. Oh, they also happen to be first-rate Oracle developers, and are trained in the Capability Maturity Models, and they don't need to be micro-managed, and....
I've watched fresh college grads who happen to know Java develop a database application from scratch, and it was really sad. No recoverable transactions. No real data structure design. No programming discipline. No documentation. No nothing. I truly feel sorry for the customer who has paid for nothing.
I think Windows, Linux, and zSeries must be the three OSs that IBM will be selling. This can't apply to the world as a whole.
Linux will only be able to replace AIX, Solaris, etc. if IBM's billion dollars goes into implementing those features that make Solaris Solaris and AIX AIX. Then, they have to convince the world that Linux really is better than Solaris or AIX, which will be difficult. IMO, Solaris is pretty damn good (I don't have experience with AIX, however). Also, Linux-based systems will need to amass documentation comparable to that for Solaris, which includes the thousands of pages of up-to-date and complete AnswerBooks.
For all biometric systems, the analysis in Schneier's article still applies. Even if the fingerprint readers and retina scanners in the airport were 99.99% accurate, the false alarms would vastly outnumber the legimate "hits". From an engineering standpoint, these systems may be marvels, but they are totally inappropriate for airport applications. Only politicians will make sure these systems get installed. A false sense of security is still security, right?
Our entire travel itinerary is already tracked electronically. Adding one more means of tracking is not really that big of an issue. The statistics in Schneier's article is a much bigger thing to worry about in terms of our rights. I don't want to go to court to prove that I am not a terrorist. This would cost me a nontrivial amount of money and time and would result in no improvement in the number of terrorists in the world. In short, only injustice would be served.
The underlying question is one of intent. So I propose that the government develop a brain-scanning machine that will determine true intent. Then, I could carry an automatic assault rifle onto an airplane with the officials knowing that I am not a violent person. The violent guy behind me in line will have his machete and grenade launcher taken away.
This brain-scanning machine would have thousands of uses including: true determination of guilt in court, abolition of minimum age for drinking alcohol, rendering the DMCA obselete, and on and on.
The UltraSPARC III architecture is designed to scale to many hundreds of processors in an SMP configuration. The 106 processor limit in the Sun Fire machine is just the latest offering from Sun. Sun also provides software to support 1024 processors in a traditional cluster of machines, so it would be possible to cluster nine or ten of the Sun Fire 15K machines (as long as I don't get the bill).
I belive the SGI system has a NUMA architecture, which has some "cons" relative to an SMP architecture, such as potentially high memory latency. It's mainly a tradeoff for being able to get 1024 processors into a single system.
If Sun releases a 512+ CPU SMP machine, then the Origin system will have some real competition in this ultra-high-end arena.
This is a two-way street. Many employees, now, have so little loyalty to their company that high-turnover is very common. The resulting unstable skill base can be lethal for a high-tech company.
I know of a company that wants to keep their employees, but they are in a rut where high turnover makes the company ineffective, which only multiplies the problem of keeping employees. They get contracts only to fail miserably, because most of their remaining employees are fresh out of college and pretty useless for real development. Even their project manager is a moron, since they had no one else to promote when the original manager left. It is really pretty sad.
I have Win2K on a 400MHz system and it really is nothing special. With a good SCSI disk subsystem, Win2K might be okay on an old computer, but I wouldn't have high expectations for it.
The U.S. has an unbalanced policy towards drugs. Why not have the same attitude towards computers?
What is and is not illegal is largely derived from politicians and special interest groups trying to steer our country to their liking. Those things that are unambiguous, such as murder or theft, probably account for a small minority of all laws. A good example is the U.S. tax code. Nothing that convoluted and nauseating would have come from hard rational thinking. The same applies to whatever policy is set towards computers. It's all politics.
Unfortunately, whatever they come up with will make it harder for me to do good (compliant) engineering. I wonder when I will have to be licensed to write software. I will have to go stand in line at the DMV, get a background check, and wait three days before I can write any code. All of my software will be subject to government audits and the only compilers will be available through the Office of Computing Control. If this happens, I think I will become a monk somewhere to escape the madness.
Since I'm fortunate enough to use a UNIX workstation at work, I often get to see those things that my M$-enslaven co-workers don't. For example, the M$-based e-mail server here encodes file attachments so that only users of M$ Outleak can read those attachments, even if the files were originally ordinary PDF. In other words, I can't use Adobe Acrobat to open the M$-tainted PDF files!
Plausable M$ advertisement: "Microsoft. We take the 'portable' out of 'Portable Document Format.'"
This story shows that someone actually read the EULA! Even with UCITA around, I bet most people still "click through" the EULA due to its jargon and tediousness. Having many applications each with a different EULA only compounds the problem.
How many people actually take the time to study each EULA to ensure they or their company is "in the right"? Even if people studied the EULA, how many of them understand the legal implications of the sometimes tricky language?
If I started a small business, I feel as if I would need to pay for a lawyer just to make sure I can use the software I buy. Stack this on top of the already overwhelming tax laws and HR issues, and I really begin to have second thoughts about taking on the business world!
The real problem with arbitrary and myopic laws, such as a CD tax, is that they don't attack the essential problems. The result is that there will always be negative consequences, because the laws could impinge on some future activity that may be truly good and useful. The impact of a CD tax is apparently small, but the immediate negative consequence is that non-criminals still pay This is wrong. Fundamentally wrong.
Take the DCMA, for instance, the anti-circumvention text doesn't really attack the root of why media companies don't seem to be willing or able to engineer real protection technology (ROT-13 PDF encoding is a total joke). The future result may be the complete inability of scientists, journalists, and enthusiasts to discus encryption and privacy technologies. What happens if the media companies begin hoarding all known encryption techniques and declare all decryption techniques "anti-circumvention"? This possiblity scares the piss out of me (figuratively speaking).
Lets attack VCRs and tape recorders too!
on
RIAA To Target CD-R
·
· Score: 1
Okay, so people can record music with a CD-R. I wonder how they feel about audio tape recorders attached to "line out" ports and VCRs attached to s-video ports?
"... the Home Edition of Windows XP executes all applications with full administrative ("root") privilege. Thus, Windows XP eliminates the raw socket safety restrictions imposed by all other operating systems."
So, while I may be a genuine fuckwad (actually, fuckwad's my first name), I defer the ignorance to another party, if, in fact, Windows XP does protect the socket access.
Here's another good one from the antionline article:
"Have you [Steve Gibson] taken the time to notice, you are the only one in this world bitching about Windows XP?"
LOL! I guess Attorney Generals, Senators, privacy-rights organizations, anti-trust organizations, and consumer-rights organizations just don't count. Has another single software package been attacked on so many fronts by so many organizations as has Windows XP?
The antioffline "facts" were not so factual. For example (from the antioffline article):
"Raw Sockets have been around for years in Unix based operating systems, and although many script kiddiots have made the move, they have yet to take over the world with the functionality of it."
This quote really misses something very important.
UNIX places the ports that would be useful to script kiddies out of their reach. This is accomplished by a simple permissions model. UNIX: I'm the superuser, don't touch my ports!
Windows XP is wide open. This is where Steve Gibson's arguments gain their basis. Windows XP: I don't mind, you can touch my ports all you want!
I guess I'm a psychotic bastard because I use UNIX at home. Oh, well. "Slowaris" really isn't a good descriptive term. I run Solaris 8 on a 40MHz SPARCStation. It is quite responsive and even handles CDE well. The great thing about UNIX is: throw enough memory at a program and it will run pretty well even with a slow processor. (Up to a point, that is, as GNOME, StarOffice, and Netscape 6 seem to be special in this regard).
Nonetheless, this year I will certainly budget for a counselor to handle that psychotic bit and talk to my mother about that bastard bit. Thanks for setting me straight.
Turning off an AI machine wouldn't be quite like "turning off" a human. Think of a laptop computer: you tell it "go to sleep", and it dumps its memory to a part of the hard drive. Nothing is lost; everything can be restored as if nothing had happened. AI machines would just need really big hard drives.
There should be no moral dilemma to turning off AI machines, as long as their state can be restored. Destroying the machine's state is the source of the moral problem, as that is the result of the large investment in training.
College students will *not* be giving up their MP3s.
Many of those college students are provided better than @home connectivity right at their dorm room wall. Otherwise, the @home market might be much better. College students are probably the ripest market for file sharing services, but it appears all that bandwidth is just going through the $$$$$/month line in the college's server room. Not to mention that the college students get full-time paid staff to look after that $$$$$/month line (talk about service!).
Re:This sounds like...
on
IBM Wants Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree with the first paragraph. The same is true for Solaris on UltraSPARC-based systems, etc. However, I'm uncertain if the death of AIX and its competitors is a good thing.
Which is better for the long-term health of computing:
1)Linux on IBM Power3, Linux on Sun UltraSPARC, Linux on SGI MIPS, Linux on IA64,...
or
2)AIX or Linux on IBM Power3, Solaris or Linux on UltraSPARC, IRIX or Linux on SGI MIPS, HP-UX or Linux on IA64,... (toss in the *BSD operating systems, too, as Linux isn't the only free option. Also add other options that I don't know about.)
I fear that a lack of diversity among operating systems will be harmful to the hardware vendors due to less differentiation. What would happen if the current undesirable monopoly in software (Microsoft) is replaced with a monopoly in computing hardware (Intel IA64). What would happen if an unforeseen "plague" that targets Linux is unleashed?
I also fear that Linux will replace Microsoft as the main-stream computing "religion" that Microsoft is today. I don't want to see one lack of options simply turn into a new lack of options. Think of the people who say "Windows" while drooling onto their bibs. Now, replace "Windows" with "Linux" emanating from the same glassy-eyed person...
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I use UNIX, because it is 30+ years old. What other software has aged so gracefully to be:
1) Understandable and predictable from the kernel on up.
2) Immensely useful with a uniform and powerful set of interfaces.
3) Scalable so that my programs work without recompilation from my dinky workstation to that new Sun Fire 15K.
4) Solid as a rock. The only time I have seen Solaris crash was due to a diagnosable and easily fixed mismatch between the video driver and the kernel version.
5) Rewarding. There is always something new to explore in UNIX.
6) Smart. The basic prinicples of UNIX make it a joy to work with (see #7, below).
7) Simple. Yes, UNIX is simple!!!
I've watched fresh college grads who happen to know Java develop a database application from scratch, and it was really sad. No recoverable transactions. No real data structure design. No programming discipline. No documentation. No nothing. I truly feel sorry for the customer who has paid for nothing.
Linux will only be able to replace AIX, Solaris, etc. if IBM's billion dollars goes into implementing those features that make Solaris Solaris and AIX AIX. Then, they have to convince the world that Linux really is better than Solaris or AIX, which will be difficult. IMO, Solaris is pretty damn good (I don't have experience with AIX, however). Also, Linux-based systems will need to amass documentation comparable to that for Solaris, which includes the thousands of pages of up-to-date and complete AnswerBooks.
Our entire travel itinerary is already tracked electronically. Adding one more means of tracking is not really that big of an issue. The statistics in Schneier's article is a much bigger thing to worry about in terms of our rights. I don't want to go to court to prove that I am not a terrorist. This would cost me a nontrivial amount of money and time and would result in no improvement in the number of terrorists in the world. In short, only injustice would be served.
This brain-scanning machine would have thousands of uses including: true determination of guilt in court, abolition of minimum age for drinking alcohol, rendering the DMCA obselete, and on and on.
I belive the SGI system has a NUMA architecture, which has some "cons" relative to an SMP architecture, such as potentially high memory latency. It's mainly a tradeoff for being able to get 1024 processors into a single system.
If Sun releases a 512+ CPU SMP machine, then the Origin system will have some real competition in this ultra-high-end arena.
No. Most of the people I know who get Ph.D.s are:
1) Truly passionate. They would study what they study no matter what.
or
2) Aimless. They finish college yet still don't know what they want nor know how to live in the "real world".
I know of a company that wants to keep their employees, but they are in a rut where high turnover makes the company ineffective, which only multiplies the problem of keeping employees. They get contracts only to fail miserably, because most of their remaining employees are fresh out of college and pretty useless for real development. Even their project manager is a moron, since they had no one else to promote when the original manager left. It is really pretty sad.
I have Win2K on a 400MHz system and it really is nothing special. With a good SCSI disk subsystem, Win2K might be okay on an old computer, but I wouldn't have high expectations for it.
What is and is not illegal is largely derived from politicians and special interest groups trying to steer our country to their liking. Those things that are unambiguous, such as murder or theft, probably account for a small minority of all laws. A good example is the U.S. tax code. Nothing that convoluted and nauseating would have come from hard rational thinking. The same applies to whatever policy is set towards computers. It's all politics.
Unfortunately, whatever they come up with will make it harder for me to do good (compliant) engineering. I wonder when I will have to be licensed to write software. I will have to go stand in line at the DMV, get a background check, and wait three days before I can write any code. All of my software will be subject to government audits and the only compilers will be available through the Office of Computing Control. If this happens, I think I will become a monk somewhere to escape the madness.
Very interesting. Thanks.
Since I'm fortunate enough to use a UNIX workstation at work, I often get to see those things that my M$-enslaven co-workers don't. For example, the M$-based e-mail server here encodes file attachments so that only users of M$ Outleak can read those attachments, even if the files were originally ordinary PDF. In other words, I can't use Adobe Acrobat to open the M$-tainted PDF files!
Plausable M$ advertisement: "Microsoft. We take the 'portable' out of 'Portable Document Format.'"
How many people actually take the time to study each EULA to ensure they or their company is "in the right"? Even if people studied the EULA, how many of them understand the legal implications of the sometimes tricky language?
If I started a small business, I feel as if I would need to pay for a lawyer just to make sure I can use the software I buy. Stack this on top of the already overwhelming tax laws and HR issues, and I really begin to have second thoughts about taking on the business world!
Nope. You are incorrect.
Take the DCMA, for instance, the anti-circumvention text doesn't really attack the root of why media companies don't seem to be willing or able to engineer real protection technology (ROT-13 PDF encoding is a total joke). The future result may be the complete inability of scientists, journalists, and enthusiasts to discus encryption and privacy technologies. What happens if the media companies begin hoarding all known encryption techniques and declare all decryption techniques "anti-circumvention"? This possiblity scares the piss out of me (figuratively speaking).
Okay, so people can record music with a CD-R. I wonder how they feel about audio tape recorders attached to "line out" ports and VCRs attached to s-video ports?
Anyway, from Steve Gibson's summary:
"... the Home Edition of Windows XP executes all applications with full administrative ("root") privilege. Thus, Windows XP eliminates the raw socket safety restrictions imposed by all other operating systems."
So, while I may be a genuine fuckwad (actually, fuckwad's my first name), I defer the ignorance to another party, if, in fact, Windows XP does protect the socket access.
"Have you [Steve Gibson] taken the time to notice, you are the only one in this world bitching about Windows XP?"
LOL! I guess Attorney Generals, Senators, privacy-rights organizations, anti-trust organizations, and consumer-rights organizations just don't count. Has another single software package been attacked on so many fronts by so many organizations as has Windows XP?
The antioffline "facts" were not so factual. For example (from the antioffline article):
"Raw Sockets have been around for years in Unix based operating systems, and although many script kiddiots have made the move, they have yet to take over the world with the functionality of it."
This quote really misses something very important.
UNIX places the ports that would be useful to script kiddies out of their reach. This is accomplished by a simple permissions model. UNIX: I'm the superuser, don't touch my ports!
Windows XP is wide open. This is where Steve Gibson's arguments gain their basis. Windows XP: I don't mind, you can touch my ports all you want!
I just noticed that e-mail address, too. Now, how can someone writing from microsoft.com blurt out "Slowaris" without feeling somehow hypocritical?
UNIX is UNIX for the same reason GNU's Not UNIX.
Nonetheless, this year I will certainly budget for a counselor to handle that psychotic bit and talk to my mother about that bastard bit. Thanks for setting me straight.
There should be no moral dilemma to turning off AI machines, as long as their state can be restored. Destroying the machine's state is the source of the moral problem, as that is the result of the large investment in training.
Many of those college students are provided better than @home connectivity right at their dorm room wall. Otherwise, the @home market might be much better. College students are probably the ripest market for file sharing services, but it appears all that bandwidth is just going through the $$$$$/month line in the college's server room. Not to mention that the college students get full-time paid staff to look after that $$$$$/month line (talk about service!).
I agree with the first paragraph. The same is true for Solaris on UltraSPARC-based systems, etc. However, I'm uncertain if the death of AIX and its competitors is a good thing.
Which is better for the long-term health of computing:
1)Linux on IBM Power3, Linux on Sun UltraSPARC, Linux on SGI MIPS, Linux on IA64, ...
or
2)AIX or Linux on IBM Power3, Solaris or Linux on UltraSPARC, IRIX or Linux on SGI MIPS, HP-UX or Linux on IA64, ... (toss in the *BSD operating systems, too, as Linux isn't the only free option. Also add other options that I don't know about.)
I fear that a lack of diversity among operating systems will be harmful to the hardware vendors due to less differentiation. What would happen if the current undesirable monopoly in software (Microsoft) is replaced with a monopoly in computing hardware (Intel IA64). What would happen if an unforeseen "plague" that targets Linux is unleashed?
I also fear that Linux will replace Microsoft as the main-stream computing "religion" that Microsoft is today. I don't want to see one lack of options simply turn into a new lack of options. Think of the people who say "Windows" while drooling onto their bibs. Now, replace "Windows" with "Linux" emanating from the same glassy-eyed person...