Oh yes, because no government agency would ever abuse its powers.
Any information that's saved, will be used: if you think it will just be to go after "terrorists" and "pedophiles," you're hopelessly naive. (Or rather, if you think that the definitions of 'terrorist' and 'pedophile' aren't sufficiently vague that they can be easily expanded at will to include pretty much anyone unpopular, you're deluding yourself.)
Reading your comment again I suspect IHBT, though.
Yeah it wouldn't surprise me if it exported to something that was called PDF, but was brain dead or broken in such a way that it only worked with other Microsoft products. Maybe it wouldn't be that way initially, but pretty soon Microsoft would be dictating to Adobe the changes to the format, and Adobe would just have to bend over and enjoy it, or else new versions of Acrobat wouldn't work with everyone's Word-exported PDFs.
It's not like MS doesn't have a long history of producing brain-damaged products. Heck, it seems like every time they try to use a standard format or protocol, they end up abusing or breaking it just slightly. It's as though they're fundamentally incapable of following somebody else's spec. (Case in point: Outlook Express and IMAP. UW-IMAP even has a special "Microsoft Brain Damage" mode to deal with their misbehavior.) That's pretty much their M.O., it seems: make a shitty product and let everyone else deal with the mess.
I work in an all-Windows shop, and everyone basically uses the freeware print-to-PDF utilities (there are a number of them, all more or less identical), which in at least some cases, use the GPL libraries at their core.
I'm not sure what the penetration of those things is like, but in my office it's really high, like up around 80 or 90 percent. Their most frequent use is making softcopy "prints" of web pages to send to people, to avoid the formatting getting too mangled (which would happen if you sent it as an HTML file).
Frankly I think putting PDF generation in as a printer driver, a la Mac OS X, is more powerful than putting it into the application itself. Anything that's on your screen can be made into a PDF that way.
I don't really understand why Adobe would be all up in arms about a basic Word output capability. I think there has to be something more to this: Microsoft wanted to include more advanced PDF generation capabilities than would be provided by the usual printer-driver type output plugins. That's getting into Adobe's rice bowl in a serious way: the domain of Acrobat was never just creating everyday PDFs (at least since everybody and their cousin could make them for free), but in making more advanced ones: forms, signed documents, encrypted documents, etc.
I think that Microsoft must have wanted to implement the whole "PDF workflow" (creation, editing/markup, signing, encryption, management, etc.) instead of just PDF export; that's the only reason why I can think that Adobe might have not been cool with the idea. Otherwise, more people producing PDFs means more demand for Acrobat, because you need it to do all the things you'd expect to do with paper besides print and file.
Yeah but it goes to a particular branch in some Third World country where for $100 you can have the police give you an escort to go down and pick up the money. Or maybe they'll just wait for you to pick it up, then kill you and take it. But either way, enforcement of international treaty obligations or giving a shit about whether the money got extorted from some American probably isn't going to be forefront on their minds.
Western Union has branches in some seriously shady locations. I just played around with their online branch locator, and they have branches in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, (not Somalia though, I guess they have to draw the line somewhere -- like having a currency and/or government), Syria, Iraq, (not Iran), the Palestinian Authority, as well as lots of offices in some of the more corruptible but not-quite-third-world locales like Mexico and Russia.
So basically, even if you traced the money to the branch where it was getting picked up, and had a photo and thumbprint of the person who received the cash, good luck getting anything done about it.
That's not entirely fair. On some big projects -- granted, this doesn't sound like one -- that have been built with extensive documentation, it can be possible to rebuild portions of them in a different language than other parts, so that you could easily bring in new programmers unfamiliar with the old language to "rewrite" something. They might never look at the old source code, ever.
The most striking example of this I ever saw was in a porting effort to take a big enterprise application from COBOL to Java. Getting Java people is easy, getting COBOL people (who were familiar with the application) was hard; so the COBOL people wrote the specs and the Java people built the modules from them, doing design-by-contract (in theory). I don't think they even had access to the original code. (I don't think that a "clean room" approach was really being pursued, but that's basically how it seemed to work.)
This guy's project doesn't sound like it's quite as big as that, but I just thought I'd put it out there that it's not totally unheard of for a programmer unfamiliar in a particular language to be hired on to a project written in that language, if the goal is to move it to something else. Now, why you'd hire someone to rewrite a VB project, who's not fluent in VB, if VB is still the target... that's a little bizarre.
Hence, recent child-porn laws making illegal computer-generated images in which no actual children are depicted. It's fantasy, but it's very very illegal. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but that IS the law.
You want to cite some sources for that? Because I call bullshit.
I think a while back someone was talking about a piece of legislation that would have been that broad, but it never made it into law. Even the really rabid social conservatives I know, think that would be a stupid idea. How are you supposed to tell whether a cartoon character is of age or not? Who gets to decide? It would be an enforcement nightmare. Plus, I think it's a pretty specious argument who's being harmed during the creation of "simulated pornography" anyway. You're not preventing any child abuse, and if you make the punishment even anywhere similar between 'real porn' and 'simulated porn,' then you just encourage people to go for the real thing, and increase the demand for actual abused children.
Our government is admittedly very stupid, but it's not quite that stupid. Yet.
I doubt very much that they're any more dangerous than a cigarette lighter. Probably less so, if they use a liquid fuel (methanol) instead of a compressed flammable gas, or a liquid fuel that's pressurized with an inert gas. A bottle of methanol isn't any more dangerous than a bottle of alcohol-based aftershave, high-proof liquor, or spray deodorant. I could imagine that you might not be able to bring the refills on in your carryon baggage, but I'm willing to bet that if they became ubiquitous, being able to take one on a plane is enough of a selling point (both for the airline and the laptop manufacturer) that I'm pretty confident the regulations would be worked out to allow the cells themselves in the cabin, perhaps empty.
Two words: energy density. There is no battery technology currently available or in development, that I know of, which approaches the energy density of petrochemicals or methanol, and probably of compressed hydrogen as well. So there is a lot of interest in producing a compact power source which runs on a high-density fuel, because you could increase the capacity of the computer's power source beyond what would be practical on batteries.
Right now, it seems like in laptops you have two choices: you can either get the very small ones that have decent battery life (iBooks, Sony Vaio, probably others), or you can get those huge, hot-as-Hades "tabletop" notebooks that really only have batteries to keep them from shutting down while you're carrying them from one outlet to the next. I don't think I'm the only one who would be really interested in getting my hands on a desktop replacement with good (6-8 hours real usage, by which I mean heavy HD and optical I/O, constant WLAN usage, maximum brightness screen and headphone audio use) battery life, especially if I could take it to places that don't have electricity available and "recharge" it with some sort of compressed-gas or fuel canisters. Or have a compact laptop with a smaller screen and less bells and whistles that ran for days or weeks on a single fueling. You're not going to get to either of those goals with current battery technology (unless you want to hire a sherpa to carry your spares around).
Personally I find the Toshiba thing pretty exciting. My big turn-off would be that I wouldn't want to buy a first-generation device that used some sort of strange vendor-specific refill. I've had too many bad experiences in the past where you get the first generation of something that requires a steady supply of consumable parts, and after a year or two the manufacturer stops making them, and you're SOL. I hope that in all this work that Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Samsung and Sanyo are doing together, they've invented a standard refill for these things: when it gets to the point where the refills are either widely available from a single manufacturer or less-easily from a variety of manufacturers (who aren't directly affiliated with the maker of the principal device), then count me in.
Sure, but read some of the other numbers to put that one in perspective:
GDP (official exchange rate): $12.47 trillion (2005 est.) GDP - composition by sector: agriculture: 1%, industry: 20.7%, services: 78.3%
So that $927B that we export is only around 7.5%, if I did my math right, of our total economic production. The other 92.5% of our GDP we're basically selling to each other inside the country in exchange for each other's labor: one great big service-economy circle jerk.
The other issue that doesn't bode well with a lot of people is the current account deficit: our quality of life is built on imports ($1.727 trillion USD of 'em a year), and to most people, a situation where your cash outflow exceeds your inflow for a significant length of time doesn't seem sustainable.
I'd say the average American probably doesn't think about these things too often, but most people are dimly aware of them, in a sort of vaguely unsettling way. At the core of the American body politic's psyche is an key insecurity: what if those clothes that the politicians sold them aren't really there at all?
Improper use of the word redact. I'm assuming you got this word from the recent The Office episode where the employees could retract their complaints by "redacting" them. The word redact actually has very little to do with deleting or removing content. The definition is more like "edit" and relates to written publications: "to select or adapt for publication."
I basically assumed he was taking a jab at the use of "redacted" that's been seen fairly frequently in the media lately: to sanitize or censor a document prior to publication or distribution.
This is a pretty standard term when working with (U.S., anyway) government documents, and its usage certainly predates the Office episode.
Given that usage I don't think it's too much of a misuse in the GP's comment.
Don't think for a moment that the people pushing copyright (and the entire concept of "intellectual property") in the U.S. haven't travelled abroad. They have, and they're for the most part not stupid. They're afraid.
A lot of people, particularly those inhabiting some very choice real estate in downtown Washington, DC, are quite aware that as a country, we don't really make anything anymore. Okay, so there are still a few agricultural commodities that we grow for export, and some manufacturing that apparently can't be outsourced to China, but it's not the sort of thing that you run an economy on. It's definitely not the sort of thing that you remain economic ruler of the free world based on.
So what do you make and sell, when you don't manufacture anything anymore? The answer that quite a few people seem to have come to, is "content."
You manufacture content. It's better than manufacturing physical goods, because it basically has no inputs besides labor, but produces a "good" which can be sold over and over again as a result. There aren't any pesky raw materials to import, so it's a totally domestic product. On one end it's a service industry, but on the other end it's manufacturing. Plus, the demand for it is basically constant, and even though foreigners may not want our airplanes or SUVs, they seem to want to watch MTV.
When you look at it this way, you can see why there are more than a few people around who think DRM is a good idea. More than that, it's a necessary idea. You basically can't do what they want to do -- manufacture content and sell it per-unit, as if they were Ford or GM -- without some control that keeps people from deflating the price back to its actual marginal cost of production and distribution (the "one more copy" cost).
DRM, in my opinion, is a bit of a desperate measure. It strikes a chord with people who can't understand (or don't want to understand, or don't believe in) the whole "service economy" concept, and would like to see the U.S. dominating a "software industry" in the same way we once dominated steel, only churning out lines of code rather than bar stock, and selling it for export.
My understanding was that Postfix simulates enough of Sendmail in order to keep stuff like this working. I have a number of Debian systems without Sendmail, and I get their cron output without any problems. Stuff that's piped to mail on the commandline also functions fine (which is nice, because I've used that pretty heavily in some of my backup scripts, emailing me logs and such).
What gets a lot of people, I think, is that in order for Postfix to replace Sendmail for all functions, Postfix has to overwrite some Sendmail files: depending on how you install Postfix, this may not happen. (E.g.:/usr/sbin/sendmail) My solution was just to purge Sendmail completely, then install Postfix -- brutal and inelegant, but it worked. I'm sure there are more graceful ways to transfer it over (I think there's an RPM package for switching...?), so it's probably worth investigating.
But one of Postfix's strengths as I've been told them has always been its ability to take the place of Sendmail in many instances, so you really shouldn't be kept from using it due to your cron jobs.
You laugh, but I once saw someone install IndigoMail (basically Sendmail-for-Windows) on Windows ME.
Struck me as being the computational equivalent of a big table saw with the safety shields removed. It's the sort of thing you just wince to look at because you know, some day, it's going to cause somebody a lot of pain.
Personally, I use Postfix. It's Free, it's intelligently designed (by this guy, if you were wondering), it's much easier to set up to be secure, and it has a certain level of Sendmail compatibility, so that older programs that assume you're running Sendmail don't barf when you switch.
The biggest architectural difference between Sendmail and Postfix is that Postfix has many small executables (arguably, many not-so-small executables) while Sendmail is monolithic. From a user's perspective this is basically transparent: the biggest benefit to a sysadmin of running Postfix is the config files, which are as close to being self-explanatory as a MTA config file can be, in my opinion.
Sendmail always struck me as a bit of a challenge to set up securely/properly (i.e. "not an open relay"); Postfix is pretty simple to get going securely, and has well-chosen default parameters (at least as I've seen it installed, on Debian) that let you set up a server that won't be immediately spewing Russian penis-enlargement emails quickly. I've never tried to set up Sendmail with SSL support, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it's easier to do this with Postfix as well.
I can't personally vouch for its speed, because I don't run a high-volume mailserver, nor do I have the hardware to really give the MTA that much of a workout (it just becomes disk-bound on my systems). Plus I use flat mbox files and the situation may be totally different with the more modern database-type mailstores. (Yeah, yeah, I know -- 1986 called and they want their file format back and all that. But it works for me.)
There are other choices out there for MTAs, and I'm sensitive to arguments in favor of them and I'm not trying to say that Postfix is necessarily the best possible thing out there for everyone, but at least in my experience it beats the hell out of Sendmail. If somebody wants to jump in here and discuss qmail or exim, and why they think they're great, please do.
Yeah, I'm with you there. Aside from inertia and sysadmin familiarity, I can't quite figure out why someone would consciously choose Sendmail over the alternatives today. There are other MTAs that are faster, more secure, and miles easier to work with, that offer an equivalent or better featureset, and are just as Free.
I think it's high time we put Sendmail out to pasture.
I think it's also worth pointing out that quite often, the ratings of many cheap power supplies are nothing but a dirty, dirty lie. Chances are, if you try to actually draw 400 watts from a "400W" house-brand PS that you picked up for $30, bad things are going to happen. At the very least, the power it produces may not be very clean. At worst, it might overheat.
I've never seen a graph of power supply efficiency as a function of percentage-of-maximum load, but I suspect it would look like a bell curve of some sort. The efficiency is pretty low at very low load, because the power supply itself has a certain "overhead" that exists, no matter what you're drawing from it... then as you get into its optimal operating range, it's reasonably efficient.. but then I suspect as you get close to its rated maximum (or less, for shitty supplies), I bet it drops back off again pretty quickly.
I don't know what methods manufacturers use to claim the ratings on their power supplies, but it definitely isn't any definition of "maximum continuous load" that I've ever heard.
If I was going to put together a system, for whatever purpose, be it a workstation or a NAS or a firewall box, the one thing I would not want to skimp on is the power supply. That doesn't mean just going and getting one that's over-rated for the purpose you want to use it for, it means buying one that's not a total piece of crap to begin with, but also which isn't being redlined the whole time.
I've seen quite a few people put together nice custom PCs with very nice components, but then toss a no-name PS in there and have it burn out. I find this very odd, since in my experience it's the power supplies that can have the longest service life: that mobo you bought today is going to be scrap metal in a few years, but a good PS today could still be running a system 5-10 years from now.
doing manual labor and all the jobs no American would apply for in the 1st place
This is crap, and it's the biggest lie currently being perpetuated in the media by the pro-immigration (generally agricultural) lobby. With the exceptions of perhaps some jobs viewed by the majority of people as grossly immoral, there are not any jobs that the legal American worker would not take on with just compensation.
I could think of dozens of gross and/or disgusting jobs that are far worse than manual labor (heck, the History Channel ran a whole week's worth of specials on stuff like that) which people happily do, because they're appropriately paid.
Americans aren't willing to take the same jobs that illegals take today, because everyone knows that they don't pay worth a damn. If it wasn't for the basically unlimited supply of cheap, disposable labor provided by our neighbors to the south, then employers would be forced to increase wages until they could attract legitimate employees. However in the current climate, they don't.
When people say that "Americans won't do the jobs that illegal immigrants do," what they really mean is "Americans won't do the jobs that illegal immigrants do, at the rates that employers would prefer to pay." Obviously, employers would prefer to pay someone less for the same work, so they'll come up with no end of justifications to maintain the status quo, so you hear these ridiculous claims made.
This is silly. Look, the average user may be dumb, but they're not so dumb they can't figure out how to rip a CD in iTunes. Especially when the alternative is paying a dollar a track from the iTMS, pretty much anyone can figure out how to put their CD in the drive, and press the rip button when it comes up in iTunes.
The people who can't be bothered to figure that out are probably so rich that they don't really care where the music comes from anyway, and aren't bothered by the fact that they'll have to repurchase it if they wanted to switch MP3 player brands.
Regular people rip their CDs. That was the original motto on iTunes, long before the iTMS: "Rip, Mix, Burn."
My understanding (and I don't do network security as a career, but I do hang out with people that do) is that putting root logins into the LDAP or AD server is considered bad practice. System root logins are supposed to be kept at the per-system level, so that if one machine gets broken, the attacker can't use the LDAP/AD system to propagate the break to the entire intranet.
The admin-types I know all have their regular user accounts on the LDAP system, so they can do single-sign-on like the rest of us (to their email, shared volumes, photocopiers, whatever), but their administration passwords to various systems are separate. (And occasionally written on business cards in their wallet, but that's a separate issue.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yes, because no government agency would ever abuse its powers.
Any information that's saved, will be used: if you think it will just be to go after "terrorists" and "pedophiles," you're hopelessly naive. (Or rather, if you think that the definitions of 'terrorist' and 'pedophile' aren't sufficiently vague that they can be easily expanded at will to include pretty much anyone unpopular, you're deluding yourself.)
Reading your comment again I suspect IHBT, though.
Yeah it wouldn't surprise me if it exported to something that was called PDF, but was brain dead or broken in such a way that it only worked with other Microsoft products. Maybe it wouldn't be that way initially, but pretty soon Microsoft would be dictating to Adobe the changes to the format, and Adobe would just have to bend over and enjoy it, or else new versions of Acrobat wouldn't work with everyone's Word-exported PDFs.
It's not like MS doesn't have a long history of producing brain-damaged products. Heck, it seems like every time they try to use a standard format or protocol, they end up abusing or breaking it just slightly. It's as though they're fundamentally incapable of following somebody else's spec. (Case in point: Outlook Express and IMAP. UW-IMAP even has a special "Microsoft Brain Damage" mode to deal with their misbehavior.) That's pretty much their M.O., it seems: make a shitty product and let everyone else deal with the mess.
I work in an all-Windows shop, and everyone basically uses the freeware print-to-PDF utilities (there are a number of them, all more or less identical), which in at least some cases, use the GPL libraries at their core.
I'm not sure what the penetration of those things is like, but in my office it's really high, like up around 80 or 90 percent. Their most frequent use is making softcopy "prints" of web pages to send to people, to avoid the formatting getting too mangled (which would happen if you sent it as an HTML file).
Frankly I think putting PDF generation in as a printer driver, a la Mac OS X, is more powerful than putting it into the application itself. Anything that's on your screen can be made into a PDF that way.
I don't really understand why Adobe would be all up in arms about a basic Word output capability. I think there has to be something more to this: Microsoft wanted to include more advanced PDF generation capabilities than would be provided by the usual printer-driver type output plugins. That's getting into Adobe's rice bowl in a serious way: the domain of Acrobat was never just creating everyday PDFs (at least since everybody and their cousin could make them for free), but in making more advanced ones: forms, signed documents, encrypted documents, etc.
I think that Microsoft must have wanted to implement the whole "PDF workflow" (creation, editing/markup, signing, encryption, management, etc.) instead of just PDF export; that's the only reason why I can think that Adobe might have not been cool with the idea. Otherwise, more people producing PDFs means more demand for Acrobat, because you need it to do all the things you'd expect to do with paper besides print and file.
Yeah but it goes to a particular branch in some Third World country where for $100 you can have the police give you an escort to go down and pick up the money. Or maybe they'll just wait for you to pick it up, then kill you and take it. But either way, enforcement of international treaty obligations or giving a shit about whether the money got extorted from some American probably isn't going to be forefront on their minds.
Western Union has branches in some seriously shady locations. I just played around with their online branch locator, and they have branches in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, (not Somalia though, I guess they have to draw the line somewhere -- like having a currency and/or government), Syria, Iraq, (not Iran), the Palestinian Authority, as well as lots of offices in some of the more corruptible but not-quite-third-world locales like Mexico and Russia.
So basically, even if you traced the money to the branch where it was getting picked up, and had a photo and thumbprint of the person who received the cash, good luck getting anything done about it.
Notice how much this virus is like a proprietary file format? You can't get at your own data without paying for a license to the proprietary reader.
Yeah but at least the virus author doesn't blow smoke up your ass by calling their file format a "feature."
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those on a power strip.
Yeah, you'd be able to run spyware in parallel that way.
That's not entirely fair. On some big projects -- granted, this doesn't sound like one -- that have been built with extensive documentation, it can be possible to rebuild portions of them in a different language than other parts, so that you could easily bring in new programmers unfamiliar with the old language to "rewrite" something. They might never look at the old source code, ever.
... that's a little bizarre.
The most striking example of this I ever saw was in a porting effort to take a big enterprise application from COBOL to Java. Getting Java people is easy, getting COBOL people (who were familiar with the application) was hard; so the COBOL people wrote the specs and the Java people built the modules from them, doing design-by-contract (in theory). I don't think they even had access to the original code. (I don't think that a "clean room" approach was really being pursued, but that's basically how it seemed to work.)
This guy's project doesn't sound like it's quite as big as that, but I just thought I'd put it out there that it's not totally unheard of for a programmer unfamiliar in a particular language to be hired on to a project written in that language, if the goal is to move it to something else. Now, why you'd hire someone to rewrite a VB project, who's not fluent in VB, if VB is still the target
I think you forgot a flag:
...
$ glxgears -iacknowledgethatthistoolisnotabenchmark
Hence, recent child-porn laws making illegal computer-generated images in which no actual children are depicted. It's fantasy, but it's very very illegal. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but that IS the law.
You want to cite some sources for that? Because I call bullshit.
I think a while back someone was talking about a piece of legislation that would have been that broad, but it never made it into law. Even the really rabid social conservatives I know, think that would be a stupid idea. How are you supposed to tell whether a cartoon character is of age or not? Who gets to decide? It would be an enforcement nightmare. Plus, I think it's a pretty specious argument who's being harmed during the creation of "simulated pornography" anyway. You're not preventing any child abuse, and if you make the punishment even anywhere similar between 'real porn' and 'simulated porn,' then you just encourage people to go for the real thing, and increase the demand for actual abused children.
Our government is admittedly very stupid, but it's not quite that stupid. Yet.
I doubt very much that they're any more dangerous than a cigarette lighter. Probably less so, if they use a liquid fuel (methanol) instead of a compressed flammable gas, or a liquid fuel that's pressurized with an inert gas. A bottle of methanol isn't any more dangerous than a bottle of alcohol-based aftershave, high-proof liquor, or spray deodorant. I could imagine that you might not be able to bring the refills on in your carryon baggage, but I'm willing to bet that if they became ubiquitous, being able to take one on a plane is enough of a selling point (both for the airline and the laptop manufacturer) that I'm pretty confident the regulations would be worked out to allow the cells themselves in the cabin, perhaps empty.
what is wrong with batteries?
Two words: energy density. There is no battery technology currently available or in development, that I know of, which approaches the energy density of petrochemicals or methanol, and probably of compressed hydrogen as well. So there is a lot of interest in producing a compact power source which runs on a high-density fuel, because you could increase the capacity of the computer's power source beyond what would be practical on batteries.
Right now, it seems like in laptops you have two choices: you can either get the very small ones that have decent battery life (iBooks, Sony Vaio, probably others), or you can get those huge, hot-as-Hades "tabletop" notebooks that really only have batteries to keep them from shutting down while you're carrying them from one outlet to the next. I don't think I'm the only one who would be really interested in getting my hands on a desktop replacement with good (6-8 hours real usage, by which I mean heavy HD and optical I/O, constant WLAN usage, maximum brightness screen and headphone audio use) battery life, especially if I could take it to places that don't have electricity available and "recharge" it with some sort of compressed-gas or fuel canisters. Or have a compact laptop with a smaller screen and less bells and whistles that ran for days or weeks on a single fueling. You're not going to get to either of those goals with current battery technology (unless you want to hire a sherpa to carry your spares around).
Personally I find the Toshiba thing pretty exciting. My big turn-off would be that I wouldn't want to buy a first-generation device that used some sort of strange vendor-specific refill. I've had too many bad experiences in the past where you get the first generation of something that requires a steady supply of consumable parts, and after a year or two the manufacturer stops making them, and you're SOL. I hope that in all this work that Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Samsung and Sanyo are doing together, they've invented a standard refill for these things: when it gets to the point where the refills are either widely available from a single manufacturer or less-easily from a variety of manufacturers (who aren't directly affiliated with the maker of the principal device), then count me in.
Sure, but read some of the other numbers to put that one in perspective:
GDP (official exchange rate): $12.47 trillion (2005 est.)
GDP - composition by sector: agriculture: 1%, industry: 20.7%, services: 78.3%
So that $927B that we export is only around 7.5%, if I did my math right, of our total economic production. The other 92.5% of our GDP we're basically selling to each other inside the country in exchange for each other's labor: one great big service-economy circle jerk.
The other issue that doesn't bode well with a lot of people is the current account deficit: our quality of life is built on imports ($1.727 trillion USD of 'em a year), and to most people, a situation where your cash outflow exceeds your inflow for a significant length of time doesn't seem sustainable.
I'd say the average American probably doesn't think about these things too often, but most people are dimly aware of them, in a sort of vaguely unsettling way. At the core of the American body politic's psyche is an key insecurity: what if those clothes that the politicians sold them aren't really there at all?
Improper use of the word redact. I'm assuming you got this word from the recent The Office episode where the employees could retract their complaints by "redacting" them. The word redact actually has very little to do with deleting or removing content. The definition is more like "edit" and relates to written publications: "to select or adapt for publication."
I basically assumed he was taking a jab at the use of "redacted" that's been seen fairly frequently in the media lately: to sanitize or censor a document prior to publication or distribution.
This is a pretty standard term when working with (U.S., anyway) government documents, and its usage certainly predates the Office episode.
Given that usage I don't think it's too much of a misuse in the GP's comment.
Ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redaction
Don't think for a moment that the people pushing copyright (and the entire concept of "intellectual property") in the U.S. haven't travelled abroad. They have, and they're for the most part not stupid. They're afraid.
A lot of people, particularly those inhabiting some very choice real estate in downtown Washington, DC, are quite aware that as a country, we don't really make anything anymore. Okay, so there are still a few agricultural commodities that we grow for export, and some manufacturing that apparently can't be outsourced to China, but it's not the sort of thing that you run an economy on. It's definitely not the sort of thing that you remain economic ruler of the free world based on.
So what do you make and sell, when you don't manufacture anything anymore? The answer that quite a few people seem to have come to, is "content."
You manufacture content. It's better than manufacturing physical goods, because it basically has no inputs besides labor, but produces a "good" which can be sold over and over again as a result. There aren't any pesky raw materials to import, so it's a totally domestic product. On one end it's a service industry, but on the other end it's manufacturing. Plus, the demand for it is basically constant, and even though foreigners may not want our airplanes or SUVs, they seem to want to watch MTV.
When you look at it this way, you can see why there are more than a few people around who think DRM is a good idea. More than that, it's a necessary idea. You basically can't do what they want to do -- manufacture content and sell it per-unit, as if they were Ford or GM -- without some control that keeps people from deflating the price back to its actual marginal cost of production and distribution (the "one more copy" cost).
DRM, in my opinion, is a bit of a desperate measure. It strikes a chord with people who can't understand (or don't want to understand, or don't believe in) the whole "service economy" concept, and would like to see the U.S. dominating a "software industry" in the same way we once dominated steel, only churning out lines of code rather than bar stock, and selling it for export.
My understanding was that Postfix simulates enough of Sendmail in order to keep stuff like this working. I have a number of Debian systems without Sendmail, and I get their cron output without any problems. Stuff that's piped to mail on the commandline also functions fine (which is nice, because I've used that pretty heavily in some of my backup scripts, emailing me logs and such).
/usr/sbin/sendmail) My solution was just to purge Sendmail completely, then install Postfix -- brutal and inelegant, but it worked. I'm sure there are more graceful ways to transfer it over (I think there's an RPM package for switching...?), so it's probably worth investigating.
What gets a lot of people, I think, is that in order for Postfix to replace Sendmail for all functions, Postfix has to overwrite some Sendmail files: depending on how you install Postfix, this may not happen. (E.g.:
But one of Postfix's strengths as I've been told them has always been its ability to take the place of Sendmail in many instances, so you really shouldn't be kept from using it due to your cron jobs.
You laugh, but I once saw someone install IndigoMail (basically Sendmail-for-Windows) on Windows ME.
Struck me as being the computational equivalent of a big table saw with the safety shields removed. It's the sort of thing you just wince to look at because you know, some day, it's going to cause somebody a lot of pain.
Personally, I use Postfix. It's Free, it's intelligently designed (by this guy, if you were wondering), it's much easier to set up to be secure, and it has a certain level of Sendmail compatibility, so that older programs that assume you're running Sendmail don't barf when you switch.
The biggest architectural difference between Sendmail and Postfix is that Postfix has many small executables (arguably, many not-so-small executables) while Sendmail is monolithic. From a user's perspective this is basically transparent: the biggest benefit to a sysadmin of running Postfix is the config files, which are as close to being self-explanatory as a MTA config file can be, in my opinion.
Sendmail always struck me as a bit of a challenge to set up securely/properly (i.e. "not an open relay"); Postfix is pretty simple to get going securely, and has well-chosen default parameters (at least as I've seen it installed, on Debian) that let you set up a server that won't be immediately spewing Russian penis-enlargement emails quickly. I've never tried to set up Sendmail with SSL support, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it's easier to do this with Postfix as well.
I can't personally vouch for its speed, because I don't run a high-volume mailserver, nor do I have the hardware to really give the MTA that much of a workout (it just becomes disk-bound on my systems). Plus I use flat mbox files and the situation may be totally different with the more modern database-type mailstores. (Yeah, yeah, I know -- 1986 called and they want their file format back and all that. But it works for me.)
There are other choices out there for MTAs, and I'm sensitive to arguments in favor of them and I'm not trying to say that Postfix is necessarily the best possible thing out there for everyone, but at least in my experience it beats the hell out of Sendmail. If somebody wants to jump in here and discuss qmail or exim, and why they think they're great, please do.
Yeah, I'm with you there. Aside from inertia and sysadmin familiarity, I can't quite figure out why someone would consciously choose Sendmail over the alternatives today. There are other MTAs that are faster, more secure, and miles easier to work with, that offer an equivalent or better featureset, and are just as Free.
I think it's high time we put Sendmail out to pasture.
I think it's also worth pointing out that quite often, the ratings of many cheap power supplies are nothing but a dirty, dirty lie. Chances are, if you try to actually draw 400 watts from a "400W" house-brand PS that you picked up for $30, bad things are going to happen. At the very least, the power it produces may not be very clean. At worst, it might overheat.
... then as you get into its optimal operating range, it's reasonably efficient .. but then I suspect as you get close to its rated maximum (or less, for shitty supplies), I bet it drops back off again pretty quickly.
I've never seen a graph of power supply efficiency as a function of percentage-of-maximum load, but I suspect it would look like a bell curve of some sort. The efficiency is pretty low at very low load, because the power supply itself has a certain "overhead" that exists, no matter what you're drawing from it
I don't know what methods manufacturers use to claim the ratings on their power supplies, but it definitely isn't any definition of "maximum continuous load" that I've ever heard.
If I was going to put together a system, for whatever purpose, be it a workstation or a NAS or a firewall box, the one thing I would not want to skimp on is the power supply. That doesn't mean just going and getting one that's over-rated for the purpose you want to use it for, it means buying one that's not a total piece of crap to begin with, but also which isn't being redlined the whole time.
I've seen quite a few people put together nice custom PCs with very nice components, but then toss a no-name PS in there and have it burn out. I find this very odd, since in my experience it's the power supplies that can have the longest service life: that mobo you bought today is going to be scrap metal in a few years, but a good PS today could still be running a system 5-10 years from now.
Ohh good engineering and industrial design, where are't thou?
Here?
Jazzy Jaguar
That's so gay I think even the Mac fanboys would let you have it.
If you communicate ... asking Slashdot instead of discussing this with your wife...
I think you pretty much answered that one for yourself.
doing manual labor and all the jobs no American would apply for in the 1st place
This is crap, and it's the biggest lie currently being perpetuated in the media by the pro-immigration (generally agricultural) lobby. With the exceptions of perhaps some jobs viewed by the majority of people as grossly immoral, there are not any jobs that the legal American worker would not take on with just compensation.
I could think of dozens of gross and/or disgusting jobs that are far worse than manual labor (heck, the History Channel ran a whole week's worth of specials on stuff like that) which people happily do, because they're appropriately paid.
Americans aren't willing to take the same jobs that illegals take today, because everyone knows that they don't pay worth a damn. If it wasn't for the basically unlimited supply of cheap, disposable labor provided by our neighbors to the south, then employers would be forced to increase wages until they could attract legitimate employees. However in the current climate, they don't.
When people say that "Americans won't do the jobs that illegal immigrants do," what they really mean is "Americans won't do the jobs that illegal immigrants do, at the rates that employers would prefer to pay." Obviously, employers would prefer to pay someone less for the same work, so they'll come up with no end of justifications to maintain the status quo, so you hear these ridiculous claims made.
This is silly. Look, the average user may be dumb, but they're not so dumb they can't figure out how to rip a CD in iTunes. Especially when the alternative is paying a dollar a track from the iTMS, pretty much anyone can figure out how to put their CD in the drive, and press the rip button when it comes up in iTunes.
The people who can't be bothered to figure that out are probably so rich that they don't really care where the music comes from anyway, and aren't bothered by the fact that they'll have to repurchase it if they wanted to switch MP3 player brands.
Regular people rip their CDs. That was the original motto on iTunes, long before the iTMS: "Rip, Mix, Burn."
My understanding (and I don't do network security as a career, but I do hang out with people that do) is that putting root logins into the LDAP or AD server is considered bad practice. System root logins are supposed to be kept at the per-system level, so that if one machine gets broken, the attacker can't use the LDAP/AD system to propagate the break to the entire intranet.
The admin-types I know all have their regular user accounts on the LDAP system, so they can do single-sign-on like the rest of us (to their email, shared volumes, photocopiers, whatever), but their administration passwords to various systems are separate. (And occasionally written on business cards in their wallet, but that's a separate issue.)