I know I'm following up to my own post, but I've just been looking around Gleick's homepage for the first time, and discovered that/Faster/ has its own domain:
As the article mentions, Gleick's most recent book is/Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything/, and it is an outstanding book. I highly recommend it.
Like most sci-fi novels, one book is planned, but the author is pressured to write more, and this definitely shows in the latter books.
Read the foreward that Herbert wrote for one of the later volumes. He talked about how he planned out many of the novels before sitting down to write the first one, and how certain scenes had to be shifted between the books.
Doesn't sound to me like he was pressured into more...
we don't know what else it's looking for, or who it's contacting.
Anyone concerned about security should already know how to use tracing tools to see what a program is doing. All the good Unixes come with some kind of native execution tracing tool (called trace or truss or whatever) as well as network tools to monitor connections. Plus you have all of the various third-party tools available as well.
If you think it's looking for specific files other than the DoS programs, trace it on a test machine. If you think it's contacting the FBI and uploading your pr0n collection, put the NIC into promiscuous mode and watch for packets. The program is no different from any of the others.
Personally, I suspect that the programs are okay, if only because the FBI knows that the programs will be under this kind of scrutiny. They're not stupid.
I'll probably be checking off the little "don't want to read any more of this author" stuff for Mr. Katz in the near future, just because I value my bandwidth.
Having said that, here's my question: You've said yourself that you are not a technical person. What makes you think that you can speak for those of us who are?
(That isn't necessarily a flame, although I realize it sounds hostile. I'm merely curious and asking for qualifications.)
Find a copy of Isaac Asimov's nonfiction collection of essays. One of them is an essay on cloning that's now around two decades old (in which he mentions, among other things, that the word "clone" comes from the Greek word for "twig" but nobody on/. gives a rat's ass about that:-).
He wrote this song, which is to be sung to the tune of "Home on the Range" and has some five or six versus plus the chorus. The real first verse goes:
Oh give me a clone Of my own flesh and bone With the Y chromosome changed to X. And when I'm alone With my own little clone We will both think of nothing but sex.
The others are fscking hilarious.
I'm not going to type the rest because a) it's probably infringement or something, b) you should buy the book anyhow because it's really good, c) I'm tired, and d) now that this thread has existed for more than ninety minutes, all of/. has kneejerked their reactions and nobody's reading it anymore.
Asimov also mentions his guest speech to a Holmes appreciation society a few nights later, at which he brought the house down by singing an alternative version: "Oh give me a clone / Of the great Sherlock Holmes / With the Y..."
Eli the Bearded posted a perl script to alt.hackers recently that edits the Netscape binary and disables certain Javascript "features".
If you don't read alt.hackers or have no idea what a really cool hack that is, then fire up whatever browser the Linux Lemmings are using this week and go to DejaNews. (I don't recall whether his article has an X-No-Archive header in it or not, YMMV.)
...and likewise, don't want to set a precendent of "Oh, just ignore them, they'll have to take years to decrypt it." Forcing a criminal to obey the law sets a much better tone than making the government dance to the criminal's tune.
(This holds in general, regardless of whether you think Mitnick (the specific case) is "guilty" or not.)
My two timeslices, is all.
Re:Absolutely -- ask a professional instead of a k
on
Free Solaris 8
·
· Score: 2
Heh. I'm 25, not 50.
The reason I assume that the flamers are all kids is because they ARE.
Absolutely -- ask a professional instead of a kid
on
Free Solaris 8
·
· Score: 2
Graymalkin's points are all very good, most especially this one:
Come on people, quit the "if it ain't Linux we bash it" attitude.
Solaris 7 (and there is a perfectly good reason for dropping the "2." as I've stated before) is much better than previous versions of Solaris, and Solaris 8 shows every sign of making it even better. Just because it doesn't have a penguin and allow 12-year-olds to form corporations based on it doesn't mean it's poor.
We use a great deal of Solaris here in a professional research environment. We also use Linux on a laptop or two when somebody needs to do a traveling demo. The idea is balance, people -- the entire world running Linux would be little different from the entire world running Solaris or the entire world running WindowsNiceTry.
Those of you still going through puberty may now begin the flaming.
There are TVs scattered through the hallways where I work, switching back and forth between CNN and an internal USAF news network. On the CNN report I just watched that covers this story, there's a brief snapshot of one of the NWS scientists hacking away at a workstation running CDE.
That's why there's a two-week limit to the forecasting times. After that, CDE has exhausted the swap space.
Our dorm rooms had telephone lines made out of human hair. Dialing up to campus involved horrible line noise that would spew all over your text editor. It was more efficient just to walk up to campus (through the snow or rain or whatever), sit in the labs, and walk back.
The year after I graduated, they installed fiber optics. I recently dated a girl who is about four years younger than me and had just moved out of the same dorms. She mentioned that $her_isp is really slow and crappy, and that she really misses having such a high-speed connection. Made me feel ancient.
(Of course,/all/ of my connections were high speed because I didn't have to compete with eight million fucking yuppies trying to stream radio stations from the other coast.)
Yeah, I am also a computer geek (I posted the parent comment to which you responded), but I will be the first to advocate serious restraint in adding technology to schools. For now, at least.
Reasons include the technophobia of the teachers that other have mentioned. Plus the undeniable fact that the typical "if we through enough money at them, the sudents will get smarter on their own" approach is utter unadulterated bullshit. The point is to teach the students to THINK, not to just blindly turn to the computer as the Source Of All Knowledge. Spending thousands of dollars on new computers won't do a damn thing by itself. Concentrating their schooling in computers at an early age can easily have this effect if we aren't careful.
(Why should you listen to me? All of the jobs I held while in school, from high school through college, were technology-related jobs working for the school itself. My mother is currently the director of education technology for the city school system, and she and I talk shop when I go over to visit (which hasn't been for a while, sorry Mom). I'm very familiar with how technology is viewed at different stages of the cirriculum.)
While he is correct in saying that the educational software needs to be as friendly as possible, there is a more serious problem that, frankly, Woz and you and I can't do much about. The teachers in early education need to understand, use, and appreciate the computer as well.
Currently, far, far too many teachers view computers as either:
A glorified Game Boy, good for nothing but entertainment.
A replacement.
I won't tell any horror stories here because I've been typing all day long and I'm tired, but the current generation of teachers are not happy about the computer "taking over" their classrooms. As those teachers retire and newer ones are hired (or not, depending on whether your community believes in passing school levies), this problem should diminish, slowly, iff the new teachers understand that the computer is nothing more than another tool to be put to good use. It can't replace them. (No, "iff" isn't a typo.)
We'll get very limited returns on improved software if the people being taught to introduce that software belittle it.
...which at one point (early 90's) was apparently read by him directly. I'm certain by now that it's filtered by grad students -- consider the amount of spamcrap the Doctor must receive!
On an unrelated note, does anyone on that side of the pond have a copy of the television advertisements for "Specsavers" (??) that the interview mentioned? I haven't even seen the Simpsons appearance, and I never knew that he'd done commercials!
Uh, look closely. SCMP isn't the one reporting the decision. They are only reporting what another paper has said.
The decision to ban W2K was reported by the Yangcheng Evening News. And they don't need to be lying, as another Coward suggested; they only need to be misinformed.
Chinese Government doesn't necessarily agree
on
China Banning Win2k
·
· Score: 5
For those of you who are posting kneejerk reactions without reading the article:
Officials at several government ministries said they were unaware of such a policy.
The story is posted by a Chinese newspaper, and we all know how informed our own media is... Maybe it's true; I'll believe it when I see it, that's all.
I used to think it was a bunch of marketing bullcrap until I installed Solaris 7 and read through its documentation. Sun may have gotten it right on this one.
The reasoning works like this:
A change in the major version numbering indicates some kind of rewrite or incompatible change.
There will never be a version of Solaris 2.x that is not backwards-compatible. (This is by decree, that is, such changes will be disallowed.)
Thus, Solaris 3.0 will never happen. Only more versions of Solaris 2.x.
The "2." is therefore redundant and pointless and can be dropped.
Given that Sun is trying to speed up their release cycle, for smaller, quicker changes -- Solaris 8 is available and the Solaris 9 source tree has existed for some time now -- this actually does make sense.
Even though you could see the digits at the base of the ball spell out "2000" before they lit up, I was desperately hoping that when midnight hit, they would actually light up "1900" instead.
> For example, I just [...] but still, life is good.
Exactly. I'm in a very similar situation. I've been out of school longer, and this job gets boring easily, but it pays very well and I have some good hobbies. Once my debts are paid off, I will be much happier.
And I live in dinky little Dayton, where there is next-to-zero night life, big sports teams, or anything else that you might want. So everything's relative.
I think our 'instant availability' society is the cause. They know I can give then a simplified, concise answer in seconds, while referring to the manual may cut into their coffee break and actually require them learning something!
No kidding. And it's not just Linux, either, because the jump-on-da-shiny-Web bandwagon dorks over lots of communities other than Linux.
For example, the Sun-Managers mailing list is an unmoderated high-response list for Sun-related emergencies. Anything that isn't directly dealing with Sun, and urgent, doesn't belong. That doesn't mean that those questions don't need to be asked, just that they need to go to a newsgroup or something else. (And this is all spelled out in the FAQ.)
What's it like today? Fucking useless. "I know this is supposed to be only for Suns, so forgive me about this HP-UX question, but" blather blather blather. One guy posted an "emergency" problem because he couldn't create any files in his home directory. The problem? No write permission to that directory. He had no clue what dr-xr-xr-x meant in ls(1) output. He'd never read a man page or bought/stole/borrowed a book.
There were occasionally some actual emergencies posted, and I tried my hardest to help those fellow victims. Eventually I got tired of the sheer amount of laziness and unsubscribed.
My point? Don't bother. It's a complete waste of effort. Those who actually use documentation will know how to get it, and how to produce it. If they really want to learn, I'll help, but if they're in too much of a hurry to read, I'm in too much of a hurry to write.
I agree completely! I beat my co-developers over the head with this saying all the time. But...
If you develop a web browser, you would probably be insane if you did it in Java (I would love to be proved wrong) because it would be so much slower. If you develop a complex server side application in C/C++ or Perl, you're nuts because there's NO WAY you will achieve the same quality in the amount of time you can achieve it in Java.
This is kind of funny...
My approach is to use, say, C++ as the server-side language, because of the richer feature space and the quality of code. I use Java as the client-side GUI because it's trivial to build GUIs in Java, and because the code speed is not as important -- most of the time the human is still the slowest thing in the loop.
I should add, however, that I don't use Java to write web applets (it's not that I use other languages for that, it's that I don't write web applets at all). I use Java to generate a complete GUI application, and then use an ahead-of-time compiler to create optimized binaries for the platforms that I know are going to use it. (See, for example, Per Bothner's paper on treating Java as just another language.)
This just goes to show how programmers can have exactly opposing views, and both be right.:-)
Always worked pretty well for me under Solaris. I especially liked the little colored "threads" that showed the multiple connections: if a data connection was still open, I would wait, but once enough of the page was loaded that all the remaining connections were the "image" color, then I could safely click "Stop". No bigass images sucking down my bandwidth, and I know that all the HTML/Java/Javascript/etc has arrived.:-)
I gave it up because it can't do forms and pop-up boxes worth CRAP -- even when communicating with Sun's own site to download security reports! As a Sun sysadmin, I/need/ those to work... back to Netscrape.
Slashdot Mirror
I know I'm following up to my own post, but I've just been looking around Gleick's homepage for the first time, and discovered that /Faster/ has its own domain:
http://fasterbook.com/
As the article mentions, Gleick's most recent book is /Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything/, and it is an outstanding book. I highly recommend it.
:-)
It even quotes from the Jargon File.
Read the foreward that Herbert wrote for one of the later volumes. He talked about how he planned out many of the novels before sitting down to write the first one, and how certain scenes had to be shifted between the books.
Doesn't sound to me like he was pressured into more...
we don't know what else it's looking for, or who it's contacting.
Anyone concerned about security should already know how to use tracing tools to see what a program is doing. All the good Unixes come with some kind of native execution tracing tool (called trace or truss or whatever) as well as network tools to monitor connections. Plus you have all of the various third-party tools available as well.
If you think it's looking for specific files other than the DoS programs, trace it on a test machine. If you think it's contacting the FBI and uploading your pr0n collection, put the NIC into promiscuous mode and watch for packets. The program is no different from any of the others.
Personally, I suspect that the programs are okay, if only because the FBI knows that the programs will be under this kind of scrutiny. They're not stupid.
I'll probably be checking off the little "don't want to read any more of this author" stuff for Mr. Katz in the near future, just because I value my bandwidth.
Having said that, here's my question: You've said yourself that you are not a technical person. What makes you think that you can speak for those of us who are?
(That isn't necessarily a flame, although I realize it sounds hostile. I'm merely curious and asking for qualifications.)
Find a copy of Isaac Asimov's nonfiction collection of essays. One of them is an essay on cloning that's now around two decades old (in which he mentions, among other things, that the word "clone" comes from the Greek word for "twig" but nobody on /. gives a rat's ass about that :-).
/. has kneejerked their reactions and nobody's reading it anymore.
He wrote this song, which is to be sung to the tune of "Home on the Range" and has some five or six versus plus the chorus. The real first verse goes:
Oh give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With the Y chromosome changed to X.
And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex.
The others are fscking hilarious.
I'm not going to type the rest because a) it's probably infringement or something, b) you should buy the book anyhow because it's really good, c) I'm tired, and d) now that this thread has existed for more than ninety minutes, all of
Asimov also mentions his guest speech to a Holmes appreciation society a few nights later, at which he brought the house down by singing an alternative version: "Oh give me a clone / Of the great Sherlock Holmes / With the Y..."
Eli the Bearded posted a perl script to alt.hackers recently that edits the Netscape binary and disables certain Javascript "features".
If you don't read alt.hackers or have no idea what a really cool hack that is, then fire up whatever browser the Linux Lemmings are using this week and go to DejaNews. (I don't recall whether his article has an X-No-Archive header in it or not, YMMV.)
...and likewise, don't want to set a precendent of "Oh, just ignore them, they'll have to take years to decrypt it." Forcing a criminal to obey the law sets a much better tone than making the government dance to the criminal's tune.
(This holds in general, regardless of whether you think Mitnick (the specific case) is "guilty" or not.)
My two timeslices, is all.
Heh. I'm 25, not 50.
The reason I assume that the flamers are all kids is because they ARE.
Graymalkin's points are all very good, most especially this one:
Solaris 7 (and there is a perfectly good reason for dropping the "2." as I've stated before) is much better than previous versions of Solaris, and Solaris 8 shows every sign of making it even better. Just because it doesn't have a penguin and allow 12-year-olds to form corporations based on it doesn't mean it's poor.We use a great deal of Solaris here in a professional research environment. We also use Linux on a laptop or two when somebody needs to do a traveling demo. The idea is balance, people -- the entire world running Linux would be little different from the entire world running Solaris or the entire world running WindowsNiceTry.
Those of you still going through puberty may now begin the flaming.
There are TVs scattered through the hallways where I work, switching back and forth between CNN and an internal USAF news network. On the CNN report I just watched that covers this story, there's a brief snapshot of one of the NWS scientists hacking away at a workstation running CDE.
That's why there's a two-week limit to the forecasting times. After that, CDE has exhausted the swap space.
Our dorm rooms had telephone lines made out of human hair. Dialing up to campus involved horrible line noise that would spew all over your text editor. It was more efficient just to walk up to campus (through the snow or rain or whatever), sit in the labs, and walk back.
/all/ of my connections were high speed because I didn't have to compete with eight million fucking yuppies trying to stream radio stations from the other coast.)
The year after I graduated, they installed fiber optics. I recently dated a girl who is about four years younger than me and had just moved out of the same dorms. She mentioned that $her_isp is really slow and crappy, and that she really misses having such a high-speed connection. Made me feel ancient.
(Of course,
Bummer, they've added a bunch of filtered public addresses. I can understand it completely, of course. I wonder if the old one still works?
Hmm.
Yeah, I am also a computer geek (I posted the parent comment to which you responded), but I will be the first to advocate serious restraint in adding technology to schools. For now, at least.
Reasons include the technophobia of the teachers that other have mentioned. Plus the undeniable fact that the typical "if we through enough money at them, the sudents will get smarter on their own" approach is utter unadulterated bullshit.
The point is to teach the students to THINK, not to just blindly turn to the computer as the Source Of All Knowledge. Spending thousands of dollars on new computers won't do a damn thing by itself. Concentrating their schooling in computers at an early age can easily have this effect if we aren't careful.
(Why should you listen to me? All of the jobs I held while in school, from high school through college, were technology-related jobs working for the school itself. My mother is currently the director of education technology for the city school system, and she and I talk shop when I go over to visit (which hasn't been for a while, sorry Mom). I'm very familiar with how technology is viewed at different stages of the cirriculum.)
While he is correct in saying that the educational software needs to be as friendly as possible, there is a more serious problem that, frankly, Woz and you and I can't do much about. The teachers in early education need to understand, use, and appreciate the computer as well.
Currently, far, far too many teachers view computers as either:
- A glorified Game Boy, good for nothing but entertainment.
- A replacement.
I won't tell any horror stories here because I've been typing all day long and I'm tired, but the current generation of teachers are not happy about the computer "taking over" their classrooms. As those teachers retire and newer ones are hired (or not, depending on whether your community believes in passing school levies), this problem should diminish, slowly, iff the new teachers understand that the computer is nothing more than another tool to be put to good use. It can't replace them. (No, "iff" isn't a typo.)We'll get very limited returns on improved software if the people being taught to introduce that software belittle it.
...which at one point (early 90's) was apparently read by him directly. I'm certain by now that it's filtered by grad students -- consider the amount of spamcrap the Doctor must receive!
On an unrelated note, does anyone on that side of the pond have a copy of the television advertisements for "Specsavers" (??) that the interview mentioned? I haven't even seen the Simpsons appearance, and I never knew that he'd done commercials!
Uh, look closely. SCMP isn't the one reporting the decision. They are only reporting what another paper has said.
The decision to ban W2K was reported by the Yangcheng Evening News. And they don't need to be lying, as another Coward suggested; they only need to be misinformed.
For those of you who are posting kneejerk reactions without reading the article:
The story is posted by a Chinese newspaper, and we all know how informed our own media is... Maybe it's true; I'll believe it when I see it, that's all.
I used to think it was a bunch of marketing bullcrap until I installed Solaris 7 and read through its documentation. Sun may have gotten it right on this one.
The reasoning works like this:
Given that Sun is trying to speed up their release cycle, for smaller, quicker changes -- Solaris 8 is available and the Solaris 9 source tree has existed for some time now -- this actually does make sense.
Even though you could see the digits at the base of the ball spell out "2000" before they lit up, I was desperately hoping that when midnight hit, they would actually light up "1900" instead.
/that/ joke.
/Everybody/ would get
Nope, no automounter IIRC. Just stupidity.
> It's been open with Sun Service for like 3 weeks.
Wow... time to escalate!
> For example, I just [...] but still, life is good.
Exactly. I'm in a very similar situation. I've been out of school longer, and this job gets boring easily, but it pays very well and I have some good hobbies. Once my debts are paid off, I will be much happier.
And I live in dinky little Dayton, where there is next-to-zero night life, big sports teams, or anything else that you might want. So everything's relative.
I think our 'instant availability' society is the cause. They know I can give then a simplified, concise answer in seconds, while referring to the manual may cut into their coffee break and actually require them learning something!
No kidding. And it's not just Linux, either, because the jump-on-da-shiny-Web bandwagon dorks over lots of communities other than Linux.
For example, the Sun-Managers mailing list is an unmoderated high-response list for Sun-related emergencies. Anything that isn't directly dealing with Sun, and urgent, doesn't belong. That doesn't mean that those questions don't need to be asked, just that they need to go to a newsgroup or something else. (And this is all spelled out in the FAQ.)
What's it like today? Fucking useless. "I know this is supposed to be only for Suns, so forgive me about this HP-UX question, but" blather blather blather. One guy posted an "emergency" problem because he couldn't create any files in his home directory. The problem? No write permission to that directory. He had no clue what dr-xr-xr-x meant in ls(1) output. He'd never read a man page or bought/stole/borrowed a book.
There were occasionally some actual emergencies posted, and I tried my hardest to help those fellow victims. Eventually I got tired of the sheer amount of laziness and unsubscribed.
My point? Don't bother. It's a complete waste of effort. Those who actually use documentation will know how to get it, and how to produce it. If they really want to learn, I'll help, but if they're in too much of a hurry to read, I'm in too much of a hurry to write.
Pick the right tool for the right job.
I agree completely! I beat my co-developers over the head with this saying all the time. But...
If you develop a web browser, you would probably be insane if you did it in Java (I would love to be proved wrong) because it would be so much slower. If you develop a complex server side application in C/C++ or Perl, you're nuts because there's NO WAY you will achieve the same quality in the amount of time you can achieve it in Java.
This is kind of funny...
My approach is to use, say, C++ as the server-side language, because of the richer feature space and the quality of code. I use Java as the client-side GUI because it's trivial to build GUIs in Java, and because the code speed is not as important -- most of the time the human is still the slowest thing in the loop.
I should add, however, that I don't use Java to write web applets (it's not that I use other languages for that, it's that I don't write web applets at all). I use Java to generate a complete GUI application, and then use an ahead-of-time compiler to create optimized binaries for the platforms that I know are going to use it. (See, for example, Per Bothner's paper on treating Java as just another language.)
This just goes to show how programmers can have exactly opposing views, and both be right. :-)
Always worked pretty well for me under Solaris. I especially liked the little colored "threads" that showed the multiple connections: if a data connection was still open, I would wait, but once enough of the page was loaded that all the remaining connections were the "image" color, then I could safely click "Stop". No bigass images sucking down my bandwidth, and I know that all the HTML/Java/Javascript/etc has arrived.
I gave it up because it can't do forms and pop-up boxes worth CRAP -- even when communicating with Sun's own site to download security reports! As a Sun sysadmin, I