Actually, I got to witness it as it happened in 2004. Good god was that a nightmare. NTS shut down the entirety of Daisy Hill and Oliver for at least a week. Spam was going out due to massive virus infections. The MAC registration system was already in place when this happened. In the ensuing insanity, they shut down at least the Ellsworth router (I think a Catalyst 8500) because it was going bonkers with all the traffic if I recall correctly. This screwed with the load balancing of the entire campus network. For a day and a half there was practically ZERO connectivity west of Naismith. When the campus connectivity came back up, the dorm room ports were switched on ONE BY ONE and ONLY after you finished a certain procedure including the installation of Sophos Antivirus and filled out an online form saying that you did. There was also something that said NTS would shut you down and fine you if you caused trouble that could snowball into something like what had just happened again.
Yes, in the early days of p2p, students in EECS would take advantage of the fact that the EECS department had all their own computers running Linux and you could do almost anything you wanted with them. This led to people compiling gtk-gnutella and downloading music. I believe the old EECS sysadmin at the time had a cron job that would look for mp3 files and delete them from the NFS server. Other than that I don't think he really cared all that much.
On ResNet, when you connected to the network you received an internal address that would route you to a computer registration page. You needed to supply at least your name and KU student ID number, and your MAC address was recorded. Only then would the DHCP server provide you with a routable IP and connect you to the Internet. That was four years ago. So yes, in the dorms, they sure as heck know you are when you do something you shouldn't.
The university's job first and foremost is to provide students with an education. Why should the universities use their own (usually limited) resources to do something that a private entity wants, which will detract from their ability to fulfill the goals of their mission, i.e. provide an education?
Also, the universities are not interfering with the law, if provided with a subpoena for student information they have to comply. All this does is tell the RIAA stormtroopers that THEY need to comply with the law and play nice with the courts.
Close, I think its about 36k students including the Medical School in KC and Wichita, and the Edwards campus. The network is old, open, in some places not well organized, and only in the last couple years has seen major updates. K-State even had functioning campus wireless before KU, although KU's is more advanced.
I'm proud that finally KU has stood up to outside pressure and is protecting its students. Coincidentally, their Academic Computing Services department (university wide IS/IT) is being completely reorganized.
Just a few days ago I was ripping into old KU for pandering to the MAFIAA, and now we've got this partial about-face. Makes me want to walk over to walk over to the chancellor's house and tell him that this was a good decision.
I, for one, agree that incompetence is running around. I have to work with an arrogant grad student in aerospace engineering that is destined for a GS-13 job at NASA. I'm not trolling, I work for a high profile aircraft design and analysis firm that often works with the local university, so I see this guy for the conman he is. Problem is the idiot isn't an engineer. He had ZERO engineering background prior to starting this masters degree, and every project he has undertaken as a grad student has failed. But he keeps getting good grades. He also didn't have to take most of the prerequisite classes, like structures and aerodynamics. And his thesis? Nobody has seen it, and the topic changes every week? Why? Because he's full of crap. Even today, he is helping load the moving truck to go to his fantastic job at NASA, and he hasn't even defended his thesis. Never mind that the job supposedly is contingent upon him actually passing. It sickens me to think that this guy is going to receive gobs of money to work with things he doesn't understand with the potential to cause harm to people.
I used to love NASA, and I always kept a meatball sticker on my car. But after seeing how connections trump incompetence and the threat to people's safety, I am sorely disappointed in NASA.
SSNs can be used to open lines of credit or bank accounts, obtain identification cards or drivers licenses. If Joe Conman has John Q. Public's SSN, he effectively has control of John Q. Public's assets (and thus can financially destroy him) and the ability to fraudulently obtain legal identification.
"I have no use for a serial...connectors,...Every one of those ports takes away...ports that could be something useful, such as USB"
Frankly, who cares if you have no use for serial connectors? There are millions of people across the world that will go, "ah, a consumer."
You do realize that RS-232 is far more pervasive, easy to use, easy to troubleshoot, and easy to develop for than USB, right? There are _billions_ of devices that interface over serial ports. The speed of USB is really quite irrelevant as well; not every device you interface to a computer needs to transfer data from 11 to 400Mbps. There are myriad applications where 115.2Kbps is fantastic. There is far more to the PC/workstation/entry level server world than playing games, downloading pr0n, and storing leeched movies. Serial ports are used every day on modern hardware, and if you don't believe me, try setting up a brand new Sun SPARC-based server. One of the first instructions is along the lines of "connect a serial cable to the console port..."
As far as designing the system goes, for passenger airliners, flight critical systems should be triply redundant, and mission critical systems dual redundant. For the sake of example lets call this proposed GPS based ATC system flight critical. There will be three systems, and you can have them compare their data and vote on what data is correct. If a system fails, and you start getting errors, the functioning systems alert the pilot to a problem. This is common in avionics design.
What security concern? Contrary to what Hollywood likes to make people believe, there is no "hacking" of avionics, and with the redundancy of aircraft systems, you would be hard pressed to make anything "lie".
There was an interesting article in the Lawrence Journal-World (local paper) about the University of Kansas' new policies regarding students accused of copyright violation. I recommend hunting around their website for it.
The University of Kansas will capitulate to anyone that threatens them. The chancellor is inept and doesn't care about the students. The IT Security Office is manned by a bunch of lunatics (all the awesome old guys from Academic Computing Services are gone) that will do anything in the name of "security." Also at this school, the attitude towards students is that they are always wrong, and the Great and Holy Chancellor and his Apostles in the administration are always right. They will destroy students to appease the RIAA, mark my words.
I'm intrigued that the RIAA would be threatening Internet2 members. Notice that the RIAA is a member of Internet2. What possible positive contribution can they make? Look at the rest of the members. I think that if I were a member institution threatened by them, I would petition for their expulsion from the network.
So am I going to get four copies of the book every week in my real mailbox in packages with nonexistent return addresses while a guy punches me, takes my credit card, and bills me for the books?
If you yell and scream enough about protocol compliance and FCC regulations (regardless of whether or not they apply, you just need to sound like you know what you're talking about) eventually they capitulate. In 2003 I yelled and screamed at Verizon and got them to activate an old Sony Zuma Z200. They told me they couldn't activate it because it was incompatible with their network. When I asked the CSR if he was sure, and he replied that he was, he gave in when I told him that I was talking to him on the phone at that very moment.
There are millions of perfectly good, usable, used cell phones out there that won't cost anyone more than $5. Its a shame that the providers are so environmentally negligent as to try and force people to upgrade to devices they don't need.
BTW, a friend of mine ran over her StarTAC (accidentally) with her car and it survived with only a small crack in the case. Love those old phones.
There were umpteen millions of StarTACs out there you can probably dig up, and they were great simple phones. I still have one as a backup. Any old Nextel will also do the trick. Man, I do miss the i1000plus. I could go five days without needing to charge it.
What limited nature? There is EVDO coverage to millions of people in the US, and Sprint, Verizon, and Alltel sell EVDO capable phones like hotcakes. In about a month, there will be EVDO rev. A coverage as well. Heck, I can stand in the middle of a field in central Kansas or Oklahoma and still have bandwidth that beats the pants off of EDGE.
My two AS/400s keep chugging along. They have never screwed up when they have been needed. With every other type of computer I've worked with, there has always been a case that I've gotten screwed by them. But those two old IBM mini-mainframes just do what they're told, so I'm happy.
Besides, I love the sounds of IPL'ing one of those monsters.
If there are people who can (and have) done it for numerous video game console platforms, I'm putting my money on somebody successfully getting the iPhone emulated. With a million code monkeys at a million keyboards...
Re:Great, so engineers are Masons now?
on
Explosives Camp
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· Score: 1
"Turning society into a series of closed, medieval-Masonic-ish 'knowledge cults' isn't going to help us in the long run."
Tell that to the administrators of public schools in the United States that continue to have skyrocketing tuition, increasingly difficult admissions requirements for no good reason, and focus more on cranking out four-year graduates than competent professionals. The universities will only let you have knowledge if you are willing to pay them exorbitant amounts of money.
The knowledge cults are already here, the divide between those with knowledge and those without is huge. Then again, I live in a university town, so perhaps I am jaded.
Our company writes software in Delphi, and we seriously considered using Kylix to release our software to Linux users in addition to Windows users. We ran into too many issues since the program had too many Windows specific things added in that it wasn't worth it to go that route.
Then there's the other side. We use a lot of scientific and engineering software that will only run on proprietary Unix systems. Recently, the developers of one of those programs decided to try and port their 64-bit Unix version of a CAD/CAM/CAE package to Linux to compete with their lighter and less stable Windows version. It didn't go over so well. They retained ye olde Motif UI on this brand spanking new program in 2006. After a lot of people were upset by this, the next release of the program saw a somewhat nicer UI. This same company is also planning on cutting development for HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX, and instead focusing on Windows XP, Windows XP x64, and Linux (64-bit), while porting their software to OS X (10.5 64-bit) with their next release.
In rural areas, we don't have major multilane highways. We have two lane roads with 55 to 70mph speed limits. One accident can cause major havoc, even in the middle of nowhere. To get to one of the next cities north of us, we have to cross a river. One of the bridges was closed for repairs. A farm semi took a turn too fast, tipped, and blocked the other bridge. The nearest river crossing for us was suddenly 27 miles away.
The intersection of US 56 and US 59 in Kansas was infamous for nasty accidents that have claimed many lives. It is smack dab in the middle of nowhere, but both roads are well traveled. Traffic slows quite a bit when you have KHP and county sheriffs trying to figure out traffic and what to do with the smashed cars, and the airborne medevac team trying to get the victims into a helicopter and to a hospital. Not everyone has cell phones out here either, and even if you do, there aren't guarantees that they will work. A system that could help report rural accidents would be very, very useful.
So since the firmware restore image is out in the open, is it possible to emulate an ARM CPU in QEMU and boot the image? That would be interesting to find out.
I use the Suns for structural and computational fluid dynamics analysis of prototype aircraft. Clients aren't particularly picky about speed, and neither am I. We are however, picky about numbers being correct. People aren't fond of airplanes falling out of the sky.
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Actually, I got to witness it as it happened in 2004. Good god was that a nightmare. NTS shut down the entirety of Daisy Hill and Oliver for at least a week. Spam was going out due to massive virus infections. The MAC registration system was already in place when this happened. In the ensuing insanity, they shut down at least the Ellsworth router (I think a Catalyst 8500) because it was going bonkers with all the traffic if I recall correctly. This screwed with the load balancing of the entire campus network. For a day and a half there was practically ZERO connectivity west of Naismith. When the campus connectivity came back up, the dorm room ports were switched on ONE BY ONE and ONLY after you finished a certain procedure including the installation of Sophos Antivirus and filled out an online form saying that you did. There was also something that said NTS would shut you down and fine you if you caused trouble that could snowball into something like what had just happened again.
Yes, in the early days of p2p, students in EECS would take advantage of the fact that the EECS department had all their own computers running Linux and you could do almost anything you wanted with them. This led to people compiling gtk-gnutella and downloading music. I believe the old EECS sysadmin at the time had a cron job that would look for mp3 files and delete them from the NFS server. Other than that I don't think he really cared all that much.
Rock Chalk, my friend.
On ResNet, when you connected to the network you received an internal address that would route you to a computer registration page. You needed to supply at least your name and KU student ID number, and your MAC address was recorded. Only then would the DHCP server provide you with a routable IP and connect you to the Internet. That was four years ago. So yes, in the dorms, they sure as heck know you are when you do something you shouldn't.
The university's job first and foremost is to provide students with an education. Why should the universities use their own (usually limited) resources to do something that a private entity wants, which will detract from their ability to fulfill the goals of their mission, i.e. provide an education?
Also, the universities are not interfering with the law, if provided with a subpoena for student information they have to comply. All this does is tell the RIAA stormtroopers that THEY need to comply with the law and play nice with the courts.
Close, I think its about 36k students including the Medical School in KC and Wichita, and the Edwards campus. The network is old, open, in some places not well organized, and only in the last couple years has seen major updates. K-State even had functioning campus wireless before KU, although KU's is more advanced.
I'm proud that finally KU has stood up to outside pressure and is protecting its students. Coincidentally, their Academic Computing Services department (university wide IS/IT) is being completely reorganized.
Just a few days ago I was ripping into old KU for pandering to the MAFIAA, and now we've got this partial about-face. Makes me want to walk over to walk over to the chancellor's house and tell him that this was a good decision.
Yes, I am quite aware. GS-13 is a pay grade. Did you know that?
I, for one, agree that incompetence is running around. I have to work with an arrogant grad student in aerospace engineering that is destined for a GS-13 job at NASA. I'm not trolling, I work for a high profile aircraft design and analysis firm that often works with the local university, so I see this guy for the conman he is. Problem is the idiot isn't an engineer. He had ZERO engineering background prior to starting this masters degree, and every project he has undertaken as a grad student has failed. But he keeps getting good grades. He also didn't have to take most of the prerequisite classes, like structures and aerodynamics. And his thesis? Nobody has seen it, and the topic changes every week? Why? Because he's full of crap. Even today, he is helping load the moving truck to go to his fantastic job at NASA, and he hasn't even defended his thesis. Never mind that the job supposedly is contingent upon him actually passing. It sickens me to think that this guy is going to receive gobs of money to work with things he doesn't understand with the potential to cause harm to people.
I used to love NASA, and I always kept a meatball sticker on my car. But after seeing how connections trump incompetence and the threat to people's safety, I am sorely disappointed in NASA.
SSNs can be used to open lines of credit or bank accounts, obtain identification cards or drivers licenses. If Joe Conman has John Q. Public's SSN, he effectively has control of John Q. Public's assets (and thus can financially destroy him) and the ability to fraudulently obtain legal identification.
"I have no use for a serial...connectors,...Every one of those ports takes away...ports that could be something useful, such as USB"
Frankly, who cares if you have no use for serial connectors? There are millions of people across the world that will go, "ah, a consumer."
You do realize that RS-232 is far more pervasive, easy to use, easy to troubleshoot, and easy to develop for than USB, right? There are _billions_ of devices that interface over serial ports. The speed of USB is really quite irrelevant as well; not every device you interface to a computer needs to transfer data from 11 to 400Mbps. There are myriad applications where 115.2Kbps is fantastic. There is far more to the PC/workstation/entry level server world than playing games, downloading pr0n, and storing leeched movies. Serial ports are used every day on modern hardware, and if you don't believe me, try setting up a brand new Sun SPARC-based server. One of the first instructions is along the lines of "connect a serial cable to the console port..."
So by extension are SCSI cables evil as well? Usually its the power connector that is troublesome to disconnect also, not the data connector.
Well, heck, if you want to play the "ease of connection" card, reach back in time and remember three letters: SCA.
As far as designing the system goes, for passenger airliners, flight critical systems should be triply redundant, and mission critical systems dual redundant. For the sake of example lets call this proposed GPS based ATC system flight critical. There will be three systems, and you can have them compare their data and vote on what data is correct. If a system fails, and you start getting errors, the functioning systems alert the pilot to a problem. This is common in avionics design.
What security concern? Contrary to what Hollywood likes to make people believe, there is no "hacking" of avionics, and with the redundancy of aircraft systems, you would be hard pressed to make anything "lie".
The University of Kansas will capitulate to anyone that threatens them. The chancellor is inept and doesn't care about the students. The IT Security Office is manned by a bunch of lunatics (all the awesome old guys from Academic Computing Services are gone) that will do anything in the name of "security." Also at this school, the attitude towards students is that they are always wrong, and the Great and Holy Chancellor and his Apostles in the administration are always right. They will destroy students to appease the RIAA, mark my words.
I'm intrigued that the RIAA would be threatening Internet2 members. Notice that the RIAA is a member of Internet2. What possible positive contribution can they make? Look at the rest of the members. I think that if I were a member institution threatened by them, I would petition for their expulsion from the network.
So am I going to get four copies of the book every week in my real mailbox in packages with nonexistent return addresses while a guy punches me, takes my credit card, and bills me for the books?
...and Dutch aircraft designers...lots of modern Western passenger planes and several GA planes flown today use an old Dutch guy's design methods.
If you yell and scream enough about protocol compliance and FCC regulations (regardless of whether or not they apply, you just need to sound like you know what you're talking about) eventually they capitulate. In 2003 I yelled and screamed at Verizon and got them to activate an old Sony Zuma Z200. They told me they couldn't activate it because it was incompatible with their network. When I asked the CSR if he was sure, and he replied that he was, he gave in when I told him that I was talking to him on the phone at that very moment.
There are millions of perfectly good, usable, used cell phones out there that won't cost anyone more than $5. Its a shame that the providers are so environmentally negligent as to try and force people to upgrade to devices they don't need.
BTW, a friend of mine ran over her StarTAC (accidentally) with her car and it survived with only a small crack in the case. Love those old phones.
There were umpteen millions of StarTACs out there you can probably dig up, and they were great simple phones. I still have one as a backup. Any old Nextel will also do the trick. Man, I do miss the i1000plus. I could go five days without needing to charge it.
RePet: Never lose your loved pets. Opening in a mall near you!
What limited nature? There is EVDO coverage to millions of people in the US, and Sprint, Verizon, and Alltel sell EVDO capable phones like hotcakes. In about a month, there will be EVDO rev. A coverage as well. Heck, I can stand in the middle of a field in central Kansas or Oklahoma and still have bandwidth that beats the pants off of EDGE.
My two AS/400s keep chugging along. They have never screwed up when they have been needed. With every other type of computer I've worked with, there has always been a case that I've gotten screwed by them. But those two old IBM mini-mainframes just do what they're told, so I'm happy.
Besides, I love the sounds of IPL'ing one of those monsters.
If there are people who can (and have) done it for numerous video game console platforms, I'm putting my money on somebody successfully getting the iPhone emulated. With a million code monkeys at a million keyboards...
"Turning society into a series of closed, medieval-Masonic-ish 'knowledge cults' isn't going to help us in the long run."
Tell that to the administrators of public schools in the United States that continue to have skyrocketing tuition, increasingly difficult admissions requirements for no good reason, and focus more on cranking out four-year graduates than competent professionals. The universities will only let you have knowledge if you are willing to pay them exorbitant amounts of money.
The knowledge cults are already here, the divide between those with knowledge and those without is huge. Then again, I live in a university town, so perhaps I am jaded.
Our company writes software in Delphi, and we seriously considered using Kylix to release our software to Linux users in addition to Windows users. We ran into too many issues since the program had too many Windows specific things added in that it wasn't worth it to go that route.
Then there's the other side. We use a lot of scientific and engineering software that will only run on proprietary Unix systems. Recently, the developers of one of those programs decided to try and port their 64-bit Unix version of a CAD/CAM/CAE package to Linux to compete with their lighter and less stable Windows version. It didn't go over so well. They retained ye olde Motif UI on this brand spanking new program in 2006. After a lot of people were upset by this, the next release of the program saw a somewhat nicer UI. This same company is also planning on cutting development for HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX, and instead focusing on Windows XP, Windows XP x64, and Linux (64-bit), while porting their software to OS X (10.5 64-bit) with their next release.
Just thought I'd throw that in the mix.
In rural areas, we don't have major multilane highways. We have two lane roads with 55 to 70mph speed limits. One accident can cause major havoc, even in the middle of nowhere. To get to one of the next cities north of us, we have to cross a river. One of the bridges was closed for repairs. A farm semi took a turn too fast, tipped, and blocked the other bridge. The nearest river crossing for us was suddenly 27 miles away.
The intersection of US 56 and US 59 in Kansas was infamous for nasty accidents that have claimed many lives. It is smack dab in the middle of nowhere, but both roads are well traveled. Traffic slows quite a bit when you have KHP and county sheriffs trying to figure out traffic and what to do with the smashed cars, and the airborne medevac team trying to get the victims into a helicopter and to a hospital. Not everyone has cell phones out here either, and even if you do, there aren't guarantees that they will work. A system that could help report rural accidents would be very, very useful.
So since the firmware restore image is out in the open, is it possible to emulate an ARM CPU in QEMU and boot the image? That would be interesting to find out.
I use the Suns for structural and computational fluid dynamics analysis of prototype aircraft. Clients aren't particularly picky about speed, and neither am I. We are however, picky about numbers being correct. People aren't fond of airplanes falling out of the sky.