Just a brief nitpick here, but I think that most versions of getty actually spawn login, which is what reads the shadow file. But they can only read the shadow file as they have root privileges, there is no "and stuff like...". Just root. You'll note that passwd can no longer be used by normal users if you take away its SUID 0 status.
You can set it up to use the old-school style and hold hashes in/etc/passwd, but it's generally frowned upon.
You could set it up to use NetInfo if you had the inclination, though I expect few people do, as you'd probably need to have a couple of Linux machines connected to a NeXT network. People with Linux+Mac have no good reason not to use LDAP or something equally interoperable:-)
I'm still not sure why you're picking on Twain though
No reason other than that the OP cited him amongst the four or so great wits of literary history, and I happened to remember an ironically countertype quote I had once read. I'm afraid it boils down to that; pure argumentativity on my part;).
Anyway, thanks for the stimulating discussion. Sure beats working...
Are you serious? Twain is bad for saying something negative about God? Give me a break.
As a fully paid-up and life-long agnostic it wasn't a particularly offensive comment; that wasn't why I decided to post it. It was the irony value. Consider that Twain namechecks God[s] and religion a few times throughout his work. A hastily-pasted example:
It is by the goodness of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either.
India has 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all. In religion, other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.
The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
Fair call on Churchill though. 1937 was a bit late in the day for any sensible person to find anything admirable about Hitler - although Kristallnacht and Munich were still to come.
TBF Hitler did make a reputation for himself as being a charismatic leader, and Churchill was a fairly right-wing animal with sympathies for the guy. Politically and morally they were in similar boats - for instance with regard to that 'lively terror' quote, in the early 1920s Churchill ordered the gassing of the Kurds in the north of Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in order to subjugate them under Baghdad rule. That's something our countries just removed a leader from there for doing.
So why is one genocidal monster a national (or even international) hero, and the other pillaried worldwide? The victor will never be asked if he told the truth. Guess who;)
I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes... to spread a lively terror - as President of the Air Council, 1919
If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable (as Hitler) to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations ? - writing in "Great Contemporaries", 1937
Twain
Who wrote such gems as:
He says naively, outspokenly and without suggestion of embarrassment "I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God."
It is only another way of saying "I, the Lord thy God, am a small God; fretful about small things"
apt-get does a little to resolve this; i.e. you still sometimes need to install shedloads of additional packages but it *should* DTRT and get the correct packages for you. There also exists apt-rpm for Red-Hat derived distros.
Other than that, ports-based systems such as FreeBSD's, Gentoo's and Darwin's seem to do a good job; you run a makefile and they get the appropriate code, configure it in the optimal manner for your system, compile and install it all in one go. In a well-written ports system it's rare to require user intervention except when necessary.
I thought I'd better check what you said, given that it sounded wrong. So I did. And it would appear that criterion is the singular, criteria (less commonly criterions) is the plural, but that criteria is not acceptable in the singular. So the phrase "an exit criteria" is wrong.
Although, I don't see how this will work. Almost all of the students I know use something free as in free, like Debian, Slack, Gentoo, or downloaded Mandrake. I'm the odd one out using SuSE, have done the best part of half a decade. The computing service's Linux cluster runs Debian. Anyone who wants to try out a Linux OS can get it for free already, so being able to get it for cheap from someone else isn't going to turn any heads.
That's only recently become true. Up until about the launch of Jaguar, they were the biggest Mac development shop in the world full stop. Apple just looked after the Operating System, and let other people do most of the userland software. Try and recall all of the Apple product lines that ran on OS 9, or any pre-iLife OS X software written by Apple.
So say someone calls Gator yspay areway [encryption used to avoid confrontation;-)]. Then Gator say "Oi! Our stuff isn't yspay areway!" and sue that person's ass. The courts say "but hold on, it *is* yspay areway" and spank Gator down. Does that means it would then be legal to call Gator yspay areway?
Only the extent to which SSL is used, which I admit to having misread from the amsn website. The rest is correct, especially (as DD has already said) the punchline that no-one has been kickbanned from the MSN chat network.
What happened was that yesterday, the older MSNP8 protocol for accessing the MSN Messenger Network was discontinued; only clients capable of the new MSNP9 protocol can now connect.
MSNP9 is actually better than the previous protocol (as well as incompatible:-( but you can't have everything) because it negotiates via the Secure Sockets Layer; i.e. your IMs are encrypted with a strong algorithm and cannot easily be read by people with NICs in promiscuous mode on your network hardware.
There already exist third-party clients that can make use of this newer MSNP9 system; if your client does not then maybe it's worth (i)switching, (ii)asking the maintainers to add support, (iii)grabbing the source and doing it yourself you lazy wossname! However, Trillian frmo Cerulean Studios apparently does the business. I am currently connected to the MSN Network by Al's MSN; you must use at least v0.83 in order to connect.
If you know of a root exploit for AmigaDOS or Workbench, I'd be interested in hearing it. As a single-user operating system it's quite hard to get root on:-)
The oldest machine I own that's actually in business use is my Sinclair QL from 1984, upon which my accounts are based (along with some of my writings, posted to the internet where appropriate via a serial link to my PC). Apart from that, I've got programs I wrote on my Amiga 600 (1992) which are still used as part of my degree (it's fractal aggregation code written in AMOS), and I still hack about on my Spectrum (1982, hence the name ZX82) and Dragon 32 (also 1982). I've also got some Sun Ultras (~1996) and a SPARCStation (~god knows, probably around 1993).
At work, the oldest production computer is a NeXT cube which weighs in at 1988. There are some VT100s and other terminals, though; these *may* be older but I don't have info to hand on that.
I know this is going to sound like flamebait, and if you feel it is then be my guest in using the moderation system to let me, and everyone else, know.
Where SCO press is concerned, Do Not Feed The Troll. SCO are undoubtedly revelling in the fact that every time their marketing droids put pen to paper, their output is mirrored on/., newsforge, linux.com and any number of similar sites. I expect they use this coverage to show their investors how seriously the community takes SCO's business, and how the Linux-using and Open Source Software communities are incredibly worried about the fact that 'they stole SCO IP and used it in their anti-competitive software'. In short, SCO profit from the coverage, and Darl McBride's worth increases with every SCO post on/..
We as a community should not be furthering this action. SCO proved long ago that their statements do very little to reflect reality, and that they are not averse to publishing absurd comments in order to try and gain a few share points. Indeed, at the time IBM showed us what a large organisation of UNIX-types should do in such a situation; they ignored SCO. SGI have since taken a similar approach. However, regular statements by ESR and others, alongside frequent coverage on sites such as this or Newsforge, have shown that the Open Source community cannot help but to rise to a troll's bait.
This may be because of the lack of centralisation of the community, i.e. there is no single mouthpiece from which views are aired. Whereas IBM or the like can carefully control the statements issued by its press department, should someone like ESR decide to express their opinion on a subject, it is erroneously considered to represent the wishes and views of the community as a whole. Now while I'm not advocating restrictions to free speech, I do think that such publications or announcements should be self-vetted to consider whether or not they are helping the very people who wish to harm our winderfully open community.
In summary, as I said at the top, SCO are trolls. Please do not feed them in the future.
From my limited experience, there's a very good (and platform-agnostic) BIOS in the form of Open Firmware, which does lots of useful stuff and a lot more. The PC BIOSes like Phoenix and American Megatrends work fine on PC, but don't contain enough diagnostic information to be that useful. Frankly, why more BIOS manus. don't use Open Firmware, as it's a fantastically good system for both setting up a machine, and troubleshooting. It also contains a complete Forth system 8-)
and my mentality has always been that if someone needs the software then they'll pay for it to exist, even if they don't want to sell the source code afterwards. And to a large extent, this works. In fat, it works perfectly. I've never had anyone say "well you're writing free software, so why should we pay you?". In fact, often the software I write is for universities, who would rather release the code open source than hang on to it. This is just the mentality that unis have, I guess.
Go to school and revise Emergent Behaviour. Look at Conway's Game of Life. Look at any one of hundreds of other examples, including multicellular biological organisms and colonies.
I agree with your statement about the dirtiness of nuclear power. However, remember that suitable Uranium, Plutonium or whatever your particular reactor uses are in short supply just as fossil fuels are, though I think it's expected that nuclear fuel will last longer (on the order of centuries as opposed to decades for coal or oil - look out GWB!:-).
OTOH, I raise issue with your discussion of the CO2 emissions involved in erecting wind farms. I've been reading up about the construction of wind farms (they plan to build one in Portland Harbour - I live in Weymouth[*]) and accept the ~84Gg CO2 figure you give. Remember though, that wind farms only need to be built once during their career. Think of how much CO2 a coal-fired station - which has an efficiency of about 29%[@] puts out over its whole career, including constructing the huge concrete cooling towers. Wind still wins.
Also, wind farms are generally nicer-looking. Down in the West Country (and over in Holland, FWIW) they're minor tourist attractions.
[*]They're using a few big masts instead of a lot of small ones; the test station is 30m (~100ft) tall.
[@]Nuclear power stations are less efficient than this - about 23% - because of the complexity of handling the fuel after it's been used.
The problem with the London blackout was a lack of redundant generating/distributing structure. Ironically, Transport for London had only very recently had a large ceremony in which they switched off the generator that had been powering the Tube, DLR, etc. These train networks were switched over to the national grid. Because of this, when two small (and easily repairable) failures in the distribution network occurred and the Grid provision to London and the south-east was interrupted, the trains and stations were rendered inactive. Only recently they would have been able to carry on unaffected thanks to their own generator, which the Mayor of London (Red Ken Livingstone) had insisted should continue suplying TfL.
So is a free market to blame? The problem here was a lack of redundant equipment, which was definitely a cost-saving exercise. But whether the costs are reduced in order to increase profit, or in order to reduce the tax burden, is insignificant in context. So no, in the case of the London blackout a free market wasn't the cause of the problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a brief nitpick here, but I think that most versions of getty actually spawn login, which is what reads the shadow file. But they can only read the shadow file as they have root privileges, there is no "and stuff like...". Just root. You'll note that passwd can no longer be used by normal users if you take away its SUID 0 status.
You could set it up to use NetInfo if you had the inclination, though I expect few people do, as you'd probably need to have a couple of Linux machines connected to a NeXT network. People with Linux+Mac have no good reason not to use LDAP or something equally interoperable :-)
Argh! Goto! My eyes are melting!!!
No reason other than that the OP cited him amongst the four or so great wits of literary history, and I happened to remember an ironically countertype quote I had once read. I'm afraid it boils down to that; pure argumentativity on my part ;).
I'm a student, please remind me what that is.
As a fully paid-up and life-long agnostic it wasn't a particularly offensive comment; that wasn't why I decided to post it. It was the irony value. Consider that Twain namechecks God[s] and religion a few times throughout his work. A hastily-pasted example:
It is by the goodness of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either.
India has 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all. In religion, other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.
The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
TBF Hitler did make a reputation for himself as being a charismatic leader, and Churchill was a fairly right-wing animal with sympathies for the guy. Politically and morally they were in similar boats - for instance with regard to that 'lively terror' quote, in the early 1920s Churchill ordered the gassing of the Kurds in the north of Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in order to subjugate them under Baghdad rule. That's something our countries just removed a leader from there for doing.
So why is one genocidal monster a national (or even international) hero, and the other pillaried worldwide? The victor will never be asked if he told the truth. Guess who ;)
Churchill, famed for such witty quotes as:
I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes ... to spread a lively terror - as President of the Air Council, 1919
If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable (as Hitler) to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations ? - writing in "Great Contemporaries", 1937
Who wrote such gems as:
He says naively, outspokenly and without suggestion of embarrassment "I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God." It is only another way of saying "I, the Lord thy God, am a small God; fretful about small things"
What jolly nice fellows those two were, eh?
"War does not determine who's right, only who's left" was written by Bertrand Russell, not Mark Twain.
apt-get does a little to resolve this; i.e. you still sometimes need to install shedloads of additional packages but it *should* DTRT and get the correct packages for you. There also exists apt-rpm for Red-Hat derived distros. Other than that, ports-based systems such as FreeBSD's, Gentoo's and Darwin's seem to do a good job; you run a makefile and they get the appropriate code, configure it in the optimal manner for your system, compile and install it all in one go. In a well-written ports system it's rare to require user intervention except when necessary.
I thought I'd better check what you said, given that it sounded wrong. So I did. And it would appear that criterion is the singular, criteria (less commonly criterions) is the plural, but that criteria is not acceptable in the singular. So the phrase "an exit criteria" is wrong.
Or even an exit criterion.
Although, I don't see how this will work. Almost all of the students I know use something free as in free, like Debian, Slack, Gentoo, or downloaded Mandrake. I'm the odd one out using SuSE, have done the best part of half a decade. The computing service's Linux cluster runs Debian. Anyone who wants to try out a Linux OS can get it for free already, so being able to get it for cheap from someone else isn't going to turn any heads.
Hypercard was bought, Claris Works was bought, DocMaker ran on Hypercard, ResEdit was an internal development app. Next?
That's only recently become true. Up until about the launch of Jaguar, they were the biggest Mac development shop in the world full stop. Apple just looked after the Operating System, and let other people do most of the userland software. Try and recall all of the Apple product lines that ran on OS 9, or any pre-iLife OS X software written by Apple.
So say someone calls Gator yspay areway [encryption used to avoid confrontation ;-)]. Then Gator say "Oi! Our stuff isn't yspay areway!" and sue that person's ass. The courts say "but hold on, it *is* yspay areway" and spank Gator down. Does that means it would then be legal to call Gator yspay areway?
If so: spyware spyware spyware spyware
If not: yspay areway yspay areway yspay areway
Only the extent to which SSL is used, which I admit to having misread from the amsn website. The rest is correct, especially (as DD has already said) the punchline that no-one has been kickbanned from the MSN chat network.
What happened was that yesterday, the older MSNP8 protocol for accessing the MSN Messenger Network was discontinued; only clients capable of the new MSNP9 protocol can now connect. :-( but you can't have everything) because it negotiates via the Secure Sockets Layer; i.e. your IMs are encrypted with a strong algorithm and cannot easily be read by people with NICs in promiscuous mode on your network hardware.
MSNP9 is actually better than the previous protocol (as well as incompatible
There already exist third-party clients that can make use of this newer MSNP9 system; if your client does not then maybe it's worth (i)switching, (ii)asking the maintainers to add support, (iii)grabbing the source and doing it yourself you lazy wossname! However, Trillian frmo Cerulean Studios apparently does the business. I am currently connected to the MSN Network by Al's MSN; you must use at least v0.83 in order to connect.
If you know of a root exploit for AmigaDOS or Workbench, I'd be interested in hearing it. As a single-user operating system it's quite hard to get root on :-)
The oldest machine I own that's actually in business use is my Sinclair QL from 1984, upon which my accounts are based (along with some of my writings, posted to the internet where appropriate via a serial link to my PC). Apart from that, I've got programs I wrote on my Amiga 600 (1992) which are still used as part of my degree (it's fractal aggregation code written in AMOS), and I still hack about on my Spectrum (1982, hence the name ZX82) and Dragon 32 (also 1982). I've also got some Sun Ultras (~1996) and a SPARCStation (~god knows, probably around 1993).
At work, the oldest production computer is a NeXT cube which weighs in at 1988. There are some VT100s and other terminals, though; these *may* be older but I don't have info to hand on that.
I know this is going to sound like flamebait, and if you feel it is then be my guest in using the moderation system to let me, and everyone else, know.
Where SCO press is concerned, Do Not Feed The Troll. SCO are undoubtedly revelling in the fact that every time their marketing droids put pen to paper, their output is mirrored on /., newsforge, linux.com and any number of similar sites. I expect they use this coverage to show their investors how seriously the community takes SCO's business, and how the Linux-using and Open Source Software communities are incredibly worried about the fact that 'they stole SCO IP and used it in their anti-competitive software'. In short, SCO profit from the coverage, and Darl McBride's worth increases with every SCO post on /..
We as a community should not be furthering this action. SCO proved long ago that their statements do very little to reflect reality, and that they are not averse to publishing absurd comments in order to try and gain a few share points. Indeed, at the time IBM showed us what a large organisation of UNIX-types should do in such a situation; they ignored SCO. SGI have since taken a similar approach. However, regular statements by ESR and others, alongside frequent coverage on sites such as this or Newsforge, have shown that the Open Source community cannot help but to rise to a troll's bait.
This may be because of the lack of centralisation of the community, i.e. there is no single mouthpiece from which views are aired. Whereas IBM or the like can carefully control the statements issued by its press department, should someone like ESR decide to express their opinion on a subject, it is erroneously considered to represent the wishes and views of the community as a whole. Now while I'm not advocating restrictions to free speech, I do think that such publications or announcements should be self-vetted to consider whether or not they are helping the very people who wish to harm our winderfully open community.
In summary, as I said at the top, SCO are trolls. Please do not feed them in the future.
From my limited experience, there's a very good (and platform-agnostic) BIOS in the form of Open Firmware, which does lots of useful stuff and a lot more. The PC BIOSes like Phoenix and American Megatrends work fine on PC, but don't contain enough diagnostic information to be that useful. Frankly, why more BIOS manus. don't use Open Firmware, as it's a fantastically good system for both setting up a machine, and troubleshooting. It also contains a complete Forth system 8-)
Please note the Darwin/x86 project, on Apple's web site.
and my mentality has always been that if someone needs the software then they'll pay for it to exist, even if they don't want to sell the source code afterwards. And to a large extent, this works. In fat, it works perfectly. I've never had anyone say "well you're writing free software, so why should we pay you?". In fact, often the software I write is for universities, who would rather release the code open source than hang on to it. This is just the mentality that unis have, I guess.
Go to school and revise Emergent Behaviour. Look at Conway's Game of Life. Look at any one of hundreds of other examples, including multicellular biological organisms and colonies.
The Amiga had Ctrl-LAmiga-RAmiga (or Ctrl-CBM-Amiga on some keyboards) at much the same time.
OTOH, I raise issue with your discussion of the CO2 emissions involved in erecting wind farms. I've been reading up about the construction of wind farms (they plan to build one in Portland Harbour - I live in Weymouth[*]) and accept the ~84Gg CO2 figure you give. Remember though, that wind farms only need to be built once during their career. Think of how much CO2 a coal-fired station - which has an efficiency of about 29%[@] puts out over its whole career, including constructing the huge concrete cooling towers. Wind still wins.
Also, wind farms are generally nicer-looking. Down in the West Country (and over in Holland, FWIW) they're minor tourist attractions.
[*]They're using a few big masts instead of a lot of small ones; the test station is 30m (~100ft) tall.
[@]Nuclear power stations are less efficient than this - about 23% - because of the complexity of handling the fuel after it's been used.
The problem with the London blackout was a lack of redundant generating/distributing structure. Ironically, Transport for London had only very recently had a large ceremony in which they switched off the generator that had been powering the Tube, DLR, etc. These train networks were switched over to the national grid. Because of this, when two small (and easily repairable) failures in the distribution network occurred and the Grid provision to London and the south-east was interrupted, the trains and stations were rendered inactive. Only recently they would have been able to carry on unaffected thanks to their own generator, which the Mayor of London (Red Ken Livingstone) had insisted should continue suplying TfL.
So is a free market to blame? The problem here was a lack of redundant equipment, which was definitely a cost-saving exercise. But whether the costs are reduced in order to increase profit, or in order to reduce the tax burden, is insignificant in context. So no, in the case of the London blackout a free market wasn't the cause of the problems.