I realise this is probably just a troll, but in case you really thought this was the case - the engines in this rocket burn kerosene and oxygen, which is pretty benign stuff, about the same as in an airliner.
And that's without the cooling. they must have some hefty equipment to get rid of those 4MW...
That's probably high though, I'd guess something like 1.5MW with slightly cooler boxes, blades etc.
Plus a couple of watts for switches, routers, lighting, UPS loss, stuff like that.
I'm guessing they haven't got everything in one building though, they probably have a number of facilities, in different parts of the world.
>Oddly, there is a town in Wisconsin called Falun. I keep meaning to go there to see if they have a gong.
It's probably named after the swedish town with the same name (here) A fair amount of the swedes who left for america during the 19th century went to WI.
Don't know if they have any gongs there either though, the place is mostly known for sausages and red paint.
/August.
Re:standardized locations, etc.
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 1
One thing that's bad about the registry (and other lookalike systmes, AIX's ODM for example) is that it's system-specific. Normally, most of the info in there is supposed to be shared among a lot of machines, with some of it per-machine. And you can't do that with a system like that, not without reinventing the shared filesystem, and all of the infrastructure that takes (authentication, authorization...). A file can be on a shared filesystem however (there's a problem if you need different per-machine data withing one file, but that's not a big problem with real apps.)
Yes I know this is why they invented AD, but that's way overkill for the most part.
Also, a lot of the information that ie GNOME keeps in its' databases should really be stored in the X server as atoms or properties or whatever. I run into problems all the time when running apps remote, and the end up working/looking weirdly, because it looked at files on that computer which are not the same as what I have on this one.
Example: On one box i use a different theme than what I normally use (it's slow). Now, If I'm logged onto another box, ssh to the slow one, and use a gnome app there, it shows up on my desktop using the theme from the the other box! That's not right! Now, the X server has facilities to to this kind of thing correctly, but it's not what gnome uses.
Some other apps do get this right though, the netscape -remote feature uses this, and the different programs that make up xscreensaver use this to talk to (and find) each other.
This reminds me of a discussion we had about what the next-generation sparc chips would be called. I mean they've had microsparc, hypersparc, supersparc, turbosparc and now ultrasparc, what's next?
I'm hoping for übersparc CPUs in my next server, but who knows...
In Rocket boys, which is the (highly recommended) book October Sky was based on, the author describes ZnS (aka Micrograin) rockets. In the movie they just used off the shelf Aerotech motors.
Too bad really; ZnS rockets suck in many different ways, but they are highlyphotogenic!
Amateur Rocketry is for folks making their own motors. This looks like a fairly standard Large Model or maybe High Power Rocket.
The pad they're using is obvoiusly an Aerotech Mantis, and the rocket isn't much bigger than the standard rockets for that pad.
It looks like a White lightning motor from the plume, but it's hard to tell. I'd guess it flies on somehing like an F or a G. Probably under LMR rules.
There are of course local ordinances and stuff that you need to now about, but should be nothing illegal about that launch from a national POV.
Portability: Have you ever tried to move data from DB system to another? Not fun! There need to be some standards! There is such a thing as SQL-92, but nobody uses it yet. Yet? Right...
Portablility again: Isn't it nice today how you can get a tar file from just anybode, and it will just untar on your system, even if you haven't got the same OS and filesystem as the guy you got it from? Well see the previous point.
Performance, but that's possibly not that big a deal: A database can do a lot of work "server side". What do you think will happen to the system load on a big multi-user system when some moron submits a huge SQL query with all kinds of weird joins and stuff?
Not much user, lots of system and iowait, that's what. We run into a whole new realm of needing accounting for these kinds of things.
Am I the only one who thinks Unix used to be friendlier than it is now?
Do you remember...
When all commands had a manpage? And it actually describe the program! And it would have all the proper sections like "Synopsis" and most oftenly it would include an example or two.
When all kinds of other things had manpages too. "man nfs", "man kernel" etc. actually worked?
When the "learn" program was around? Remember that? (It was a program that did interactive little courses on newbie topics. You'd do "learn vi" or "learn files". If you stopped at some point it remembered how far you had gotten and would start there the next time. It was simple, but useful.)
When vendors actually shipped usable termcaps for common terminals? (OK, the linux vendors are pretty good at this, but some of the "real" unix vendors... Brr.)
On the positive side, I really do like Debian's manpage policy. Maybe there's hope.
Then the Linux desktops ripped off Windows, warts and all, and we have to double-click as well. (Sure, you can override it. I do. But it's certainly not something the average user, even the average Linux user, can do)
Double- and triple-clicking has been with X since way before Linux.
Try press+drag in an xterm: it selects text. Now try double-click+drag, notice how it now selects by word. Triple-click+drag does whole lines.
It makes a lot of sense. In my opinion the selection system is actually one of the best features of X versus windows and mac.
I've thought about this before because of our software licensing. Let's say Microsoft thinks they need a license audit. What's more important: maintaining our security by not allowing Microsoft access to sensitive computer systems, or complying with their "copyright" policies? If a computer is located in a secure area protected by federal classification law, who will know?
When I used to do that kind of work, we used to joke about this scenario. Don't get me wrong, we went to great pains to make sure we had all the licenses we needed and complied with all the terms, but we also knew the BSA would have a really hard time getting thru the people guarding the gate to the base. Defense in depth, we called it!:)
/August, former conscript military sysadmin(Yep, they do that here!)
A blade 100 costing "much much more" than a new Athlon 1900?
The blade 100 is about US$1k. It represents the low-low end of the spectrum. The blade 1000 (which looks a lot like the 2000) is fast, and expensive. It's the box to comapre this to
OK, I'm from what you could call the worst-case country when it comes to taxation, Sweden. We have the highest taxes in the world, pretty much, and I'll elaborate on your points a bit.
First of all, you forgot one kind of taxation, excise taxes, ie taxes on specific things that the government doesn't like. (Alcohol, tobacco, pollution, gambling etc) These sound like a good idea, and they are, to a point. The practice of having a market of pollution quotas is well proven to work. The problem is that when these taxes get too high, and if there's a way around these taxes, that will become a problem. For example, sweden has very high taxes on hard liqour -> A lot of moonshine in circulation -> people die from drinking methanol every now and then. (And a lot of people end up in jail for running the illegal alcohol factories.)
(Oh yeah, and estate tax. It seems like a good idea ("It they're going to take my money, the best time for it when I'm dead!"), but it too can become a problem for example when children inherit a house that's worth a lot and have to sell it immediatly to pay for the taxes on the estate.)
Property taxes get problematic as they grow high, as around here a lot of (for example) old folks who own their own house have to move because they can't pay the taxes on it anymore with their pensions, because the area got more popular and the house increased in value because of that.
A too high sales tax (we have 25% except for books(6%) and food(12%)) creates a large shadow economy with bartering and/or their own currencies which is never good. Actually, in sweden, if you're a painter and your neighbor is a carpenter, and he builds oyu a shed and in return you paint his house, you're supposed to report that to the government so they can tax you. This is rarely done.:)
Income taxes. You're right about these. I pay about 51% in income tax and I'm certainly not rich. The problem here is largely the sama as with the high sales tax, it becomes very profitable to try to avoid it by "swapping favors" or getting paid in goods you make and stuff like that.
Too high tariffs and duties make your nation's industries weak. Just you watch your steel indutry the coming years...:)
Use fees. If it can be financed that way, the government should butt out and let industry deal with it.
In short, TANSTAAFL, and there's no such thing as a good tax. The least bad one I think are excise taxes on pollution, because it's reasonably moral, reasonably enforceable, and has the potential to bring in quite a lot of money, done right.
Somehow, I don't think I'd want to brag about poorly designed, cheap guns that were dropped in large quantities to anyone claiming to be a "resistance fighter," which
many times turned out to be a German intelligence operative. Or maybe they were hoping that the Germans would try to use them...
The germans already had (way better) guns. This was someting like a single-shot, non-reloadable pretty concealable.45. The idea was for the wannabe resistance fighter to kill a german soldier with it and take his gun. From what I understand the plan worked fairly well.
Actually I've never met an ethernet card I couldn't change the mac address on. Not that I tried on all of them, but datapoints include the two I have in this laptop, one Orinoco wireless and one eepro. And every ethernet card sun has ever shipped, since they set the same mac address on all cards in one box. (!) Doesn't normally cause a problem...
Try
ifconfig ethX hw ether NE:WM:AC:AD:DR:ES
some time...
And you don't have to have a card with a mac address on it to have an IP, (ethernet, TR, etc have them and slip, ppp, etc doesn't)
Still the mac address seems better to use, since so many runs NAT nowadays. The 10/24 and 192.168/16 UUID-namespaces must be getting crowded.
Actually, thinking about it... DCE doesn't require IP, you can run it over Decnet and all kinds of other weirdness, I wonder what happens then?
My UUID (which is from an actual DCE implementation, which is where Microsoft got this idea) does not contain a MAC address, the last field is the IP of the machine where it was generated, plus two more unknown bytes.
When did this change? The spec I found here doesn't mention using IPs at all.
Also, how come they're calling them GUIDs instead of UUIDs? Doesn't matter much I guess, but I like the sound of it. "Ah, bad UUID."
Impresses users too, they think "juju-ID".
Re:There are major problems with compartmentalizat
on
HP-LX 1.0 Secure Linux
·
· Score: 1
:even if kernel holes are not remotely exploitable, :userland holes make it possible to exploit kernel holes locally
No, not neccessarily.
The trick is boxing the applications so they can't do much damage. On (for example) selinux you can grant xntpd permission to do just what it needs to do its' job, and nothing more. Maybe you don't want to let it read world-readable files (the only file it has any business reading is its config file, so why let it do anything else?), or fork,
or whatever.
This means that a cracker would have to be really lucky. He needs to find an exploitable application that gets to use an exploitable local feature.
Even if he manages to turn xntpd's image in memory into a shell, he'd end up with a really stupid shell which basically can't see any of the filesystem, can't run commands, etc.
/August.
Re:There are major problems with compartmentalizat
on
HP-LX 1.0 Secure Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, kernel bugs will still get you, no doubt about that. You can compartmentalize the kernel itself, at least to some point, but that's kind of a separate problem.
Kernel bugs aren't the big problem though. Look thru bugtraq and see what the kernel/user-app ratio of security problems is.
Now look at how many of the kernel level bugs that are remotely exploitable. (Ummm, I mean exploitable from remote, not that they're unlikely.) Not to say that local problems aren't problems too, but they're a lot easier to manage.
You're right about the bug whack a mole, but this time you'll be playing on a table with most of the moleholes plugged.
The X thing is a bit of a red herring. The problem is that it has hardware access (disregarding fbdev and stuff like that), and hence (from a security POV) could almost just as well be part of the kernel. Solutions:
Don't run it. And don't allow other processes the priviliges it would/could have had. (This is easy with any MAC and even DAC system, X is always a bit of a special case.)
The Selinux system is very fine grained and you can grant a subject a capability or not depending on its' type.
Compartmentalize X itself. To some extent this is getting worked at, but not (mostly at least) for that reason.
(X apps are a little different from other apps, since they have other IO options (Atoms, cut+paste buffer etc.) Look up CMW (Compartmented Mode Workstation) if you want to get into that.)
But even if you can't do a thing about X, this is still worthwhile. Think about someting like xntpd. It's root because it needs to open a low port and because it needs to be able to update the system time. But there's no reason that it needs to be able to, say, mount filesystems, read protected files, or load kernel modules. with traditional unix security we can't do that, but with this stuff we can. The attutude that "because it only fixes 99% of the problem, it's not worthwhile" has been a problem long enough.
Actually even longer. The (non -128) Rage Mobility P has it at least. Don't know if it goes further back than that.
I can't really see why they're adding this to geforce 4 however, if they didn't have it before.
It was a useful optimization back then when a lot of computers were marginal for playing DVDs in software, but noone is going to put a geforce4 in a computer that slow, so this will probably be moot almost everywhere.
I'd use the chipspace for something more useful, like accumulation buffers.
Slashdot Mirror
That's probably high though, I'd guess something like 1.5MW with slightly cooler boxes, blades etc. Plus a couple of watts for switches, routers, lighting, UPS loss, stuff like that.
I'm guessing they haven't got everything in one building though, they probably have a number of facilities, in different parts of the world.
It's probably named after the swedish town with the same name (here) A fair amount of the swedes who left for america during the 19th century went to WI.
Don't know if they have any gongs there either though, the place is mostly known for sausages and red paint.
Yes I know this is why they invented AD, but that's way overkill for the most part.
Also, a lot of the information that ie GNOME keeps in its' databases should really be stored in the X server as atoms or properties or whatever. I run into problems all the time when running apps remote, and the end up working/looking weirdly, because it looked at files on that computer which are not the same as what I have on this one.
Example: On one box i use a different theme than what I normally use (it's slow). Now, If I'm logged onto another box, ssh to the slow one, and use a gnome app there, it shows up on my desktop using the theme from the the other box! That's not right! Now, the X server has facilities to to this kind of thing correctly, but it's not what gnome uses.
Some other apps do get this right though, the netscape -remote feature uses this, and the different programs that make up xscreensaver use this to talk to (and find) each other.
I'm hoping for übersparc CPUs in my next server, but who knows...
In Rocket boys, which is the (highly recommended) book October Sky was based on, the author describes ZnS (aka Micrograin) rockets. In the movie they just used off the shelf Aerotech motors.
Too bad really; ZnS rockets suck in many different ways, but they are highly photogenic!
The pad they're using is obvoiusly an Aerotech Mantis, and the rocket isn't much bigger than the standard rockets for that pad.
It looks like a White lightning motor from the plume, but it's hard to tell. I'd guess it flies on somehing like an F or a G. Probably under LMR rules.
There are of course local ordinances and stuff that you need to now about, but should be nothing illegal about that launch from a national POV.
Not much user, lots of system and iowait, that's what. We run into a whole new realm of needing accounting for these kinds of things.
Do you remember...
- When all commands had a manpage? And it actually describe the program! And it would have all the proper sections like "Synopsis" and most oftenly it would include an example or two.
- When all kinds of other things had manpages too. "man nfs", "man kernel" etc. actually worked?
-
When the "learn" program was around? Remember that? (It was a program that did interactive little courses on newbie topics. You'd do "learn vi" or "learn files". If you stopped at some point it remembered how far you had gotten and would start there the next time. It was simple, but useful.)
- When vendors actually shipped usable termcaps for common terminals? (OK, the linux vendors are pretty good at this, but some of the "real" unix vendors... Brr.)
On the positive side, I really do like Debian's manpage policy. Maybe there's hope./August, feeling old today.
Double- and triple-clicking has been with X since way before Linux.
Try press+drag in an xterm: it selects text.
Now try double-click+drag, notice how it now selects by word.
Triple-click+drag does whole lines.
It makes a lot of sense. In my opinion the selection system is actually one of the best features of X versus windows and mac.
When I used to do that kind of work, we used to joke about this scenario. Don't get me wrong, we went to great pains to make sure we had all the licenses we needed and complied with all the terms, but we also knew the BSA would have a really hard time getting thru the people guarding the gate to the base. Defense in depth, we called it! :)
The blade 100 is about US$1k. It represents the low-low end of the spectrum. The blade 1000 (which looks a lot like the 2000) is fast, and expensive. It's the box to comapre this to
I thought that was an old aircraft they didn't really like anymore. Guess they changed their mind...
First of all, you forgot one kind of taxation, excise taxes, ie taxes on specific things that the government doesn't like. (Alcohol, tobacco, pollution, gambling etc) These sound like a good idea, and they are, to a point. The practice of having a market of pollution quotas is well proven to work. The problem is that when these taxes get too high, and if there's a way around these taxes, that will become a problem. For example, sweden has very high taxes on hard liqour -> A lot of moonshine in circulation -> people die from drinking methanol every now and then. (And a lot of people end up in jail for running the illegal alcohol factories.)
(Oh yeah, and estate tax. It seems like a good idea ("It they're going to take my money, the best time for it when I'm dead!"), but it too can become a problem for example when children inherit a house that's worth a lot and have to sell it immediatly to pay for the taxes on the estate.)
Property taxes get problematic as they grow high, as around here a lot of (for example) old folks who own their own house have to move because they can't pay the taxes on it anymore with their pensions, because the area got more popular and the house increased in value because of that.
A too high sales tax (we have 25% except for books(6%) and food(12%)) creates a large shadow economy with bartering and/or their own currencies which is never good. Actually, in sweden, if you're a painter and your neighbor is a carpenter, and he builds oyu a shed and in return you paint his house, you're supposed to report that to the government so they can tax you. This is rarely done. :)
Income taxes. You're right about these. I pay about 51% in income tax and I'm certainly not rich. The problem here is largely the sama as with the high sales tax, it becomes very profitable to try to avoid it by "swapping favors" or getting paid in goods you make and stuff like that.
Too high tariffs and duties make your nation's industries weak. Just you watch your steel indutry the coming years... :)
Use fees. If it can be financed that way, the government should butt out and let industry deal with it.
In short, TANSTAAFL, and there's no such thing as a good tax. The least bad one I think are excise taxes on pollution, because it's reasonably moral, reasonably enforceable, and has the potential to bring in quite a lot of money, done right.
The germans already had (way better) guns. This was someting like a single-shot, non-reloadable pretty concealable .45. The idea was for the wannabe resistance fighter to kill a german soldier with it and take his gun. From what I understand the plan worked fairly well.
/August.
You know, that could really put the "panic" back in "kernel panic".
Try
some time...And you don't have to have a card with a mac address on it to have an IP, (ethernet, TR, etc have them and slip, ppp, etc doesn't)
Still the mac address seems better to use, since so many runs NAT nowadays. The 10/24 and 192.168/16 UUID-namespaces must be getting crowded .
Actually, thinking about it... DCE doesn't require IP, you can run it over Decnet and all kinds of other weirdness, I wonder what happens then?
My UUID (which is from an actual DCE implementation, which is where Microsoft got this idea) does not contain a MAC address, the last field is the IP of the machine where it was generated, plus two more unknown bytes.
When did this change? The spec I found here doesn't mention using IPs at all.
Also, how come they're calling them GUIDs instead of UUIDs? Doesn't matter much I guess, but I like the sound of it. "Ah, bad UUID."
Impresses users too, they think "juju-ID".
No, not neccessarily.
The trick is boxing the applications so they can't do much damage. On (for example) selinux you can grant xntpd permission to do just what it needs to do its' job, and nothing more. Maybe you don't want to let it read world-readable files (the only file it has any business reading is its config file, so why let it do anything else?), or fork, or whatever.
This means that a cracker would have to be really lucky. He needs to find an exploitable application that gets to use an exploitable local feature.
Even if he manages to turn xntpd's image in memory into a shell, he'd end up with a really stupid shell which basically can't see any of the filesystem, can't run commands, etc.
Kernel bugs aren't the big problem though. Look thru bugtraq and see what the kernel/user-app ratio of security problems is.
Now look at how many of the kernel level bugs that are remotely exploitable. (Ummm, I mean exploitable from remote, not that they're unlikely.) Not to say that local problems aren't problems too, but they're a lot easier to manage.
You're right about the bug whack a mole, but this time you'll be playing on a table with most of the moleholes plugged.
The X thing is a bit of a red herring. The problem is that it has hardware access (disregarding fbdev and stuff like that), and hence (from a security POV) could almost just as well be part of the kernel. Solutions:
- Don't run it. And don't allow other processes the priviliges it would/could have had. (This is easy with any MAC and even DAC system, X is always a bit of a special case.)
The Selinux system is very fine grained and you can grant a subject a capability or not depending on its' type.
- Compartmentalize X itself. To some extent this is getting worked at, but not (mostly at least) for that reason.
(X apps are a little different from other apps, since they have other IO options (Atoms, cut+paste buffer etc.) Look up CMW (Compartmented Mode Workstation) if you want to get into that.)But even if you can't do a thing about X, this is still worthwhile. Think about someting like xntpd. It's root because it needs to open a low port and because it needs to be able to update the system time. But there's no reason that it needs to be able to, say, mount filesystems, read protected files, or load kernel modules. with traditional unix security we can't do that, but with this stuff we can. The attutude that "because it only fixes 99% of the problem, it's not worthwhile" has been a problem long enough.
> in a server room is zero ( 0 )! And it'll be
> just as hot as it was before.
Actually, he'd be a lot worse off, as the freezer is pretty ineffective.
(Main thing you learn from thermo, no matter what you do, you lose.)
I can't really see why they're adding this to geforce 4 however, if they didn't have it before. It was a useful optimization back then when a lot of computers were marginal for playing DVDs in software, but noone is going to put a geforce4 in a computer that slow, so this will probably be moot almost everywhere.
I'd use the chipspace for something more useful, like accumulation buffers.