So it seems that your friend has not much idea about Avaya's products
Perhaps he doesn't know much about Avaya's advertisements (neither do I - and your link didn't work in my browser) but he sure knows all about actually working with their products in the "real world".
He also knows about spending many hours with their installation and support crew - many, many hours. I'd trust his judgement more than a corporate web page, although I realize it's just unverifiable hearsay from your point of view.
Rather than edit the passwd file, which might have alerted Avaya support, he just took a copy and bruted the encryption. Now he gets in whenever he wants, and it appears that his fears of their support staff detecting him were unwarranted, since they didn't notice when he secured the box - which required some fairly noticeable intervention, including loading big patches and knocking out a lot of unneeded services.
I know of an Avaya product installed on a large corporate network. It runs HP-UX internally!! According to my buddy the security geek (and I quote), "Avaya fears Open Source". They don't even install OpenSSH, all their traffic is telnet or worse. Nor do they use Samba or Apache - although their products could be greatly improved by either one.
And get this: they won't let their customers know the root password. That's right, you buy a closed box with a known hackable OS (and it's not secured AT ALL - my buddy found a dozen known vulnerabilities left open) and then they expect you to install it behind your firewall!
--The Rev
von Braun was a Nazi bastard
on
Man Conquers Space
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I remember when I was a child I was taught in school that von Braun was a great scientist and an admirable man. I repeated this in front of my father (who had met and worked with the man) and his face turned hard as he told me, "Von Braun is a Nazi. He was always a Nazi, and he's been rewarded for being a Nazi, and he'll always be a Nazi."
Since then I've read stories from slave-labor survivors about the atrocities at Thuringen and Peenemunde. It appears that my father's judgement was sound; von Braun was a cold-hearted slave-driver at the very least - and if the most extreme of the stories that eyewitnesses have told are true, then he was a sadistic monster.
If we are to honor von Braun for his contributions to science, we should equally decry his history of racism, slave labor exploitation, and possibly torture. At the very least our government should stop trying to cover it up, and NASA's biography of the man should include the testimony of the workers at Peenemunde.
My apologies for taking so long to respond. I spend a fair amount of time recycling, so I don't get on the net that often:^).
I think you've taken a basically correct starting point - we have gone too far in our energy curve to turn our backs on technology - and extended that point into a self-defeating excuse for bitterness and inaction. The numbers you're asking for do exist, as "best guess" estimates; but I don't think you could accept them, because only "environmentalists" actually study such things.
My friend Pedro runs his Mercedes on biodiesel he makes himself because overcoming the technical challenges pleases him. He uses no petroleum or electrical power to do so, and makes soap from the leftovers. His engine emits a pleasant smell of hot vegetable oil - and far less particulate than it would if run on the refinery waste most people call "diesel fuel".
I recycle because I don't like waste, and because I've found the landfills I've visted to be aesthetically displeasing. I adopt children because I can afford to, and because I don't want to contribute to overpopulation. I drive a Prius because it's quiet, reliable, affordable, and it doesn't make me breathe stinking fumes when it's sitting still. (I recycle the oil, incidentally.)
Pedro and I certainly don't do any of those things because we think we can change the direction of the world. After all, a meteor tomorrow could make all our arguments moot! In the great scheme of the universe, we are but little things; but there is no harm in indulging ones' nobler impulses.
Why, particularly, do you 1) characterise "environmentalists" as a group and 2) set yourself in opposition to that group?
As it happens, your information is entirely incorrect, because you are talking about a specific type of diesel engine and a specific type of fuel as though your information were applicable to all diesels. Dr. Diesel's original design ran on peanut oil and did not emit harmful levels of particulates, and modern German "super-diesels" also do not emit the levels of particulate you've referenced. In fact, your data only applies to shoddy American truck engines that are, frankly, burning waste products from gasoline manufacture. Those engines should indeed be banned, even though they can be run with greatly reduced emissions on biodiesel.
Perhaps you should think about the way you are categorizing your perceptions of reality - we preachers usually find the people who like to "rain on a parade" are really nice people inside, they are just being misled by bad philosophy and harmful social environments.
Ballard has been shopping fuel-cell powered buses for metropolitan centers for around a decade, I think. GM's lame attempt to appear progressive in the bus market is pretty pathetic, just as it's pretty ridiculous to flame Honda for trying to make better, more economical cars.
The Toyota gas/electric hybrid Minivan will be an excellent replacement for soccer-mom SUVs. The proven Prius hybrid power train (the Prius has been on the road for five years in Japan now) is unlikely to be challenged by GM's gold-plated version 0.1 entry.
Honda's system uses the excellent CVCC (Controlled Vortex Combustion Chamber) gas engine to get even better mileage than the Toyota, but it suffers from an inferior hybrid system that basically runs the gas engine all the time when the vehicle is in motion. (By contrast, my Prius can make it up to 35 miles/hour using pure electric propulsion on a good road.) As soon as Honda finishes fine-tuning their hybrid to match the efficiency of the Toyota, they can potentially get even better mileage - possibly in the neighborhood of 60 mpg (my Prius gets about 48).
I tried to buy an American-made electric car (and I mean, I seriously tried for several months - faxes, phone calls, dealership visits, etc.) but GM refused to sell or lease me an EV-1 because I don't live in California.
Then, they discontinued the vehicle because "there was no market demand".
So, I bought a Toyota Prius, and I'm very happy with it. It's a great car, and perfect for my family on trips as well as my daily commute.
At least once a week somebody stops me and asks me how they can get a Prius (it's a four month waiting list, and you have to make the purchase on the web, but it's really very easy and you don't have to haggle with salespeople). I usually let them give it a test drive, if I've got time.
Hydrogen can be stored in solid metal - no, really, there are alloys that you can stash the stuff in - or carbon nanotubes. Either method produces safer storage than your standard automobile gas tank full of gasoline vapor (liquid gasoline is not particularly flammable - so your petrol tank is pretty safe except when it's nearly empty).
As I understand it, the NECAR5 cracks the hydrogen from methanol right next to the fuel cell membrane face. So technically, it's not a hydrogen fuel cell at all - it's a methanol fuel cell. Which is cool, OK, I'm not criticising the technology, just trying to make an important distinction. The NECAR5 has no on-board hydrogen storage whatsoever and thus there are no real issues of hydrogen safety - the issue is methanol containment, which is a whole 'nother problem.
Site doesn't work in my zilla 0.9 installation, time to go to 1.01 on this machine.
But, I'm guessing there are a lot more machines reporting from the US of A, and I wonder how many of them are getting feeds with chinese hosts blocked out.
In HP's Avondale plant, HP hired huge numbers of staff as "temps" - that is, they kept these workers the maximum amount of time they could without paying any benefits, then laid 'em off, then re-hired 'em after the minimum time possible had passed.
This was due to a court decision that basically said they couldn't keep people on staff forever and treat them like shit just by pretending they were "temps". The decision stipulated time frames, so HP used those time frames as guidelines for their systematic abuse of their workers.
When HP eventually sold off the site it was discovered that they had been secretly polluting the local water table for years, and the whole area around the plant was contaminated with toxic waste.
Check it out, it's all true. The HP these people are lamenting was just another nasty corporate criminal that this entire region was happy to see the last off.
"Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash" -- Winston Churchill 1874-1965
Uh, Guy, you also left out a whompin' big step there, where they bought out Apollo because their own computers sucked wind outrageously.
Then they threw out two operating systems with real potential and created the infamously horrible HP-UX, which is the lamest Unix on the market at the moment.
Well, it totally subverts your system security for one thing. See the numerous Bugtraq postings on the subject; if you're running Windows Media Player you can be easily owned through malicious web sites or Email.
For another thing, it's spyware. It tracks what DVDs you play and reports back to the mother ship. Again, see the Bugtraq discussion.
And finally, I don't want to use a $2000 machine for a media player, so I don't feel a need to waste disk space on an item I'll never use. I'm sure blind and deaf people (increasingly marginalized by the de-textification of the Internet) feel the same way.
Incidentally, you got modded "flamebait" for this statement:
Additionally, Media Player 6.4 is the absolutely best media player program that there can be.
You can't make religious statements like that in this forum unless you are a member of one of the accepted cults, and M$ definitely does not qualify.
--The Rev
Not slashdotted yet, but getting there....
on
Gentoo 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The ISO is only 103 MB. Tres coolito.
However, I'm watching my download get slower, slower, slower.......
--The Rev
OpenBSD is an operating system, designed with security in mind. It is probably as secure as anything BSD-derived can possibly be at this point.
IPCop, Smoothwall, Freesco, etc. are not operating systems, they are dedicated firewall/router devices built on stripped-down linux kernels. Although they incorporate DHCP servers, DNS relays, and similar network infrastructure schtupfh they are nonetheless strictly single-purpose appliances.
Morrell and Manning should be applauded for their achievement; Smoothwall broke new ground as an easily configured home firewall with Snort and Squid transparently integrated (no small feat).
UNfortunately, Smoothwall shares one characteristic with OpenBSD; like OpenBSD guru Theo De Raadt, Richard Morrell has an egotistical, abrasive manner and does not communicate well with end-users or fools. If his commercial venture is to be a success, he's going to have to learn some diplomacy. Or maybe not, Larry Ellison gets away with it.
Um, the practice of keeping all configuration in/etc is a recent innovation - attributable directly to the linux community (see LFSS/HFSS).
Lame unices like the dreaded HP-UX still have configuration files scattered randomly through the folder hierarchy, binaries in/etc, non-optional drivers in/opt, and so forth ad nauseum.
Linux is also moving to a standard of/etc/*.conf for individual configuration files, and/etc/*/* subdirectories (like/etc/httpd or/etc/apache) for multi-file configurations. Note the recent change from/etc/conf.modules to/etc/modules.conf, and the increasingly popular ln -s/etc/nfs.conf/etc/exports.
But you're right that XML configuration is overkill and ridiculously verbose for most purposes. An XML-driven STATELESS configurator would be great, and would allow multiple front-ends to cleanly interoperate, but the basic text configuration files should remain as simple as possible.
I think it'd be rather like climbing a very tall tree, at least until the air got thin. If the tree isn't strong enough, it fails. Otherwise, you are just more wind.
Slashdot Mirror
He also knows about spending many hours with their installation and support crew - many, many hours. I'd trust his judgement more than a corporate web page, although I realize it's just unverifiable hearsay from your point of view.
--The Rev
--The Rev
I know of an Avaya product installed on a large corporate network. It runs HP-UX internally!! According to my buddy the security geek (and I quote), "Avaya fears Open Source". They don't even install OpenSSH, all their traffic is telnet or worse. Nor do they use Samba or Apache - although their products could be greatly improved by either one.
And get this: they won't let their customers know the root password. That's right, you buy a closed box with a known hackable OS (and it's not secured AT ALL - my buddy found a dozen known vulnerabilities left open) and then they expect you to install it behind your firewall!
--The Rev
I remember when I was a child I was taught in school that von Braun was a great scientist and an admirable man. I repeated this in front of my father (who had met and worked with the man) and his face turned hard as he told me, "Von Braun is a Nazi. He was always a Nazi, and he's been rewarded for being a Nazi, and he'll always be a Nazi."
Since then I've read stories from slave-labor survivors about the atrocities at Thuringen and Peenemunde. It appears that my father's judgement was sound; von Braun was a cold-hearted slave-driver at the very least - and if the most extreme of the stories that eyewitnesses have told are true, then he was a sadistic monster.
If we are to honor von Braun for his contributions to science, we should equally decry his history of racism, slave labor exploitation, and possibly torture. At the very least our government should stop trying to cover it up, and NASA's biography of the man should include the testimony of the workers at Peenemunde.
My apologies for taking so long to respond. I spend a fair amount of time recycling, so I don't get on the net that often :^).
I think you've taken a basically correct starting point - we have gone too far in our energy curve to turn our backs on technology - and extended that point into a self-defeating excuse for bitterness and inaction. The numbers you're asking for do exist, as "best guess" estimates; but I don't think you could accept them, because only "environmentalists" actually study such things.
My friend Pedro runs his Mercedes on biodiesel he makes himself because overcoming the technical challenges pleases him. He uses no petroleum or electrical power to do so, and makes soap from the leftovers. His engine emits a pleasant smell of hot vegetable oil - and far less particulate than it would if run on the refinery waste most people call "diesel fuel".
I recycle because I don't like waste, and because I've found the landfills I've visted to be aesthetically displeasing. I adopt children because I can afford to, and because I don't want to contribute to overpopulation. I drive a Prius because it's quiet, reliable, affordable, and it doesn't make me breathe stinking fumes when it's sitting still. (I recycle the oil, incidentally.)
Pedro and I certainly don't do any of those things because we think we can change the direction of the world. After all, a meteor tomorrow could make all our arguments moot! In the great scheme of the universe, we are but little things; but there is no harm in indulging ones' nobler impulses.
As it happens, your information is entirely incorrect, because you are talking about a specific type of diesel engine and a specific type of fuel as though your information were applicable to all diesels. Dr. Diesel's original design ran on peanut oil and did not emit harmful levels of particulates, and modern German "super-diesels" also do not emit the levels of particulate you've referenced. In fact, your data only applies to shoddy American truck engines that are, frankly, burning waste products from gasoline manufacture. Those engines should indeed be banned, even though they can be run with greatly reduced emissions on biodiesel.
Perhaps you should think about the way you are categorizing your perceptions of reality - we preachers usually find the people who like to "rain on a parade" are really nice people inside, they are just being misled by bad philosophy and harmful social environments.
Ballard has been shopping fuel-cell powered buses for metropolitan centers for around a decade, I think. GM's lame attempt to appear progressive in the bus market is pretty pathetic, just as it's pretty ridiculous to flame Honda for trying to make better, more economical cars.
The Toyota gas/electric hybrid Minivan will be an excellent replacement for soccer-mom SUVs. The proven Prius hybrid power train (the Prius has been on the road for five years in Japan now) is unlikely to be challenged by GM's gold-plated version 0.1 entry.
Honda's system uses the excellent CVCC (Controlled Vortex Combustion Chamber) gas engine to get even better mileage than the Toyota, but it suffers from an inferior hybrid system that basically runs the gas engine all the time when the vehicle is in motion. (By contrast, my Prius can make it up to 35 miles/hour using pure electric propulsion on a good road.) As soon as Honda finishes fine-tuning their hybrid to match the efficiency of the Toyota, they can potentially get even better mileage - possibly in the neighborhood of 60 mpg (my Prius gets about 48).
I tried to buy an American-made electric car (and I mean, I seriously tried for several months - faxes, phone calls, dealership visits, etc.) but GM refused to sell or lease me an EV-1 because I don't live in California.
Then, they discontinued the vehicle because "there was no market demand".
So, I bought a Toyota Prius, and I'm very happy with it. It's a great car, and perfect for my family on trips as well as my daily commute.
At least once a week somebody stops me and asks me how they can get a Prius (it's a four month waiting list, and you have to make the purchase on the web, but it's really very easy and you don't have to haggle with salespeople). I usually let them give it a test drive, if I've got time.
Hydrogen can be stored in solid metal - no, really, there are alloys that you can stash the stuff in - or carbon nanotubes. Either method produces safer storage than your standard automobile gas tank full of gasoline vapor (liquid gasoline is not particularly flammable - so your petrol tank is pretty safe except when it's nearly empty).
As I understand it, the NECAR5 cracks the hydrogen from methanol right next to the fuel cell membrane face. So technically, it's not a hydrogen fuel cell at all - it's a methanol fuel cell. Which is cool, OK, I'm not criticising the technology, just trying to make an important distinction. The NECAR5 has no on-board hydrogen storage whatsoever and thus there are no real issues of hydrogen safety - the issue is methanol containment, which is a whole 'nother problem.
Site doesn't work in my zilla 0.9 installation, time to go to 1.01 on this machine.
But, I'm guessing there are a lot more machines reporting from the US of A, and I wonder how many of them are getting feeds with chinese hosts blocked out.
I'm having a Hank Senior moment.
In HP's Avondale plant, HP hired huge numbers of staff as "temps" - that is, they kept these workers the maximum amount of time they could without paying any benefits, then laid 'em off, then re-hired 'em after the minimum time possible had passed.
This was due to a court decision that basically said they couldn't keep people on staff forever and treat them like shit just by pretending they were "temps". The decision stipulated time frames, so HP used those time frames as guidelines for their systematic abuse of their workers.
When HP eventually sold off the site it was discovered that they had been secretly polluting the local water table for years, and the whole area around the plant was contaminated with toxic waste.
Check it out, it's all true. The HP these people are lamenting was just another nasty corporate criminal that this entire region was happy to see the last off.
"Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash"
-- Winston Churchill 1874-1965
Uh, Guy, you also left out a whompin' big step there, where they bought out Apollo because their own computers sucked wind outrageously.
Then they threw out two operating systems with real potential and created the infamously horrible HP-UX, which is the lamest Unix on the market at the moment.
--The Rev
For another thing, it's spyware. It tracks what DVDs you play and reports back to the mother ship. Again, see the Bugtraq discussion.
And finally, I don't want to use a $2000 machine for a media player, so I don't feel a need to waste disk space on an item I'll never use. I'm sure blind and deaf people (increasingly marginalized by the de-textification of the Internet) feel the same way.
Incidentally, you got modded "flamebait" for this statement: You can't make religious statements like that in this forum unless you are a member of one of the accepted cults, and M$ definitely does not qualify.
--The Rev
The ISO is only 103 MB. Tres coolito. However, I'm watching my download get slower, slower, slower....... --The Rev
OpenBSD is an operating system, designed with security in mind. It is probably as secure as anything BSD-derived can possibly be at this point.
IPCop, Smoothwall, Freesco, etc. are not operating systems, they are dedicated firewall/router devices built on stripped-down linux kernels. Although they incorporate DHCP servers, DNS relays, and similar network infrastructure schtupfh they are nonetheless strictly single-purpose appliances.
Morrell and Manning should be applauded for their achievement; Smoothwall broke new ground as an easily configured home firewall with Snort and Squid transparently integrated (no small feat).
UNfortunately, Smoothwall shares one characteristic with OpenBSD; like OpenBSD guru Theo De Raadt, Richard Morrell has an egotistical, abrasive manner and does not communicate well with end-users or fools. If his commercial venture is to be a success, he's going to have to learn some diplomacy. Or maybe not, Larry Ellison gets away with it.
It's like the shareware principle but without the annoying nag screens. If you're broke, if you can't pay, yeah whatever.
Um, the practice of keeping all configuration in /etc is a recent innovation - attributable directly to the linux community (see LFSS /HFSS).
/etc, non-optional drivers in /opt, and so forth ad nauseum.
/etc/*.conf for individual configuration files, and /etc/*/* subdirectories (like /etc/httpd or /etc/apache) for multi-file configurations. Note the recent change from /etc/conf.modules to /etc/modules.conf, and the increasingly popular ln -s /etc/nfs.conf /etc/exports.
Lame unices like the dreaded HP-UX still have configuration files scattered randomly through the folder hierarchy, binaries in
Linux is also moving to a standard of
But you're right that XML configuration is overkill and ridiculously verbose for most purposes. An XML-driven STATELESS configurator would be great, and would allow multiple front-ends to cleanly interoperate, but the basic text configuration files should remain as simple as possible.
I think it'd be rather like climbing a very tall tree, at least until the air got thin. If the tree isn't strong enough, it fails. Otherwise, you are just more wind.