Well... If you actually follow the news (not just/.) you'd realize that Slashdot was about 3 days behind on this one.
The site was shut down quite a while ago. So we're slashdoting a null point on the net (which I believe would be yahoo's nameservers's but, check the whois and see for yourself)
Man.. I knew kids were smart but, 8 years old and knows how to work emacs?
I might as well file for unemployment now... I still can't figure out how to work that damn thing:-D
It's midnight on a Friday and you have a modded up post that has the words "aspiring model" in it.
I will send a priest over to give your server the last rites. And you can bring your "friend" over I'll let her cry on my shoulder about the death of her website.
Messaging that discusses possible Linux patent violations, pings the OSS development process for lacking accountability, attempts to call out the 'viral' aspect of the GPL, and the like are only marginally effective in driving unfavorable opinions around OSS, Linux, and the GPL, and in some cases backfire. On the other hand 'positive' OSS, Linux, and GPL messages are very effective - both across geographies and audiences.
Viral... hehe.. What a great idea. Anyone want to start a project on SourceForge for an OpenSource Outlook virus?
American Airlines specifically denies you permission to hyperlink or provide references to the Site
Oops. Sorry Slashdot.. You've been bad
American Airlines will not treat as confidential any communications you send to us by electronic mail or otherwise. American Airlines has no obligation to refrain from publishing, reproducing, or otherwise using your communications in any way and for any purpose.
Thank You for respecting my privacy
------------
An example of lawyers that don't understand technology Download or upload files that may damage the operation of another's computer, such as computer viruses, corrupt files, or similar software
When was the last time you downloaded something that hurt a website:D
Ohh.. I'm sure there's more intresting stuff in there... And I'm also pretty damn sure it's not the longest EULA...
Robert Deniro, as an ex-CIA officer turned CTO for a small news service. Matt Damon as the pimply faced recent MIS graduate who thinks he knows it all. Angelina Jolie as the harsh but, fair yet extremely hot and burdening CEO.
They have 5 hours to construct a load-balanced webserver to survive the dreaded Slashdot Effect. They must balance usability versus IT security in a short time-frame while dealing with the issuses of creating a load-balanced network.
A daring and innovative story that appeals to a very small audience and no-one will go see because the only people that would be even remotely intrested in the plot hate the movie company that produced it and would simply cringe at all of the techincal errors in the movie.
Will they choose Linux or Windows? Will they be able to get the new servers patched in time? How do they set-up the routing tables? Will they have enough ethernet cable? Will the producer of the movie actually use realistic looking images on the screen instead of stupid eye candy crap like in "Hackers"? Will the damn telco tech support ever get back to them about their connection?
At the same time, we have an equally legitimate concern that they comply with the proper legal process
We oppose the Berman bill. It's very troubling in that it essentially permits one particular segment of the U.S. industry to engage in vigilantism on the Internet
For example, even assuming that Verizon was able to provide digital television over the Internet, would we be allowed to do so without a technology that has been blessed by three (movie) studios?
We find ourselves with shared interests in making sure that fair use is preserved
Not everyone with an Inc. or Coporation after there name is bad.... Can you here me now?
Quick lesson in physics for those that don't want to read the article...
Time travel. Possible? Yes. It happens relativly speaking every day.
When you get onto an airplane you slow down in time. To say this simply. The faster you go, the slower time moves around you. This was confirmed back in the 1970's using atomic clocks. Although this isn't exactly time travel it's called time dilation which is a product of the general theory of relativity.
A quick little reference for those not familar with Relativity is a set of lecture notes from a basic astronomy class in U of Oregon.
For a little more in depth reading I'd look into buying The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time by Stephen W. Hawking. Or for those that are sadistic you can read Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime and Black Hole Thermodynamics. That is a collection of lectures from the University of Chicago. Although good in a sense of understanding relativity it kinda takes a tagent into the debate about light being a particle or a wave argument.
The Computers of ILM ILM says they have rarely seen artists get excited by hardware, but artists fought to get the new Linux workstations--Dell single-CPU P4s with NVIDIA Quadra 2 Pro graphics cards. The question became, ``Where's my Linux box?''
Production Engineering Manager Ken Beyer says
More than 350 Linux boxes were deployed during Episode II. Animators and modelers got their workstations first, then compositors. The first group had flat panels because animators lack the desk space for monitors. There were problems with monitor calibration under Red Hat 7.1. We used flat panels to get Linux out there. Last to get workstations were TDs. They push the envelope of what they ask for. An issue was how quickly we could get things ported for them.
``We've changed over quite a bit of our plant here to Linux--half of our desktops and about 30% of our 2,000 CPU renderfarm is now Linux'', says ILM Director of Research and Development Andy Hendrickson. ``We've got 700-plus O2 machines'', adds Beyer. ``But it isn't affordable to replace those with Octanes.'' SGI is recognized for producing high-end workstations and servers but has abandoned competing with commodity PC hardware. SGI seems to be rebounding in the military market but less so in entertainment. ``Our renderfarm towers carry the Deathstar logo'', points out Beyer. A render tower is a stack of 1RU 2-CPU units connected together with inexpensive 100Base-TX. He says:
These are 1RU, 2-CPU P4 units. If we lose a unit it is more convenient now that it is just two CPUs rather than four or eight with SGI 2800. For Episode II we had to double available capacity and power. It's 512 processors. We use dual 225 kVA UPS systems, and have three AC systems that rotate. Power goes out often in the San Rafael area. We can run on UPS for 15 minutes then [on a] diesel generator.
An unexpected snag arose during the upgrade: all the PC fans had to be replaced because they were defective. Systems R&D Group Manager Mike Kiernan reports a few problems with Linux:
Sometimes when I arrive in the morning a quarter of the Linux cluster is locked up. Fortunately, it doesn't happen too often. VM problems in the 2.4 kernel appear to be at the root of our kernel lockup problem. Recent improvements in the 2.4 kernel may resolve that. Things look promising.
But he adds that ``Linux needs work on NFS big time.''
We won't be going to Linux for our NFS servers. I wish we could replace NFS, but none of the document management systems is flexible enough. And the ones that are flexible have a rather high integration cost. When AFS is distributed natively for all the client platforms we need to support, perhaps we'll consider it.
ILM is comfortable with multiple platforms. Its 1,400 employees use a variety of operating systems. The art department has Macs, with the rotoscopers and painters transitioning to OS X. Hendrickson sees OS X as a possible player. ``What attracts us is the BSD-like Darwin core and network compatibility.'' ILM has few Windows boxes, besides those on business side. ``There's no advantage to a Windows conversion for us'', says Hendrickson. ``We're a UNIX shop and probably always will be.'' R&D Principal Engineer Phil Peterson says ILM chose the Red Hat distro because it seemed easier to go with what's popular. ``At ILM the 2.4.9 kernel is deployed, and 2.4.17 or 2.4.18 is in test. We tweak the kernel--things like shared memory size, number of file descriptors, default stack size--nothing dramatic.'' Open Motif 2.1 did a good job maintaining the look-and-feel of IRIX, so ILM didn't try LessTif. ILM workstations include limited installations of GNOME and KDE. ``No special effort was spent to strip machines down'', says Peterson. ``We just left out unused portions of the full install. We're pretty vanilla.''
An unusual aspect of the ILM Linux workstation configuration is the replacement of the MESA libs with the SGI open source, OpenGL implementation. ``MESA is behind compared to the SGI version in aspects such as libGLU'', explains Peterson. Other studios haven't experienced the best stability using Maya on Linux with NVIDIA drivers. It seems that may be due to MESA and not Maya, NVIDIA or Linux, as previously thought. ILM has replaced the MESA libraries with a combination of NVIDIA's core OpenGL and libraries from the SGI open-source sample implementation.
``Chances are you will not find solutions in any documentation'', notes Peterson.
We don't have a support line to call. We fix things and extend. It introduces a layer of maintenance we're not used to. We had to use open-source drivers with tablets. With calibrating monitors, the work is ongoing. Still, we've had an easy road. Our artists are technically savvy, able to endure pain. Having the best testers in the world around the corner from you provides quick feedback.
Hendrickson concurs that Linux support can be a problem. He says, ``As we get into Linux we're not finding one company to hand-hold. IBM and HP aren't there, yet. But, before Linux it was out of our control and out of control. [Now] we own our Linux problems.'' Is it possible for Linux to be too fast? ``Due to the speed of Linux, for the first time in my life, 15 years in the business, I'm starting to feel some RSI [repetitive strain injury]'', says Technical Director Robert Weaver. ``Usually you are working the machine, but Linux is so fast it can overwork you.'' Weaver has to remember to take breaks because with Linux he doesn't get any breaks waiting for the machine anymore.
http://www-ccar.colorado.edu/~jasp2/Graph.html
http://cam.radioactivecat.com/unix-rosetta.pdf
Not as graphically friendly as the orginal... But, Still gets the point across...
The quality of Unix sysadmins has declined so much over the past decade that what passes for a sysadmin right now is what I used to call "an operator".
We have 5 unix sysadmins (major transportation company). Not one of them could write a shell script if their life depended on it.
They insist on doing everything by hand and then complain there are no automated tools to them. Their definition of an automated tool really means "graphical front end to those grubby text commands".
They have no appreciation for the modularity of unix, and they look longingly at Windows servers.
Meanwhile, they're all getting paid twice what they're worth because apparently as dumb as the Unix sysadmins are, the NT ones are apparently on a different evolutionary scale where "rock" is considered the most intelligent life form.
So my point is that getting these sysadmins to switch won't happen. They'll piss, bitch and moan about the opportunity to learn something to enhance their skills, then complain the application is screwing up "their" servers.
If only ASPs would take off, my life would be much better, because sysadmin skills suck so bad, black holes pale in comparision to the event horizon of these so-called admins.
The only problem I can see with this is that there was a recent thread on here about Google blocking a lump of IP addresses as someone in there was automatically querying way too often and affecting their load.
With the exposed API I could see, by malice or sheer accident, floods of queries coming in...
There's really only one reason: hardware support. I can take my MP3s virtually anywhere and be able to play them, whether it's a computer, a CD player a flash player or something else, it's almost universally supported on digital audio gadgets. I like Ogg, I'd say at the [high] bitrates I encode at it's as good if not better than MP3, but it just doesn't have the hardware support to make encoding for it worth my while, it's more time-effective for me just to rip to MP3 directly.
No, it's not. Read the law; it was prepared roughly two months ago, and it's just going into effect 'round now care of the 60-day delay.
And the state AG is the one that makes the blocking decisions; the law explicitly states that the ISPs are under no obligation to go searching on their own, to monitor content (to
decide what to block), or to otherwise search for affirmative evidence of wrong-doing.
Now, the proxy issue... the law says "disabling access", which could be interpreted as either accessing directly (which makes a certain degree of sense, as the law mentions that
banning requests should include URLs -- so ban the URL might be sufficient under that) or even banning indirect access (proxies, mirrors, and other foo).
I'd be inclined to think that the former was meant (ban direct accessing of the specific URL), but... you'd probably have to check the debate records to find out.
-- the silly student / he writes really bad haiku / readers all go mad
Does anyone know how the dial-up information is stored in TiVO?...
Is it encrypted or is it open text?..
If it's open text then wouldn't the DMCA not apply to the subscription information stored? So couldn't you change the dial-up number or user info?...
Could you set up a user-name sharing system?..
Everyone pays $4 a month and given a shared user ID?
Distribute the ID's to 7 people... And all schedule dial-up on a different day each week?
Access to the rejected submissions bin?
Yes, please -- with the opportunity to moderate or rank them, so the most interesting rejected submissions float to the top.
If a story gets a very positive ranking, maybe the editorial staff can give it a second thought. And if it goes the way of the troll, nobody is the worse for it
Slashdot Mirror
Well... If you actually follow the news (not just /.) you'd realize that Slashdot was about 3 days behind on this one.
The site was shut down quite a while ago. So we're slashdoting a null point on the net (which I believe would be yahoo's nameservers's but, check the whois and see for yourself)
No
If I spend 400 hours writing code for something I want to sell, I'm not gonna give it away. I'm sorry
I contribute to open source projects as well but, I have to eat. That's just the facts of life.
Amazing that this park is run by a private company and not by the city?
See company's can do nice things...
Don't bash all of them
I might as well file for unemployment now... I still can't figure out how to work that damn thing
Good luck to your Raq..
It's midnight on a Friday and you have a modded up post that has the words "aspiring model" in it.
I will send a priest over to give your server the last rites. And you can bring your "friend" over I'll let her cry on my shoulder about the death of her website.
Viral... hehe..
What a great idea. Anyone want to start a project on SourceForge for an OpenSource Outlook virus?
American Airlines specifically denies you permission to hyperlink or provide references to the Site
Oops. Sorry Slashdot.. You've been bad
American Airlines will not treat as confidential any communications you send to us by electronic mail or otherwise. American Airlines has no obligation to refrain from publishing, reproducing, or otherwise using your communications in any way and for any purpose.
Thank You for respecting my privacy
------------
An example of lawyers that don't understand technology
Download or upload files that may damage the operation of another's computer, such as computer viruses, corrupt files, or similar software
When was the last time you downloaded something that hurt a website
Ohh.. I'm sure there's more intresting stuff in there... And I'm also pretty damn sure it's not the longest EULA...
Make sure he enters A B A C A B B first :-).
For everyone that has the $141,000 car (*cough*, umm, yeah I have 2) this is how you do it.
1) Disable traction control
2) Select Agressive Shifting mode
3) Hold the shift lever forward for a few seconds
4) Slam the pedal
Your electronically limited to only 30 "acceleration assisted" burn-out's for the life of the clutch (torque converter) and only 1 per hour.
Fun but, for $141,000 I want a damn 5-speed.
For the first time you can actually watch the owner of a website watch his server crash and burn via a webcam :-)
http://members.slacker.com/~nugget/camb.php
Found via : Distributed Webcams
I'm sure 42 was tested in one of the 15,769,938,165,961,326,592 keys tried.
The unknown message is: some things are better left unread
So RC5-64 is insecure?
:-)
Damn... I guess I'm gonna just have to start hashing my data to keep it secure.
Coming to a theatre near you in 2004.
The Slashdot Effect
Robert Deniro, as an ex-CIA officer turned CTO for a small news service.
Matt Damon as the pimply faced recent MIS graduate who thinks he knows it all.
Angelina Jolie as the harsh but, fair yet extremely hot and burdening CEO.
They have 5 hours to construct a load-balanced webserver to survive the dreaded Slashdot Effect. They must balance usability versus IT security in a short time-frame while dealing with the issuses of creating a load-balanced network.
A daring and innovative story that appeals to a very small audience and no-one will go see because the only people that would be even remotely intrested in the plot hate the movie company that produced it and would simply cringe at all of the techincal errors in the movie.
Will they choose Linux or Windows?
Will they be able to get the new servers patched in time?
How do they set-up the routing tables?
Will they have enough ethernet cable?
Will the producer of the movie actually use realistic looking images on the screen instead of stupid eye candy crap like in "Hackers"?
Will the damn telco tech support ever get back to them about their connection?
You'll have to see it to find out.
At the same time, we have an equally legitimate concern that they comply with the proper legal process
We oppose the Berman bill. It's very troubling in that it essentially permits one particular segment of the U.S. industry to engage in vigilantism on the Internet
For example, even assuming that Verizon was able to provide digital television over the Internet, would we be allowed to do so without a technology that has been blessed by three (movie) studios?
We find ourselves with shared interests in making sure that fair use is preserved
Not everyone with an Inc. or Coporation after there name is bad....
Can you here me now?
Quick lesson in physics for those that don't want to read the article...
Time travel. Possible? Yes. It happens relativly speaking every day.
When you get onto an airplane you slow down in time. To say this simply. The faster you go, the slower time moves around you. This was confirmed back in the 1970's using atomic clocks. Although this isn't exactly time travel it's called time dilation which is a product of the general theory of relativity.
A quick little reference for those not familar with Relativity is a set of lecture notes from a basic astronomy class in U of Oregon.
For a little more in depth reading I'd look into buying The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time by Stephen W. Hawking. Or for those that are sadistic you can read Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime and Black Hole Thermodynamics. That is a collection of lectures from the University of Chicago. Although good in a sense of understanding relativity it kinda takes a tagent into the debate about light being a particle or a wave argument.
But, can it figure out why Cowboy Neal always wins the polls? Hmm... Ya know... Some things are probably best left unsolved.
The Computers of ILM
ILM says they have rarely seen artists get excited by hardware, but artists fought to get the new Linux workstations--Dell single-CPU P4s with NVIDIA Quadra 2 Pro graphics cards. The question became, ``Where's my Linux box?''
Production Engineering Manager Ken Beyer says
More than 350 Linux boxes were deployed during Episode II. Animators and modelers got their workstations first, then compositors. The first group had flat panels because animators lack the desk space for monitors. There were problems with monitor calibration under Red Hat 7.1. We used flat panels to get Linux out there. Last to get workstations were TDs. They push the envelope of what they ask for. An issue was how quickly we could get things ported for them.
``We've changed over quite a bit of our plant here to Linux--half of our desktops and about 30% of our 2,000 CPU renderfarm is now Linux'', says ILM Director of Research and Development Andy Hendrickson. ``We've got 700-plus O2 machines'', adds Beyer. ``But it isn't affordable to replace those with Octanes.'' SGI is recognized for producing high-end workstations and servers but has abandoned competing with commodity PC hardware. SGI seems to be rebounding in the military market but less so in entertainment.
``Our renderfarm towers carry the Deathstar logo'', points out Beyer. A render tower is a stack of 1RU 2-CPU units connected together with inexpensive 100Base-TX. He says:
These are 1RU, 2-CPU P4 units. If we lose a unit it is more convenient now that it is just two CPUs rather than four or eight with SGI 2800. For Episode II we had to double available capacity and power. It's 512 processors. We use dual 225 kVA UPS systems, and have three AC systems that rotate. Power goes out often in the San Rafael area. We can run on UPS for 15 minutes then [on a] diesel generator.
An unexpected snag arose during the upgrade: all the PC fans had to be replaced because they were defective.
Systems R&D Group Manager Mike Kiernan reports a few problems with Linux:
Sometimes when I arrive in the morning a quarter of the Linux cluster is locked up. Fortunately, it doesn't happen too often. VM problems in the 2.4 kernel appear to be at the root of our kernel lockup problem. Recent improvements in the 2.4 kernel may resolve that. Things look promising.
But he adds that ``Linux needs work on NFS big time.''
We won't be going to Linux for our NFS servers. I wish we could replace NFS, but none of the document management systems is flexible enough. And the ones that are flexible have a rather high integration cost. When AFS is distributed natively for all the client platforms we need to support, perhaps we'll consider it.
ILM is comfortable with multiple platforms. Its 1,400 employees use a variety of operating systems. The art department has Macs, with the rotoscopers and painters transitioning to OS X. Hendrickson sees OS X as a possible player. ``What attracts us is the BSD-like Darwin core and network compatibility.'' ILM has few Windows boxes, besides those on business side. ``There's no advantage to a Windows conversion for us'', says Hendrickson. ``We're a UNIX shop and probably always will be.''
R&D Principal Engineer Phil Peterson says ILM chose the Red Hat distro because it seemed easier to go with what's popular. ``At ILM the 2.4.9 kernel is deployed, and 2.4.17 or 2.4.18 is in test. We tweak the kernel--things like shared memory size, number of file descriptors, default stack size--nothing dramatic.'' Open Motif 2.1 did a good job maintaining the look-and-feel of IRIX, so ILM didn't try LessTif. ILM workstations include limited installations of GNOME and KDE. ``No special effort was spent to strip machines down'', says Peterson. ``We just left out unused portions of the full install. We're pretty vanilla.''
An unusual aspect of the ILM Linux workstation configuration is the replacement of the MESA libs with the SGI open source, OpenGL implementation. ``MESA is behind compared to the SGI version in aspects such as libGLU'', explains Peterson. Other studios haven't experienced the best stability using Maya on Linux with NVIDIA drivers. It seems that may be due to MESA and not Maya, NVIDIA or Linux, as previously thought. ILM has replaced the MESA libraries with a combination of NVIDIA's core OpenGL and libraries from the SGI open-source sample implementation.
``Chances are you will not find solutions in any documentation'', notes Peterson.
We don't have a support line to call. We fix things and extend. It introduces a layer of maintenance we're not used to. We had to use open-source drivers with tablets. With calibrating monitors, the work is ongoing. Still, we've had an easy road. Our artists are technically savvy, able to endure pain. Having the best testers in the world around the corner from you provides quick feedback.
Hendrickson concurs that Linux support can be a problem. He says, ``As we get into Linux we're not finding one company to hand-hold. IBM and HP aren't there, yet. But, before Linux it was out of our control and out of control. [Now] we own our Linux problems.''
Is it possible for Linux to be too fast? ``Due to the speed of Linux, for the first time in my life, 15 years in the business, I'm starting to feel some RSI [repetitive strain injury]'', says Technical Director Robert Weaver. ``Usually you are working the machine, but Linux is so fast it can overwork you.'' Weaver has to remember to take breaks because with Linux he doesn't get any breaks waiting for the machine anymore.
http://www-ccar.colorado.edu/~jasp2/Graph.html http://cam.radioactivecat.com/unix-rosetta.pdf Not as graphically friendly as the orginal... But, Still gets the point across...
Not a flippant post.
The quality of Unix sysadmins has declined so much over the past decade that what passes for a sysadmin right now is what I used to call "an operator".
We have 5 unix sysadmins (major transportation company). Not one of them could write a shell script if their life depended on it.
They insist on doing everything by hand and then complain there are no automated tools to them. Their definition of an automated tool really means "graphical front end to those grubby text commands".
They have no appreciation for the modularity of unix, and they look longingly at Windows servers.
Meanwhile, they're all getting paid twice what they're worth because apparently as dumb as the Unix sysadmins are, the NT ones are apparently on a different evolutionary scale where "rock" is considered the most intelligent life form.
So my point is that getting these sysadmins to switch won't happen. They'll piss, bitch and moan about the opportunity to learn something to enhance their skills, then complain the application is screwing up "their" servers.
If only ASPs would take off, my life would be much better, because sysadmin skills suck so bad, black holes pale in comparision to the event horizon of these so-called admins.
The only problem I can see with this is that there was a recent thread on here about Google blocking a lump of IP addresses as someone in there was automatically querying way too often and affecting their load.
With the exposed API I could see, by malice or sheer accident, floods of queries coming in...
There's really only one reason: hardware support.
I can take my MP3s virtually anywhere and be able to play them, whether it's a computer, a CD player a flash player or something else, it's almost universally supported on digital audio gadgets.
I like Ogg, I'd say at the [high] bitrates I encode at it's as good if not better than MP3, but it just doesn't have the hardware support to make encoding for it worth my while, it's more time-effective for me just to rip to MP3 directly.
No, it's not. Read the law; it was prepared roughly two months ago, and it's just going into effect 'round now care of the 60-day delay.
And the state AG is the one that makes the blocking decisions; the law explicitly states that the ISPs are under no obligation to go searching on their own, to monitor content (to
decide what to block), or to otherwise search for affirmative evidence of wrong-doing.
Now, the proxy issue... the law says "disabling access", which could be interpreted as either accessing directly (which makes a certain degree of sense, as the law mentions that
banning requests should include URLs -- so ban the URL might be sufficient under that) or even banning indirect access (proxies, mirrors, and other foo).
I'd be inclined to think that the former was meant (ban direct accessing of the specific URL), but... you'd probably have to check the debate records to find out.
-- the silly student / he writes really bad haiku / readers all go mad
Does anyone know how the dial-up information is stored in TiVO?... Is it encrypted or is it open text?.. If it's open text then wouldn't the DMCA not apply to the subscription information stored? So couldn't you change the dial-up number or user info?... Could you set up a user-name sharing system?.. Everyone pays $4 a month and given a shared user ID? Distribute the ID's to 7 people... And all schedule dial-up on a different day each week?
Access to the rejected submissions bin? Yes, please -- with the opportunity to moderate or rank them, so the most interesting rejected submissions float to the top. If a story gets a very positive ranking, maybe the editorial staff can give it a second thought. And if it goes the way of the troll, nobody is the worse for it