The gravitational pull from being inside a spherical shell is neutral, that is quite easy to prove.
Thus inside the earth assuming it is made of uniform spheres, you can ignore the spheres you are already underneath.
Assuming the mass is proportional to the volume in the spheres underneath (constant density - unlikely but hey it is late here), the mass varies as r^3
force = GMm/r^2 -> Gxr^3m/r^2 -> Gxmr where x is a constant left for the reader to work out but we know what the force is at the surface.
So not so strange it doesn't fall to dimensional analysis with a few bits of knowhow.
Read the post Tsar Bomba was 57Mt in 1961, the UK nuclear deterrent is presumably classified still but is just Trident since we destroy 175 warheads in the 200 - 400 Kt range.
So the UK got major political capital from decommission weapons with the total yield of one 1961 bomb.
Similarly the remaining warheads in the UK arsenal probably have a similar yield per Trident submarine as the Tsar Bomba. Think many small devices means many targets get hit, with adjustable yield you can tune them down almost as low as the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs, and only wipe out small cities or big military targets.
One big bomb means you flatten one target completely and scare the living daylights out of anyone within a thousand miles or so. Which might make for good "shock and awe" but is totally useless if you want to live on the planet afterwards.
The point is that the individual devices in the worlds nuclear arsenals don't match big earthquakes (the UK created a 5.3 magnitude earthquake in one of their tests), because we have deliberately built many small warheads.
Britain if it wanted could have built 400, 100Mt yield nukes, allowing a total yield of 40 Gt. Detonated underground that could produce 40 earthquakes of the scale that caused the Asian Tsunami in December.
However even the current UK nuclear arsenal is estimated to be more than sufficent to deplete the ozone layer to almost nothing (in both hemispheres if we nuke the right places), and induces a nuclear winter. If we target the worlds most populous cities we can probably take out over a tenth of the worlds population in the first few minutes.
Now your definition of TEOTWAWKI may vary from mine, but I think if one relatively small country could scale up two orders of magnitude from total depletion of the ozone layer, I'm not sure what would be left? Algae, and scorpions.
King James Bible (Genesis 1:28): "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."
Note "Earth" surely literal biblical interpretation means we should leave the catholics and other religious bigots behind.
I'm having so much fun with this biblical interpretation perhaps I should eschew my atheism and learn ancient Hebrew.
Software patents are also tricky because you need original ideas to patent, and the SCM field is extremely mature, even if very few products implement all of the many ideas that have been around, many of them since the 1960's.
I'm not familiar with BitKeeper, but I use to do pre/post sales technical work on one of the big (at the time) SCM tools, and I see nothing in Bitkeepers description that looks terribly original.
That is not to criticise it, the real value in SCM tools is doing their job well, being well integrated into the programmer work environment, and keeping out of the way except where they add value, not being innovative computer science.
It is possible Bitkeeper have devised mysterious complex mathematical enhancements on the theory of changesets - but I doubt it, and even if they have I doubt that is what adds much of the value perceived in BK.
Indeed many "old time" developers use to complain bitterly when we were selling SCM that the modern tools often lacked integration features the older tools had.
Although this was largely market driven, trying to appeal to as big a market as possible, where as many of the earlier tools targetted a much smaller toolset (Cobol on IBM Mainframes for example), not least because there were less tools around then, and interoperability and portability were more talked about than actually implemented before the late 1980's.
400 Megatonnes or about 7 Tsar Bomba yields (I thought the yield estimate had gone up for this one but 57Mt stands apparently).
The worlds nuclear arsenal is designed for destroying on the scale of cities and miltary targets, if we wanted to destroy continents we would build different sorts of nukes.
Nuclear scientists reportedly have designs for much bigger nukes (this was 1961 technology after all), but there is no motivation to build such devices.
A handful of nukes within our current technical abilities probably could create TEOTWAWKI
"Now, it's not like only Linux has these problems."
I don't even think they are problems, it is just an old model for security, but as said earlier it is understood and it works.
We built a demo laptop with recent GNOME and 2.6 kernel, you just plug USB storage devices in and a Window opens on your desktop showing you the content. No crappy "Windows has detected new hardware", or "Windows must load a driver", or other system bollocks. It just opens a Window, it glances or reads any files, and creates pretty thumbnails of the contents where it knows how to.
Put in an audio CD and it plays music, put in a data CD it opens a filemanager, put in a DVD it just shows the movie (okay stopping it showing the DVD contents was more interesting than it should have been). All done with normal user privileges and the documented calls - heck it required only about 3 lines of config changes from a default Debian testing install to get this behaviour. It also required ensuring users were added to the relevant privilege groups. But it is all basic system admin skill, this isn't deep system integration work. Anyone shipping GNU/Linux for end user desktop should do at least this much.
Whilst I think mandatory access control models are interesting, I don't know if they will be the norm, although it is quite possible we'll get MAC and the default will be "like Unix always was" at least for most aspects of the system, so those that don't want it won't even know it is there.
Sorry it is a packaging issue - getting software to play nicely is what distros are all about.
The only thing to mess up recently in my Debian testing install was AMSN, and GAIM uses the same config file so that didn't really hurt. Otherwise I've just been acquiring the bug fixes as Sarge is bought into release quality, although the only one I noticed in the last few weeks was the fix to the GNOME backdrop chooser.
Indeed I don't even think Debian is that hard to install and use properly, sure is easier than other Linux distro's and MS Windows.
But I agree there is a lot of hype over Ubuntu that isn't justified IMHO.
I suspect a lot of non-Debian users got a free CD and tried it and thought - that was easy - and have never actually run (say) "Debian testing" in comparison.
But of course the poster you replied to missed the point, Ubuntu is planning snapshotting Debian AIUI, so Ubuntu has created a whole group whose survival depends on Debians continued success. Or is that snapshot thing unworkable, and they'll be maintaining their own fork?
The daft thing is that Microsoft have been shipping DNS servers with this switched off for so long.
I can't even begin to conceive the mindset of the developers (or organisation) who thought "lets create a registry setting that switches on a widely accepted necessary security feature, and then defaults it to off", and keep doing this even through major revisions of the product (and service packs).
I mean people were even poisoning the Microsoft caches by mistake before it was done deliberately, but because it usually happened in reverse DNS lookups the admins didn't notice, or didn't have the clue to understand what had happened (and no doubt just rebooted and "fixed" the problem).
Bits of Microsoft are just badly broken, and their approach to the DNS protocols exhibits the worst aspects of "embrace and extend", although this particular fault is unrelated to the "embrace and extend" of DNS they have tried.
Which is why there are tools to turn other package formats (RPMs, tarballs) into debs.
People might think they want to install something that isn't a deb yet - but that is a perception issue, they just need to learn to make debs* - once you've spent 15 years maintaining systems your heart sinks every time you step outside of the native packaging system.
Google ain't a good search tool for software, just think about the machinations you have to go through to get it to stop telling you about Windows software when you want GNU/Linux, or in my case "Free Software" not freeware.
As regards finding suitable software - sure synaptic needs better defaults, but "search", select "Description", and enter a keyword. If they can't do that don't expect them to use Google successfully.
In this International world if every company sent you email, and you took a couple of seconds to unsubscribe (optimistic I know), you'd spend your entire working life unsubscribing.
If it is unsolicited and sent in bulk it is spam. It is spam whatever the content. It is about using machines to abuse humans.
Religious spam is more worrying in someways, because the irrational nature of the people sending it - just ask the senders what my boss did "who would Jesus spam?".
The munged headers and use of stolen PC resources to send spam just reflect that people block it if you don't do those things because they don't want it, and they don't want it because it devalues email as a form of communication.
5 times as much snail and email spam - well before filtering I get about 3 to 4 thousand junk emails a day of various sorts, and I've met people with far more. Trust me you don't know what email spam is about if you get more snail mail spam.
In the UK you can opt out of snail spam - works pretty well - I'm tempted to sign-up everyone in the village (as the validation is pretty weak) to save the postman work, and save the planet.
Problem is I fear the post office offer bulk discounts - perhaps if you campaign to stop the bulk discounts...
Good example, I'm fairly sure every ".co.uk" got an unsolicited email to "info@" last month.
I got dozens of this particular spam, and one mate whose domain is used, and we thought known only to his family and Nominet, also got the same spam to "info@".
Google is your friend;) Well was before they went public;)
Dictionary attacks are where spammers try entire dictionaries of names against a domain.
Typically one of say 10,000 compromised windows boxes connects to your email server as says "is there an aardvark@example.com?", then it say "aaron@aardvark.com?", then another one connects and say "barry@example.com?", and so on down to aardvarrk.aardvark@ through to zulu.zulu@example.com.
Typically you see one connection from each PC involved in the attack, so blacklisting is almost pointless (it might help stop the next attack), and because you can't be 100% sure it wasn't just a typo....
I think you see more dictionary attacks the more email addresses that are out there. We have a server which has over the years had over a million email accounts in one domain (some repetition of names), so there are a lot of references to the domain out there, it seems almost continual attacks of this nature. It perpetually has 80 or so connections sending and receiving email to the outside world, even though it forwards email for only 20 or 30,000 mostly low use email accounts.
Sometimes I see attacks that look like dictionary attacks, but on inspection the bastards have actually already harvested many thousands of addresses in your domain, and are delivering spam to working addresses only, in alphabetical order, in a similar pattern.
Still you know when you see machines connect, and try five or so addresses in close alphabetical succession that your email server is in for a bad few hours.
I suspect blacklists are about the only useful weapon here, but even they are only so successful.
Either ways admins have had to do a lot of work to get email servers into shape, and cope with the sheer dross.
Whilst costwise the eyeball cost to end users is probably the biggest waste, for moderate to big email admins spam is a perpetual waste of life.
A lot of us remember the Internet before spam, heck before the web, when you could relay email through almost anyones server because the one you needed was offline. When the right thing to do was to be strict about what you sent out, but relaxed about what you accepted in terms of email format.
If you are introducing a new installation system into the environment you should make it work with the estalished system, not complain that it is faulty because the establish player didn't anticipate someone trying to break a well establish principal in computer systems management of staying within the package management system.
Of course the reason Debian deb doesn't do this is "there is no point", if you can present something that contains all the information in a well form deb you can just convert it mechanically to a well formed deb. If your package doesn't have all that information... then I don't want to install it.
Slashdot Mirror
I vaguely recall this one from my physics degree.
The gravitational pull from being inside a spherical shell is neutral, that is quite easy to prove.
Thus inside the earth assuming it is made of uniform spheres, you can ignore the spheres you are already underneath.
Assuming the mass is proportional to the volume in the spheres underneath (constant density - unlikely but hey it is late here), the mass varies as r^3
force = GMm/r^2 -> Gxr^3m/r^2 -> Gxmr where x is a constant left for the reader to work out but we know what the force is at the surface.
So not so strange it doesn't fall to dimensional analysis with a few bits of knowhow.
Read the post Tsar Bomba was 57Mt in 1961, the UK nuclear deterrent is presumably classified still but is just Trident since we destroy 175 warheads in the 200 - 400 Kt range.
So the UK got major political capital from decommission weapons with the total yield of one 1961 bomb.
Similarly the remaining warheads in the UK arsenal probably have a similar yield per Trident submarine as the Tsar Bomba. Think many small devices means many targets get hit, with adjustable yield you can tune them down almost as low as the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs, and only wipe out small cities or big military targets.
One big bomb means you flatten one target completely and scare the living daylights out of anyone within a thousand miles or so. Which might make for good "shock and awe" but is totally useless if you want to live on the planet afterwards.
The point is that the individual devices in the worlds nuclear arsenals don't match big earthquakes (the UK created a 5.3 magnitude earthquake in one of their tests), because we have deliberately built many small warheads.
Britain if it wanted could have built 400, 100Mt yield nukes, allowing a total yield of 40 Gt. Detonated underground that could produce 40 earthquakes of the scale that caused the Asian Tsunami in December.
However even the current UK nuclear arsenal is estimated to be more than sufficent to deplete the ozone layer to almost nothing (in both hemispheres if we nuke the right places), and induces a nuclear winter. If we target the worlds most populous cities we can probably take out over a tenth of the worlds population in the first few minutes.
Now your definition of TEOTWAWKI may vary from mine, but I think if one relatively small country could scale up two orders of magnitude from total depletion of the ozone layer, I'm not sure what would be left? Algae, and scorpions.
King James Bible (Genesis 1:28): "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."
Note "Earth" surely literal biblical interpretation means we should leave the catholics and other religious bigots behind.
I'm having so much fun with this biblical interpretation perhaps I should eschew my atheism and learn ancient Hebrew.
"non-critical problem"
Possibly, but he wouldn't be the only person who doesn't want to use proprietary code in contributing to the Linux kernel.
Indeed Debian practically exists these days so people can get a GNU/Linux distro without non-free software.
Presumably if Linus switches to a free software SCM system, Tridge is happy, Linus will have to learn some new tricks, and McVoy loses out anyway.
Either way it seems Tridge gets his way.
Software patents are also tricky because you need original ideas to patent, and the SCM field is extremely mature, even if very few products implement all of the many ideas that have been around, many of them since the 1960's.
I'm not familiar with BitKeeper, but I use to do pre/post sales technical work on one of the big (at the time) SCM tools, and I see nothing in Bitkeepers description that looks terribly original.
That is not to criticise it, the real value in SCM tools is doing their job well, being well integrated into the programmer work environment, and keeping out of the way except where they add value, not being innovative computer science.
It is possible Bitkeeper have devised mysterious complex mathematical enhancements on the theory of changesets - but I doubt it, and even if they have I doubt that is what adds much of the value perceived in BK.
Indeed many "old time" developers use to complain bitterly when we were selling SCM that the modern tools often lacked integration features the older tools had.
Although this was largely market driven, trying to appeal to as big a market as possible, where as many of the earlier tools targetted a much smaller toolset (Cobol on IBM Mainframes for example), not least because there were less tools around then, and interoperability and portability were more talked about than actually implemented before the late 1980's.
400 Megatonnes or about 7 Tsar Bomba yields (I thought the yield estimate had gone up for this one but 57Mt stands apparently).
The worlds nuclear arsenal is designed for destroying on the scale of cities and miltary targets, if we wanted to destroy continents we would build different sorts of nukes.
Nuclear scientists reportedly have designs for much bigger nukes (this was 1961 technology after all), but there is no motivation to build such devices.
A handful of nukes within our current technical abilities probably could create TEOTWAWKI
There is no "collateral damage" moderation.
Damn I can't mod you "off topic" now.
"Now, it's not like only Linux has these problems."
I don't even think they are problems, it is just an old model for security, but as said earlier it is understood and it works.
We built a demo laptop with recent GNOME and 2.6 kernel, you just plug USB storage devices in and a Window opens on your desktop showing you the content. No crappy "Windows has detected new hardware", or "Windows must load a driver", or other system bollocks. It just opens a Window, it glances or reads any files, and creates pretty thumbnails of the contents where it knows how to.
Put in an audio CD and it plays music, put in a data CD it opens a filemanager, put in a DVD it just shows the movie (okay stopping it showing the DVD contents was more interesting than it should have been). All done with normal user privileges and the documented calls - heck it required only about 3 lines of config changes from a default Debian testing install to get this behaviour. It also required ensuring users were added to the relevant privilege groups. But it is all basic system admin skill, this isn't deep system integration work. Anyone shipping GNU/Linux for end user desktop should do at least this much.
Whilst I think mandatory access control models are interesting, I don't know if they will be the norm, although it is quite possible we'll get MAC and the default will be "like Unix always was" at least for most aspects of the system, so those that don't want it won't even know it is there.
"Sometimes I wonder if the IT people are overly paranoid"
If they have XP and haven't loaded SP2 they aren't paranoid enough.
"Basically it's a Linux problem."
Sorry the kernel broke your package management?
Sorry it is a packaging issue - getting software to play nicely is what distros are all about.
The only thing to mess up recently in my Debian testing install was AMSN, and GAIM uses the same config file so that didn't really hurt. Otherwise I've just been acquiring the bug fixes as Sarge is bought into release quality, although the only one I noticed in the last few weeks was the fix to the GNOME backdrop chooser.
XP grew old very quickly - it was all that removing the spyware.
Microsoft did release something in 2003, at least I assume it was 2003 from the version number.
Nah "apt-get --reinstall install vote" would be for vote rigging.
;)
This is a new vote, so "apt-get install vote" will get the latest version as needed.
Please RTFM
I got my "shiny and new fix" for the week by using the Debian Installer rc-3 the day after it was released.
I don't like your elitist comments.
Indeed I don't even think Debian is that hard to install and use properly, sure is easier than other Linux distro's and MS Windows.
But I agree there is a lot of hype over Ubuntu that isn't justified IMHO.
I suspect a lot of non-Debian users got a free CD and tried it and thought - that was easy - and have never actually run (say) "Debian testing" in comparison.
But of course the poster you replied to missed the point, Ubuntu is planning snapshotting Debian AIUI, so Ubuntu has created a whole group whose survival depends on Debians continued success. Or is that snapshot thing unworkable, and they'll be maintaining their own fork?
The daft thing is that Microsoft have been shipping DNS servers with this switched off for so long.
I can't even begin to conceive the mindset of the developers (or organisation) who thought "lets create a registry setting that switches on a widely accepted necessary security feature, and then defaults it to off", and keep doing this even through major revisions of the product (and service packs).
I mean people were even poisoning the Microsoft caches by mistake before it was done deliberately, but because it usually happened in reverse DNS lookups the admins didn't notice, or didn't have the clue to understand what had happened (and no doubt just rebooted and "fixed" the problem).
Bits of Microsoft are just badly broken, and their approach to the DNS protocols exhibits the worst aspects of "embrace and extend", although this particular fault is unrelated to the "embrace and extend" of DNS they have tried.
"Watch karma in action in the next couple of years"
;)
Anyone running a book on how long before they sell BK to Computer Associates to milk the last remaining dregs of value from the product
3 minutes is probably quicker than the "rubber hose" approach.
Although the rubber hose approach gets you a secondhand laptop as well as the WEP key.
Which is why there are tools to turn other package formats (RPMs, tarballs) into debs.
People might think they want to install something that isn't a deb yet - but that is a perception issue, they just need to learn to make debs* - once you've spent 15 years maintaining systems your heart sinks every time you step outside of the native packaging system.
Google ain't a good search tool for software, just think about the machinations you have to go through to get it to stop telling you about Windows software when you want GNU/Linux, or in my case "Free Software" not freeware.
As regards finding suitable software - sure synaptic needs better defaults, but "search", select "Description", and enter a keyword. If they can't do that don't expect them to use Google successfully.
The stop bugging me argument falls over.
In this International world if every company sent you email, and you took a couple of seconds to unsubscribe (optimistic I know), you'd spend your entire working life unsubscribing.
If it is unsolicited and sent in bulk it is spam. It is spam whatever the content.
It is about using machines to abuse humans.
Religious spam is more worrying in someways, because the irrational nature of the people sending it - just ask the senders what my boss did "who would Jesus spam?".
The munged headers and use of stolen PC resources to send spam just reflect that people block it if you don't do those things because they don't want it, and they don't want it because it devalues email as a form of communication.
5 times as much snail and email spam - well before filtering I get about 3 to 4 thousand junk emails a day of various sorts, and I've met people with far more. Trust me you don't know what email spam is about if you get more snail mail spam.
In the UK you can opt out of snail spam - works pretty well - I'm tempted to sign-up everyone in the village (as the validation is pretty weak) to save the postman work, and save the planet.
Problem is I fear the post office offer bulk discounts - perhaps if you campaign to stop the bulk discounts...
Good example, I'm fairly sure every ".co.uk" got an unsolicited email to "info@" last month.
I got dozens of this particular spam, and one mate whose domain is used, and we thought known only to his family and Nominet, also got the same spam to "info@".
Google is your friend ;) Well was before they went public ;)
Dictionary attacks are where spammers try entire dictionaries of names against a domain.
Typically one of say 10,000 compromised windows boxes connects to your email server as says "is there an aardvark@example.com?", then it say "aaron@aardvark.com?", then another one connects and say "barry@example.com?", and so on down to aardvarrk.aardvark@ through to zulu.zulu@example.com.
Typically you see one connection from each PC involved in the attack, so blacklisting is almost pointless (it might help stop the next attack), and because you can't be 100% sure it wasn't just a typo....
I think you see more dictionary attacks the more email addresses that are out there. We have a server which has over the years had over a million email accounts in one domain (some repetition of names), so there are a lot of references to the domain out there, it seems almost continual attacks of this nature. It perpetually has 80 or so connections sending and receiving email to the outside world, even though it forwards email for only 20 or 30,000 mostly low use email accounts.
Sometimes I see attacks that look like dictionary attacks, but on inspection the bastards have actually already harvested many thousands of addresses in your domain, and are delivering spam to working addresses only, in alphabetical order, in a similar pattern.
Still you know when you see machines connect, and try five or so addresses in close alphabetical succession that your email server is in for a bad few hours.
I suspect blacklists are about the only useful weapon here, but even they are only so successful.
Either ways admins have had to do a lot of work to get email servers into shape, and cope with the sheer dross.
Whilst costwise the eyeball cost to end users is probably the biggest waste, for moderate to big email admins spam is a perpetual waste of life.
A lot of us remember the Internet before spam, heck before the web, when you could relay email through almost anyones server because the one you needed was offline. When the right thing to do was to be strict about what you sent out, but relaxed about what you accepted in terms of email format.
Mirrors are so very 1990's, you've been able to get debs off several different scalable peer to peer networks for years.
I don't get debs that way, but sharing files is a solved problem, ask the RIAA.
Sure sharing packages is unfriendly to closed source software, but they are inherently at a disadvantage when it comes to distributing software.
Sorry this is a cop out.
If you are introducing a new installation system into the environment you should make it work with the estalished system, not complain that it is faulty because the establish player didn't anticipate someone trying to break a well establish principal in computer systems management of staying within the package management system.
Of course the reason Debian deb doesn't do this is "there is no point", if you can present something that contains all the information in a well form deb you can just convert it mechanically to a well formed deb. If your package doesn't have all that information... then I don't want to install it.