Take a look at this current front page CNN article -- the Supreme Court *just* struck down an attempt by the Bush Administration to bypass habeas corpus.
Pissed off nationalists are a large, manipulable pool to use -- if you're trying to build up a world video game competition, try feeding off of nationalist feelings.
Japan underwent a massive swing from one of the most conservative nations with respect to pornography to one of the most liberal, and extremely accepting of fetishes. There was a corresponding *decrease* in sex crimes.
America is a nation where killing can be shown on any broadcast television, but nudity is banned.
America is a nation where a thirteen-year-old schoolchild can be let in to watch a movie starring action hero becoming a vigilante and gunning down and knifing all the bad guys that have been trying to get in his way, but where that same thirteen-year-old cannot watch a movie where two people are making love.
America is a nation where exchanging money for sex is illegal everywhere but in parts of a single state of the fifty, but exchanging money to kill, becoming a corporate mercenary working in Iraq, is considered laudable and encouraged.
America is a nation where up until one year ago, thirteen states had laws banning consentual anal sex. Forty years ago, *every* state made consentual anal sex illegal. Fifty years ago, sodomy could widely be (and was) punished by "corrective actions", such as forced lobotomies. For those of you unfamiliar with lobotomies, they are commonly performed by inserting an ice pick through a patient's skull and swirling it around in certain areas of the brain in hopes of destroying portions of the brain that induce "deviant behavior".
America is a nation where (well, with the exception of San Francisco), being in public showing bare breasts (unless one is nursing an infant), genitalia, or one's rear end is grounds for lewdness arrest, but carrying a loaded gun visibily on one's hip is legal and acceptable.
America is a nation where a seventeen-year-old who convinces his seventeen-year-old girlfriend to send him a nude picture of herself has committed a felony (United States Code Title 18, Part I, 2251).
America is a nation where it is perfectly legal for an Olympic swimmer and lifeguard to stand by a pool and point, yelling insults and mocking, as someone drowns.
America is a nation where we cannot expose nipples, but we cheer on invading Afghanistan to "free women from the burka" and promote other human rights.
America is a nation that values free political speech, as long as it isn't:
(a) in Iraq and in opposition to the invasion (freedom of press was one of the first things removed from Iraqis, and newspapers and the only available television station were shut down for being critical of the invasion).
(b) Involving presidential candidates debating other than Bush or Kerry.
(c) Involve any Islamic advocacy. A student volunteer forum webmaster visiting the United States was charged with terrorist activities for running Islamic websites. The other side is well represented and permitted to operate, however -- consider the following quotes from this single forum thread:
My vote is that if they nuke us, we don't bother asking exactly where the bomb came from. Instead we turn ALL the likely sponsor nations into radioactive parking lots. The we tell the rest of the Islamic nations that if they don't get rid of their own terrorists, they will face the same thing. ***...I agree with your nuclear solution with one addition. As we find out the names of the people involved, we hunt down and kill every son, daughter, aunt, uncle, and every other relative they have on the entire planet right on out to the 8th cousin.
Payback isn't payback unless they continue to hurt for a long, long time. As each father, mother, and child is assasinated, it will be very hard for anyone to celebrate the conspirators as martyrs.
The message would be, "We won't only roast your damned nation. We will kill every last person on earth you ever cared about." *** I take it one step further - desroy Mecca and Media. That's right nuke their holy lands - get rid of them and than start destroying the mosques. Sprinkle their lands with pig blood. We might as well face it - this is a holy war against us supported by Muslims (look at the
and, perhaps best of all, free enterprise is allowed to flourish, with few inconvenient and inefficient regulations to stifle workers and with excellent government support of entrepreneurs and industry (in return for "campaign contributions")
Actually, I thought that China was kinda bureaucratic.
Other than that, though...that seems to be a pretty accurate and interesting look at things.
Hitler's police power grab after the wake of the Reichstag Fire to defend against terrorists included a lot of unnecessary powers as well. Funny, that.
One definite -- once you allow the federal government a power, they never release it -- they will have it forever.
Why be secret? It's making your work environment unpleasant, and, I would assume, others in your area. It helps redirect cold air to those who want it.
Re:What is Real Time exactly?
on
RT Linux Patches
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Real time refers to a system where tasks completing by a certain deadline is more important than just about anything else. Real time systems are less efficient than non-real-time systems -- they trade efficient scheduling for bounded scheduling.
This is generally split into hard real time and soft real time.
In a hard real time system, if a task misses a deadline, the task has failed. You might as well not do it. This sort of thing is important for, say, control systems that determine what thrusters to fire when on the Space Shuttle.
In a soft real time system, you have some penality if a task isn't finished by a certain time.
One kind of real-time functionality that a system might provide (and Linux does and has for a while) is a "real time priority level". To simplify things a bit, when a process is marked as "real time", that process runs and every other process is ignored. This is important if that process has a task that *must* complete. As a negative side effect, it means that another task (which might only want a tiny bit of CPU time, just enough to keep copying a file from disk to disk) can't run at all and all the disk activity stops. As a result, the time required for all the work the system must do increases, and the system runs more slowly. However, the one process that *must* gets time continues to get it.
It's not something that a desktop or server user is going to benefit much from.
Re:Time to be a troll
on
RT Linux Patches
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Your system will be slower, but will feel more responsive.
You do not need a real time system to "feel more responsive". In most systems, kernel locks simly do not tie things up for anything approaching human-perceptable times.
This stuff is important not for the server or the desktop, but things like control systems.
Re:So what is the verdict?
on
RT Linux Patches
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Are there any benefits for the senior noob who can patch and compile the kernel with the RT features.
No. Real time functionality is not just "better latency". Real time stuff is generally significantly less efficient than traditional schedulers. It's useful for specialized work -- this is not "better desktop" or "better server" for anything approaching the typical Linux end user.
If you're doing control work with Linux, then you might be interested.
Essentially every change you make to the 'current' build environment can effect all builds or just the one you have currently selected. That is what I meant when I said pick nunit in a combo and build - nunit is a seperate build config and selecting any of them (retail, debug, nunit, web version, desk version (and debug/retail of those etc)) is a combo box in the tool bar. Is that what you are asking about?
Sort of. IIRC, there are "current build configuration" and "global build configuration" stuff, but can you do a subset of build configurations with a single change? I've done this with GNU Make frequently ('IN-HOUSE' build flag), but (and I admit that I'm not a VS guru) this was a source of irritation when I was working on a VS setup. To be fair, I was working through the GUI -- there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of people working with the raw scripts VS the GUI on VS.
I have to say that I find it more objectionable to fire and then insult ("He won't find any intelligence when he looks in the mirror") an employee, especially one who is clearly right on the edge of retirement and is about to leave with pension than it is to install a piece of software.
Also, contacting this boss guy isn't going to do anything other than make him more pissy and angry. If you can express your unhappiness to his *boss*, things might be different.
I think that his point is that the *firing* of this guy for a fairly minor infraction when others aren't being *fired* for much worse things isn't particularly fair or beneficial. He's not trying to justify abuse, just pointing out that the punishment is out of whack.
The other thing is people that say "Only three years? How about some *real* time, like ten years!"
The problem is that there's just no realization of what they're asking for when they're demanding "tougher sentences". We work hard to segregate criminals and "everyone else" and to psychologically separate the two, so there doesn't seem to be any bad points associated with "tougher sentences". It just seems to have benefits. People say "Well, if you hadn't stolen that money, you wouldn't be in this situation. Have fun being Bubba's bitch!"
My usual reaction is to wonder how people would feel if *speeding* (something that risks other people's lives for the benefit of being able to spend maybe 10% less time in your car) was punishable by their "hard time" -- say, five years in prison. All of a sudden, they realize that crimes are maybe something that people decide on doing in a flash, that people screw up and can be trusted not to do so again.
I suspect that in practice there would be very little harm from running these processes, especially compared to all the other spyware and viruses that are out there, but there seems to be a very hostile reaction anyway.
It's CYA. You can blame it on the vendor if you have an *exactly* vendor-approved configuration. One of your flunkies puts some harmless app on the server, and you lose your CYA insurance.
I'm not going to blame people for CYA -- it makes a lot of sense based on our corporate reward structure, where you get fired for screwing up and rewarded only for *noisily* going far above and beyind.
Have you ever considered covering over most/all of your nearby cold-air register, and letting the air instead come out in the other (warmer) parts of the building?
With the VS configuration management, how do you deal with a change that you make that would affect multiple configurations?
e.g. on *IX, I'd have a flag set in my Makefile for all, say, BSD variants only (which might be several "build configurations"), and I'd make one change. With VS, do I need to manually make the change for each BSD-variant build configuration?
I've been avoiding SVN thus far because most folks are still using CVS, but SVN is pretty much an overall improvement over CVS -- even the CVS developers don't seem to argue too much.
* CVS has a very, *very* poor design from a security point of view. I admit that I'm not very familiar with the details of SVN's implementation, but with SVN, you can have an actual dedicated server that can filter what's coming in. With CVS, all you're doing is slapping a front end on SSHing in and running CVS as a program. It is extremely difficult, due to the *IX permissions scheme and CVS bugs relating to symlinks, to have a CVS repository that allows some users with access to a system, no access, some users read-only access, and some users write access but not administrative access. It is very easy to falsify CVS history -- it cannot be trusted to accurately log what a malicious user has done.
* CVS does not handle binary files efficiently (and doesn't really attempt to do so).
* CVS is annoying to set up/administer -- you pretty much have to hand out full shell accounts to users. I still think that it's kind of depressing to see administrators plea with users not to use high compression levels -- a VC system should just let you cap compression.
I started looking at cmake (despite the name, a replacement for autotools, not for make) just two days ago and so far I'm definitely interested. I've been very frusterated with GNU autotools (automake, autoconf, etc) for a long time. While they *do* perform their tasks, they are very difficult to learn. It is difficult to debug autotools problems -- most of the autotools-using projects I've seen have had scripts written at least somewhat incorrectly. Backwards and forwards compatibility in autotools has traditionally been very poor. It often takes quite a bit of code to perform fairly common tasks.
Cmake seems, at least on the surface, to solve a number of these problems. It also seems to be easier to do cross-platform-with-Windows development with.
So, has anyone out there used Cmake much, and if so, what do you think?
Yes, Mac OS X is both slower and more expensive (well, with hardware factored in).
That's not the point, though. If you get a Mac, you probably aren't that concerned with raw price/performance ratio. You're buying it for other reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Neal, what's your Slashdot account name?
Does the federal government still use this power?
Take a look at this current front page CNN article -- the Supreme Court *just* struck down an attempt by the Bush Administration to bypass habeas corpus.
Pissed off nationalists are a large, manipulable pool to use -- if you're trying to build up a world video game competition, try feeding off of nationalist feelings.
Anyone with interest on the subject owes it to themselves to read this paper, which examines Japan's case. Pornography, Rape, and Sex Crimes in Japan
Japan underwent a massive swing from one of the most conservative nations with respect to pornography to one of the most liberal, and extremely accepting of fetishes. There was a corresponding *decrease* in sex crimes.
America is a nation where killing can be shown on any broadcast television, but nudity is banned.
...I agree with your nuclear solution with one addition. As we find out the names of the people involved, we hunt down and kill every son, daughter, aunt, uncle, and every other relative they have on the entire planet right on out to the 8th cousin.
America is a nation where a thirteen-year-old schoolchild can be let in to watch a movie starring action hero becoming a vigilante and gunning down and knifing all the bad guys that have been trying to get in his way, but where that same thirteen-year-old cannot watch a movie where two people are making love.
America is a nation where exchanging money for sex is illegal everywhere but in parts of a single state of the fifty, but exchanging money to kill, becoming a corporate mercenary working in Iraq, is considered laudable and encouraged.
America is a nation where up until one year ago, thirteen states had laws banning consentual anal sex. Forty years ago, *every* state made consentual anal sex illegal. Fifty years ago, sodomy could widely be (and was) punished by "corrective actions", such as forced lobotomies. For those of you unfamiliar with lobotomies, they are commonly performed by inserting an ice pick through a patient's skull and swirling it around in certain areas of the brain in hopes of destroying portions of the brain that induce "deviant behavior".
America is a nation where (well, with the exception of San Francisco), being in public showing bare breasts (unless one is nursing an infant), genitalia, or one's rear end is grounds for lewdness arrest, but carrying a loaded gun visibily on one's hip is legal and acceptable.
America is a nation where a seventeen-year-old who convinces his seventeen-year-old girlfriend to send him a nude picture of herself has committed a felony (United States Code Title 18, Part I, 2251).
America is a nation where it is perfectly legal for an Olympic swimmer and lifeguard to stand by a pool and point, yelling insults and mocking, as someone drowns.
America is a nation where we cannot expose nipples, but we cheer on invading Afghanistan to "free women from the burka" and promote other human rights.
America is a nation that values free political speech, as long as it isn't:
(a) in Iraq and in opposition to the invasion (freedom of press was one of the first things removed from Iraqis, and newspapers and the only available television station were shut down for being critical of the invasion).
(b) Involving presidential candidates debating other than Bush or Kerry.
(c) Involve any Islamic advocacy. A student volunteer forum webmaster visiting the United States was charged with terrorist activities for running Islamic websites. The other side is well represented and permitted to operate, however -- consider the following quotes from this single forum thread:
My vote is that if they nuke us, we don't bother asking exactly where the bomb came from. Instead we turn ALL the likely sponsor nations into radioactive parking lots. The we tell the rest of the Islamic nations that if they don't get rid of their own terrorists, they will face the same thing.
***
Payback isn't payback unless they continue to hurt for a long, long time. As each father, mother, and child is assasinated, it will be very hard for anyone to celebrate the conspirators as martyrs.
The message would be, "We won't only roast your damned nation. We will kill every last person on earth you ever cared about."
***
I take it one step further - desroy Mecca and Media. That's right nuke their holy lands - get rid of them and than start destroying the mosques. Sprinkle their lands with pig blood. We might as well face it - this is a holy war against us supported by Muslims (look at the
and, perhaps best of all, free enterprise is allowed to flourish, with few inconvenient and inefficient regulations to stifle workers and with excellent government support of entrepreneurs and industry (in return for "campaign contributions")
Actually, I thought that China was kinda bureaucratic.
Other than that, though...that seems to be a pretty accurate and interesting look at things.
Hitler's police power grab after the wake of the Reichstag Fire to defend against terrorists included a lot of unnecessary powers as well. Funny, that.
One definite -- once you allow the federal government a power, they never release it -- they will have it forever.
Why be secret? It's making your work environment unpleasant, and, I would assume, others in your area. It helps redirect cold air to those who want it.
Real time refers to a system where tasks completing by a certain deadline is more important than just about anything else. Real time systems are less efficient than non-real-time systems -- they trade efficient scheduling for bounded scheduling.
This is generally split into hard real time and soft real time.
In a hard real time system, if a task misses a deadline, the task has failed. You might as well not do it. This sort of thing is important for, say, control systems that determine what thrusters to fire when on the Space Shuttle.
In a soft real time system, you have some penality if a task isn't finished by a certain time.
One kind of real-time functionality that a system might provide (and Linux does and has for a while) is a "real time priority level". To simplify things a bit, when a process is marked as "real time", that process runs and every other process is ignored. This is important if that process has a task that *must* complete. As a negative side effect, it means that another task (which might only want a tiny bit of CPU time, just enough to keep copying a file from disk to disk) can't run at all and all the disk activity stops. As a result, the time required for all the work the system must do increases, and the system runs more slowly. However, the one process that *must* gets time continues to get it.
It's not something that a desktop or server user is going to benefit much from.
Your system will be slower, but will feel more responsive.
You do not need a real time system to "feel more responsive". In most systems, kernel locks simly do not tie things up for anything approaching human-perceptable times.
This stuff is important not for the server or the desktop, but things like control systems.
Are there any benefits for the senior noob who can patch and compile the kernel with the RT features.
No. Real time functionality is not just "better latency". Real time stuff is generally significantly less efficient than traditional schedulers. It's useful for specialized work -- this is not "better desktop" or "better server" for anything approaching the typical Linux end user.
If you're doing control work with Linux, then you might be interested.
Essentially every change you make to the 'current' build environment can effect all builds or just the one you have currently selected. That is what I meant when I said pick nunit in a combo and build - nunit is a seperate build config and selecting any of them (retail, debug, nunit, web version, desk version (and debug/retail of those etc)) is a combo box in the tool bar.
Is that what you are asking about?
Sort of. IIRC, there are "current build configuration" and "global build configuration" stuff, but can you do a subset of build configurations with a single change? I've done this with GNU Make frequently ('IN-HOUSE' build flag), but (and I admit that I'm not a VS guru) this was a source of irritation when I was working on a VS setup. To be fair, I was working through the GUI -- there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of people working with the raw scripts VS the GUI on VS.
I have to say that I find it more objectionable to fire and then insult ("He won't find any intelligence when he looks in the mirror") an employee, especially one who is clearly right on the edge of retirement and is about to leave with pension than it is to install a piece of software.
Also, contacting this boss guy isn't going to do anything other than make him more pissy and angry. If you can express your unhappiness to his *boss*, things might be different.
If you're stupid (yes, STUPID) enough to flaunt the rules because you think they don't apply to you, you deserve what you get.
So...you ever read Slashdot at work, sir?
I think that his point is that the *firing* of this guy for a fairly minor infraction when others aren't being *fired* for much worse things isn't particularly fair or beneficial. He's not trying to justify abuse, just pointing out that the punishment is out of whack.
The other thing is people that say "Only three years? How about some *real* time, like ten years!"
The problem is that there's just no realization of what they're asking for when they're demanding "tougher sentences". We work hard to segregate criminals and "everyone else" and to psychologically separate the two, so there doesn't seem to be any bad points associated with "tougher sentences". It just seems to have benefits. People say "Well, if you hadn't stolen that money,
you wouldn't be in this situation. Have fun being Bubba's bitch!"
My usual reaction is to wonder how people would feel if *speeding* (something that risks other people's lives for the benefit of being able to spend maybe 10% less time in your car) was punishable by their "hard time" -- say, five years in prison. All of a sudden, they realize that crimes are maybe something that people decide on doing in a flash, that people screw up and can be trusted not to do so again.
I suspect that in practice there would be very little harm from running these processes, especially compared to all the other spyware and viruses that are out there, but there seems to be a very hostile reaction anyway.
It's CYA. You can blame it on the vendor if you have an *exactly* vendor-approved configuration. One of your flunkies puts some harmless app on the server, and you lose your CYA insurance.
I'm not going to blame people for CYA -- it makes a lot of sense based on our corporate reward structure, where you get fired for screwing up and rewarded only for *noisily* going far above and beyind.
Ze slightest infraction vill be met vith...TERMINATION!
Have you ever considered covering over most/all of your nearby cold-air register, and letting the air instead come out in the other (warmer) parts of the building?
With the VS configuration management, how do you deal with a change that you make that would affect multiple configurations?
e.g. on *IX, I'd have a flag set in my Makefile for all, say, BSD variants only (which might be several "build configurations"), and I'd make one change. With VS, do I need to manually make the change for each BSD-variant build configuration?
I have to agree with you.
I've been avoiding SVN thus far because most folks are still using CVS, but SVN is pretty much an overall improvement over CVS -- even the CVS developers don't seem to argue too much.
* CVS has a very, *very* poor design from a security point of view. I admit that I'm not very familiar with the details of SVN's implementation, but with SVN, you can have an actual dedicated server that can filter what's coming in. With CVS, all you're doing is slapping a front end on SSHing in and running CVS as a program. It is extremely difficult, due to the *IX permissions scheme and CVS bugs relating to symlinks, to have a CVS repository that allows some users with access to a system, no access, some users read-only access, and some users write access but not administrative access. It is very easy to falsify CVS history -- it cannot be trusted to accurately log what a malicious user has done.
* CVS does not handle binary files efficiently (and doesn't really attempt to do so).
* CVS is annoying to set up/administer -- you pretty much have to hand out full shell accounts to users. I still think that it's kind of depressing to see administrators plea with users not to use high compression levels -- a VC system should just let you cap compression.
I started looking at cmake (despite the name, a replacement for autotools, not for make) just two days ago and so far I'm definitely interested. I've been very frusterated with GNU autotools (automake, autoconf, etc) for a long time. While they *do* perform their tasks, they are very difficult to learn. It is difficult to debug autotools problems -- most of the autotools-using projects I've seen have had scripts written at least somewhat incorrectly. Backwards and forwards compatibility in autotools has traditionally been very poor. It often takes quite a bit of code to perform fairly common tasks.
Cmake seems, at least on the surface, to solve a number of these problems. It also seems to be easier to do cross-platform-with-Windows development with.
So, has anyone out there used Cmake much, and if so, what do you think?
Yes, Mac OS X is both slower and more expensive (well, with hardware factored in).
That's not the point, though. If you get a Mac, you probably aren't that concerned with raw price/performance ratio. You're buying it for other reasons.
What if law enforcement could obtain logs of all the searches associated with your Google-set cookie for the past three years?
It'd also be useful data for industrial espionage types...
Assisted by his Magic Blue Glowy Thing from ThinkGeek that exposes all evidence.