That's true, but your implication that the original poster is living his life "in [...] terror of death" is based on a shaky assumption, namely, that mraymer has the same definition of "a good life" as you do.
That's certainly not implied by my post. The only thing implied by my post is that a fear of death should not dictate how one lives one's life. I'm not saying everyone should go jump off a bridge to see what it feels like. I mean, if the guy said "I don't want to drink, because I'm afraid I'll become an alcoholic," well... I wouldn't find that a very convincing reason, but I can kind of understand that fear. But saying you won't drink because you're afraid of consequences to your health? Saying you won't get in a goddamn car because you have a 1 in 50 million chance of getting in a serious car accident every time you do? That's living your life in terror of death, and that is exactly what the OP was crowing so proudly about. I'd rather be dead at 24 than live like that. (Who knows, maybe I will be tomorrow. I plan to drive my car, and - get this - I intend to come into contact with humans who may or may not be carriers of a fatal virus. Burning the candle at both ends, baby!)
You know what? You're right, it is brain-dead to smoke and drink, and to a lesser extent to drive. But you can live your life in such terror of death that you don't live a day at all. I'd rather die at 75, having lived a good life, than live to 85 and never having done anything. Part of having a good life is having a full life, both the ups and the downs.
I expect you won't take me very seriously. Five or six years ago I would've agreed with you, but my father really taught me this lesson by his example. All I hope is that you stop living your life in fear of death and start living it in delight of life, before it's too late.
Age of Empires is fairly similar. The lead-ins on the campaigns are great. Talk about making history fun. It really does read more like the plot to a computer game than a pretty faithful retelling of history. There aren't many specifics, but then, how many specifics are you going to remember in 10 years (or even 1 week after the test on them)?
Teachers are more into this stuff than some people think, too. Hey, if it makes kids more interested in learning, they're all for it. Problem is, most games branded educational are terrible, and most games branded entertainment have no educational merits whatsoever. It's hard for someone who hasn't actually played the game to tell it's any good, sometimes.
You know, I was actually a little disappointed that RoN, AoE's heir apparent, doesn't have the historically-inspired campaigns. It's a good game, don't get me wrong. But hell, I was playing the AoE2 campaigns just to find out what happened next in the story. (I suppose I could have just picked up a history book, but...)
We Unix users have the greatest advantage of all, for though we are unbound by filename length restrictions we have to suffer through a multitude of two-letter command names. To name a few off the top of my head: cp (copy), rm (remove), ln (link), mv (move), ls (list). Don't forget the C-inspired ch/mk/rm prefixes (change/make/remove) for many commands.
Unix, because it's a terrible inconvenience to type four letters instead of two!
It probably seems intuitive to you, and that's the problem. Lots of intuitive things just aren't true, because usually your guesses are based on incomplete or simply incorrect information. That's why it's important for scientists to prove their theories instead of just accepting them blindly.
I, for one, find it encouraging that scientists are out there finding supporting evidence for the predominant theories. Contrary to what many Slashdot posters seem to think, our understanding of the global (and local!) environment is far from complete. It's even less of an exact science than psychiatry is. ("For some reason, doing this causes something to happen. We have no idea why, we're not entirely sure what happens, and sometimes something completely unexpected happens instead, but at least it gives us some measure of control.") That's why findings like this are important: it's predicted by an extremely shaky theory, so it's one more piece of evidence that our theory is right, and what we think is happening actually is.
When there's a shortage of equipment, it's up to everybody to share. You can't have one guy hogging one machine all the time and depriving others of the opportunity to use it. I would certainly have no qualms going to the gym management and complaining. And I certainly hope that, if it came to that, no hard limits would be imposed. I would expect the management to go up to the offender(s) and say "Listen, you need to give other people a chance to use the machines too. I'm not going to tell you how many hours a week you can use, just be reasonable and let other people have a turn now and then."
This is exactly how I view what Comcast is doing here.
College students definitely pay for their bandwidth, they just pay for it as part of a larger package. It's like renting an apartment that includes "free" high-speed Internet. It's not free at all, the charge is just lumped into your monthly rent. That's exactly the same way that college students pay for their Internet.
As for the other, well, you can't just assert a slippery slope without proof. OK, obviously you can, because you just did; but it's not a valid argument. You need to provide evidence for why you think it will happen. You may claim it's self-evident, but it's obviously not, since I didn't get it.
Funny, those were the first two words that came to my mind. Of course, I applied them to the submitter of the article rather than to Comcast.
Here's the deal. From my experience working for an ISP and the IT dep't at a college, the top 1% are not just using a little more bandwidth than the majority. At my college, the top 1% were using over half the school's total bandwidth. At the ISP, I didn't see the numbers myself, but was told by the admin that it was pretty much the same situation there. I strongly suspect that it's the same deal going on here.
Comcast here is actually going for a very friendly solution. They aren't imposing hard caps, which is a good thing. This means that the ISP can judge the network conditions and adapt their caps to accomodate them. So if their average user starts using 20% less bandwidth, then their power users can use a little more. On the other hand, if their average user starts using more, then they can clamp their power users a little more. This is also far more flexible than traffic shaping software, which will probably be their next step.
Obviously it can be done, since pretty much every Unix and clone except Linux already does it. And nobody says you have to trust being able to make crash dumps. Why wouldn't it be a tunable setting? If you don't like it, turn it off. Fact is, some people would find this sort of feature really useful, so why deprive them of it when adding it won't affect you at all?
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Linux doesn't implement a feature, ergo that feature is not worth implementing. I'm just glad the people on Slashdot aren't making any decisions on what goes into Linux, or it would be unchanged from what it was 5 years ago.
If you get a constant, true 30fps and the game action isn't tied to that framerate (rounding errors), then that would be okay. Of course, that's like physicists talking about frictionless surfaces or perfectly spherical objects, and about as attainable.
Actually, I wonder if this will stay true. As long as the fan is going, air is circulating over the processor, which keeps it fairly cool. But as soon as the fan stops, air nearly stops moving. In fact, the fan blades tend to block the air from moving about, which means you get a pocket of extremely hot air between the heat sink and the fan blades. If the CPU gets hot enough, it can warp and crack as it tries to expand in the constraints of the mounting system. It doesn't seem like this is a concern now, but it seems like it might be some day.
Anyway, here's what this all has to do with your comment: on some high-performance sportscars, there's an electric fan which will actually keep running for a minute or so after you shut your car off. We might see something similar for computers soon.
Re:sandbox
on
FreeBSD Jails
·
· Score: 4, Informative
No, not really. The problem with all these fine-grained access controls is that they are painfully difficult to use. Unix admins get worked up about the complexity introduced by simple POSIX filesystem ACLs, how do you think they'll be able to tolerate having per-process syscall control? It would just never get used. Incidentally, they are patches which allow exactly the functionality you describe. And nobody uses them except for people with a really exceptional need for security.
Jails have other uses too, by the way. Website hosting is one such example. You can set up jails for each person using the machine, and then he gets his own root login. He can modify Apache config files himself and do any other configuration stuff, but he can't break out of the jail to interfere with other users. There are actually providers out there that do this, though I don't know any of them by name.
Your description of classified information is incomplete. Often a classified project can be broken up into a bunch of distinct parts, some of which might be unclassified (or at least at a lower security level). This has the benefit of allowing people with low or no security clearance to work on the project.
This sounds silly, since if you can get all the unclassified pieces, you might be able to put them together and figure out the entire project. But the alternative is to give the highest security clearance to everybody, which is plainly not acceptable: the goal to security clearance is to keep the number of people who have it to a minimum. So we have this compromise, where the military keeps what it believes is key information confidential, but can free up the rest for average schmoes.
And on another note, any entity that employs more than 5 workers is going to have lots of data it wants to keep on file. Payrolls, employee data, contracts, all sorts of normal things like that. Maybe that's what was on those servers. It would certainly explain why nobody noticed. If they use them for payroll, nobody would use them until the night before all the paychecks were cut.
The way I deal with cases like this is with a flat database with "attributes." Unfortunately SQL databases, at least, are not so hot at this, not that I've seen. Since it's easier to explain, consider a simple email. When it arrives, you add a header called something like "X-Category." You then add a (comma-)delimited list of categories the message fits in. Store all the emails in a flat file (or database). Now to look at a "folder" you just suck out the emails which belong to the category you're interested in.
This is not a revolutionary idea by any means. But it subtly changes how you access emails by turning folders into views. You aren't really changing the data you're looking at, you're just changing how you're looking at it. To be honest, this doesn't really seem terribly interesting to me for email; I've never felt a need for a system like the OP describes. But I use it a lot for stuff like photos, MP3s, and other multimedia that resists straightforward categorization.
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend. Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're
overrun by lizards? Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese
needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards. Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse? Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous
type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas! Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around,
the gorillas simply freeze to death.
So clearly the solution is to discover the Internet worm equivalent of a gorilla that's susceptible to cold.
It's not good as a default, but it's good as an option. So while I hope FreeBSD installs still come with a static bin+sbin, it's nice to have the option, on a make world, to change the behavior if I decide I need to. It's added flexibility without any added complexity. What more could you want?
Why is it strange? The theory is that consumers will more easily accept small, periodic charges than large, one-time charges, even if they work out to the same total in the end. It's the same theory behind micropayments, but because you're already paying a (much larger) phone bill the fee is even less likely to be noticed. And it needn't result in consumers being screwed, as long as the fee is limited in duration (which at least two companies are saying).
Active Directory is basically an LDAP directory server with Kerberos 5 authentication. In case you don't know what those are either...
LDAP servers are pretty much quasi-object-oriented databases (LDAP is the protocol used to talk to the server). On a Unix-like system, you could store all the user information (/etc/passwd,/etc/shadow,/etc/group, everything) in an LDAP directory. But you can really store anything in an LDAP directory, such as the complete DNS database for a server. This can be handy because LDAP has replication and such built right in, so you no longer need to worry about DNS replication. These are the two big things stored in the Active Directory in Windows (user information and DNS records).
As for Kerberos, it's a secure authentication mechanism. The whole process is kind of complicated, but here are the basics. When you log in to a Kerberos domain (this is just a normal domain login for Windows) what you are doing is requesting a Ticket-Granting Ticket (TGT) from the Key Distribution Center (KDC). The TGT is returned, encrypted. If your password decrypts the TGT properly, you're logged in. Note that your password never goes over the network! Now you want to access a service on another machine in the same domain. You give your TGT to the KDC, asking it for a ticket to the specified machine. You get the ticket back, then provide it to the server. The server verifies the ticket similar to how the TGT is verified at login, and if it passes, then you've identified yourself securely. This means you don't need your password at all once you get your TGT, unless for some reason you need to get a new TGT. So Kerberos is both a secure authentication mechanism and a single sign-on mechanism.
Believe me, all this is a huge leap forward for Microsoft. Even though they keep adding proprietary bits to both LDAP and Kerberos, they are at least getting on the open standards bandwagon. And technologically, this is all far superior to the way Windows NT did things.
Actually, I have some interest in remaking the Quest for Glory games using the Neverwinter Nights engine. I started it a while back but got frustrated at how difficult it is to, among other things, create dialogue using the Aurora Toolset. These old Sierra games are heavily dialogue-based, so it was kind of a killer to have to do so much by hand. I may yet get enough interest to do it. It would obviously not be "pure" QFG, since it would use AD&D rules and spells. Some of the puzzles would have to be changed to work with the NWN UI. But I think it would be an entertaining diversion, and a way of bringing some life back to those old (but great) games. QFG2 is still one of my favorite games of all time.
Oh yeah, and I was trying to find models with capes, but they all included "anatomically correct" nude models as well. Not really a surprise, but still, kind of off-putting. Plus, doing any game remake like this would be against the law unless I got Sierra's permission, which I wouldn't, and if by some miracle the mod turned out to be popular it could cause trouble.
Any approach that triggers an automatic action on your behalf is bad, because it can be turned against you. It's not likely that email would make a terribly good DDoS service, but a system like the one you describe would certainly be vulnerable to it. And I think it would only last a week, at most, before spammers figured out a way around it. They can already handle "NOSPAM" being inserted in email addresses, and recently added the ability to reverse and combine email addresses until they get something plausible.
I do agree with you that we need multiple layers of safeguards in order to solve spam - or at least to hide it away so nobody has to look at it - but I don't think your specific example is very good.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect you won't take me very seriously. Five or six years ago I would've agreed with you, but my father really taught me this lesson by his example. All I hope is that you stop living your life in fear of death and start living it in delight of life, before it's too late.
I don't know, why do you?
Teachers are more into this stuff than some people think, too. Hey, if it makes kids more interested in learning, they're all for it. Problem is, most games branded educational are terrible, and most games branded entertainment have no educational merits whatsoever. It's hard for someone who hasn't actually played the game to tell it's any good, sometimes.
You know, I was actually a little disappointed that RoN, AoE's heir apparent, doesn't have the historically-inspired campaigns. It's a good game, don't get me wrong. But hell, I was playing the AoE2 campaigns just to find out what happened next in the story. (I suppose I could have just picked up a history book, but...)
Unix, because it's a terrible inconvenience to type four letters instead of two!
I, for one, find it encouraging that scientists are out there finding supporting evidence for the predominant theories. Contrary to what many Slashdot posters seem to think, our understanding of the global (and local!) environment is far from complete. It's even less of an exact science than psychiatry is. ("For some reason, doing this causes something to happen. We have no idea why, we're not entirely sure what happens, and sometimes something completely unexpected happens instead, but at least it gives us some measure of control.") That's why findings like this are important: it's predicted by an extremely shaky theory, so it's one more piece of evidence that our theory is right, and what we think is happening actually is.
This is exactly how I view what Comcast is doing here.
As for the other, well, you can't just assert a slippery slope without proof. OK, obviously you can, because you just did; but it's not a valid argument. You need to provide evidence for why you think it will happen. You may claim it's self-evident, but it's obviously not, since I didn't get it.
Here's the deal. From my experience working for an ISP and the IT dep't at a college, the top 1% are not just using a little more bandwidth than the majority. At my college, the top 1% were using over half the school's total bandwidth. At the ISP, I didn't see the numbers myself, but was told by the admin that it was pretty much the same situation there. I strongly suspect that it's the same deal going on here.
Comcast here is actually going for a very friendly solution. They aren't imposing hard caps, which is a good thing. This means that the ISP can judge the network conditions and adapt their caps to accomodate them. So if their average user starts using 20% less bandwidth, then their power users can use a little more. On the other hand, if their average user starts using more, then they can clamp their power users a little more. This is also far more flexible than traffic shaping software, which will probably be their next step.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Linux doesn't implement a feature, ergo that feature is not worth implementing. I'm just glad the people on Slashdot aren't making any decisions on what goes into Linux, or it would be unchanged from what it was 5 years ago.
3 grammatical errors (albeit identical ones) in the first three sentences of the article. Do the Slashdot editors work at that site too?
If you get a constant, true 30fps and the game action isn't tied to that framerate (rounding errors), then that would be okay. Of course, that's like physicists talking about frictionless surfaces or perfectly spherical objects, and about as attainable.
Anyway, here's what this all has to do with your comment: on some high-performance sportscars, there's an electric fan which will actually keep running for a minute or so after you shut your car off. We might see something similar for computers soon.
Jails have other uses too, by the way. Website hosting is one such example. You can set up jails for each person using the machine, and then he gets his own root login. He can modify Apache config files himself and do any other configuration stuff, but he can't break out of the jail to interfere with other users. There are actually providers out there that do this, though I don't know any of them by name.
This sounds silly, since if you can get all the unclassified pieces, you might be able to put them together and figure out the entire project. But the alternative is to give the highest security clearance to everybody, which is plainly not acceptable: the goal to security clearance is to keep the number of people who have it to a minimum. So we have this compromise, where the military keeps what it believes is key information confidential, but can free up the rest for average schmoes.
And on another note, any entity that employs more than 5 workers is going to have lots of data it wants to keep on file. Payrolls, employee data, contracts, all sorts of normal things like that. Maybe that's what was on those servers. It would certainly explain why nobody noticed. If they use them for payroll, nobody would use them until the night before all the paychecks were cut.
This is not a revolutionary idea by any means. But it subtly changes how you access emails by turning folders into views. You aren't really changing the data you're looking at, you're just changing how you're looking at it. To be honest, this doesn't really seem terribly interesting to me for email; I've never felt a need for a system like the OP describes. But I use it a lot for stuff like photos, MP3s, and other multimedia that resists straightforward categorization.
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
So clearly the solution is to discover the Internet worm equivalent of a gorilla that's susceptible to cold.
1. Find joke used 1,000 times already.
2. Use it wrong.
3. ???
4. Karma!
It's not good as a default, but it's good as an option. So while I hope FreeBSD installs still come with a static bin+sbin, it's nice to have the option, on a make world, to change the behavior if I decide I need to. It's added flexibility without any added complexity. What more could you want?
Why is it strange? The theory is that consumers will more easily accept small, periodic charges than large, one-time charges, even if they work out to the same total in the end. It's the same theory behind micropayments, but because you're already paying a (much larger) phone bill the fee is even less likely to be noticed. And it needn't result in consumers being screwed, as long as the fee is limited in duration (which at least two companies are saying).
LDAP servers are pretty much quasi-object-oriented databases (LDAP is the protocol used to talk to the server). On a Unix-like system, you could store all the user information (/etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group, everything) in an LDAP directory. But you can really store anything in an LDAP directory, such as the complete DNS database for a server. This can be handy because LDAP has replication and such built right in, so you no longer need to worry about DNS replication. These are the two big things stored in the Active Directory in Windows (user information and DNS records).
As for Kerberos, it's a secure authentication mechanism. The whole process is kind of complicated, but here are the basics. When you log in to a Kerberos domain (this is just a normal domain login for Windows) what you are doing is requesting a Ticket-Granting Ticket (TGT) from the Key Distribution Center (KDC). The TGT is returned, encrypted. If your password decrypts the TGT properly, you're logged in. Note that your password never goes over the network! Now you want to access a service on another machine in the same domain. You give your TGT to the KDC, asking it for a ticket to the specified machine. You get the ticket back, then provide it to the server. The server verifies the ticket similar to how the TGT is verified at login, and if it passes, then you've identified yourself securely. This means you don't need your password at all once you get your TGT, unless for some reason you need to get a new TGT. So Kerberos is both a secure authentication mechanism and a single sign-on mechanism.
Believe me, all this is a huge leap forward for Microsoft. Even though they keep adding proprietary bits to both LDAP and Kerberos, they are at least getting on the open standards bandwagon. And technologically, this is all far superior to the way Windows NT did things.
Whoa, isn't that the Tor guy in charge of publishing Robert Jordan's books? I had no idea he was that quotable!
Oh yeah, and I was trying to find models with capes, but they all included "anatomically correct" nude models as well. Not really a surprise, but still, kind of off-putting. Plus, doing any game remake like this would be against the law unless I got Sierra's permission, which I wouldn't, and if by some miracle the mod turned out to be popular it could cause trouble.
I do agree with you that we need multiple layers of safeguards in order to solve spam - or at least to hide it away so nobody has to look at it - but I don't think your specific example is very good.
Spammer: Duck season!
You: Spammer season!
Spammer: Duck season!
You: Duck season!
Spammer: Spammer season! Fire!
*bang*