> I assume you guys also have to register for a birth certificate
Yeah, but after you're born you can move to a different state, let alone voting precinct.
> you need to pay taxes at some point so you have a social security number,
Technically, it's unconstitutional to deny the vote to people who opt out of social security for religious reasons. Also, again, after you register for the social security card, you can move to a different voting precinct, possibly in a different state.
Indeed, I forgot to mention that, but it takes less time than composing a reply on slashdot. My twelfth-grade US Government teacher brought in the voter registration forms and let us all do it in class and still managed to teach a full lesson that day. The main people who complain about voter registration are the people who object on principle to any form of registration whatsoever, and politicians who want more people to vote for them and apparently don't realize that people who don't bother to take thirty seconds to register *certainly* aren't going to bother to vote (which takes much longer, because there are a lot more slots to fill in, unless it's a special election for just one thing, such as a school district levy).
> Some American please explain me: why do you have voter registration at all?
Long story short? Because we let people vote who aren't registered for anything else. There are a lot of details, some of which I discuss below, but it all boils down to that: we let people vote who aren't registered for anything else.
> In my country (Netherlands), everyone above 18 is registered by default.
I don't know how it is in the Netherlands, but that system would be impractical here because the people here are free to move around (and often do, across voting district lines, state lines, you name it, without a second thought) without informing anyone. There's no central registry of all citizens in the first place, and there's *certainly* no central registry of where everyone lives. Other than the voter registration, there isn't any other registry that could be used for determining where people can vote and whether they've already voted (possibly in a different polling location) and so forth. The thing most people immediately think of to use instead is the Bureau of Motor Vehicles database of licensed drivers, but that would exclude substantial categories of people on unconstitutional grounds.
Note that it does matter very much which voting district people vote in, not just for determining whether someone has already voted in another polling location, but also because you vote on different stuff. For example, school taxes are voted on by the residents of each school district (and while I suspect you don't here anything much about it overseas because of the inherently local nature of it, people at the local level are often more concerned with the outcome of these local elections than with the state and national ones). US Representatives represent not just the people of a specific state but more particularly the people of a specific congressional district within a state, so for voting purposes it matters which district you're in. And so forth.
Among other things, the Board of Elections has to know *where* to expect you to come and vote, so they can have your name on the list for that location. (Having a list of who is going to come and vote, and checking them off, is the only realistic way to enforce the limit of one vote per person, i.e., to prevent ballot-stuffing.) So you have to let them know where you live ahead of time, so they can put you on the list for your precinct. If you move, you're still registered, but you have to update your registration with the new address if you want to vote in the new polling location (and, thus, on the local issues in your new place of residence).
> The only caveat is that you have to be registered with your municipality, which you have to do > anyhow for various different reasons (municipal tax, getting passports/ID/driving licence...).
So you can't vote if you don't live in a municipality? That wouldn't go over so well here. Also, while it varies from one municipality to another, most municipal taxes in the US are levied on either income or property ownership (land, specifically), so no, not everyone who lives in a city, town, or village has to register for tax purposes, or any other reason for that matter. There's a census every ten years, but while participation is encouraged (and there's really no downside), it's not actually mandatory, and I think the privacy nuts (ironically, including a lot of the sort of people who read slashdot) would go bonkers and start filing lawsuits if the government tried to make the census mandatory or give it any legal force.
As for the passports, most Americans don't have them. (Before you react too strongly to that, bear in mind that from here I can travel for two thousand miles in any direction, or three thousand miles to the west, without a passport. This is mostly a very good thing, though it would be nice if it were somewhat easier to find people who speak a foreign language fluently.)
As noted above, the driver's license is something whole categori
> Well to be fair the UK's House of Lords is an unelected body that holds no accountability to anyone > and they've looked out for the "average Joe" way more than the elected and accountable house of commons.
Only in recent years, since most of the real power was vested in the House of Commons. It's not accountability that corrupts, but power. (And no, I don't have a solution. Well, I do, but it's worse than the problem.)
The answer is obvious: there are infinitely many ways to tie shoelaces. I'm pretty sure I can prove this by mathematical induction in no more than half a dozen steps.
Unless you limit the length of the laces, of course, but then the limit will depend on the physical properties of the laces (not just length but also thickness and so forth), at which point the problem loses its mathematical purity and becomes more of a physics problem.
> It takes 15 minutes to setup wireless on XP or Ubuntu?
I don't actually have any experience with that, because I use wired ethernet, on account of the fact that it's cheaper and faster, in combination with the fact that I had already been using it for years and was comfortable with it before the prices on wireless gear came down out of the stratosphere to where ordinary human beings could even consider it.
However, if wireless really does take fifteen minutes to set up on Ubuntu, it's just about the *only* thing that takes anywhere near that long to set up. Ubuntu in my experience is a lot like Knoppix with regard to hardware detection. It's still not quite BeOS, but it's heading in that direction.
(BeOS was *legendary* for this. You could literally pull the hard drive out of a BeOS system and put it in a completely different computer with different everything including the video hardware, boot it up, and everything would Just Work. It was amazing, especially considering where other operating systems were in terms of hardware detection at the time.)
MIDI? You had MIDI? Back in my day all we had for sound was the PC speaker, and if we wanted to create the illusion of polyphonic sound we switched back and forth between frequencies several times per second.
And then there's the four-color medium-resolution mode on a CGA monitor, which had three different pallettes of foreground colors to pick from and sixteen choices of background color. With careful dithering, you could actually get something that looked... impressively close to recognizable.
> Remember the joys of setting up your hardware in every single game? Running GAMECONFIG.EXE to say yes, my > SoundBlaster is on IRQ 7, my display can handle 1024x769 in 256 colours, and no, I don't have an AdLib card.
I remember telling each game whether the computer had EMS or XMS and whether LMBs were available, and setting up different versions of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to configure those things differently for the requirements of different games. Honestly, it wasn't as big a deal as people made out. Okay, yeah, you had to read some of the DOS help information once or twice to get the hang of it, but once you knew what you were doing it wasn't really difficult.
However, these days I would miss being able to have other applications running at the same time as the game, if nothing else because most games have extremely mediocre music and it's nice to let xmms continue playing through my playlist as usual while I'm playing the game. And it's nice to be able to minimize the game from time to time (between turns, presumably) to check something else in another application for just a moment. And it's nice to be able to let a large download happen in the background. That sort of thing.
I'll tell you what Windows needs. It needs a proper system-level auto-update mechanism for applications that can run in the background with admin privileges and check for and install updates to all the installed applications on a schedule set up by the system administrator, without prompting the logged-in user for anything and without requiring the logged-in user to have admin privileges. There would have to be cooperation from application developers, of course, in the form of creating auto-update services and having the installers declare them to the system at installation time. But the developers of certain applications that need security updates (e.g., web browsers) would jump at the chance, and others would follow in time. Not all applications would support it, of course, but enough to be very useful. It still wouldn't be as nice as something like apt (much less the CPAN), but it would be a good deal better than the current situation.
Actually, if they could just get the *antivirus* software to silently update itself in the background automatically without bugging the user or requiring the system administrator to log in, that would be a serious step forward. Granted, it would probably be necessary to blackmail Symantec with compromising photos of their entire board of directors to get them to abandon their fifteen-year-old Live Update code that runs in a window on the desktop with the privileges of the logged-in user and needs the user to click three times even in so-called Express Mode. But I'm confident that Microsoft has the capability to twist enough arms to make it happen if they would just decide to make it a priority.
Oh, and the system administrator should have the option to tell all the automatic updates (including the ones for the OS) not to force a reboot for twenty-four hours. That doesn't matter in environments where the computers are on all night while people aren't using them, because you just tell the updates to happen then. But in environments where the power bars get shut off when the users go home, the updates have to happen during the day, and the forced reboots are a major cause of user complaints. "Black Tuesday", some of my users call it. We want the security updates to be installed, but there's no reason the reboot couldn't wait until the computers get turned off in the evening, except that Microsoft is too dense to think of it.
> Oh, they're making me move all right. To Linux or OSX.
Meh. If you haven't moved to Linux or cetera by now, it's because you aren't so inclined. Complain all you like about the annoyances in specific versions, you've nonetheless chosen, for whatever reason, to stay with Microsoft Windows.
Theoretically that depends on the instrument, although most of the major instruments in the standard western music tradition share some of the same limitations, not least that at any given time they are either well-tempered or else justly intoned for a specific key, not both, and certainly not justly intoned for multiple keys at the same time. It is possible to design an instrument that can overcome these limitations and, for instance, play just intervals in multiple keys. But it isn't usual.
> I call BS! Columbus was backed by a government and made several trips back and forth. > It was only after he went that settlers followed.
Yes, and he and his sailors had come back and reported that A) there was land over there and B) it was land that could support life. In fact, C) there were already humans living there, though they weren't Europeans.
It was dangerous moving to the new world, but it was not suicide.
We're not ready to send settlers to Mars. We can barely even maintain a self-sufficient base at the South Pole for nine months at a time, and even there we end up trying to brave the winter weather and flying supply planes over from time to time during the winter to drop emergency supplies (e.g., for chemotherapy). And we don't let people winter-over two years in a row. Before we're ready to even *think* about sending people to Mars, we need to leave a group of people on inland Antarctica with no new incoming supplies for three years.
And that doesn't even address the *big* problem with Mars, because Antarctica has a perfectly breathable (if somewhat cold and rather dry and a little thin) atmosphere. Mars has, to a first approximation, no atmosphere at all. (Yes, technically, it has one, but it's too thin to be really relevant for humans. It's not like being on a tall mountain. It's more like being in outer space. Movie depictions notwithstanding, you can't open your pressure suit on Mars and live to tell the tale.)
That's why you shouldn't reinvent complicated wheels for an individual software application. Every program that needs this stuff should be using a standard module or library, such as DateTime (for Perl) or the equivalent (for whatever language you're developing in).
Actually, the Sun is, in terms of the impact it has on Earth, pretty much just a *REALLY BIG* incandescent bulb.
Personally, I grew up on Northeastern Ohio, where it's generally overcast three hundred and sixty-some days a year, and I've never really gotten used to the idea of broad daylight being significantly brighter than what you get indoors from a couple of 60-watt lamps. (When we moved to Michigan, the sky was blue, and I got out a camera and took photographs, because I'd grown up thinking "the sky is blue" was a weird cultural invention that had nothing to do with reality; everyone who looks up outside can see the sky is actually dull grey.)
Even if it's state-by-state, having to stop and think about what time of year it is to know which timezone you're in is extremely annoying. I went to college in Northern Indiana, and it took me three years to figure out how to keep track of the time differences between Indiana and the rest of the world. Royal Pain In The Neck. The weirdest wrinkle is that certain times of year the timezone line runs *backwards*, i.e., Indiana is (in terms of timezone) one hour *east* of Eastern Daylight Time states, even though it's geographically west of them.
I don't like DST and consider it pointless, but when 47 out of 50 states are doing it, the other three states need to do it also, because as annoying as DST is, it's still better than being in your own little one-state timezone with different properties than everything around you.
Now, if the whole country could agree to get rid of the timechange, that would be good.
Actually, if everybody just started using UTC for everything, I could live with that. But maybe that's because I'm a computer geek who spends more time on the internet than in the real world.
Exactly. Substitution ciphers are *at worst* O(n), where n is the number of distinct characters, and can usually be broken much more quickly than that with simple statistical analysis, because keys like e and the spacebar generally get hit somewhat more often than ones like ` and F6. You could go to a chording layout, I suppose, but it still wouldn't be cryptographically significant in the modern era.
> It's not clear from the article whether they have have the keyboard before hand > to be able to record which key-press outputs what radiation,
For the initial version, they probably did, because going in they probably didn't have the experience to know what they were doing really, and knowing what's going on really helps with the debugging process.
Ultimately, though, they could almost certainly get around the need for this with a standard known-plaintext attack and/or or statistical analysis based on letter and word frequency. So no, having an uncommon model of keyboard would not provide any real protection.
> What you see as wasted space I see as space going to a pretty darn good use.
Indeed. With the price difference between a 100GB drive and a 200GB drive being less than the cost of shipping, I think I can afford to keep a few copies of anything so important that I edit it regularly.
> As for pruning, you'd have to be fairly clever. But you could create > policies that specify how long to keep old versions
Not how long, but how many. You want a pruning rule that leaves you with geometrically increasing ages on the versions going backward. That is, the most recent versions are adjacent, but the further back you go the further apart the retained versions get.
I've used VMS, and the versioning is really nice. I can think of any number of ways it could be *better*, but compared to not *having* versioning, the VMS implementation is Really Nice To Have.
There are some other really cool things about VMS, too. I think anyone who's doing serious work in operating systems is really missing something if they haven't looked seriously at VMS. It's got a lot in it that's worth knowing about. Moreso, I would say, than BeOS.
Not that I'm saying I'd want a point-for-point clone of VMS, or anything. In addition to some cool things, it's also got some really ugly things, which should preferably *not* be copied into other systems.
> I don't see why you'd want people to have to ask an admin to get old versions of their files?
I can easily imagine wanting the users to have to ask an admin to get the settings changed for how many versions are kept, but that's not exactly the same thing.
I wouldn't mind being *able* to set an expiration date on files, and then being *able* to run a find command later and get a list of all the expired ones.
But it would have to be optional, and it would be nowhere near as useful as versioning.
Seriously, you cannot understand how amazingly excellent automatic versioning is until you have used a system that has it. It is at least five times as cool as having an OC3 to your bedroom.
Here's an example for programmers. You know how your code is cluttered with stuff you've commented out because you weren't certain you wouldn't need it back, and then you never bothered to delete it once you had the revised version working? You know how periodically you go through and find all the old commented-out bits and evaluate whether you still want them or should delete them now? With automatic versioning, you don't have to comment most of that stuff out in the first place. You can just hit save and then delete it.
Here's one for system administrators. You know how, when you do a dist-upgrade, apt prompts you for every configuration file in/etc that you've ever edited, and asks you whether you want to keep your edited version or the new version, and you don't remember when or why you edited it, and looking at the difference is meaningless because any real changes get lost in a sea of slightly-changed comments, and you have to choose? With automatic filesystem versioning, you can just tell it to go ahead and install the new file, and your edited version will STILL BE THERE to refer back to.
Versioned filesystems rock. If one ever makes it into the mainstream Linux kernel, I will be jumping up and down for a week.
Slashdot Mirror
> I assume you guys also have to register for a birth certificate
Yeah, but after you're born you can move to a different state, let alone voting precinct.
> you need to pay taxes at some point so you have a social security number,
Technically, it's unconstitutional to deny the vote to people who opt out of social security for religious reasons. Also, again, after you register for the social security card, you can move to a different voting precinct, possibly in a different state.
> Registering to vote is a snap, though.
Indeed, I forgot to mention that, but it takes less time than composing a reply on slashdot. My twelfth-grade US Government teacher brought in the voter registration forms and let us all do it in class and still managed to teach a full lesson that day. The main people who complain about voter registration are the people who object on principle to any form of registration whatsoever, and politicians who want more people to vote for them and apparently don't realize that people who don't bother to take thirty seconds to register *certainly* aren't going to bother to vote (which takes much longer, because there are a lot more slots to fill in, unless it's a special election for just one thing, such as a school district levy).
> Some American please explain me: why do you have voter registration at all?
...).
Long story short? Because we let people vote who aren't registered for anything else. There are a lot of details, some of which I discuss below, but it all boils down to that: we let people vote who aren't registered for anything else.
> In my country (Netherlands), everyone above 18 is registered by default.
I don't know how it is in the Netherlands, but that system would be impractical here because the people here are free to move around (and often do, across voting district lines, state lines, you name it, without a second thought) without informing anyone. There's no central registry of all citizens in the first place, and there's *certainly* no central registry of where everyone lives. Other than the voter registration, there isn't any other registry that could be used for determining where people can vote and whether they've already voted (possibly in a different polling location) and so forth. The thing most people immediately think of to use instead is the Bureau of Motor Vehicles database of licensed drivers, but that would exclude substantial categories of people on unconstitutional grounds.
Note that it does matter very much which voting district people vote in, not just for determining whether someone has already voted in another polling location, but also because you vote on different stuff. For example, school taxes are voted on by the residents of each school district (and while I suspect you don't here anything much about it overseas because of the inherently local nature of it, people at the local level are often more concerned with the outcome of these local elections than with the state and national ones). US Representatives represent not just the people of a specific state but more particularly the people of a specific congressional district within a state, so for voting purposes it matters which district you're in. And so forth.
Among other things, the Board of Elections has to know *where* to expect you to come and vote, so they can have your name on the list for that location. (Having a list of who is going to come and vote, and checking them off, is the only realistic way to enforce the limit of one vote per person, i.e., to prevent ballot-stuffing.) So you have to let them know where you live ahead of time, so they can put you on the list for your precinct. If you move, you're still registered, but you have to update your registration with the new address if you want to vote in the new polling location (and, thus, on the local issues in your new place of residence).
> The only caveat is that you have to be registered with your municipality, which you have to do
> anyhow for various different reasons (municipal tax, getting passports/ID/driving licence
So you can't vote if you don't live in a municipality? That wouldn't go over so well here. Also, while it varies from one municipality to another, most municipal taxes in the US are levied on either income or property ownership (land, specifically), so no, not everyone who lives in a city, town, or village has to register for tax purposes, or any other reason for that matter. There's a census every ten years, but while participation is encouraged (and there's really no downside), it's not actually mandatory, and I think the privacy nuts (ironically, including a lot of the sort of people who read slashdot) would go bonkers and start filing lawsuits if the government tried to make the census mandatory or give it any legal force.
As for the passports, most Americans don't have them. (Before you react too strongly to that, bear in mind that from here I can travel for two thousand miles in any direction, or three thousand miles to the west, without a passport. This is mostly a very good thing, though it would be nice if it were somewhat easier to find people who speak a foreign language fluently.)
As noted above, the driver's license is something whole categori
> Well to be fair the UK's House of Lords is an unelected body that holds no accountability to anyone
> and they've looked out for the "average Joe" way more than the elected and accountable house of commons.
Only in recent years, since most of the real power was vested in the House of Commons. It's not accountability that corrupts, but power. (And no, I don't have a solution. Well, I do, but it's worse than the problem.)
The answer is obvious: there are infinitely many ways to tie shoelaces. I'm pretty sure I can prove this by mathematical induction in no more than half a dozen steps.
Unless you limit the length of the laces, of course, but then the limit will depend on the physical properties of the laces (not just length but also thickness and so forth), at which point the problem loses its mathematical purity and becomes more of a physics problem.
> It takes 15 minutes to setup wireless on XP or Ubuntu?
I don't actually have any experience with that, because I use wired ethernet, on account of the fact that it's cheaper and faster, in combination with the fact that I had already been using it for years and was comfortable with it before the prices on wireless gear came down out of the stratosphere to where ordinary human beings could even consider it.
However, if wireless really does take fifteen minutes to set up on Ubuntu, it's just about the *only* thing that takes anywhere near that long to set up. Ubuntu in my experience is a lot like Knoppix with regard to hardware detection. It's still not quite BeOS, but it's heading in that direction.
(BeOS was *legendary* for this. You could literally pull the hard drive out of a BeOS system and put it in a completely different computer with different everything including the video hardware, boot it up, and everything would Just Work. It was amazing, especially considering where other operating systems were in terms of hardware detection at the time.)
MIDI? You had MIDI? Back in my day all we had for sound was the PC speaker, and if we wanted to create the illusion of polyphonic sound we switched back and forth between frequencies several times per second.
And then there's the four-color medium-resolution mode on a CGA monitor, which had three different pallettes of foreground colors to pick from and sixteen choices of background color. With careful dithering, you could actually get something that looked... impressively close to recognizable.
> Remember the joys of setting up your hardware in every single game? Running GAMECONFIG.EXE to say yes, my
> SoundBlaster is on IRQ 7, my display can handle 1024x769 in 256 colours, and no, I don't have an AdLib card.
I remember telling each game whether the computer had EMS or XMS and whether LMBs were available, and setting up different versions of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to configure those things differently for the requirements of different games. Honestly, it wasn't as big a deal as people made out. Okay, yeah, you had to read some of the DOS help information once or twice to get the hang of it, but once you knew what you were doing it wasn't really difficult.
However, these days I would miss being able to have other applications running at the same time as the game, if nothing else because most games have extremely mediocre music and it's nice to let xmms continue playing through my playlist as usual while I'm playing the game. And it's nice to be able to minimize the game from time to time (between turns, presumably) to check something else in another application for just a moment. And it's nice to be able to let a large download happen in the background. That sort of thing.
> Perhaps /.ers could begin a wish list?
I'll tell you what Windows needs. It needs a proper system-level auto-update mechanism for applications that can run in the background with admin privileges and check for and install updates to all the installed applications on a schedule set up by the system administrator, without prompting the logged-in user for anything and without requiring the logged-in user to have admin privileges. There would have to be cooperation from application developers, of course, in the form of creating auto-update services and having the installers declare them to the system at installation time. But the developers of certain applications that need security updates (e.g., web browsers) would jump at the chance, and others would follow in time. Not all applications would support it, of course, but enough to be very useful. It still wouldn't be as nice as something like apt (much less the CPAN), but it would be a good deal better than the current situation.
Actually, if they could just get the *antivirus* software to silently update itself in the background automatically without bugging the user or requiring the system administrator to log in, that would be a serious step forward. Granted, it would probably be necessary to blackmail Symantec with compromising photos of their entire board of directors to get them to abandon their fifteen-year-old Live Update code that runs in a window on the desktop with the privileges of the logged-in user and needs the user to click three times even in so-called Express Mode. But I'm confident that Microsoft has the capability to twist enough arms to make it happen if they would just decide to make it a priority.
Oh, and the system administrator should have the option to tell all the automatic updates (including the ones for the OS) not to force a reboot for twenty-four hours. That doesn't matter in environments where the computers are on all night while people aren't using them, because you just tell the updates to happen then. But in environments where the power bars get shut off when the users go home, the updates have to happen during the day, and the forced reboots are a major cause of user complaints. "Black Tuesday", some of my users call it. We want the security updates to be installed, but there's no reason the reboot couldn't wait until the computers get turned off in the evening, except that Microsoft is too dense to think of it.
> Oh, they're making me move all right. To Linux or OSX.
Meh. If you haven't moved to Linux or cetera by now, it's because you aren't so inclined. Complain all you like about the annoyances in specific versions, you've nonetheless chosen, for whatever reason, to stay with Microsoft Windows.
Theoretically that depends on the instrument, although most of the major instruments in the standard western music tradition share some of the same limitations, not least that at any given time they are either well-tempered or else justly intoned for a specific key, not both, and certainly not justly intoned for multiple keys at the same time. It is possible to design an instrument that can overcome these limitations and, for instance, play just intervals in multiple keys. But it isn't usual.
> Why do you think people in the past have chosen to leave over fixing what is wrong with their governments?
Because at the time there was somewhere to go, with a rather more breathable atmosphere than Mars.
> I call BS! Columbus was backed by a government and made several trips back and forth.
> It was only after he went that settlers followed.
Yes, and he and his sailors had come back and reported that A) there was land over there and B) it was land that could support life. In fact, C) there were already humans living there, though they weren't Europeans.
It was dangerous moving to the new world, but it was not suicide.
We're not ready to send settlers to Mars. We can barely even maintain a self-sufficient base at the South Pole for nine months at a time, and even there we end up trying to brave the winter weather and flying supply planes over from time to time during the winter to drop emergency supplies (e.g., for chemotherapy). And we don't let people winter-over two years in a row. Before we're ready to even *think* about sending people to Mars, we need to leave a group of people on inland Antarctica with no new incoming supplies for three years.
And that doesn't even address the *big* problem with Mars, because Antarctica has a perfectly breathable (if somewhat cold and rather dry and a little thin) atmosphere. Mars has, to a first approximation, no atmosphere at all. (Yes, technically, it has one, but it's too thin to be really relevant for humans. It's not like being on a tall mountain. It's more like being in outer space. Movie depictions notwithstanding, you can't open your pressure suit on Mars and live to tell the tale.)
Wait, I'm missing something. They have colder months in Arizona?
Because, I was kind of under the impression it was always summer down there.
That's why you shouldn't reinvent complicated wheels for an individual software application. Every program that needs this stuff should be using a standard module or library, such as DateTime (for Perl) or the equivalent (for whatever language you're developing in).
Actually, the Sun is, in terms of the impact it has on Earth, pretty much just a *REALLY BIG* incandescent bulb.
Personally, I grew up on Northeastern Ohio, where it's generally overcast three hundred and sixty-some days a year, and I've never really gotten used to the idea of broad daylight being significantly brighter than what you get indoors from a couple of 60-watt lamps. (When we moved to Michigan, the sky was blue, and I got out a camera and took photographs, because I'd grown up thinking "the sky is blue" was a weird cultural invention that had nothing to do with reality; everyone who looks up outside can see the sky is actually dull grey.)
Even if it's state-by-state, having to stop and think about what time of year it is to know which timezone you're in is extremely annoying. I went to college in Northern Indiana, and it took me three years to figure out how to keep track of the time differences between Indiana and the rest of the world. Royal Pain In The Neck. The weirdest wrinkle is that certain times of year the timezone line runs *backwards*, i.e., Indiana is (in terms of timezone) one hour *east* of Eastern Daylight Time states, even though it's geographically west of them.
I don't like DST and consider it pointless, but when 47 out of 50 states are doing it, the other three states need to do it also, because as annoying as DST is, it's still better than being in your own little one-state timezone with different properties than everything around you.
Now, if the whole country could agree to get rid of the timechange, that would be good.
Actually, if everybody just started using UTC for everything, I could live with that. But maybe that's because I'm a computer geek who spends more time on the internet than in the real world.
Exactly. Substitution ciphers are *at worst* O(n), where n is the number of distinct characters, and can usually be broken much more quickly than that with simple statistical analysis, because keys like e and the spacebar generally get hit somewhat more often than ones like ` and F6. You could go to a chording layout, I suppose, but it still wouldn't be cryptographically significant in the modern era.
> It's not clear from the article whether they have have the keyboard before hand
> to be able to record which key-press outputs what radiation,
For the initial version, they probably did, because going in they probably didn't have the experience to know what they were doing really, and knowing what's going on really helps with the debugging process.
Ultimately, though, they could almost certainly get around the need for this with a standard known-plaintext attack and/or or statistical analysis based on letter and word frequency. So no, having an uncommon model of keyboard would not provide any real protection.
> What you see as wasted space I see as space going to a pretty darn good use.
Indeed. With the price difference between a 100GB drive and a 200GB drive being less than the cost of shipping, I think I can afford to keep a few copies of anything so important that I edit it regularly.
> As for pruning, you'd have to be fairly clever. But you could create
> policies that specify how long to keep old versions
Not how long, but how many. You want a pruning rule that leaves you with geometrically increasing ages on the versions going backward. That is, the most recent versions are adjacent, but the further back you go the further apart the retained versions get.
> How does the filesystem know when to create a new version?
This isn't even hard. When the file is opened for writing, that starts a new version.
> The PIP commands acquired saner aliases in VMS, and the organization of the file system was somewhat improved.
And the pathname syntax became even more complicated.
I've used VMS, and the versioning is really nice. I can think of any number of ways it could be *better*, but compared to not *having* versioning, the VMS implementation is Really Nice To Have.
There are some other really cool things about VMS, too. I think anyone who's doing serious work in operating systems is really missing something if they haven't looked seriously at VMS. It's got a lot in it that's worth knowing about. Moreso, I would say, than BeOS.
Not that I'm saying I'd want a point-for-point clone of VMS, or anything. In addition to some cool things, it's also got some really ugly things, which should preferably *not* be copied into other systems.
> I don't see why you'd want people to have to ask an admin to get old versions of their files?
I can easily imagine wanting the users to have to ask an admin to get the settings changed for how many versions are kept, but that's not exactly the same thing.
I wouldn't mind being *able* to set an expiration date on files, and then being *able* to run a find command later and get a list of all the expired ones.
/etc that you've ever edited, and asks you whether you want to keep your edited version or the new version, and you don't remember when or why you edited it, and looking at the difference is meaningless because any real changes get lost in a sea of slightly-changed comments, and you have to choose? With automatic filesystem versioning, you can just tell it to go ahead and install the new file, and your edited version will STILL BE THERE to refer back to.
But it would have to be optional, and it would be nowhere near as useful as versioning.
Seriously, you cannot understand how amazingly excellent automatic versioning is until you have used a system that has it. It is at least five times as cool as having an OC3 to your bedroom.
Here's an example for programmers. You know how your code is cluttered with stuff you've commented out because you weren't certain you wouldn't need it back, and then you never bothered to delete it once you had the revised version working? You know how periodically you go through and find all the old commented-out bits and evaluate whether you still want them or should delete them now? With automatic versioning, you don't have to comment most of that stuff out in the first place. You can just hit save and then delete it.
Here's one for system administrators. You know how, when you do a dist-upgrade, apt prompts you for every configuration file in
Versioned filesystems rock. If one ever makes it into the mainstream Linux kernel, I will be jumping up and down for a week.