Yes, taking a raw percentage of the overall vote is a Bad Idea. It makes campaigning unimportant, since overall it's not likely to be a close race.
Taking each congressional district, however might be a Good Idea. It makes campaigning more important, because each district has a greater chance of being close. Of course, then each district controls only a single EV, so you need to consider whether it's worth it.
This paper should be required reading of anyone even thinking about changing our voting system.
To save on the amount of alcohol you have to use, you can actually wash the machines with hot soapy water first, then rinse it off with regular water. Then pour the alcohol over it. The water does the job of cleaning. The purpose of the alcohol is to remove any remaining water so it can dry (by evaporation) quickly.
if you really put security as #1 priority you should better not run the same software everywhere
I think you're confusing security with ability to stay up during a crisis (stability). Yes, if you're running a webserver farm, it's good to have a spread of OSes to keep them from all dying from the same thing. But that's a stability issue, as the concern is keeping them online, not keeping intruders out.
The more common case is to have a few machines that users log in to. If those machines are all the same, there's one set of security vulnerabilities for attackers to find. If you have 2-3 flavors, there are 2-3 times as many vulnerabilities (plus some extras for the configuration between them). As you will recall, I place security above stability, hence my comment of keeping the number of OSes to a minimum.
You find yourself having to do things at every possible moment of your day. It becomes habitial that you must be busy else you are doing something wrong.
Exactly right. I woke up this morning, rolled over to check my email on my laptop by my bed, and discovered no pressing issues. I was struck with a sense of panic that I must be forgetting something.
I have to say, though, that I really enjoy hypertasking. It's a lot of fun figuring out how to prioritize a large set of tasks, or how to optimize them in a way that allows you to work on multiple tasks at the same time. There's also the benefit of being able to rapidly switch when you get stuck, and switch back if you think of a potential fix. On the downside, if the tasks are sufficiently complicated you might start swapping. Worse yet is when you context switch so fast that the CPU is simply thrashing... not getting any real work done.
Of course, I'm amused by the article talking of 400 emails/week. I currently receive about 1400/week (not counting spam/virus mails). It has taught me to delete by subject line, which is a very valuable skill.
I've been looking to train a replacement, and therefore have been thinking about this a lot. The most important "skill" is maturity. They need to be mature enough to prioritize tasks, handle the responsibility of keeping data secure, and not tinker with things too much.
As a sysadmin I've had the opportunity to work with, or closely observe the work of, about 30 other admins. The ones who do well are those that have a healthy respect for the system. I try to keep my setups as default as possible. Any change must have a good reason. This keeps things more stable (defaults are better tested) and easier for my replacement. The "problem" admins are the ones that can't resist tweaking everything. Yes, they might get a 1% performance boost, but they're also more likely to generate system instability.
In terms of priorities, there are a few basic rules: #1 priority is security, #2 is stability, and #3 is performance or other user requirements.
Finally, there's the concept of structuring the environment. Think about dependencies. Try to consolidate services so there's a single point of failure. This means not having multiple fileservers with crossmounts. Running a single OS/distribution will make your life a lot easier, assuming your shop doesn't require the diversity.
As others have said, there's a lot you can teach them about how to read manpages and use google, but without the basic philosophy of how to be an admin, all their knowledge will probably just lead them to manage unstable systems.
I really start to wonder about disturbing the graves of others. I guess the fact that they aren't from a current religion means they don't deserve respect, right?
Agreed. This looked interesting to me when I stumbled across it last week, since I've been thinking about replacing my swiss army knife, which is showing extreme signs of wear after 10 years of use (the previous one was stolen). Here's what has killed it:
Scissors got dulled by cutting sheet metal (I resharpened them a bit, but they're still not the best)
Lost the toothpick, and, many years later, the tweezers (used for retrieving screws from inside computers)
Tip of main blade broken off (which, incidentally, makes it a great jeweler's screwdriver)
Spring on scissors broken
Outer hard plastic casing chipped and splintering off due to repeated use as a mini-hammer
Given how much abuse I've given this thing (knives are useful on canoe trips, but also get rather wet/muddy), I really can't imagine something with electronics surviving more than a month. And how many people will want a crappy knife (no real features) after the USB part dies?
Related amusing anecdote: was in a talk by the Red Cross about storing food/water/supplies as part of disaster planning. The woman joked about all the idiots that only have electric can openers, and would starve if power went out. She asked how many of us still had a manual one. I yelled out "right here" and waved my knife around. She asked if I knew how to use it. Yes... it's the only can opener I own.
Vote reform is a great idea, but it will never happen. For it to happen, it'd have to get pushed through congress. And congress is controlled by the Rs and Ds, neither of which want vote reform to pass.
little rubber nubs that you can steer the pointer with, called a clitoris or not
After calling it a "nipple" in front of my gf (we both do tech support) I got yelled at that there must be a more proper name for that thing. 10 minutes of googling led to the conclusion that it's a "pointing stick".
Agree with your point that a new mouse is hardly a story.
I agree that they couldn't break into the RNC servers. But what do script kiddies do when they can't hack something? They pout -- and then they launch a DoS attack.
SpamAssassin run as a milter would accomplish exactly the same thing... blocking spam before the SMTP accept. The problem is that it currently is an all-or-nothing beast. I'd love it if it could take user preferences into account (spam score threshholds, individual bayes databases, etc). Of course, that's probably impossible because a single mail with two recipients might be accepted by one and rejected by another....
Being stuck calling SA from procmail (and therefore being a "filter" instead of a "firewall" kinda sucks, but it allows for greater flexibility.
I gained a healthy fear of ReiserFS a while back when it had some issues with playing nice with NFS. Basically, if I created an arbitrary link in my home-dir, it would sometimes screw up and the destination of the link would be the contents of someone else's file. A file which I do not have permissions to read. Needless to say, it's not hard to hack up a while loop that creates links and then does the ls -l and saves the output for later perusal.
In any case, if you're looking for a really nice filesystem, use XFS. It was developed by professionals (SGI), is fast and stable, and is now released as open source.
I suppose it's just a coincidence that the reiser benchmarks page doesn't compare it to XFS... or maybe they were too embarassed to show the results?
For anyone who happens to be reading this, my original rant was about people who go crazy trying to obfuscate their email addresses and have them fill out web-forms to contact them. I said I wasn't afraid to just put my email address (menscher@uiuc.edu) online. (You may also reach me at: menscher@fnal.gov, dmenscher@yahoo.com, and, if you want to bypass SpamAssassin/ClamAV, at menscher@mail.physics.uiuc.edu. )
Simple things like fuel rods going UP into the reactor.
Actually, they typically do the opposite: they have the cadmium "control" rods get lowered DOWN into the reactor. Cadmium absorbs neutrons, so if something goes wrong, they just drop them and the reaction stops in a fraction of a second.
Not that this makes everything safe. Read the report on Three Mile Island sometime. It's long, but it's a fascinating read.
Made all the better when they discover that southern hemisphere monitors actually *are* different for exactly the same reason.
I call bull. The Earth's magnetic field is far too weak to have an effect on anything like that. Besides, don't you think someone might notice if it mattered whether your monitor was facing north or south? You really shouldn't believe everything your BOFH tells you.
More importantly, make sure you know your Boss' Slashdot username. Had an occasion about 9 months ago where my boss submitted an "Ask Slashdot". I posted a rant about how it was the most utterly moronic question ever asked, etc. As you might guess, that didn't go over so well.;)
Some physicist person please come correct all the errors I probably made
No physics errors, and a very nice explanation. (And yes, IAAP. Just too lazy to write all that myself.)
You might want to reconsider your statement "if you've already made an almost perfect replica of the item then who needs the original anyway?" Keep in mind that twins have the same physical makeup, but different personalities, knowledge, and experiences. Quantum teleportation would include those aspects (the part that makes us "conscious") as well.
You're almost right. Yes, you can send photons down both directions. When you measure the polarization of one photon, it intstantly determines the polarization of the other photon. But you can't choose how to measure the polarization. It's random. Therefore you can't transmit information in this way.
Ok, as a physicist I initially thought these must be crackpots. A careful read made it clear that the science is good, it's just the slashdot title and summary that don't make sense.
What they did NOT do is teleport particles of light. That just makes no sense. Light was used as the means of conveying the information used to teleport the quantum properties from one particle to another, without the particle having to travel.
By the way, the reason this is called "teleportation" is that the particle effectively travels at the speed of light -- its properties can be transferred by light. If this could be applied to humans, for example, it would allow for light-speed travel, without all the nuisances of acceleration. It should be noted that this does NOT violate the universal speed limit.
Oh, and before someone asks, this is entirely different from quantum tunnelling....
Kinda off-topic, but I was considering buying a DLink 514 wireless router since it's so much cheaper than the linksys equivalent. I've seen a lot of scathing reviews online, but those are mostly from the non-technical crowd (firmware update? wazzat?). I'd love to know if any/.ers have tried this out, and were successful.
For those who are seriously following this, you've probably seen the paper claiming to break MD5. I immediately started playing with confirming their results, but failed. There was some seriously strange stuff going on.
Eventually I gave up trying to reproduce the hashes, and went to looking online. I found a good summary explaining the mistake the authors made (endianness problems, mostly) at
this website.
The end result is that they didn't break MD5 -- yet. But their result can probably be modified to break the real MD5. Looks like we have a few more days till the world ends.;)
you could still guess what the pad is on your first shot
Incorrect. How would you know that you had guessed correctly? If my encrypted message is FJKSCIWUGAPN it could be "ATTACKATDAWN" or "SMCLEANISDUMB" or any other message of that length and you would have no way of knowing which. Hence it is impossible to break.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, taking a raw percentage of the overall vote is a Bad Idea. It makes campaigning unimportant, since overall it's not likely to be a close race.
Taking each congressional district, however might be a Good Idea. It makes campaigning more important, because each district has a greater chance of being close. Of course, then each district controls only a single EV, so you need to consider whether it's worth it.
This paper should be required reading of anyone even thinking about changing our voting system.
To save on the amount of alcohol you have to use, you can actually wash the machines with hot soapy water first, then rinse it off with regular water. Then pour the alcohol over it. The water does the job of cleaning. The purpose of the alcohol is to remove any remaining water so it can dry (by evaporation) quickly.
I think you're confusing security with ability to stay up during a crisis (stability). Yes, if you're running a webserver farm, it's good to have a spread of OSes to keep them from all dying from the same thing. But that's a stability issue, as the concern is keeping them online, not keeping intruders out.
The more common case is to have a few machines that users log in to. If those machines are all the same, there's one set of security vulnerabilities for attackers to find. If you have 2-3 flavors, there are 2-3 times as many vulnerabilities (plus some extras for the configuration between them). As you will recall, I place security above stability, hence my comment of keeping the number of OSes to a minimum.
Have you ever seen an obese pedestrian? No? Didn't think so. Obese people don't walk. That's why they're obese.
Humbly submitted to the mods, who can fight over whether this is insightful, funny, troll, or flamebait.
Exactly right. I woke up this morning, rolled over to check my email on my laptop by my bed, and discovered no pressing issues. I was struck with a sense of panic that I must be forgetting something.
I have to say, though, that I really enjoy hypertasking. It's a lot of fun figuring out how to prioritize a large set of tasks, or how to optimize them in a way that allows you to work on multiple tasks at the same time. There's also the benefit of being able to rapidly switch when you get stuck, and switch back if you think of a potential fix. On the downside, if the tasks are sufficiently complicated you might start swapping. Worse yet is when you context switch so fast that the CPU is simply thrashing... not getting any real work done.
Of course, I'm amused by the article talking of 400 emails/week. I currently receive about 1400/week (not counting spam/virus mails). It has taught me to delete by subject line, which is a very valuable skill.
As a sysadmin I've had the opportunity to work with, or closely observe the work of, about 30 other admins. The ones who do well are those that have a healthy respect for the system. I try to keep my setups as default as possible. Any change must have a good reason. This keeps things more stable (defaults are better tested) and easier for my replacement. The "problem" admins are the ones that can't resist tweaking everything. Yes, they might get a 1% performance boost, but they're also more likely to generate system instability.
In terms of priorities, there are a few basic rules: #1 priority is security, #2 is stability, and #3 is performance or other user requirements.
Finally, there's the concept of structuring the environment. Think about dependencies. Try to consolidate services so there's a single point of failure. This means not having multiple fileservers with crossmounts. Running a single OS/distribution will make your life a lot easier, assuming your shop doesn't require the diversity.
As others have said, there's a lot you can teach them about how to read manpages and use google, but without the basic philosophy of how to be an admin, all their knowledge will probably just lead them to manage unstable systems.
I really start to wonder about disturbing the graves of others. I guess the fact that they aren't from a current religion means they don't deserve respect, right?
- Scissors got dulled by cutting sheet metal (I resharpened them a bit, but they're still not the best)
- Lost the toothpick, and, many years later, the tweezers (used for retrieving screws from inside computers)
- Tip of main blade broken off (which, incidentally, makes it a great jeweler's screwdriver)
- Spring on scissors broken
- Outer hard plastic casing chipped and splintering off due to repeated use as a mini-hammer
Given how much abuse I've given this thing (knives are useful on canoe trips, but also get rather wet/muddy), I really can't imagine something with electronics surviving more than a month. And how many people will want a crappy knife (no real features) after the USB part dies?Related amusing anecdote: was in a talk by the Red Cross about storing food/water/supplies as part of disaster planning. The woman joked about all the idiots that only have electric can openers, and would starve if power went out. She asked how many of us still had a manual one. I yelled out "right here" and waved my knife around. She asked if I knew how to use it. Yes... it's the only can opener I own.
Vote reform is a great idea, but it will never happen. For it to happen, it'd have to get pushed through congress. And congress is controlled by the Rs and Ds, neither of which want vote reform to pass.
After calling it a "nipple" in front of my gf (we both do tech support) I got yelled at that there must be a more proper name for that thing. 10 minutes of googling led to the conclusion that it's a "pointing stick".
Agree with your point that a new mouse is hardly a story.
I agree that they couldn't break into the RNC servers. But what do script kiddies do when they can't hack something? They pout -- and then they launch a DoS attack.
Not sure how this relates to any jihad, though.
When's the Republican National Convention? Maybe this is somehow related to CrimethInc's talk?
Does she get real bitchy once a month also?
Being stuck calling SA from procmail (and therefore being a "filter" instead of a "firewall" kinda sucks, but it allows for greater flexibility.
In any case, if you're looking for a really nice filesystem, use XFS. It was developed by professionals (SGI), is fast and stable, and is now released as open source.
I suppose it's just a coincidence that the reiser benchmarks page doesn't compare it to XFS... or maybe they were too embarassed to show the results?
For anyone who happens to be reading this, my original rant was about people who go crazy trying to obfuscate their email addresses and have them fill out web-forms to contact them. I said I wasn't afraid to just put my email address (menscher@uiuc.edu) online. (You may also reach me at: menscher@fnal.gov, dmenscher@yahoo.com, and, if you want to bypass SpamAssassin/ClamAV, at menscher@mail.physics.uiuc.edu. )
Or, if you really like webforms, go to http://www.itg.uiuc.edu/people/ and click the "send email" link by my name.
SpamAssassin and ClamAV are free and work well. Speaking of which, there's a release candidate for SA-3.0.0 available now. Go test it!
Actually, they typically do the opposite: they have the cadmium "control" rods get lowered DOWN into the reactor. Cadmium absorbs neutrons, so if something goes wrong, they just drop them and the reaction stops in a fraction of a second.
Not that this makes everything safe. Read the report on Three Mile Island sometime. It's long, but it's a fascinating read.
I call bull. The Earth's magnetic field is far too weak to have an effect on anything like that. Besides, don't you think someone might notice if it mattered whether your monitor was facing north or south? You really shouldn't believe everything your BOFH tells you.
More importantly, make sure you know your Boss' Slashdot username. Had an occasion about 9 months ago where my boss submitted an "Ask Slashdot". I posted a rant about how it was the most utterly moronic question ever asked, etc. As you might guess, that didn't go over so well. ;)
No physics errors, and a very nice explanation. (And yes, IAAP. Just too lazy to write all that myself.)
You might want to reconsider your statement "if you've already made an almost perfect replica of the item then who needs the original anyway?" Keep in mind that twins have the same physical makeup, but different personalities, knowledge, and experiences. Quantum teleportation would include those aspects (the part that makes us "conscious") as well.
You're almost right. Yes, you can send photons down both directions. When you measure the polarization of one photon, it intstantly determines the polarization of the other photon. But you can't choose how to measure the polarization. It's random. Therefore you can't transmit information in this way.
What they did NOT do is teleport particles of light. That just makes no sense. Light was used as the means of conveying the information used to teleport the quantum properties from one particle to another, without the particle having to travel.
By the way, the reason this is called "teleportation" is that the particle effectively travels at the speed of light -- its properties can be transferred by light. If this could be applied to humans, for example, it would allow for light-speed travel, without all the nuisances of acceleration. It should be noted that this does NOT violate the universal speed limit.
Oh, and before someone asks, this is entirely different from quantum tunnelling....
Kinda off-topic, but I was considering buying a DLink 514 wireless router since it's so much cheaper than the linksys equivalent. I've seen a lot of scathing reviews online, but those are mostly from the non-technical crowd (firmware update? wazzat?). I'd love to know if any /.ers have tried this out, and were successful.
Eventually I gave up trying to reproduce the hashes, and went to looking online. I found a good summary explaining the mistake the authors made (endianness problems, mostly) at this website.
The end result is that they didn't break MD5 -- yet. But their result can probably be modified to break the real MD5. Looks like we have a few more days till the world ends. ;)
Incorrect. How would you know that you had guessed correctly? If my encrypted message is FJKSCIWUGAPN it could be "ATTACKATDAWN" or "SMCLEANISDUMB" or any other message of that length and you would have no way of knowing which. Hence it is impossible to break.