[unescorted in the seamier neighborhoods of your local downtown ~= unsecorted on the internet]
A child could be physically harmed in the former, while none could come to a child who stumbled onto dirtyxxx.com
Combining some of the java hacks you see (more often) on x-rated sites and adds with browser and OS vulnerabilities, IP vs geographic databases, "passport" info, or other resources, a bad guy could come up with something that might get him street addresses and contents of saved personal correspondence containing all sorts of info about location and movement. This would enable physical attacks on person or property.
Attaching such a tool to a general site might mean all sorts of things. But attaching it to a.kids. site would be clear evidence the bad guy is stalking a minor, which would justify earlier and harsher response by police and prosecutors.
any attempt at creating an adult only domain and REQUIRING adult oriented sites to go there is a 1st amendment violation.
Hear hear!
Like cities, the Internet is a "place" that was created BY adults FOR adults. As such it contains hazardous-to-kids analogs of traffic, industrial plants, political battlegrounds, pickup bars, red-light districts, casinos, marketplaces for dangerous items, and other attractive nuisances. Indeed, these produce much of its value and utility.
If a child is not mature enough to be allowed unescorted in the seamier neighborhoods of your local downtown, that kid is also not mature enough to be unsecorted on the internet. And trying to childproof the entirety of the internet (or all but a reserved area) is just as futile, damaging, and illegal as trying to childproof the entirety of adult society.
Creating an explicit childproof fenced-in playground, on the other hand, is just fine. With one possible exception...
I hope that either the prohibition on linking out of kids.us is relaxed to allow linking to kids. of any country that sets up a similar domain with compatable rules, or (perhaps better) that sites in other countries that are willing to abide by the US rules are allowed to register in kids.us.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of the book provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
So does anyone have a URL for an online version of the book - scanned in or otherwise?
Where is..the online or downloadable version of this book?
No where. And it doesn't need to be. If the book was licensed like the GPL, then anyone who bought a copy could redistribute the text. But there is a separate libre license specifically designed to deal with documents, and so the GPL doesn't even apply.
Not only that, but Stallman has a long history of funding his open-source work by selleing books.
I recall when I first encountered emacs. Stallman was selling a manual for it to raise money - which I believe he was using to pay his rent.
The manual contained EXACTLY THE SAME MATERIAL as the free online documentation contained in the distribution. But the printed form was handy - and (depending on what your computer resources were) often cheaper than printing it out yourself, as well.
... only a really sick and twisted person would try and hack the computers of people who give time and money to help thoes in need.
Would you also advise the Salvation Army to leave the locks off the doors to their soup kitchens, stores, warehouses, and refurbishment workshops?
There really are bad guys.
Bad guys who are theives often have no more conscience about stealing from a charity than they do from anyone else. Bad guys who are graffiti artists often have no more conscience about tagging a charity building than any other. And so on.
So why should bad guys who crack systems, for fun, profit, or to use as a DDOS tool, be any less willing to crack a charity's system than a home, business, school, government bureau, or hospital system?
As long as we're talking about tribes that had bad relations with the Jews in biblical times...
I hear that "Palestine" is a modern European mispronunciation imposed on the area during the colonial period and that the people there, to this day, pronounce it (as their ancestors did before them) "FILL-ih-steen".
I don't remember seeing a 'use before' date on any linux servers. Do you?
Yep:
3:14:07 GMT Jan 19 2038 (Tue)
That's when the Unix/Linux clock rolls over.
You might have a few extra hours if you're keeping your system clock on local rather than GMT.
Linux (and any time-sensitive apps that use the appropriate system calls and/or data structures) will need a Y2K-like upgrade some time before that. For some a recompile with different includes will fix it but others may be more problematic. And like the Y2K bug we won't know for sure if we got them all until weeks after the magic date.
Fortunately, all the Unix/Linux bugs are connected to a single point source-of-failure (the undersized clock variable and related kernel data structures and system call). They can thus be tracked down in a straightforward manner. That's quite different from the Y2K bug, where an artifact of the numbering system lured people into making the same classes of error, separately, thousands of times.
Note that SOME Unix implementations (i.e. Amdahl's UTS) already expanded the clock from 32 to 64 bits, and other data structures similarly. (Amdahl did that years before Y2K - they were thinking ahead).
Well, seeing as how the US courts have given corporations the same status as human beings...
Corporations are not "human beings". Corporations are "persons".
Among the many distinctions: You can't be tried for murder for deliberately driving one out of existence. They don't get "unemployment insurance" (though a particular company or sector may get "corporate welfare" in the form of special treatment. They also can't vote (though, if for-profit, they CAN contribute to candidates and have free speech on political issues).
Treating them as "persons" is not entirely unreasonable because, like (the sometimes overlapping categories) religions, clubs, governments, political movements, bureaucracies, chain letters, and computer viruses, they ARE lifeforms.
They meet essentially all the (non-carbon-chemistry-chauvanist) definitions of life, and have a continuity and behavior distinct from (though to some extent emerging from) that of the humans that may be their creators, cells, or even hosts, food, or end products.
As "legal persons" the corporations are, again separately from their component individuals, subject to punishment if their "system" engages in lawbreaking or illegally-harmful behavior (even if the people who operate it don't knowingly or deliberately break a law or improperly harm a human or other "person"). This brings the law, as a proxy for the will of the general population of humans, into the corporations' incentive structures.
Gordon Bell designed both the PDP-8 and the PDP-11, and they were designed with different goals in mind.
Actually Gordon Bell designed the PDP-5 (same instruction set as the PDP-8), then DeCastro did the PDP-8 hardware implementation.
The PDP-8 was designed to be programmed in assembly code - the page and memory bank addressing structure made the development of efficient compilers impossible (it's not an accident that no system programming language like C was never implemented for the PDP-8 architecture).
The actual target of the PDP-8 was to be tiny and cheap (yet powerful enough to be useful). Thus the RISC-anticipating instruction set.... DeCastro... submitted a rival design for DEC's 16 bit minicomputer that was no where near as clean or compiler-writer-friendly as Bell's PDP-11 design.
When the PDP-11 design was chosen, DeCastro left and started Data General, and his 16-bit design became the oft-loathed Nova.
What happened was IBM was moving from 6-bit to 8-bit bytes. DEC realized that powers-of-two word sizes was the way of the future - making the next logical minicomputer a 16-bitter. So they put their two star architects to proposal writing.
Gordon Bell said that the thing to do was to write a couple languages to simulate the hardware and software, co-develop the instruction set and a compiler to tune up the instruction set, co-design the processor, memory, backplane, and peripheral card skeletons to optimize the hardware design, and generally do things efficiently and beautifully - after which you'd have an inexpensive, powerful machine that would take over the market for the next generation of minis and easily evolve to handle larger tasks.
DeCastro said you could quickly hack up a 16-bit followon to the PDP-8, hit the market a year earlier, sell a bunch, enable a lot of embedded apps, and make a lot of money.
Of course they were both right.
DEC went with Bell's proposal. So DeCastro went out and founded Data General. And the Nova got to market sooner, enabled a lot of embedded applications, sold a lot of units, and made a lot of money. Then the PDP-11 came out and was also a big hit. And the PDP-11 was easier to program and easier to upgrade, so after a couple generations it took over.
The original Nova had its points. Like a very efficient hardware design. (Cute use of a single 4-bit ALU slice and a single 4-bit register file chip, 4 times as fast as the RAM's cycle, to build a 16-bit processor running at the RAM rate. Reminicent of the stuff Cray did while still at Control Data.) But the Nova was a "16-bit PDP-8" thorugh and through - with the control lines of that ALU chip showing up in the "operate" instruction's microcode bit pattern. It just didn't scale well, and compilers for it were a pain. Meanwhile the PDP-11 scaled very nicely (as a microcoded machine after the first PDP-11/20) and was a breeze for writing both compilers and multitasking OSes. So a DOS, RSX-11, and then Unix were written for it, the followon VAX fixed the few design flaws that eventually put a crimp in its ability to scale, and the Nova became a dinosaur.
Those architecture are so simple, with kernels so small you could print the hex binary out on a couple of pages. Imaging how fast an accounting package would be on a 1 gHz, or even a 200 mHz.
If they do reconstitute the 8080 and a couple peripheral chips for it (like clock, uart, parallel-port), I recently found the source listing of an RTOS I did for it.
- ROMable
- Real-time
- Preemptive multitasking (arbitrary number of priorities)
- Reentrant code
- Application and driver tasks are "actors". (Think "objects" where each instance of a task object subclass is a thread of execution).
- Intertask communication supported by the kernel was:
- Semaphores
- message queues ("communicating semaphores")
- freespace memory allocation queues
- Written in assembler, but with a system service calling convention compatable with the CP/M compiler output's subroutine calls.
The kernel, queueing system, idle task, init routine, memory allocator, and an "empty" (just the idle task and stop flags) task & preallocated memory table totaled a few bytes under a half-K. (Yes, Virginia, all that in less than 512 bytes.) Or a few bytes over if you want to keep some extra per-task state so a debugger can figure out what a task is up to.
The size was very important, because the system it was written to run in had only 8K of ROM available, max. This had to hold a complete energy management system, including OS, device drivers, real-time task debugger, com stack, real-time clock handler, schedule handler, command interpreter, data collector, thermostat input, relay contact input, event counters (watthour meter data collectors), relay drivers, relay logic simulator (ladder-diagram interpreter), and a table of relay logic to simulate. The total software came in under 4K, leaving one of the two ROMs available for the relay logic, sensor, and other configuration definition tables. (At a couple bytes per relay contact and a bit per interconnect you can define a VERY complicated hunk of relay logic in 4K. B-) )
The trick was the insight that adding Mark Weiser's "T" (non-blocking "P") to semaphores' "P" and "V" lets you use communicating semaphores for EVERYTHING, including communication between the below-the-line interrupt routines and the above-the-line part of device drivers (which compete with other real-time tasks in the normal scheduling process). Think "message-passing minikernel", with a vengance.
Religiously using communicating semaphores, in a handful of idomatic ways, for all intertask communication (and even some task-internal functions), makes the tasks themselves tiny, and leads to a software organization that amounts to object-oriented programming. (I believe that this effect, in a direct ancestor of this operating system, IS the origin of OOP.)
I kept the rights to the supervisor core and tools, and had been thinking of open-sourcing it if I ever found it again (which I now have - at least the hardcopy version). Let me know if anybody needs it and I'll get in touch.
Gosh. If what you say about how your country is run is true, don't you find that a little bit worrying? I mean, it doesn't sound like a great way to run a country. Perhaps you might like to think about that again.
And what are the alternatives?
Professional politicians? People who would fill the offices with other professional politicans (who have no understanding of what it means to run a business or live off money they didn't drain out of the economy at gunpoint)?
I think if you're American, you'd be nuts not to be a conspiracy theorist! Bear with me...
I'll leave Bush aside... But have you read up on your [list of executive branch officials and their connections to oil, auto, and Texas industrial interests deleted]
Look:
Bush was the president of an OIL company in an oil-producing state, and a governor of that state.
Now he's president of the United States. As such his primary job is to quickly select a team of people to staff the upper levels of the executive branch and carry out his policies. That means very talented executives that he already KNOWS and trusts to faithfully make decisions the same way he would.
Where the HELL do you expect him to FIND such people, in quantity, in a short time, EXCEPT the industry and state he's been working in for years?
Think about it: What line of work are YOU in? If YOU had to pick several dozen executives whose work YOU know and whose decisions YOU trust, what line of work would THEY be in?
... the Lifeboat project. An attempt to create a spaceship for the purposes of saving the human race from the singularity predicted by Vernor Vinge.
A good idea.
But if it's The Singularity they want to dodge it's probably a bit early to start. As The Singularity approaches the cost of such a venture will drop like a rock. (Of course, like buying a computer you have to stop waiting and plunk down cash SOME time. In this case, preferably before something breaks. B-) )
Now dodging other stuff (like an extinction-level event such as a comet-head impact) should not wait until the incoming comet is sighted.
So what happens when somebody uses, say, the recent Microsoft IE hole to create a web button that (while also doing something plausable) silently snifs whether the user is on a cable modem and uncaps it if so?
You could easily find the bulk of the subscribers on the cable company's line with uncapped modems through no fault of their own.
Of course the FBI could go after the owner(s) of the sites(s) with the link. (But suppose their sites had it because it had been installed by a nimda variant, so it wasn't THEIR fault, either?)
Or suppose somebody constructs and launches an email virus that, as its payload, uncaps cable modems? (Probably disguised as an add for faster internet access, ha ha.) Similar story, but no web sites to chase. (HOW MANY new viruses per day? HOW MANY authors actually caught?)
Up until a bit ago, this was very valid criticism. Typically, one node could provide 30Mbps to a neighborhood, and a single cable modem could snatch up a max of 10Mbps of that for its own use. It was a lot like being plugged into a hub. When usage spiked, you were in collision city. However, cable providers have started sending out configuration files to cable modems telling them to only snag a certain amount of bandwidth.
And putting the throttle in the equipment at the customer end of the cable was a big mistake, opening a major can of worms. (Especially given that some customers own their own equipment...) Makes it vulnerable to tampering, leading the company into playing "whack-a-mole", in this case with a BIG mallet.
The proper solution is to do the throttling at the head end. Downstream you can limit bandwidth with a subscriber management box between the head end and the backbone. Upstream the cable systems assign timeslots to each modem from a central box. So you can limit upstream bandwidth by limiting the timeslots. (Or just have the SMS drop the extra packets - which will cause TCP connections to throttle back.)
Of course that means the cable companies have to buy an SMS, rather than pestering the FBI to bust their subscribers.
... if the IT dept. at Buckeye wasn't a bunch of inept mouthbreathers, it wouldn't have been possible on their service either.
Or if they'd sprung a few bux for a "subscriber management" box. Think "router/firewall with per-user filters, traffic control, and rapid configuration from the terminals in front of the NOC phone operators".
The subjects he lists, history, literature, languages, politics, economics, and arts, science, mathematics, and engineerin why would you disagree that it's possible for someone to obtain competency in these areas?
I believe you misunderstood me.
The point was not to obtain competence in these areas. It was to obtain MASTERY of ALL AREAS of human knowledge SIMULTANEOUSLY.
No longer possible.
(Of course it's even harder when the school systems don't even teach their students to SPELL it correctly. B-) )
While you are slamming ``liberal arts'' -- a term you seem not to understand -- you highlight the need for it. Liberal arts does not imply a non-scientific, non-technological education. It implies a broad education, including science, mathematics, and engineering along with the ``traditional'' topics of history, literature, languages, politics, economics, and arts. For politics, governance, and management, I want people who are conversant in all of those topics.
Unfortunately, the subjects you list have all grown to the point that no human can obtain even a BASIC understanding of all of them before he's too old to have a useful carreer left.
It was once possible to be a "Rennisance Man" - a master of ALL the sciences and arts reduced to teachability. No more. It's just too bloody large. (I say this as someone who attended a univerdity that claims to try to produce such people - centuries after the last of them is dead. B-) )
Unfortunately, "Liberal Arts" schools have, over much of the last century, been filled with the mathematically and technically illiterate - both because the students without the necessary skills gravitated there, and because the faculties themselves were so disabled, and in turn disparaged the skills they were incompetent to teach.
The engineering/scientific/biologic/technical cirriculum had constant feedback from the real world about what was true and what was false. But the "Arts Schools" taught classes where what was "right" was ONLY a matter of opinion - and grades solely a measure of how well you could regurgitate your Prof's pet bonnet-bees. (This DESPITE the fact that SOME of these theories could be TESTED - if only the academics understood, and/or believed in, things like the scientific method, statistics, and sampling methods.)
Yes the "Social 'Sciences'" are hard. But the bulk of their credentialed practitioners used this as an excuse to drop "science" from their methodologies. (This despite that fact that mathematics departments were generally part of the art, rather than the engineering, side of the school organization.)
I've been out of academia for a while now. I can hope that things have improved, as you seem to claim. But I have not personally seen any sign of such from the outside (other than your claim).
In my school days, too, many students on the Arts side of the wall knew tech, math, and the like. (Students are generally young, and still hunting for their muse.) But they would generally transfer out to some field more conducive to clear thought, drop out to use it in the real world, or (if they stayed in LS&A) suppress it or flunk out.
Ever since the first real SBus machines (SS1 4/60) came out in 1989 (well over ten years ago) there have been full SBus developer's kits that Sun gave away to anyone that asked. That included hardware specs, software/firmware specs, reference designs, Etc.
Well, not EVERYONE who asked. I asked and got the runaround big-time. (Probably asked the wrong people - or at the wrong time.) Non-disclosures, tell-us-your-business-plan, etc.
I'm pretty positive all the later versions had Y2k patches that you could freely download from Sun's site.
And in fact even 4.1.3 worked pretty well on new year's day, much to my suprise. Major exception was the version of calendar manager (which wouldn't display any appointments after 1999 - and hadn't even during 1999). So if I ever discover that I really need to do something on the old machine (before I throw it out or some bitrot sets in) I can power it up again.
But by that point I'd already gotten fed up with a decade of Sun's now-it's-open-kinda, now-it's-closed-again vacilation, on both hardware and software (and Apple's too, for that matter.) I'd determined years before that open source was where the action would be. (Chosing Linux over *BSD was tougher, given BSD's more standard build enviornment and its function as the canonical exchange platform for network software. Jury's still out on that, but it still looks like I picked the winner.)
By Y2K I'd bit the bullet long since and been on Linux for some time. New year's was just an excuse to cut the apron strings. So I moved the last server (the MTA) off from it, and pulled the plug. (And saw a significant power bill reduction. B-) )
After all: If I'm not going to use Solaris any more (except maybe on work sites where somebody ELSE can do the sysadmin drudgework), why bother burning my precious manhour-capital upgrading it?
SPARC and SBus are open, fully documented IEEE standards. Nowadays Sun uses PCI for I/O expansion. You wouldn't know "closed" if it bit you on the ass.
That is now. This was then.
Back when the Sun 4 was current, finding out anything about the SBus was like pulling teeth - and signing away your soul.
Solaris isn't open source by any means, but it's a free download on SPARC and until recently Intel platforms, and you can download the source after agreeing to Sun's license. You can make changes to the source, recompile anything you damn well please, and contribute changes back to Sun (I have done so myself), the only thing you can't do is redistribute it.
And if they'd done that ten years ago, when I (and others) had a significant need to hack up some min or features and no budget to buy into their source distribution package it wouled have been wonderful - and might have headed off the obsolescence of Solaris.
Now, with Linux (+ GNU utilities + X + Gnome|KDE), and Free/Open/Net BSD, and Mach, and the rest of the Open Source world, it's too little too late.
I've reverse-engineered OSes on IBM, Control Data, DEC, Mac, and Altos when useful to add features or custom hardware. But with Spark's RISC instruction set and Sun's insistance on keeping both hardware and software closed, the cost/benefit balance was tipped.
I retired my last Solaris home machine on Dec 31, 1999, rather than upgrade it for Y2K.
At work:
- The serious networking software development is now done on NetBSD and variants. BSD desktops.
- The ASIC development is still partly on Solaris... because we still have legacy machines from when that was all the tools would run on. But the simulation farm was ported to Linux long ago. New machines are PCs and the Sun boxes will run - mostly as legacy desktops - until they die or become too painful to maintain.
- And of course the administrators are still on Windoze - though it wouldn't surprise me to see them move to Linux in the near future.
... if the manufacturers ship with WEP by default, then there'd be quite a few people leaving them on with the default keys... yet another problem
Actually, it looks more like a solution.
WEP, now that it's so thoroughly cracked, is useless for actual security against even a mildly-interested eavesdropper. But WEP also serves another funciton.
In much of the computing industry and culture, permissions serve another purpose - the expression of intent. A read-any file is intended to be read without bothering to ask, a read-owner-only file is intended to be private (i.e. don't break the lock without asking even if you're the sysadmin), and so on.
Many people deliberately leave their WiFi hubs open and allow them to be used (on a non-interference-with-owner's-use basis), for a variety of reasons. The configuration COULD be used to indicate intent - open = go ahead, WEP on = I want it private, etc.
But that is compromised by the practice of having WEP off by default. If WEP is on it's clear that the owner DOESN'T want you using it without at least asking permission. But if it's off, was it because the owner is granting permission, or because he just left the default in place, typically through ignorance.
Shipping with WEP on and a default key adds a clear third category:
- WEP off: It was TURNED off, a clear sign of intent to let the port be generally used (or total cluelessness).
- WEP on, non-default key: The key was changed, a clear sign that the user INTENDED the port to be reserved for those to whom the owner granted permission.
- WEP on, default key: The configuration is default. The user's just plugged it in and started using it, so his intent is not clearly expressed.
Unfortunately, every security option that's on by default means an additional barrier between a new user and getting something to work. So it represents a flood of service calls, and a heavy extra expense. Thus, vendors have an incentive to ship products with security options off by default, leaving the user wide open until they become sufficiently educated (or burned) to pay attention to plugging the security holes.
ISO/IEC 8802-11:1999(E), that is, the official ANSI/IEEE 802.11 spec.
It says WEP is Wired Equivalent Privacy
Thanks for the correction. I had heard it called "wireLESS equivalent OF privacy", which made enough sense (given the 802.11b context) that I didn't look deeper.
Slashdot Mirror
[unescorted in the seamier neighborhoods of your local downtown ~= unsecorted on the internet]
.kids. site would be clear evidence the bad guy is stalking a minor, which would justify earlier and harsher response by police and prosecutors.
A child could be physically harmed in the former, while none could come to a child who stumbled onto dirtyxxx.com
Combining some of the java hacks you see (more often) on x-rated sites and adds with browser and OS vulnerabilities, IP vs geographic databases, "passport" info, or other resources, a bad guy could come up with something that might get him street addresses and contents of saved personal correspondence containing all sorts of info about location and movement. This would enable physical attacks on person or property.
Attaching such a tool to a general site might mean all sorts of things. But attaching it to a
any attempt at creating an adult only domain and REQUIRING adult oriented sites to go there is a 1st amendment violation.
Hear hear!
Like cities, the Internet is a "place" that was created BY adults FOR adults. As such it contains hazardous-to-kids analogs of traffic, industrial plants, political battlegrounds, pickup bars, red-light districts, casinos, marketplaces for dangerous items, and other attractive nuisances. Indeed, these produce much of its value and utility.
If a child is not mature enough to be allowed unescorted in the seamier neighborhoods of your local downtown, that kid is also not mature enough to be unsecorted on the internet. And trying to childproof the entirety of the internet (or all but a reserved area) is just as futile, damaging, and illegal as trying to childproof the entirety of adult society.
Creating an explicit childproof fenced-in playground, on the other hand, is just fine. With one possible exception...
I hope that either the prohibition on linking out of kids.us is relaxed to allow linking to kids. of any country that sets up a similar domain with compatable rules, or (perhaps better) that sites in other countries that are willing to abide by the US rules are allowed to register in kids.us.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of the book provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
So does anyone have a URL for an online version of the book - scanned in or otherwise?
Where is ..the online or downloadable version of this book?
No where. And it doesn't need to be. If the book was licensed like the GPL, then anyone who bought a copy could redistribute the text. But there is a separate libre license specifically designed to deal with documents, and so the GPL doesn't even apply.
Not only that, but Stallman has a long history of funding his open-source work by selleing books.
I recall when I first encountered emacs. Stallman was selling a manual for it to raise money - which I believe he was using to pay his rent.
The manual contained EXACTLY THE SAME MATERIAL as the free online documentation contained in the distribution. But the printed form was handy - and (depending on what your computer resources were) often cheaper than printing it out yourself, as well.
... only a really sick and twisted person would try and hack the computers of people who give time and money to help thoes in need.
Would you also advise the Salvation Army to leave the locks off the doors to their soup kitchens, stores, warehouses, and refurbishment workshops?
There really are bad guys.
Bad guys who are theives often have no more conscience about stealing from a charity than they do from anyone else. Bad guys who are graffiti artists often have no more conscience about tagging a charity building than any other. And so on.
So why should bad guys who crack systems, for fun, profit, or to use as a DDOS tool, be any less willing to crack a charity's system than a home, business, school, government bureau, or hospital system?
As long as we're talking about tribes that had bad relations with the Jews in biblical times...
I hear that "Palestine" is a modern European mispronunciation imposed on the area during the colonial period and that the people there, to this day, pronounce it (as their ancestors did before them) "FILL-ih-steen".
As in "Philistines".
That conflict has been going on for a LONG time.
I don't remember seeing a 'use before' date on any linux servers. Do you?
Yep:
3:14:07 GMT Jan 19 2038 (Tue)
That's when the Unix/Linux clock rolls over.
You might have a few extra hours if you're keeping your system clock on local rather than GMT.
Linux (and any time-sensitive apps that use the appropriate system calls and/or data structures) will need a Y2K-like upgrade some time before that. For some a recompile with different includes will fix it but others may be more problematic. And like the Y2K bug we won't know for sure if we got them all until weeks after the magic date.
Fortunately, all the Unix/Linux bugs are connected to a single point source-of-failure (the undersized clock variable and related kernel data structures and system call). They can thus be tracked down in a straightforward manner. That's quite different from the Y2K bug, where an artifact of the numbering system lured people into making the same classes of error, separately, thousands of times.
Note that SOME Unix implementations (i.e. Amdahl's UTS) already expanded the clock from 32 to 64 bits, and other data structures similarly. (Amdahl did that years before Y2K - they were thinking ahead).
Well, seeing as how the US courts have given corporations the same status as human beings ...
Corporations are not "human beings". Corporations are "persons".
Among the many distinctions: You can't be tried for murder for deliberately driving one out of existence. They don't get "unemployment insurance" (though a particular company or sector may get "corporate welfare" in the form of special treatment. They also can't vote (though, if for-profit, they CAN contribute to candidates and have free speech on political issues).
Treating them as "persons" is not entirely unreasonable because, like (the sometimes overlapping categories) religions, clubs, governments, political movements, bureaucracies, chain letters, and computer viruses, they ARE lifeforms.
They meet essentially all the (non-carbon-chemistry-chauvanist) definitions of life, and have a continuity and behavior distinct from (though to some extent emerging from) that of the humans that may be their creators, cells, or even hosts, food, or end products.
As "legal persons" the corporations are, again separately from their component individuals, subject to punishment if their "system" engages in lawbreaking or illegally-harmful behavior (even if the people who operate it don't knowingly or deliberately break a law or improperly harm a human or other "person"). This brings the law, as a proxy for the will of the general population of humans, into the corporations' incentive structures.
Being Belgian I grew up on these "comics" (a term that really doesn't do justice to the art, at least not the Begian/French kind of "comics").
A term has been coined which, IMHO, does accurately describe the art form which includes Tintin.
"Graphic Novel"
(It has the same relation to a written novel that a stage play or feature movie has to an oral storyteller's story or radio drama.)
Gordon Bell designed both the PDP-8 and the PDP-11, and they were designed with different goals in mind.
... DeCastro ... submitted a rival design for DEC's 16 bit minicomputer that was no where near as clean or compiler-writer-friendly as Bell's PDP-11 design.
Actually Gordon Bell designed the PDP-5 (same instruction set as the PDP-8), then DeCastro did the PDP-8 hardware implementation.
The PDP-8 was designed to be programmed in assembly code - the page and memory bank addressing structure made the development of efficient compilers impossible (it's not an accident that no system programming language like C was never implemented for the PDP-8 architecture).
The actual target of the PDP-8 was to be tiny and cheap (yet powerful enough to be useful). Thus the RISC-anticipating instruction set.
When the PDP-11 design was chosen, DeCastro left and started Data General, and his 16-bit design became the oft-loathed Nova.
What happened was IBM was moving from 6-bit to 8-bit bytes. DEC realized that powers-of-two word sizes was the way of the future - making the next logical minicomputer a 16-bitter. So they put their two star architects to proposal writing.
Gordon Bell said that the thing to do was to write a couple languages to simulate the hardware and software, co-develop the instruction set and a compiler to tune up the instruction set, co-design the processor, memory, backplane, and peripheral card skeletons to optimize the hardware design, and generally do things efficiently and beautifully - after which you'd have an inexpensive, powerful machine that would take over the market for the next generation of minis and easily evolve to handle larger tasks.
DeCastro said you could quickly hack up a 16-bit followon to the PDP-8, hit the market a year earlier, sell a bunch, enable a lot of embedded apps, and make a lot of money.
Of course they were both right.
DEC went with Bell's proposal. So DeCastro went out and founded Data General. And the Nova got to market sooner, enabled a lot of embedded applications, sold a lot of units, and made a lot of money. Then the PDP-11 came out and was also a big hit. And the PDP-11 was easier to program and easier to upgrade, so after a couple generations it took over.
The original Nova had its points. Like a very efficient hardware design. (Cute use of a single 4-bit ALU slice and a single 4-bit register file chip, 4 times as fast as the RAM's cycle, to build a 16-bit processor running at the RAM rate. Reminicent of the stuff Cray did while still at Control Data.) But the Nova was a "16-bit PDP-8" thorugh and through - with the control lines of that ALU chip showing up in the "operate" instruction's microcode bit pattern. It just didn't scale well, and compilers for it were a pain. Meanwhile the PDP-11 scaled very nicely (as a microcoded machine after the first PDP-11/20) and was a breeze for writing both compilers and multitasking OSes. So a DOS, RSX-11, and then Unix were written for it, the followon VAX fixed the few design flaws that eventually put a crimp in its ability to scale, and the Nova became a dinosaur.
Those architecture are so simple, with kernels so small you could print the hex binary out on a couple of pages. Imaging how fast an accounting package would be on a 1 gHz, or even a 200 mHz.
If they do reconstitute the 8080 and a couple peripheral chips for it (like clock, uart, parallel-port), I recently found the source listing of an RTOS I did for it.
- ROMable
- Real-time
- Preemptive multitasking (arbitrary number of priorities)
- Reentrant code
- Application and driver tasks are "actors". (Think "objects" where each instance of a task object subclass is a thread of execution).
- Intertask communication supported by the kernel was:
- Semaphores
- message queues ("communicating semaphores")
- freespace memory allocation queues
- Written in assembler, but with a system service calling convention compatable with the CP/M compiler output's subroutine calls.
The kernel, queueing system, idle task, init routine, memory allocator, and an "empty" (just the idle task and stop flags) task & preallocated memory table totaled a few bytes under a half-K. (Yes, Virginia, all that in less than 512 bytes.) Or a few bytes over if you want to keep some extra per-task state so a debugger can figure out what a task is up to.
The size was very important, because the system it was written to run in had only 8K of ROM available, max. This had to hold a complete energy management system, including OS, device drivers, real-time task debugger, com stack, real-time clock handler, schedule handler, command interpreter, data collector, thermostat input, relay contact input, event counters (watthour meter data collectors), relay drivers, relay logic simulator (ladder-diagram interpreter), and a table of relay logic to simulate. The total software came in under 4K, leaving one of the two ROMs available for the relay logic, sensor, and other configuration definition tables. (At a couple bytes per relay contact and a bit per interconnect you can define a VERY complicated hunk of relay logic in 4K. B-) )
The trick was the insight that adding Mark Weiser's "T" (non-blocking "P") to semaphores' "P" and "V" lets you use communicating semaphores for EVERYTHING, including communication between the below-the-line interrupt routines and the above-the-line part of device drivers (which compete with other real-time tasks in the normal scheduling process). Think "message-passing minikernel", with a vengance.
Religiously using communicating semaphores, in a handful of idomatic ways, for all intertask communication (and even some task-internal functions), makes the tasks themselves tiny, and leads to a software organization that amounts to object-oriented programming. (I believe that this effect, in a direct ancestor of this operating system, IS the origin of OOP.)
I kept the rights to the supervisor core and tools, and had been thinking of open-sourcing it if I ever found it again (which I now have - at least the hardcopy version). Let me know if anybody needs it and I'll get in touch.
Gosh. If what you say about how your country is run is true, don't you find that a little bit worrying? I mean, it doesn't sound like a great way to run a country. Perhaps you might like to think about that again.
And what are the alternatives?
Professional politicians? People who would fill the offices with other professional politicans (who have no understanding of what it means to run a business or live off money they didn't drain out of the economy at gunpoint)?
Professional criminals?
Warlords?
No, thanks.
I think if you're American, you'd be nuts not to be a conspiracy theorist! Bear with me...
I'll leave Bush aside... But have you read up on your [list of executive branch officials and their connections to oil, auto, and Texas industrial interests deleted]
Look:
Bush was the president of an OIL company in an oil-producing state, and a governor of that state.
Now he's president of the United States. As such his primary job is to quickly select a team of people to staff the upper levels of the executive branch and carry out his policies. That means very talented executives that he already KNOWS and trusts to faithfully make decisions the same way he would.
Where the HELL do you expect him to FIND such people, in quantity, in a short time, EXCEPT the industry and state he's been working in for years?
Think about it: What line of work are YOU in? If YOU had to pick several dozen executives whose work YOU know and whose decisions YOU trust, what line of work would THEY be in?
... the Lifeboat project. An attempt to create a spaceship for the purposes of saving the human race from the singularity predicted by Vernor Vinge.
A good idea.
But if it's The Singularity they want to dodge it's probably a bit early to start. As The Singularity approaches the cost of such a venture will drop like a rock. (Of course, like buying a computer you have to stop waiting and plunk down cash SOME time. In this case, preferably before something breaks. B-) )
Now dodging other stuff (like an extinction-level event such as a comet-head impact) should not wait until the incoming comet is sighted.
So what happens when somebody uses, say, the recent Microsoft IE hole to create a web button that (while also doing something plausable) silently snifs whether the user is on a cable modem and uncaps it if so?
You could easily find the bulk of the subscribers on the cable company's line with uncapped modems through no fault of their own.
Of course the FBI could go after the owner(s) of the sites(s) with the link. (But suppose their sites had it because it had been installed by a nimda variant, so it wasn't THEIR fault, either?)
Or suppose somebody constructs and launches an email virus that, as its payload, uncaps cable modems? (Probably disguised as an add for faster internet access, ha ha.) Similar story, but no web sites to chase. (HOW MANY new viruses per day? HOW MANY authors actually caught?)
Whack-a-mole will only work for a little while.
Up until a bit ago, this was very valid criticism. Typically, one node could provide 30Mbps to a neighborhood, and a single cable modem could snatch up a max of 10Mbps of that for its own use. It was a lot like being plugged into a hub. When usage spiked, you were in collision city. However, cable providers have started sending out configuration files to cable modems telling them to only snag a certain amount of bandwidth.
And putting the throttle in the equipment at the customer end of the cable was a big mistake, opening a major can of worms. (Especially given that some customers own their own equipment...) Makes it vulnerable to tampering, leading the company into playing "whack-a-mole", in this case with a BIG mallet.
The proper solution is to do the throttling at the head end. Downstream you can limit bandwidth with a subscriber management box between the head end and the backbone. Upstream the cable systems assign timeslots to each modem from a central box. So you can limit upstream bandwidth by limiting the timeslots. (Or just have the SMS drop the extra packets - which will cause TCP connections to throttle back.)
Of course that means the cable companies have to buy an SMS, rather than pestering the FBI to bust their subscribers.
... if the IT dept. at Buckeye wasn't a bunch of inept mouthbreathers, it wouldn't have been possible on their service either.
Or if they'd sprung a few bux for a "subscriber management" box. Think "router/firewall with per-user filters, traffic control, and rapid configuration from the terminals in front of the NOC phone operators".
The subjects he lists, history, literature, languages, politics, economics, and arts, science, mathematics, and engineerin why would you disagree that it's possible for someone to obtain competency in these areas?
I believe you misunderstood me.
The point was not to obtain competence in these areas. It was to obtain MASTERY of ALL AREAS of human knowledge SIMULTANEOUSLY.
No longer possible.
(Of course it's even harder when the school systems don't even teach their students to SPELL it correctly. B-) )
While you are slamming ``liberal arts'' -- a term you seem not to understand -- you highlight the need for it. Liberal arts does not imply a non-scientific, non-technological education. It implies a broad education, including science, mathematics, and engineering along with the ``traditional'' topics of history, literature, languages, politics, economics, and arts. For politics, governance, and management, I want people who are conversant in all of those topics.
Unfortunately, the subjects you list have all grown to the point that no human can obtain even a BASIC understanding of all of them before he's too old to have a useful carreer left.
It was once possible to be a "Rennisance Man" - a master of ALL the sciences and arts reduced to teachability. No more. It's just too bloody large. (I say this as someone who attended a univerdity that claims to try to produce such people - centuries after the last of them is dead. B-) )
Unfortunately, "Liberal Arts" schools have, over much of the last century, been filled with the mathematically and technically illiterate - both because the students without the necessary skills gravitated there, and because the faculties themselves were so disabled, and in turn disparaged the skills they were incompetent to teach.
The engineering/scientific/biologic/technical cirriculum had constant feedback from the real world about what was true and what was false. But the "Arts Schools" taught classes where what was "right" was ONLY a matter of opinion - and grades solely a measure of how well you could regurgitate your Prof's pet bonnet-bees. (This DESPITE the fact that SOME of these theories could be TESTED - if only the academics understood, and/or believed in, things like the scientific method, statistics, and sampling methods.)
Yes the "Social 'Sciences'" are hard. But the bulk of their credentialed practitioners used this as an excuse to drop "science" from their methodologies. (This despite that fact that mathematics departments were generally part of the art, rather than the engineering, side of the school organization.)
I've been out of academia for a while now. I can hope that things have improved, as you seem to claim. But I have not personally seen any sign of such from the outside (other than your claim).
In my school days, too, many students on the Arts side of the wall knew tech, math, and the like. (Students are generally young, and still hunting for their muse.) But they would generally transfer out to some field more conducive to clear thought, drop out to use it in the real world, or (if they stayed in LS&A) suppress it or flunk out.
Ever since the first real SBus machines (SS1 4/60) came out in 1989 (well over ten years ago) there have been full SBus developer's kits that Sun gave away to anyone that asked. That included hardware specs, software/firmware specs, reference designs, Etc.
Well, not EVERYONE who asked. I asked and got the runaround big-time. (Probably asked the wrong people - or at the wrong time.) Non-disclosures, tell-us-your-business-plan, etc.
Guess I should have gone to Usenix. B-b
Upgrade it for Y2K? What were you running, 4.1.3?
yep, if I recall correctly.
I'm pretty positive all the later versions had Y2k patches that you could freely download from Sun's site.
And in fact even 4.1.3 worked pretty well on new year's day, much to my suprise. Major exception was the version of calendar manager (which wouldn't display any appointments after 1999 - and hadn't even during 1999). So if I ever discover that I really need to do something on the old machine (before I throw it out or some bitrot sets in) I can power it up again.
But by that point I'd already gotten fed up with a decade of Sun's now-it's-open-kinda, now-it's-closed-again vacilation, on both hardware and software (and Apple's too, for that matter.) I'd determined years before that open source was where the action would be. (Chosing Linux over *BSD was tougher, given BSD's more standard build enviornment and its function as the canonical exchange platform for network software. Jury's still out on that, but it still looks like I picked the winner.)
By Y2K I'd bit the bullet long since and been on Linux for some time. New year's was just an excuse to cut the apron strings. So I moved the last server (the MTA) off from it, and pulled the plug. (And saw a significant power bill reduction. B-) )
After all: If I'm not going to use Solaris any more (except maybe on work sites where somebody ELSE can do the sysadmin drudgework), why bother burning my precious manhour-capital upgrading it?
SPARC and SBus are open, fully documented IEEE standards. Nowadays Sun uses PCI for I/O expansion. You wouldn't know "closed" if it bit you on the ass.
That is now. This was then.
Back when the Sun 4 was current, finding out anything about the SBus was like pulling teeth - and signing away your soul.
Solaris isn't open source by any means, but it's a free download on SPARC and until recently Intel platforms, and you can download the source after agreeing to Sun's license. You can make changes to the source, recompile anything you damn well please, and contribute changes back to Sun (I have done so myself), the only thing you can't do is redistribute it.
... because we still have legacy machines from when that was all the tools would run on. But the simulation farm was ported to Linux long ago. New machines are PCs and the Sun boxes will run - mostly as legacy desktops - until they die or become too painful to maintain.
And if they'd done that ten years ago, when I (and others) had a significant need to hack up some min or features and no budget to buy into their source distribution package it wouled have been wonderful - and might have headed off the obsolescence of Solaris.
Now, with Linux (+ GNU utilities + X + Gnome|KDE), and Free/Open/Net BSD, and Mach, and the rest of the Open Source world, it's too little too late.
I've reverse-engineered OSes on IBM, Control Data, DEC, Mac, and Altos when useful to add features or custom hardware. But with Spark's RISC instruction set and Sun's insistance on keeping both hardware and software closed, the cost/benefit balance was tipped.
I retired my last Solaris home machine on Dec 31, 1999, rather than upgrade it for Y2K.
At work:
- The serious networking software development is now done on NetBSD and variants. BSD desktops.
- The ASIC development is still partly on Solaris
- And of course the administrators are still on Windoze - though it wouldn't surprise me to see them move to Linux in the near future.
... if the manufacturers ship with WEP by default, then there'd be quite a few people leaving them on with the default keys... yet another problem
Actually, it looks more like a solution.
WEP, now that it's so thoroughly cracked, is useless for actual security against even a mildly-interested eavesdropper. But WEP also serves another funciton.
In much of the computing industry and culture, permissions serve another purpose - the expression of intent. A read-any file is intended to be read without bothering to ask, a read-owner-only file is intended to be private (i.e. don't break the lock without asking even if you're the sysadmin), and so on.
Many people deliberately leave their WiFi hubs open and allow them to be used (on a non-interference-with-owner's-use basis), for a variety of reasons. The configuration COULD be used to indicate intent - open = go ahead, WEP on = I want it private, etc.
But that is compromised by the practice of having WEP off by default. If WEP is on it's clear that the owner DOESN'T want you using it without at least asking permission. But if it's off, was it because the owner is granting permission, or because he just left the default in place, typically through ignorance.
Shipping with WEP on and a default key adds a clear third category:
- WEP off: It was TURNED off, a clear sign of intent to let the port be generally used (or total cluelessness).
- WEP on, non-default key: The key was changed, a clear sign that the user INTENDED the port to be reserved for those to whom the owner granted permission.
- WEP on, default key: The configuration is default. The user's just plugged it in and started using it, so his intent is not clearly expressed.
Unfortunately, every security option that's on by default means an additional barrier between a new user and getting something to work. So it represents a flood of service calls, and a heavy extra expense. Thus, vendors have an incentive to ship products with security options off by default, leaving the user wide open until they become sufficiently educated (or burned) to pay attention to plugging the security holes.
ISO/IEC 8802-11:1999(E), that is, the official ANSI/IEEE 802.11 spec.
It says WEP is Wired Equivalent Privacy
Thanks for the correction. I had heard it called "wireLESS equivalent OF privacy", which made enough sense (given the 802.11b context) that I didn't look deeper.