Unfortunately fluxbox has a really crappy alt-tab model that the developers don't want to fix. If it wasn't for that fluxbox might be a useful replacement.
A 'single point of failure' for a single employee is nowhere near as severe as a 'single point of failure' for an entire department.
You continue to miss the point. It's no better for the departmental file server to be down than for the depmartmental thin client server to be down. Any reasonably well managed organization (one that has centralized resources for better workflow) already has things that absolutely need to be up. Thin clients are just one more, no big deal.
When a 10 user department is completely unable to do their work it's considered far more serious than one or two machines in the workgroup being down.
That's a fairly specious argument these days. The reality is that a whole lotta people depend on network resources even if they don't have a thin client, to the extent that their desktop is basically unusable if the remote resources are unavailable. (E.g., file server.) Replacing a thin client with thick clients doesn't eliminate a single point of failure, it simply increases the number of single points of failure.
Now tell me which AMD64 version of Linux works out of the box with an Intel 64-bit processor. I'm sure both processors are mostly similar but they're not identical, that's for sure.
I suppose you're just not aware that while the 64 bit pentium 4 is new the 64 bit xeon has been out for a year now--the only difference is that the new chip is marketed at desktops rather than servers. All the amd64 linuxes that I know of work fine on intel's implementation.
That is why I said "seemingly done a good job at Lucent". We now know she failed there too, but back then it looked like she did fine.
Only to a complete moron or a wall street analyst. The signs of doom were obvious at lucent--it was a science company, the heir to the great bell labs, and it got rid of its scientists! What remotely positive long-term future was there? It's like the hp-compaq merger--some people drank the coolaid and believed that it would create wonderfully profitable synergies, while the rest of us pondered what kind of idiot could believe that smashing two failing companies together would magically fix all their inherent problems. The problem with carly was that she was style over substance, and in the irrational exuberance of the late 20th century that was enough to put her in a position where her lack of substance could cause real damage.
FYI, there are 4 other working instruments on board (WFPC2, ACS, NICMOS, FGS). So, just because the STIS, the one you are interested in, is dead, you are willing to throw the others away? To hell, with the rest of us and our science, right? I routinely use Hubble data from STScI, but you don't care, huh?
Seems fair to me, since people with HST-blinders don't seem to care that making hubble last a couple of more years will take a fairly large chunk out of the total US science budget. There's a very limited amount of money that congress will spend on science in total, and hubble just ain't the best bang we can get for the bucks.
This is all we ask. Do a risk analysis for the Hubble mission. Identify and assess the risks and benefits of carrying out the mission. If the goal of continuing Hubble's mission (which is a very complex and dynamic issue to define in the first place) does not outweight the risks, then that's fine. But have the data to back it up. We are (supposed to be) scientists at NASA. We make up our minds based on analyzing as many of the associated facts as possible.
No, a formal risk analysis for this is just a way to waste time and money. NASA has enough beurocracy (more than enough, really) already. It's actually refreshing, IMO, to see someone just make a decision. The reality is that after months of time and $$$ writing a risk analysis (probably heavily influenced by the people currently working on hubble, who are far from unbiased) someone would still have to make a judgement call, and a lot of the factors are intangibles that the risk analysis wouldn't cover in a factual manner anyway. Bottom line is that another shuttle accident will kill the program and take the ISS with it. That's not a risk worth taking for an old system like hubble.
I am very grateful to the EU as it is tying together all the countries in the continent that has suffered the most from wars in the last century. By making all the countries depend on each other in trade, none of them will ever think of going to war against each other again.
That's absurd. Germany's major trading partner prior to WWI was, well, France. Wars are not based on logic and creating new logical constructs for avoid war is useless.
Uhm, all the other SI units are defined off physical things. A second is defined as so many oscillations of a cesium atom, a meter is defined as 1/299792458 light*second, a kelvin is 1/273 the triple point of water and an ampere is 6.25*10^25 electrons/second passing a given point on a circuit. All of these things are based off a particular physical "thing" - it'd be impossible to create a definition that wasn't!
No, none of those things is based off a particular thing. They are all based off experements that are easily repeated at any reasonably equipped lab in the world. A standard that can be used to easily verify the accuracy of a particular instrument is much more useful than one which can only be verified by checking the mass of a particular bar of iridium kept in a vault in paris.
I've already mentioned Centos and Whitebox, and that's what I meant by 'and friends'.
So instead of using RH you suggest I go to a third party leech? A process which still won't get reasonably priced paid support? (Like the old red hat, say $100 or so.) Why on earth would I want to do that as opposed to just getting SUSE or some such? See, that's the thing you're missing--RH isn't the only vendor, and other people seem to be delivering the things that RH won't.
RHEL is reliable, because RH put lots of work into QA, not because they charge for it (though arguably, this is something of a prerequisite to produce a distro of the quality that they do AND on the schedule that they do it: "good, fast, cheap - pick any two" as the saying goes).
Personally, I've been tremendously unimpressed with the quality of RHEL. And as a leech as opposed to an actual customer I'd have even less leverage in getting broken stuff fixed, wouldn't I?
Personally, I'm OK with a distro upgrade every year or so on my workstations
Well good for you. Many people find they have more important things to do (actually productive work) than upgrade workstations.
Oh, sure, lots. But if the SHA-1 is being used for, say, passwords - where all that's stored and checked is the hash - then ANY collision will do. So if you can find a collision in a day, you can break into any system using SHA-1 for password authentication in a day.
That's false for two reasons. First, you'd need to actually get the hashed version of the password. On most systems that requires privileged access--they aren't just available to anyone who asks. If an intruder has privileged access to your system you have bigger problems than the possibility of someone breaking your hashed passwords. The other thing is that not all collisions will result in valid passphrases. Most systems won't accept, for example, null bytes or special characters or thousands of characters in passwords. So its not enough to find a collision, you need to find a valid collision.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.fbi.gov
says it is running Linux. Perhaps that is why Slashdot didn't post the operating system in the summary
Or perhaps because the OS of the web server has absolutely nothing to do with the OS of the mail server?
It's not really that hard if you know what you're doing. as for not implementing fixes and hacks, well unfortunately I live in the real world, not an ideal utopia where I can tell my clients users to go to hell.
Strange how it happens all the time to users who choose to run firefox. (Of course, it's even stranger how pages tend to be perfectly usable if you change the user-agent to MSIE...)
Pipelining is specified in HTTP/1.1, so it has to be at least acknowleged by the server. Of course, the server doesn't have to do anything with the request. So it makes no sense to not implement it in software because you can always fall back on non-pipelined transmissions if the server doesn't feel like doing it.
The issue isn't servers that don't do it, the problem is servers that do it wrong.
And yet they haven't posted an official statement to their website about the Mac Mini not voiding the warranty when you either A) break the clips holding the case together or B) open the case in the first place.
Why would they? It would be a violation of US federal law (the Magnuson-Moss Act). You might as well demand that they conspicuously post notices that they don't sell illegal drugs or engage in racketeering; most businesses don't list on their web sites all the illegal things they don't do.
Hmm. The popular trick I'm familiar with is to enable pipelining--which lets you submit multiple requests in a single tcp session; this is not the same as increasing the maximum number of simultaneous requests, although the FUDdites like to run around claiming that it is. It's not enabled by default because some lousy web servers can't handle pipelining.
You seem to be under the impression that the criteria is arbitrarily set
Yes, they are arbitrary. There's no natural law behind the dow 30.
and that SS could somehow manipulate the setting of the criteria
The "somehow" is no mystery. They say something like "the default fund is now X" and a whole lotta money flows in a different direction. And it isn't just the SSA that's got influence in this case, it's the various fund managers that are establishing the indices. The only difference between an index fund and a regular fund is that the managers aren't trying to pick stocks on a day-to-day basis, they are instead setting up some rules ahead of time and essentially putting the daily trades on autopilot. The advantage of the index fund is that you spend less money on managing the fund--but there are still managers. And index fund can change its index, subject to some kind of procedure, including notification of the change. The small shareholders don't generally even read the notifications that indicate when the fund changes something.
And how is this any different than the current situation?
Withdrawals aren't established by federal legislation, the money isn't used for a program considered the safety net for elderly americans, and the market for the last 50 years or so has had a net influx of money.
And how might a dishonest SS fund take advantage of this?
Ok, so you know that the SSA is going to need $300bn on 1 Oct. You know that they're going to be selling a particular set of stocks to get that $300bn. (Because you know the weightings of the stocks in the SSA's funds.) You then short the stocks because the price is going to be depressed when those shares hit the market. There's only so much demand. What's really scary is that the SSA has to do this regardless of market conditions. They can't say "wow, the economy is in recession this quarter, we'd better hold off until next quarter" because under this new system the government assumes that the market will magically find liquidity. You're right that the same sort of problem happens when if today's 401k net deposits turn into net 401k withdrawals--but people are looking at SS as the safety net if their 401k's tank, which puts SS in a different risk category. People have gotten used to the idea that money is always flowing into the market and that the market is always going up. It's been true, again, for 50 years now. But that's a blink of an eye in historical terms, and nobody really knows what happens when a whole generation of individual investors all start pulling their money out of the market. And people really don't know what happens when the government tries to fund itself from the market. I'd rather not find out than rush headlong into disaster.
Maybe I'm crazy and totally ignorant, but AFAIK, if you buy a DJIA index fund, you've bought an exact mirror of the DJIA. Ditto NASDAQ 100, S&P, Wishire 5000. An index fund doesn't have a stock manager.
And who makes up the rules for the what stocks are on the dow, etc? Also, given a list like the wilshire 5000, how many of each stock on the index do you buy? The criteria are known up front, but someone is still setting those criteria.
Your criticicism is based on your misunderstanding of index funds and your misunderstanding of the role that the Fed plays.
If you say repeatedly that I have a misunderstanding do you think that makes your case stronger?
Interest rates have a major effect on the entire economy.
They have an indirect and, despite claims to the contrary, fairly unknown effect on the economy.
And because the SS fund would be using an index fund, there wouldn't be any arbitrary moves in a "particular security".
Sure there would. If you know the index you know what securities are going to be affected by the move.
I'm not claiming that the SS funds participation wouldn't effect the market. I'm just claiming that it's not a given that the government could be able to use this to manipulate the market. The government already regulates the market through the SEC. Would you say that the SEC manipulates the market?
Yes and no. The SEC certainly influences the market, but the SEC isn't trying to make a profit off the market and isn't competing with other investors.
I think your fears are greatly exaggerated. If it was this easy to manipulate the market, why couldn't China, or the EU destroy our economy through such manipulations?
What makes you think that they couldn't? The big reason for them to avoid doing so is deterrence: first, because it would lead to an immediate military response; and second, because their own economies depend greatly on the strength of US economy. Trade wars tend to bite both ways and real wars are even worse.
Can't forget the concept of "entitlement" - the concept is part of Federal law. Some programs are defined as "entitlements"
The nifty thing about the law is that it can change. It's not an entitlement the way, say, free speech is. It's a temporary condition. When people talk about entitlements they seem to think they come down on stone tablets and can never be altered--which just ain't the case.
That said, there is no special reason to believe that any Third Party would change anything.
Greater diversity in the congress would make it impossible for a single party (changing every few years) to enact laws by simply excercising party solidarity. That would, hopefully, force the various parties to work together to some extent.
Yeah yeah, index funds are magic. There's still discretion about what specific stocks the index fund buys, and someone determines what is in the index. (Or you have a silly index like "every stock you can possibly buy" which degenerates to "whatever stock the managers feel like buying".)
This isn't an arbitrary decision. And it needn't be a big surprise. Have you noticed that fed moves don't really surprise the markets anymore
Oh, yeah! A statement like "we'll be buying $18bn of FOO on 18 Feb wouldn't have any affect on the market, since it's announced ahead of time... There's a huge and fairly obvious difference between fed moves, which affect only one tiny, fairly abstract, part of the economy and specific moves regarding particular securities.
It needn't be done all on one day
Once you let the government start directly manipulating the market on this scale it really doesn't matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately fluxbox has a really crappy alt-tab model that the developers don't want to fix. If it wasn't for that fluxbox might be a useful replacement.
You continue to miss the point. It's no better for the departmental file server to be down than for the depmartmental thin client server to be down. Any reasonably well managed organization (one that has centralized resources for better workflow) already has things that absolutely need to be up. Thin clients are just one more, no big deal.
That's a fairly specious argument these days. The reality is that a whole lotta people depend on network resources even if they don't have a thin client, to the extent that their desktop is basically unusable if the remote resources are unavailable. (E.g., file server.) Replacing a thin client with thick clients doesn't eliminate a single point of failure, it simply increases the number of single points of failure.
I suppose you're just not aware that while the 64 bit pentium 4 is new the 64 bit xeon has been out for a year now--the only difference is that the new chip is marketed at desktops rather than servers. All the amd64 linuxes that I know of work fine on intel's implementation.
Only to a complete moron or a wall street analyst. The signs of doom were obvious at lucent--it was a science company, the heir to the great bell labs, and it got rid of its scientists! What remotely positive long-term future was there? It's like the hp-compaq merger--some people drank the coolaid and believed that it would create wonderfully profitable synergies, while the rest of us pondered what kind of idiot could believe that smashing two failing companies together would magically fix all their inherent problems.
The problem with carly was that she was style over substance, and in the irrational exuberance of the late 20th century that was enough to put her in a position where her lack of substance could cause real damage.
Seems fair to me, since people with HST-blinders don't seem to care that making hubble last a couple of more years will take a fairly large chunk out of the total US science budget. There's a very limited amount of money that congress will spend on science in total, and hubble just ain't the best bang we can get for the bucks.
No, a formal risk analysis for this is just a way to waste time and money. NASA has enough beurocracy (more than enough, really) already. It's actually refreshing, IMO, to see someone just make a decision. The reality is that after months of time and $$$ writing a risk analysis (probably heavily influenced by the people currently working on hubble, who are far from unbiased) someone would still have to make a judgement call, and a lot of the factors are intangibles that the risk analysis wouldn't cover in a factual manner anyway. Bottom line is that another shuttle accident will kill the program and take the ISS with it. That's not a risk worth taking for an old system like hubble.
Yeah, she did great things for lucent. They might even recover someday.
That's absurd. Germany's major trading partner prior to WWI was, well, France. Wars are not based on logic and creating new logical constructs for avoid war is useless.
No, none of those things is based off a particular thing. They are all based off experements that are easily repeated at any reasonably equipped lab in the world. A standard that can be used to easily verify the accuracy of a particular instrument is much more useful than one which can only be verified by checking the mass of a particular bar of iridium kept in a vault in paris.
*puke*
There's your real problem. If you've gotten to 5 nested loops in a single function you desperately need to refactor the code.
Pot. Kettle.
So instead of using RH you suggest I go to a third party leech? A process which still won't get reasonably priced paid support? (Like the old red hat, say $100 or so.) Why on earth would I want to do that as opposed to just getting SUSE or some such? See, that's the thing you're missing--RH isn't the only vendor, and other people seem to be delivering the things that RH won't.
Personally, I've been tremendously unimpressed with the quality of RHEL. And as a leech as opposed to an actual customer I'd have even less leverage in getting broken stuff fixed, wouldn't I?
Well good for you. Many people find they have more important things to do (actually productive work) than upgrade workstations.
That's false for two reasons. First, you'd need to actually get the hashed version of the password. On most systems that requires privileged access--they aren't just available to anyone who asks. If an intruder has privileged access to your system you have bigger problems than the possibility of someone breaking your hashed passwords. The other thing is that not all collisions will result in valid passphrases. Most systems won't accept, for example, null bytes or special characters or thousands of characters in passwords. So its not enough to find a collision, you need to find a valid collision.
And yet for all its potential benefits, SRP was crippled by patent licensing that made people reluctant to implement it. What a shame.
Bull. Just because RHEL is $$$ doesn't make it any more reliable. If fedora is unreliable then the alternative is another vendor, not RHEL.
No it isn't. Even a desktop OS needs security updates, and even "geeks" don't necessarily want to be on an upgrade treadmill.
In a manner of speaking. The legacy updates have been very slow and sporadic, and I'm not sure I'd trust anything important to them yet.
Or perhaps because the OS of the web server has absolutely nothing to do with the OS of the mail server?
Strange how it happens all the time to users who choose to run firefox. (Of course, it's even stranger how pages tend to be perfectly usable if you change the user-agent to MSIE...)
The issue isn't servers that don't do it, the problem is servers that do it wrong.
Why would they? It would be a violation of US federal law (the Magnuson-Moss Act). You might as well demand that they conspicuously post notices that they don't sell illegal drugs or engage in racketeering; most businesses don't list on their web sites all the illegal things they don't do.
Hmm. The popular trick I'm familiar with is to enable pipelining--which lets you submit multiple requests in a single tcp session; this is not the same as increasing the maximum number of simultaneous requests, although the FUDdites like to run around claiming that it is. It's not enabled by default because some lousy web servers can't handle pipelining.
Yes, they are arbitrary. There's no natural law behind the dow 30.
The "somehow" is no mystery. They say something like "the default fund is now X" and a whole lotta money flows in a different direction. And it isn't just the SSA that's got influence in this case, it's the various fund managers that are establishing the indices. The only difference between an index fund and a regular fund is that the managers aren't trying to pick stocks on a day-to-day basis, they are instead setting up some rules ahead of time and essentially putting the daily trades on autopilot. The advantage of the index fund is that you spend less money on managing the fund--but there are still managers. And index fund can change its index, subject to some kind of procedure, including notification of the change. The small shareholders don't generally even read the notifications that indicate when the fund changes something.
Withdrawals aren't established by federal legislation, the money isn't used for a program considered the safety net for elderly americans, and the market for the last 50 years or so has had a net influx of money.
Ok, so you know that the SSA is going to need $300bn on 1 Oct. You know that they're going to be selling a particular set of stocks to get that $300bn. (Because you know the weightings of the stocks in the SSA's funds.) You then short the stocks because the price is going to be depressed when those shares hit the market. There's only so much demand. What's really scary is that the SSA has to do this regardless of market conditions. They can't say "wow, the economy is in recession this quarter, we'd better hold off until next quarter" because under this new system the government assumes that the market will magically find liquidity. You're right that the same sort of problem happens when if today's 401k net deposits turn into net 401k withdrawals--but people are looking at SS as the safety net if their 401k's tank, which puts SS in a different risk category. People have gotten used to the idea that money is always flowing into the market and that the market is always going up. It's been true, again, for 50 years now. But that's a blink of an eye in historical terms, and nobody really knows what happens when a whole generation of individual investors all start pulling their money out of the market. And people really don't know what happens when the government tries to fund itself from the market. I'd rather not find out than rush headlong into disaster.
Do you?
And who makes up the rules for the what stocks are on the dow, etc? Also, given a list like the wilshire 5000, how many of each stock on the index do you buy? The criteria are known up front, but someone is still setting those criteria.
If you say repeatedly that I have a misunderstanding do you think that makes your case stronger?
They have an indirect and, despite claims to the contrary, fairly unknown effect on the economy.
Sure there would. If you know the index you know what securities are going to be affected by the move.
Yes and no. The SEC certainly influences the market, but the SEC isn't trying to make a profit off the market and isn't competing with other investors.
What makes you think that they couldn't? The big reason for them to avoid doing so is deterrence: first, because it would lead to an immediate military response; and second, because their own economies depend greatly on the strength of US economy. Trade wars tend to bite both ways and real wars are even worse.
The nifty thing about the law is that it can change. It's not an entitlement the way, say, free speech is. It's a temporary condition. When people talk about entitlements they seem to think they come down on stone tablets and can never be altered--which just ain't the case.
Greater diversity in the congress would make it impossible for a single party (changing every few years) to enact laws by simply excercising party solidarity. That would, hopefully, force the various parties to work together to some extent.
Yeah yeah, index funds are magic. There's still discretion about what specific stocks the index fund buys, and someone determines what is in the index. (Or you have a silly index like "every stock you can possibly buy" which degenerates to "whatever stock the managers feel like buying".)
Oh, yeah! A statement like "we'll be buying $18bn of FOO on 18 Feb wouldn't have any affect on the market, since it's announced ahead of time... There's a huge and fairly obvious difference between fed moves, which affect only one tiny, fairly abstract, part of the economy and specific moves regarding particular securities.
Once you let the government start directly manipulating the market on this scale it really doesn't matter.