Re:Feeble egalitarian "equal but different" logic.
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Video Games and ADD
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There are actually many, many teachers who went into teaching in spite of low salaries and high teaching loads, because they want to help people learn, not because they couldn't do anything else. I have an incredible amount of respect for those people.
However, there aren't enough of them. So the standards have to be lowered so that people who can't get higher paying jobs can make it through the curriculum.
If teacher pay scales went up 50% across the board, I bet we would see a dramatic increase in the number of good and excellent teachers. Unfortunately, in the current political climate it seems the only way this is going to happen is through further privatization of schools, which is IMO, a bad thing.
Also there are some good ones out there already. I was privleged to encounter many excellent teachers throughout my K-12 career, while my brother, 2 years younger, had teachers ranging from bad to worse. In the same school system. If it wasn't for one of my 3rd grade teachers, I would probably be a high school dropout professional stoner mooching off my parents.
SO basically this guy thinks he is being insightful and all he is really doing is arguing sematnics. He is trying to change the definition of a term (operating system), rather than use an established term for the concept he was trying to get across, namely operating environment. This has been the defacto term for the concept of "set of software that provides the base user experince of a computer system" for at least a decade.
As for the insightful part, everybody already knows that computers need more software than just a kernel and shell to be usable/useful to the vast majority of users.
For instance, if you get really technical, Solaris 7 is an operating environment consisting of X/Motif/CDE implemented over the SunOS 5.7 operating system (kernel + base libraries).
Just because windows doesn't draw the same distinction (though it is possible to use a differnet shell) doesn't mean UNIX can't. This is especially important when considering that Linux, as an OS, can run a KDE, GNOME, or CDE (among others) environment. While varying greatly, they all still use the same OS underneath. Likewise, Those enviromnents may be implemented on other UNIX or possibly non-UNIX operating systems.
And where then does that leave the leigons of computers that have no need or use for a browser, a GUI, or even a shell? Just because joe-user can't type term papers on a cisco router doesn't mean that it isn't extremely important to him when he tries to email that paper to his professor.
Yes, just like the article, I am mincing words. It just annoys the hell out of me to see people redefining things just because they don't know the term they actually want to use. Especially when they (and they always do) then chastize people for using the correct and well established terms.
The point of the article is that for RedHat, this was called "a major backdoor" and for MS, a "feature".
But here is a news flash for people. Oracle has *two* default u/p combos: sys/manager and system/change_on_install (cute, eh?). Both have administrator privs. Oracle 8i introduces the relatively poorly documented outln/outln login, though with far fewer privleges. Other oracle add on packages (Intermedia, iFS, whatnot) often add other default username/password combos with varying degrees of power.
Of course, people with a clue firewall the damn things, and only allow incoming connections to their web server, or even use a private network segment for them. This is why, IMO, the RedHat problem is bigger... Even though it is usually read-only, as a web server issue, it will *always* be vulnerable to the outside. DB servers rarely are, unless the admin is enough of a cluefuck to not change the default PW. er...
Whatever people say about microsoft, they have the work environment right... Every developer has an office, with real walls and a door. While this is perhaps out of reach for many less profitable companies, they should at least consider it. Cubicles are barely acceptable, "open environments" are totally inappropriate. I used to work in one, and everytime someone had questions for me or whatever, 5 other people basically stopped working.
Gee, that is useful... any database ought to give awesome performance under those kind of conditions. In fact, all DB optimizations boil down to 2 things: 1) minimize number of block reads necessary for a given query (indexing) and 2) Reuse data from a single read many times (caching). If an application requires performance in excess of what a database system can handle while entirely in memory, it is time to think about using specialized data structures.
Always, always, always set up firewall rules to deny everything, then allow only the service(s) you want (namely, ssh) Also, just out of habit, all packets with internal or localhost IP addresses coming in off the external ethernet should be logged and droped.
Woah. Not true. If I write (for instance) A really cool 3D modeling engine for my graphics class final project (I didn't--I wrote a lame one;), I still retain the copyright to it. Had my professor wanted to republish it in any form, she would have had to ask me (I would have agreed), but it wasn't automatically given.
Unless you A) explicitly sign away IP rights (I didn't), B) do the work as an employee of an organization (I was a TA for another class, but my graphics homework was not in the scope of that), or C) Do the work as a "work for hire" (contract work), nobody is ever automatically granted *ANY* IP rights to something you write.
With a PhD thesis, you grant the university basically unconditional license to do as they see fit with your thesis.
VPNs that use IPsec (instead of a proprietary protocol) use not TCP/UDP packet types, thus blaring to the world that they are VPN. However, if you run PPPd over SSH (or SSL) on port 443 (HTTPS), they probably won't know the difference, especially since several client-server applications hijack port 443 to make long term connections through corporate firewalls (almost all of which support the CONNECT method on port 443 to open a completely transparent connection)
[Though shalt not use this service...] AS AN END-POINT ON A NON-COMCAST LOCAL AREA NETWORK OR WIDE AREA NETWORK, OR IN CONJUNCTION WITH A VPN (VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORK) OR A VPN TUNNELING PROTOCOL;
Looks like all of the above are forbidden. In the same paragraph, telnetd, ftpd, httpd, and others are also forbidden. Quite honestly, if AT&T tries to tell me this when I get their Cable modem service, they can go to hell (and I will do it anyway).
More like blaming Chevrolet for an employee locking his keys in the car and being late to work.
As near as I can tell, they are talking about IT staffers making "internal tweaks" to free software used in mission critical aplications and not telling anybody, not potential bugs or undocumented features of stock software.
Obviously anybody in the business of using tweaked versions of any software (free, or commercial with source avaiable) internally should set up a CVS repository for this purpose (or whatever VC system they use).
People who actually know what they are talking about (as opposed to CFOs, a clueless lot all around) realize that no company should rely on software without source if they can avoid it at all. I don't know how many hours I have spent on the phone, or preparing test cases for HP to get them to fix bugs that I could have probably fixed in an hour, given the source. Same with Oracle, except that at least it is possible to relink all of their software, so you can strip out a broken function and replace it (I have done this, and 3 weeks later am still wating for an "official" patch from Oracle).
Perl and TCL both have sandbox mechanisms, and in a Real OS (with full memory and IO protection), it is possible to sandbox native code applications through system call filtering. This can be done already with User Mode Linux. On the fringe, capabilities based systems such as EROS and Hurd, while not exactly an average desktop OS, provide excellent support for fine grained access control needed for sandboxing.
Sun unfortunately, has brainwashed many people into thinking that their rehash of 1970's technology (garbage collection and virtual machines) plus a watered down version of OO support constitutes a revolutionary advance in computing. The only thing revolutonary about Java is its marketing.
What this article is saying is that even Windows users get bit by the "it is impossible to buy a computer without windows" OEM licensing deals. Linux users have been paying this tax for a long time (paying for windows they don't want), now Windows users have to pay it to (pay for two copies of Windows when they only want one).
Wrong. This is USthink (I am from the US too). The UK has a democracy based on an unwritten constitution (not just the Magna Carta)... It is based on "common law", historical precident, and a series of disparate documents. The UK evolved to a democracy from a monarchy over a period of several hundred years, beginning (mostly) with the Magna Carta, as opposed to the US which instituted democracy through revolution and has a group of historical documents (Decl. of Independance, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights) all writen about the same time mostly by the same people. While it is natural to us, it is actually quite unusual.
IIRC, the only legal responsibility of the Queen is to open sessions of pariliment.
That is only true if a network *HAS* a most important 4%. The whole point of the article is that networks (in the general term) resilient against random failure are weak against malicious attacks, and vice versa. Since random failure is always a problem (routers fry, brain cells die, people get in car accidents), natural networks have usually optimized themselves for that case.
A physical attack on a link would probably be easier, and harder to repair, however, taking out 1 router does more damage than taking out 1 link. Consider that killing a router with 12 interfaces drops 12 links.
There are more demanding signal processing tasks than MP3 encoding, hard as it is to belive. Some of them might even be of interst to the home user. For instance, technical analysis of the stock market (technical analysis is using past history to predict future performance, while fundamental analyis is using financial information to do the same). Much of the work in thecnical analysis is doing FFTs of the historical data, and the ability to churn through it quickly can be very important.
Witness that Wall Street is on of the biggest consumers of supercomputing in the world. While that kind of power (and the algorithms to exploit it) are out of the reach of individuals, I know a guy who has done some stuff that can be cranked through in several hours on a consumer PC...
Not likely. Despite appearences, jet airplanes are actually extremely efficient (for long hauls -- across the oceans and whatnot)... Like, on par with trains (on a Joule / Person*mile rating). While a supercavitating submarine may be orders of magnitude more efficient than a standard sub, it is still more drag than a 747 at 35,000 ft.
One technical problem they didn't even address is heat dissipation. Rocket propulsion releases huge ammounts of heat. A traditional sub has excellent cooling by virtue of being entirely enclosed in water. The pressure in such a cavity will be the vapor pressure of water at edge of the bubble. Since sea water is cold, this will be fairly low, so they can't dissipate heat very quickly. Of course, they can conduct it to the nose, which will have water contact, but that will be quite a challenge.
Bottom line, I think this will have a huge impact for naval warfare, and has several potential commercial applications (underwater exploration and science), but not likely to be used as mass transit.
The reason why every statement doesn't return a value is because it is very inefficient -- basically it means that any value must be allowed to be undefined. modern CPUs don't have any support for this (on integers and pointers, at least. floating point has NaN), which means the "undefined" value must be recorded sepearatly and every operation has to check for it. This is ok in an interpreted language like Perl where you already have a lot of bookkeeping to do, but killer in a compiled/low run-time support language like C/C++.
Undefined values also make it harder to pick up many potential errors at compile time, which is the halmark of C++ philosophy.
HTTP is restartable-- it allows arbitrary byte range requests. Try hitting stop in the middle of a large file, then hitting reload--- notice how it zooms by the part that was already downloaded?
FTP doesn't support byte ranges, but it does support specifying a starting offset, which a caching browser or an ftp client can use to restart a transmission.
I found that windows explorer is very convenient up until you have more than 200 files in a directory, at which point it becomes too slow and cumbersome to use. Managing 800+ files in one directly under a CLI is no walk in the park, but it is possible, thanks to shells with great built in scripting, globbing, and tab completion. Obviously, the real "solution" for me is to organize those files (a task which a file manager will really help with, if I ever decide to do it), however for now the CLI will have to do.
Funny, I own a computer so that it can do some of my work for me. Thinking, however, I prefer to leave to me, as I am much better at it than the computer.
When you let the machine do the thinking, suddenly you become the slave to the computer, rather than the other way around.
I agree. One of my favorite parts of Cryptonomicon is when he was describing the mechanics of Turing's bicycle with the bad link and broken spoke.
Of course, I had just finished a course on modern algebra, and was sort of hoping he would prove a couple of relevant theorems from group theory, so maybe I am just nuts.
Windows NT is just getting support for USB as well (ie, W2K). That is not an excuse, mostly just an observation that both the NT and Linux developers have had more important things to work on. While USB has been around for several years, only in the past 2-3 has there been wide-spread use of USB on PCs--Win 95's USB support was only available as an add on to OSR2, and pitiful at best. It wasn't until W98 that you could count on USB, and therefore only then that there were enough devices to A) create a need, and B) have adequate hardware available to linux developers to test USB.
Hopefully someday Linux will be in a position where it can drive those sorts of market forces to some degree, but it ain't here.
Mac zealots are no doubt laughing at all this, since iMacs had (usable) USB far before PCs.
True, except that I belive ATAPI devices (like CD-ROMs, and opposed to hard drives) actually support the SCSI protocol encapsulated inside of ATA commands. This at least theoretically means that CD-ROM's could support SCSI disconnect, but I have no idea if they actually do.
UW2 (and all variants of wide scsi) support 15 devices / controllerm not 7. With Ultra/160, I hear that you can run 6-10 w/o hitting serious contention.
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There are actually many, many teachers who went into teaching in spite of low salaries and high teaching loads, because they want to help people learn, not because they couldn't do anything else. I have an incredible amount of respect for those people.
However, there aren't enough of them. So the standards have to be lowered so that people who can't get higher paying jobs can make it through the curriculum.
If teacher pay scales went up 50% across the board, I bet we would see a dramatic increase in the number of good and excellent teachers. Unfortunately, in the current political climate it seems the only way this is going to happen is through further privatization of schools, which is IMO, a bad thing.
Also there are some good ones out there already. I was privleged to encounter many excellent teachers throughout my K-12 career, while my brother, 2 years younger, had teachers ranging from bad to worse. In the same school system. If it wasn't for one of my 3rd grade teachers, I would probably be a high school dropout professional stoner mooching off my parents.
SO basically this guy thinks he is being insightful and all he is really doing is arguing sematnics. He is trying to change the definition of a term (operating system), rather than use an established term for the concept he was trying to get across, namely operating environment. This has been the defacto term for the concept of "set of software that provides the base user experince of a computer system" for at least a decade.
As for the insightful part, everybody already knows that computers need more software than just a kernel and shell to be usable/useful to the vast majority of users.
For instance, if you get really technical, Solaris 7 is an operating environment consisting of X/Motif/CDE implemented over the SunOS 5.7 operating system (kernel + base libraries).
Just because windows doesn't draw the same distinction (though it is possible to use a differnet shell) doesn't mean UNIX can't. This is especially important when considering that Linux, as an OS, can run a KDE, GNOME, or CDE (among others) environment. While varying greatly, they all still use the same OS underneath. Likewise, Those enviromnents may be implemented on other UNIX or possibly non-UNIX operating systems.
And where then does that leave the leigons of computers that have no need or use for a browser, a GUI, or even a shell? Just because joe-user can't type term papers on a cisco router doesn't mean that it isn't extremely important to him when he tries to email that paper to his professor.
Yes, just like the article, I am mincing words. It just annoys the hell out of me to see people redefining things just because they don't know the term they actually want to use. Especially when they (and they always do) then chastize people for using the correct and well established terms.
The point of the article is that for RedHat, this was called "a major backdoor" and for MS, a "feature".
But here is a news flash for people. Oracle has *two* default u/p combos: sys/manager and system/change_on_install (cute, eh?). Both have administrator privs. Oracle 8i introduces the relatively poorly documented outln/outln login, though with far fewer privleges. Other oracle add on packages (Intermedia, iFS, whatnot) often add other default username/password combos with varying degrees of power.
Of course, people with a clue firewall the damn things, and only allow incoming connections to their web server, or even use a private network segment for them. This is why, IMO, the RedHat problem is bigger... Even though it is usually read-only, as a web server issue, it will *always* be vulnerable to the outside. DB servers rarely are, unless the admin is enough of a cluefuck to not change the default PW. er...
Whatever people say about microsoft, they have the work environment right... Every developer has an office, with real walls and a door. While this is perhaps out of reach for many less profitable companies, they should at least consider it. Cubicles are barely acceptable, "open environments" are totally inappropriate. I used to work in one, and everytime someone had questions for me or whatever, 5 other people basically stopped working.
Gee, that is useful... any database ought to give awesome performance under those kind of conditions. In fact, all DB optimizations boil down to 2 things: 1) minimize number of block reads necessary for a given query (indexing) and 2) Reuse data from a single read many times (caching). If an application requires performance in excess of what a database system can handle while entirely in memory, it is time to think about using specialized data structures.
Always, always, always set up firewall rules to deny everything, then allow only the service(s) you want (namely, ssh) Also, just out of habit, all packets with internal or localhost IP addresses coming in off the external ethernet should be logged and droped.
Woah. Not true. If I write (for instance) A really cool 3D modeling engine for my graphics class final project (I didn't--I wrote a lame one ;), I still retain the copyright to it. Had my professor wanted to republish it in any form, she would have had to ask me (I would have agreed), but it wasn't automatically given.
Unless you A) explicitly sign away IP rights (I didn't), B) do the work as an employee of an organization (I was a TA for another class, but my graphics homework was not in the scope of that), or C) Do the work as a "work for hire" (contract work), nobody is ever automatically granted *ANY* IP rights to something you write.
With a PhD thesis, you grant the university basically unconditional license to do as they see fit with your thesis.
VPNs that use IPsec (instead of a proprietary protocol) use not TCP/UDP packet types, thus blaring to the world that they are VPN. However, if you run PPPd over SSH (or SSL) on port 443 (HTTPS), they probably won't know the difference, especially since several client-server applications hijack port 443 to make long term connections through corporate firewalls (almost all of which support the CONNECT method on port 443 to open a completely transparent connection)
[Though shalt not use this service...] AS AN END-POINT ON A NON-COMCAST LOCAL AREA NETWORK OR WIDE AREA NETWORK, OR IN CONJUNCTION WITH A VPN (VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORK) OR A VPN TUNNELING PROTOCOL;
Looks like all of the above are forbidden. In the same paragraph, telnetd, ftpd, httpd, and others are also forbidden. Quite honestly, if AT&T tries to tell me this when I get their Cable modem service, they can go to hell (and I will do it anyway).
More like blaming Chevrolet for an employee locking his keys in the car and being late to work.
As near as I can tell, they are talking about IT staffers making "internal tweaks" to free software used in mission critical aplications and not telling anybody, not potential bugs or undocumented features of stock software.
Obviously anybody in the business of using tweaked versions of any software (free, or commercial with source avaiable) internally should set up a CVS repository for this purpose (or whatever VC system they use).
People who actually know what they are talking about (as opposed to CFOs, a clueless lot all around) realize that no company should rely on software without source if they can avoid it at all. I don't know how many hours I have spent on the phone, or preparing test cases for HP to get them to fix bugs that I could have probably fixed in an hour, given the source. Same with Oracle, except that at least it is possible to relink all of their software, so you can strip out a broken function and replace it (I have done this, and 3 weeks later am still wating for an "official" patch from Oracle).
Perl and TCL both have sandbox mechanisms, and in a Real OS (with full memory and IO protection), it is possible to sandbox native code applications through system call filtering. This can be done already with User Mode Linux. On the fringe, capabilities based systems such as EROS and Hurd, while not exactly an average desktop OS, provide excellent support for fine grained access control needed for sandboxing.
Sun unfortunately, has brainwashed many people into thinking that their rehash of 1970's technology (garbage collection and virtual machines) plus a watered down version of OO support constitutes a revolutionary advance in computing. The only thing revolutonary about Java is its marketing.
What this article is saying is that even Windows users get bit by the "it is impossible to buy a computer without windows" OEM licensing deals. Linux users have been paying this tax for a long time (paying for windows they don't want), now Windows users have to pay it to (pay for two copies of Windows when they only want one).
Wrong. This is USthink (I am from the US too). The UK has a democracy based on an unwritten constitution (not just the Magna Carta)... It is based on "common law", historical precident, and a series of disparate documents. The UK evolved to a democracy from a monarchy over a period of several hundred years, beginning (mostly) with the Magna Carta, as opposed to the US which instituted democracy through revolution and has a group of historical documents (Decl. of Independance, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights) all writen about the same time mostly by the same people. While it is natural to us, it is actually quite unusual.
IIRC, the only legal responsibility of the Queen is to open sessions of pariliment.
That is only true if a network *HAS* a most important 4%. The whole point of the article is that networks (in the general term) resilient against random failure are weak against malicious attacks, and vice versa. Since random failure is always a problem (routers fry, brain cells die, people get in car accidents), natural networks have usually optimized themselves for that case.
A physical attack on a link would probably be easier, and harder to repair, however, taking out 1 router does more damage than taking out 1 link. Consider that killing a router with 12 interfaces drops 12 links.
There are more demanding signal processing tasks than MP3 encoding, hard as it is to belive. Some of them might even be of interst to the home user. For instance, technical analysis of the stock market (technical analysis is using past history to predict future performance, while fundamental analyis is using financial information to do the same). Much of the work in thecnical analysis is doing FFTs of the historical data, and the ability to churn through it quickly can be very important.
Witness that Wall Street is on of the biggest consumers of supercomputing in the world. While that kind of power (and the algorithms to exploit it) are out of the reach of individuals, I know a guy who has done some stuff that can be cranked through in several hours on a consumer PC...
Not likely. Despite appearences, jet airplanes are actually extremely efficient (for long hauls -- across the oceans and whatnot)... Like, on par with trains (on a Joule / Person*mile rating). While a supercavitating submarine may be orders of magnitude more efficient than a standard sub, it is still more drag than a 747 at 35,000 ft.
One technical problem they didn't even address is heat dissipation. Rocket propulsion releases huge ammounts of heat. A traditional sub has excellent cooling by virtue of being entirely enclosed in water. The pressure in such a cavity will be the vapor pressure of water at edge of the bubble. Since sea water is cold, this will be fairly low, so they can't dissipate heat very quickly. Of course, they can conduct it to the nose, which will have water contact, but that will be quite a challenge.
Bottom line, I think this will have a huge impact for naval warfare, and has several potential commercial applications (underwater exploration and science), but not likely to be used as mass transit.
The reason why every statement doesn't return a value is because it is very inefficient -- basically it means that any value must be allowed to be undefined. modern CPUs don't have any support for this (on integers and pointers, at least. floating point has NaN), which means the "undefined" value must be recorded sepearatly and every operation has to check for it. This is ok in an interpreted language like Perl where you already have a lot of bookkeeping to do, but killer in a compiled/low run-time support language like C/C++.
Undefined values also make it harder to pick up many potential errors at compile time, which is the halmark of C++ philosophy.
HTTP is restartable-- it allows arbitrary byte range requests. Try hitting stop in the middle of a large file, then hitting reload--- notice how it zooms by the part that was already downloaded?
FTP doesn't support byte ranges, but it does support specifying a starting offset, which a caching browser or an ftp client can use to restart a transmission.
I was talking to an opthamoligist just this weekend about this, and he claimed they were working on incorporating it into laser eye surgery.
I found that windows explorer is very convenient up until you have more than 200 files in a directory, at which point it becomes too slow and cumbersome to use. Managing 800+ files in one directly under a CLI is no walk in the park, but it is possible, thanks to shells with great built in scripting, globbing, and tab completion. Obviously, the real "solution" for me is to organize those files (a task which a file manager will really help with, if I ever decide to do it), however for now the CLI will have to do.
Funny, I own a computer so that it can do some of my work for me. Thinking, however, I prefer to leave to me, as I am much better at it than the computer.
When you let the machine do the thinking, suddenly you become the slave to the computer, rather than the other way around.
I agree. One of my favorite parts of Cryptonomicon is when he was describing the mechanics of Turing's bicycle with the bad link and broken spoke.
Of course, I had just finished a course on modern algebra, and was sort of hoping he would prove a couple of relevant theorems from group theory, so maybe I am just nuts.
Windows NT is just getting support for USB as well (ie, W2K). That is not an excuse, mostly just an observation that both the NT and Linux developers have had more important things to work on. While USB has been around for several years, only in the past 2-3 has there been wide-spread use of USB on PCs--Win 95's USB support was only available as an add on to OSR2, and pitiful at best. It wasn't until W98 that you could count on USB, and therefore only then that there were enough devices to A) create a need, and B) have adequate hardware available to linux developers to test USB.
Hopefully someday Linux will be in a position where it can drive those sorts of market forces to some degree, but it ain't here.
Mac zealots are no doubt laughing at all this, since iMacs had (usable) USB far before PCs.
True, except that I belive ATAPI devices (like CD-ROMs, and opposed to hard drives) actually support the SCSI protocol encapsulated inside of ATA commands. This at least theoretically means that CD-ROM's could support SCSI disconnect, but I have no idea if they actually do.
UW2 (and all variants of wide scsi) support 15 devices / controllerm not 7. With Ultra/160, I hear that you can run 6-10 w/o hitting serious contention.