However, when I'm on my way to school or work and a car is travelling 5-10mph below the speed limit I get pretty annoyed. So when its a biker who isn't hugging the curb, but instead taking up an entire lane, I reserve the right to get pissed.
There are a lot of ways you can "take the lane", even when going significantly below the speed limit, without slowing people down much:
Stick mostly to roads with at least 2 lanes in your direction, and people can usually pass with at most a few seconds' delay in all but the most congested traffic.
As a fallback, in the worst case, you can always just pull over every now and then to let past any traffic that's piling up behind you.
There really are a lot of situations where "taking the lane" is the best thing to do, for all involved: on narrow lanes when there isn't space to share side-by-side anyway; when there's street parking and you don't want to get "doored"; when you're getting ready to make a left turn and want to move over gradually instead of swerving left at the last minute; etc.
I don't want to cause anyone huge delays, but in every case where I've have someone complain about me holding them up, they've been slowed by at most 4 or 5 seconds. If that kind of thing is really happenning to you a lot, complain to your local traffic engineers---that's a case when a bike lane might make sense. Don't complain to the cyclist--they're probably just trying to get from point A to point B like everyone else.
I noticed freedesktop.org has started using it to some degree.
That's interesting, because I remember them saying at OLS that they were considering it, but wanted to audit the code and the design a bit first. Based on your comment, I assume they've actually done the audit and decided they were happy with it--does anyone have a pointer to the results? I'm sure I'd be not alone in being interested.
Turning on and off either a server or a client for long enough (say an hour) confuses both the server and other clients and can cause both the server and every other client to require rebooting to clear the state, even if you use automounting.
Then you have a buggy NFS implementation; if it's from a recent Linux kernel could you report the bug on the nfs sourceforge list please?
Add in its typical use with no security whatsoever in cross-platform environments
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "no security", and why it matters whether you're in a "cross-platform environment" or not. Most platforms I know of (including Solaris and Linux) now either implement rpcsec_gss/krb5 or are working on it.
and its inability to properly handle subdirectories that require different export permissions from their parent directories
On Linux (at least with recent kernels) you can allow clients to cross mountpoints, and can export the mounted filesystem to different clients than the mounted-on one.
As for security, NFS is built on top of RPC, secure RPC and you have secured NFS. Sun's latest implementation of RPC does include a collection of security features.
And note that recent 2.6 kernels have experimental rpcsec_gss support that allows you to authenticate rpc requests using Kerberos. This interoperates with Sun's and other implementations (and was funded in part by Sun).
Eventually, we'll have universal wisdom about being careful of email attachments and avoiding phishing schemes. But it'll have to happen through word of mouth and Oprah. No one is going to read a book like this.
Nobody at all? What if, for example, someone who Oprah happens to know reads a book, learns something, passes it on to Oprah, and Oprah decides to do a show based on it?
Just because few non-experts will read books about computer security, it does *not* follow that books about computer security written for non-security people may not play a part in educating a larger audience of non-experts.
I guess it depends on the use: my Daughter uses it for homework, I use it on slashdot as reference. But it's not like we're using in court or anything. I guess journalists are at the biggest risk...
I think it's useful for the same thing a traditional encyclopedia is useful for: you can read it to get general background, or to sketch out your ideas, but when it comes to actually writing down an argument in detail you need to go to original sources for support. But there again Wikipedia or a good encyclopedia may be able to provide help by pointing you to good sources.
I recently got a shuttle "Zen" st62k (review), put a 1.8G P4, 1G ram, and a 180G hard drive in it. So it's in a completely different class from something embedded. But it has a fancy heat sink and an external power supply, which means the whole thing needs only one variable-speed fan, which I've never actually heard go above its lowest speed except briefly on startup.
So despite the fact that it's always on, and lives on top of a desk in my living room, I don't really hear it. Very quiet. I haven't measured the energy use, but I suspect it's not bad. My original plan was just to use it as a firewall/personal server, but since it's plenty adequate for a regular desktop, I use it for that now too--it's nice being able to just check the weather or whatever without waiting for something to boot.
So, anyway, I'm pretty happy with it. Recommended.
American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition (by way of dictionary.com):
A literary or cinematic genre in which fantasy, typically based on speculative scientific discoveries or developments, environmental changes, space travel, or life on other planets, forms part of the plot or background.
The OED:
Imaginative fiction based on postulated scientific discoveries or spectacular environmental changes, freq. set in the future or on other planets and involving space or time travel.
Star Wars would fit well under some of these definitions, less well under others.
Most people think of any kind of fantastic fiction with space ships in it as being science fiction, and clearly it would be hard to write such a work without at least betraying some influence from that genre.
I find it makes communication easier if I use words in a way which other people will understand. So I'm inclined to accept a broader definition of science fiction and reserve some other term ("hard science fiction", maybe?) for works that are more focused on the technical underpinnings of an alternate world (which I'm assuming is closer to the definition you're working from).
If I walk up to you on the street and say "Hey, I'm from Bank of America, I need your bank account information." and then you proceed to give it to me, then it is indeed your fault.
The closer analogy would be you walking up to me, saying "Hey, the Bank of America is over there", and giving me directions to an address where you have, overnight, erected an identical replica of a bank of america branch. (OK, perhaps the font on the logo is just slightly wrong if I think to look really closely.)
In retrospect, I shouldn't have trusted directions from a random stranger, but by the time I'm standing there with the bank branch in front of me and the original referral already forgotten, it may not really cross my mind to doubt its legitimacy.
The real idiocy here is all the banks setting up "secure" websites where you authenticate by sending them one secret (or maybe one of a few secrets), with the result that all it takes is for that secret to be compromised once, and your identity is compromised forever.
Perhaps this will finally them that they need something better. (Surely some kind of USB dongle/smartcard-like thingy would be cheap enough now?)
Most ssh users here [in the US] don't use it as a way to avoid censorship, because we don't have to.
OK. My only point is just that if I were, say, a Chinese geek setting up a linux box, ssh would probably be one of the first things I'd install and use, for the same reasons it's one of the first things I install here. So there are probably plenty of people using ssh there for the usual stuff--logging into their server to check their mail, encrypting a remote X session, etc.
Thus I'm questioning the claim that Chinese authorities could use the presence of encrypted traffic to find censorship-circumventors. Such traffic could very well be lost in the bulk of everyday VPN and ssh traffic.
Though of course sufficiently sophisticated traffic analysis might still be a threat. (E.g. it might be possible to recognize that a bunch of ssh traffic to an outside site has packets whose size and timing looks like ssh-tunneled http traffic from mozilla).
The thing I notice most about GPL and open source in general is how many internal flame wars ensue.
Most free software is developed in an extremely open fashion. Anyone in the world can show up on the linux kernel mailing list and post their opinion of some patch, whether that opinion is a minority opinion, or is just totally misinformed. The result is that a), there are a lot of flamewars, but b) it's hard to take a course of action without being fairly well aware of the arguments that might be mounted against it. This is an extremely good thing, well worth putting up with some friction.
If you ever find yourself working on a difficult project, with lots of tough decisions to make, and you find that everyone agrees on everything, be very, very afraid....
Even though the chalk is water-soluble, he admitted previously that it takes almost 2 weeks to wash off.
Where did he say that? To quote from the website:
Bikes Against Bush will utilize a water-soluble chalk mixture. It is the same material used for marking athletic fields. It is environmentally safe and removes easily with water,
OR naturally biodegrades within 15-30 days.
(Emphasis mine.) I'm having a hard time imagining "water-soluble" chalk that would *require* 2 weeks to wash off.
Ummm, maybe I'm missing something but where did the article say anything about sales numbers?
In fact, how do you actually buy these things? I checked HP's web site, and while they list the model, and claim SuSe is available for it, if I follow the "configure & buy" links, they don't list any configurations with any OS other than XP.
This is what it all comes down to. Consider how much you'd have to pay someone with even a minimal part of
the technical background to learn quickly about the products they're supporting,
the troubleshooting skills required to diagnose and fix a problem over the telephone with an inexperienced user,
the communication and people skills to work well with users who themselves have a wide variety of communication skills.
Now add in overhead and figure out how much you'd need to charge people per minute for decent technical support. Compare to the cost of your average piece of consumer electronics. In many cases it might cost less just to send the user a replacement than to have spend time with a valuable tech.
The only cost-effective solution is to spend money on the products themselves so they need less support. The R&D required to make your software secure and usable by default is also expensive, but it only has to be done once and then can be spread among all your users.
The argument over whether to spend minimum wage on domestic tech support or even less on outsourced support is all besides the point. Tech support, at least for commodity consumer products, is dead.
"EVERY computer needs an uninterruptible power supply. EVERY one."
It depends. You have to estimate a) the costs of buying and maintaining UPS's (batteries don't last forever!) per year versus b) the expected loss due to power problems in a year (the sum of the chances of various kinds of accidents times the probability of each kind of accident occuring in one year).
It would cost me about $600 to replace my desktop's hardware (I'm not including the monitor, which I'm assuming most people don't keep on backup anyway). I keep frequent enough backups that the amount of lost data is unlikely to be significant. So the costs of a power disaster would be at most $600 plus the cost of the time required to restore.
In the approximately years I've maintained my own computers, I've never lost anything due to power problems. I'm certainly not saying that it doesn't happen; some day I fully expect that it *will* happen. But at this point I'd need several major accidents to get to the point where the cost of UPS's over the last 15 years would have been worthwhile.
For people with more expensive hardware, the calculation may come out differently; but for people with good backups and cheap consumer hardware, I doubt it's usually worth it. As computer prices continue to fall, this will increasingly be true.
Back in about 1988 or so, they went after "Olympics of the Mind", who had to change their name to Odyssey of the Mind.
Yeah, I remember that. Completely disgusting--to one the one hand attempt to claim a 2000-plus-year-old heritage and a shared world experience, and on the other hand to claim that it's all your own private property.
Though I wonder whether anyone's ever actually fought them on this, or whether they're all just giving in when they get the first cease-and-desist letter. Does anyone know of any actual cases?
Thanks for the link, but note that that 20% is a percentage of all households, while the 51% is a percentage of all households that already have some kind of internet usage. From these two articles, it looks to me like the rates are actually in the same ballpark between the US and Europe; but unfortunately, I can't find numbers that are actually comparable; can anyone else?
It takes me a lot shorter to install Win98 on a box and that includes saving any or all documents.
1.5 hours tops.
You're probably minimally organized.
Now consider how long it could take on a random user's box that you've never seen before. They've got documents and preferences saved all over the place, they installed a bunch of software, and they can't remember where they installed it from or how they configured it. They've lost the printer manual and the IP information from their ISP, etc., etc., etc.
I guess they were really serious when they said that the stabilization of the kernel was up to the distro maintainers. Guess I won't be downloading 2.6.8 until 2.6.9 comes out.
They've been saying for some time that they'd also release small updates (like 2.6.8.1) against previous releases when necessary, so it should be reasonably safe to take a recent kernel if you wait a couple weeks after the major release and check for any such updates.
For what it's worth, I've been upgrading on every major release (and most of the -rc's too) since 2.6.0, without any disasters.
Of course, depending on which particular drivers you care about and so on, your mileage may vary.
It sounds like he was not yet at the part of the trip where it divides into four lanes. Speeds really increase there. It is not uncommon to be passed here while going 120km/h (~75mph) some days. Even the section he was at, speeds would be closer to 100km/h (~62mph). The speed limit there is 80km/h, and it's usually only the old ladies that drive the speed limit in this area.
Yeah, when I was there recently I was probably driving like an old lady.
I have to say, though I can understand why people drive so fast there--those country roads give convenient (and more picturesque) routes than the freeway--I think it's more than a little careless, given the lack of the median, occasional driveways and cross streets, and frequent spots (e.g. before cresting hills) where visibility isn't that good.
Actually, it's fairly common for people to live through a head-on collision with another vehicle, even at highways speeds.
You say it's "fairly common for people to survive", I say "it could be fatal"; I think we pretty much agree. Either way it's a pretty ugly crash.
Though actually, I think when people talk about a head-on collision they mean a collision in which the two vehicles are facing each other; my understanding of the description here is that the solar car was actually pointed more across the lane at this point, so was hit side-on. I think that actually tends to be a worse accident. (Perhaps someone with more knowledge of crash statics can provide more details here.)
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of ways you can "take the lane", even when going significantly below the speed limit, without slowing people down much:
There really are a lot of situations where "taking the lane" is the best thing to do, for all involved: on narrow lanes when there isn't space to share side-by-side anyway; when there's street parking and you don't want to get "doored"; when you're getting ready to make a left turn and want to move over gradually instead of swerving left at the last minute; etc.
I don't want to cause anyone huge delays, but in every case where I've have someone complain about me holding them up, they've been slowed by at most 4 or 5 seconds. If that kind of thing is really happenning to you a lot, complain to your local traffic engineers---that's a case when a bike lane might make sense. Don't complain to the cyclist--they're probably just trying to get from point A to point B like everyone else.
--Bruce Fields
That's interesting, because I remember them saying at OLS that they were considering it, but wanted to audit the code and the design a bit first. Based on your comment, I assume they've actually done the audit and decided they were happy with it--does anyone have a pointer to the results? I'm sure I'd be not alone in being interested.
--Bruce Fields
Then you have a buggy NFS implementation; if it's from a recent Linux kernel could you report the bug on the nfs sourceforge list please?
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "no security", and why it matters whether you're in a "cross-platform environment" or not. Most platforms I know of (including Solaris and Linux) now either implement rpcsec_gss/krb5 or are working on it.
On Linux (at least with recent kernels) you can allow clients to cross mountpoints, and can export the mounted filesystem to different clients than the mounted-on one.
--Bruce Fields
And note that recent 2.6 kernels have experimental rpcsec_gss support that allows you to authenticate rpc requests using Kerberos. This interoperates with Sun's and other implementations (and was funded in part by Sun).
More information here.
--Bruce Fields
Surely almost any cell-phone application would benefit from more readable text?
I mean, there's a *reason* why books aren't printed at 100dpi.
--Bruce Fields
Nobody at all? What if, for example, someone who Oprah happens to know reads a book, learns something, passes it on to Oprah, and Oprah decides to do a show based on it?
Just because few non-experts will read books about computer security, it does *not* follow that books about computer security written for non-security people may not play a part in educating a larger audience of non-experts.
--Bruce Fields
I think it's useful for the same thing a traditional encyclopedia is useful for: you can read it to get general background, or to sketch out your ideas, but when it comes to actually writing down an argument in detail you need to go to original sources for support. But there again Wikipedia or a good encyclopedia may be able to provide help by pointing you to good sources.
--Bruce Fields
And that's nothing. Think if you were the Debian maintainer....
--Bruce Fields
So despite the fact that it's always on, and lives on top of a desk in my living room, I don't really hear it. Very quiet. I haven't measured the energy use, but I suspect it's not bad. My original plan was just to use it as a firewall/personal server, but since it's plenty adequate for a regular desktop, I use it for that now too--it's nice being able to just check the weather or whatever without waiting for something to boot.
So, anyway, I'm pretty happy with it. Recommended.
--Bruce Fields
I'm less certain.
American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition (by way of dictionary.com):
The OED:
Google turns up a fascinating compilation of definitions of science fiction from science fiction authors and others.
Star Wars would fit well under some of these definitions, less well under others.
Most people think of any kind of fantastic fiction with space ships in it as being science fiction, and clearly it would be hard to write such a work without at least betraying some influence from that genre.
I find it makes communication easier if I use words in a way which other people will understand. So I'm inclined to accept a broader definition of science fiction and reserve some other term ("hard science fiction", maybe?) for works that are more focused on the technical underpinnings of an alternate world (which I'm assuming is closer to the definition you're working from).
--Bruce Fields
The closer analogy would be you walking up to me, saying "Hey, the Bank of America is over there", and giving me directions to an address where you have, overnight, erected an identical replica of a bank of america branch. (OK, perhaps the font on the logo is just slightly wrong if I think to look really closely.)
In retrospect, I shouldn't have trusted directions from a random stranger, but by the time I'm standing there with the bank branch in front of me and the original referral already forgotten, it may not really cross my mind to doubt its legitimacy.
The real idiocy here is all the banks setting up "secure" websites where you authenticate by sending them one secret (or maybe one of a few secrets), with the result that all it takes is for that secret to be compromised once, and your identity is compromised forever.
Perhaps this will finally them that they need something better. (Surely some kind of USB dongle/smartcard-like thingy would be cheap enough now?)
--Bruce Fields
OK. My only point is just that if I were, say, a Chinese geek setting up a linux box, ssh would probably be one of the first things I'd install and use, for the same reasons it's one of the first things I install here. So there are probably plenty of people using ssh there for the usual stuff--logging into their server to check their mail, encrypting a remote X session, etc.
Thus I'm questioning the claim that Chinese authorities could use the presence of encrypted traffic to find censorship-circumventors. Such traffic could very well be lost in the bulk of everyday VPN and ssh traffic.
Though of course sufficiently sophisticated traffic analysis might still be a threat. (E.g. it might be possible to recognize that a bunch of ssh traffic to an outside site has packets whose size and timing looks like ssh-tunneled http traffic from mozilla).
--Bruce Fields
Most ssh users don't use it as a way to avoid censorship--they use it to e.g. keep their passwords secret. Do they have no script kiddies in China?
--Bruce Fields
Indeed. Dorm rooms are small, and when you're living in dorms you end up moving once or twice a year. Be happy, travel light....
--Bruce Fields
Most free software is developed in an extremely open fashion. Anyone in the world can show up on the linux kernel mailing list and post their opinion of some patch, whether that opinion is a minority opinion, or is just totally misinformed. The result is that a), there are a lot of flamewars, but b) it's hard to take a course of action without being fairly well aware of the arguments that might be mounted against it. This is an extremely good thing, well worth putting up with some friction.
If you ever find yourself working on a difficult project, with lots of tough decisions to make, and you find that everyone agrees on everything, be very, very afraid....
--Bruce Fields
Where did he say that? To quote from the website:
(Emphasis mine.) I'm having a hard time imagining "water-soluble" chalk that would *require* 2 weeks to wash off.
--Bruce Fields
In fact, how do you actually buy these things? I checked HP's web site, and while they list the model, and claim SuSe is available for it, if I follow the "configure & buy" links, they don't list any configurations with any OS other than XP.
--Bruce Fields
This is what it all comes down to. Consider how much you'd have to pay someone with even a minimal part of
Now add in overhead and figure out how much you'd need to charge people per minute for decent technical support. Compare to the cost of your average piece of consumer electronics. In many cases it might cost less just to send the user a replacement than to have spend time with a valuable tech.
The only cost-effective solution is to spend money on the products themselves so they need less support. The R&D required to make your software secure and usable by default is also expensive, but it only has to be done once and then can be spread among all your users.
The argument over whether to spend minimum wage on domestic tech support or even less on outsourced support is all besides the point. Tech support, at least for commodity consumer products, is dead.
--Bruce Fields
It depends. You have to estimate a) the costs of buying and maintaining UPS's (batteries don't last forever!) per year versus b) the expected loss due to power problems in a year (the sum of the chances of various kinds of accidents times the probability of each kind of accident occuring in one year).
It would cost me about $600 to replace my desktop's hardware (I'm not including the monitor, which I'm assuming most people don't keep on backup anyway). I keep frequent enough backups that the amount of lost data is unlikely to be significant. So the costs of a power disaster would be at most $600 plus the cost of the time required to restore.
In the approximately years I've maintained my own computers, I've never lost anything due to power problems. I'm certainly not saying that it doesn't happen; some day I fully expect that it *will* happen. But at this point I'd need several major accidents to get to the point where the cost of UPS's over the last 15 years would have been worthwhile.
For people with more expensive hardware, the calculation may come out differently; but for people with good backups and cheap consumer hardware, I doubt it's usually worth it. As computer prices continue to fall, this will increasingly be true.
--Bruce Fields
Yeah, I remember that. Completely disgusting--to one the one hand attempt to claim a 2000-plus-year-old heritage and a shared world experience, and on the other hand to claim that it's all your own private property.
Though I wonder whether anyone's ever actually fought them on this, or whether they're all just giving in when they get the first cease-and-desist letter. Does anyone know of any actual cases?
--Bruce Fields
Thanks for the link, but note that that 20% is a percentage of all households, while the 51% is a percentage of all households that already have some kind of internet usage. From these two articles, it looks to me like the rates are actually in the same ballpark between the US and Europe; but unfortunately, I can't find numbers that are actually comparable; can anyone else?
--Bruce Fields
You're probably minimally organized.
Now consider how long it could take on a random user's box that you've never seen before. They've got documents and preferences saved all over the place, they installed a bunch of software, and they can't remember where they installed it from or how they configured it. They've lost the printer manual and the IP information from their ISP, etc., etc., etc.
It could take almost arbitrarily long....
--Bruce Fields
They've been saying for some time that they'd also release small updates (like 2.6.8.1) against previous releases when necessary, so it should be reasonably safe to take a recent kernel if you wait a couple weeks after the major release and check for any such updates.
For what it's worth, I've been upgrading on every major release (and most of the -rc's too) since 2.6.0, without any disasters.
Of course, depending on which particular drivers you care about and so on, your mileage may vary.
--Bruce Fields
Yeah, when I was there recently I was probably driving like an old lady.
I have to say, though I can understand why people drive so fast there--those country roads give convenient (and more picturesque) routes than the freeway--I think it's more than a little careless, given the lack of the median, occasional driveways and cross streets, and frequent spots (e.g. before cresting hills) where visibility isn't that good.
--Bruce Fields
You say it's "fairly common for people to survive", I say "it could be fatal"; I think we pretty much agree. Either way it's a pretty ugly crash.
Though actually, I think when people talk about a head-on collision they mean a collision in which the two vehicles are facing each other; my understanding of the description here is that the solar car was actually pointed more across the lane at this point, so was hit side-on. I think that actually tends to be a worse accident. (Perhaps someone with more knowledge of crash statics can provide more details here.)
--Bruce Fields