C++ and Objective C were both in fact implemented originally as a set of macros which were converted by the preprocessor into C code. Object orientation is more a way of thinking than anything. Perl uses a method of implementing OO not too dissimilar from early C++ implementations. The key question to ask is this: can I think in an OO way, and code in that way, and have everything work like I expect? I can do that in Perl, Objective C, Java or Smalltalk. I can't do that in C++ - it's just too kludgy of a syntax for me. (I know, I know, this coming from a Perl user!)
What was your inspiration for "On the Uses of Torture," and do you find that your fans are more or less interested in this kind of story than in your more well-known works?
It would be nice if SU did provide a feature so that third parties could register their software with SU, and it could then be kept up to date transparently. Of course, this would only be a feature if the user got to pick the non-Apple software to be updated. Having a method where some client I install sets up SU to automatically keep spyware updated, and not telling me about it, would be most unpleasant.
It's funny. The files the RIAA really wants to stop, Brittany, Nickelback, etc. are available on any one of the hundreds of P2P providers out there, they aren't stopping a single pirate by shutting down AG, but the lesser knowns and out of prints now are homeless.
Just think about this for a second. Which is the greater threat to the RIAA, 1000000 ripoffs of the latest Brittany single (maybe a thousand real sales lost) or the possibility of independent artists finding a way to distribute music and make money without needing the RIAA's member companies? I'd bet that RIAA is way more worried about the latter than the former.
Why port at all? Slashcode obviously works, and scales really well. Porting would at best be make-work, unless there's some really necessary feature that can't be implemented without rearchitecting the entire codebase.
And if the coders have that much time on their hands, they can fire a few people and cut down on the amount of advertising they do to support the staff overhead.
It seems to me that the ideal solution would be for everyone to agree on a single protocol. This will not happen. You see, it used to be that someone would come out with a protocol and client and server implementations, and would release them into the wild. Then, people would either use it (like IRC) or not (like UNIX's talk command). If they did, then other and better implementations would come out, as long as the protocol was solid. This is how email, FTP, HTTP and many other common Internet protocols were developed.
Now, though, companies create the protocols and allow them only to the chosen few who use their software (think AOL for IM and Real for streaming content). The protocol is not generally available, meaning better clients can't be made, and there is often a dependence upon resources wholly owned by a single company. Sometimes (again AOL and Real come to mind) these are genuinely useful. In that case, someone (another company, generally) will produce a competing product, that does the same thing in a different way.
Some people will choose one method and some will choose another. Users cannot force standardization. The corporate developers are being paid to enforce balkanization, rather than to work towards standardization. Independent developers cannot get enough of a critical mass to make it feasible for users to migrate to their systems, or for corporations to adopt the independent methods as a matter of convenience.
The net result, no pun intended, is that there is no way to move to a standard. This leaves us with the options of using a client which speaks all of the different protocols, choosing to pocket ourselves into a small part of the possible Internet community (with corresponding obeisance to the local corporate power), or choosing to cover our screen with all of the various blessed programs. Only a unified client holds any real appeal to me, and that is fraught with problems. For example, try talking to AIM when AOL keeps changing the way the servers work on the back end! It's a nontrivial problem.
So I guess the point I'm trying to make is that expecting a unified IM system to appear, just because it makes sense from a user perspective, is not very likely to be worth anyone's while.
This method only works as long as all sites are equally trusted. If p2p software develops the idea of a web of trust, this method will fail quickly. Basically, a web of trust allows a user to mark a site as trusted or untrusted. You trust sites that sites you trust trust. In other words, I mark my client to trust foo.net and bar.com, because they always provide good stuff. They trust me as well, and a few other sites like fubar.cc. Since one or more of my trusted sites trusts fubar.cc, I trust fubar.cc.
Eventually this evolves such that sites which post bogus music, low-quality rips and the like will not get used, because no one will trust them. And a good web of trust allows you to see the trust path that led you to a server, so that if you get something bad you explicitly can mark as untrusted the nearest site to that (since they didn't do a good screening job) even though they would otherwise implicitly be trusted.
Because this project includes changing the computer hardware to include a PKI chip, it is possible to design the hardware such that it will not boot at all without a Palladium-enabled OS. It is possible to design the hardware such that all of the data on the hard drive is encrypted (transparently, in the background) and even removing the hard drive to a non-Palladium computer won't get you the data. Indeed, moving the hard drive to a different Palladium computer won't get you the data.
They had their computers taken away... Sounds like enough punishment to me.
You seem unaware of the fact that it is not the job of the police or FBI to impose penalties for breaking the law. That is the job of a court. If the accused are found guilty, they are subject to punishment. With no charges filed and no arrests made, this reeks of arbitrary (and thus unconstitutional) siezure without due process.
However, anything that has to lift substantial amounts of payload will be large enough for the atmosphere to be mostly irrelevant (the benefit only comes when your rocket is small enough for its cross-sectional mass *not* to be greater than the atmosphere's at low altitudes).
Atmosphere isn't really the main problem; it's gravity. It is far more efficient to climb up the gravity well on wings than it is to blast up it on a rocket.
When you're boosting, both gravity and airfoils are irrelevant - the dominant force by far is the several gravities of thrust being supplied by your engines. The thrust-induced stresses are the same whether you're on the launchpad or flying free, or in the atmosphere or out of it (aside from exhaust expansion in the rocket nozzle). So no matter what you do your rocket has to be braced enough to take a very heavy axial load.
But you do have to lift a weight into orbit, of which most is not the payload but the vehicle. Reducing the weight of vehicle to be lifted increases the payload for the same amount of thrust. The structure has to withstand the same loads during boost, but the takeoff and landing loads are much smaller, and thus the undercarriage and body structure both get lighter. This reduces the mass fraction occupied by structure. In addition, using less energetic fuels (kerosene/LOX) makes it easier to abort if needed, and reduces costs/complexities in ferrying, over a hydrogen engine. But you pretty much need hydrogen if you're going to lift straight up, which eliminates any benefits to cheaper/safer fuels. Also note that you don't need as much oxidizer, because the oxygen required to lift the craft to fuelling height was not carried onboard, but rather came from the air. This accounts, by the way, for much of the oxidizer burned in a conventional rocket - just getting through the part of the air which has useful amounts of oxygen in it.
I'd rather not assume any technology that doesn't yet exist. I'd be willing to bet that the technology for getting SSTO using this method is available now, with perhaps some development needed on a wider high-altitude nozzle for the rockets. (Since they don't have to consider the boost phase with thick atmosphere, the nozzles could be wider, and thus give higher specific impulse for the fuel used, since the range of pressures they would have to operate in would be smaller.)
Most of the literature I've seen discussing this kind of technique assumes subsonic climb to altitude, subsonic fuelling (at maybe Mach 0.8) and a subsonic ferry mode - in other words, the jets wouldn't be powerful enough to reach supersonic speeds. Thus, the only time the aircraft would experience significant atmospheric friction would be for a short period during the boost phase and during reentry.
This, in fact, is the expectation of most companies which hire contractors: all of the contractor's knowledge sprang fully formed and without precedent into the contractor's head, and will similarly disappear when he leaves. The fact that they claim that this is how the world works does not mean that they are correct, but they all seem to claim this.
It's actually remarkably difficult to get from the surface (or subsurface) of the Earth into space. There's a reason that they compare the difficulty of things to "rocket science". The payload is typically less than 10% of the weight lofted, with the rest being fuel/oxidizer (for simplicity, henceforth "fuel") and structure. And of that, most of the weight is oxidizer. The more you want to lift, the more fuel you need. But adding fuel adds the weight of both fuel and the structure to contain it. This means that you need more fuel to lift it. Eventually, you find a nice place where you can lift the appropriate payload and fuel and structure. If, that is, you can build something that big - depends on the payload size and orbit (which together determine the amount of energy needed to loft the payload), launch pads, assembly buildings and so forth. It's difficult and it's expensive.
Are there other ways to do this than big chemical rockets? You bet. You can use nuclear rockets, like the NERVA program. You can build a rocketplane (hybrid rocket/jet). There are other options (lifting under a balloon, for example), but they are not very attractive, for a variety of reasons.
Nuclear rockets are great from a technical standpoint. If you used minimal shielding (to minimize the weight while still protecting the cargo) and didn't care about radioactive exhaust, you could theoretically launch more for less, given the high specific impulse of the engines and the lack of oxidizer, which together make up for the weight of the reactor vs. a traditional rocket. Practically, this won't happen for political reasons, though nuclear rockets may some day be lifted into space as payload, then used to move things around.
Pathfinder takes a nice approach: put both jets and rockets onto the ship, and take off without oxidizer. The ship would use the jets to fly up to a tanker, which would provide the oxidizer. The ship would then separate from the tanker, point up and light the rockets. Since no oxidizer is carried to get through the majority of the atmosphere, the total weight of the ship is much less (it needs less structure to hold oxidizer, because it uses less oxidizer). The oxidizer is carried up by a tanker, which is airbreathing, and the net effect is to be much more efficient. You could argue whether or not to carry the rockets and jets both, or just to carry rockets, and enough oxidizer to get up to tanking altitude. There are advantages and disadvantages to either.
The other nice thing about this approach is that you have built an airplane. It can be tested incrementally, and can be fully reusable with minimal refurbishment between flights. It can self-ferry to whatever airport is appropriate for whatever mission it is going to fly, and could land at any large airport that can provide the fuel of your choice (probably kerosene). The problem with this approach is that it's never been done, and there is no real constituency to do it. Unless a private company like Pioneer Rocketplane manages to get the necessary funding, or a government suddenly decides to anger its current spaceflight constituency in order to boost a doubtful new spaceflight constituency, the concept won't get tested.
The end result of all of this is that it is unlikely that the current situation will change, and it is unlikely that a shuttle-like system will ever be built to replace the shuttle. We'll continue to use disposable rockets for most things, with huge failure rates, and refurbish the shuttles until we decide that manned spaceflight is too hard for us to do, the precedents of history notwithstanding.
RTGs are cheaper than large solar arrays. Large solar arrays would have to either be orbital, with power beamed to the surface, which would be new (thus less likely to work well) and expensive. But a ground-based array would only get sunlight two weeks out of four. That is another measure of reliability - not that it's broken, but it's just not producing. This is not a couple-day thing like the Apollo landings were. You have to plan for long-term.
Don't carry nuclear reactors, carry RTGs. The general public will still panic, but then the general public are not generally capable of evaluating technical risks in the presence of emotional scaremongering, so that is to be expected.
Heck, in the Viet Nam war, the military was prevented from using sealed plastic strips filled with the chemical used in glow-in-the-dark watch hands to provide constant illumination around the perimeters of villages in order to prevent infiltration. After all, it was related to radiation in some way. (I believe radium was part of the chemical mix.)
Re:What needs to happen...
on
ICANN Updates
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· Score: 2
Are you suggesting that voting on issues that affect so many naive users should be reduced to a tug-of war between nerds and corporations?
Isn't that what happened with the last presidential election?
No, in the last presidential election (in fact, in the last several), large organizations who don't care about the common citizen, but who want to be left alone by the government, battled large organizations who don't care about the common citizen, but want the government to grant them all kinds of money, monopolies, special rights and privileges. There is no way I can think of that a society can have personal liberty, and a two-party system, without this state of affairs prevailing.
There was no evidence of any attempt to actually reconnoiter the potential sites - this will require manned landings in advance of the establishment of a base. There was no evidence of an attempt to determine if there were sufficient water ice to actually support human habitation, or if not, to figure out the logistics of water and air resupply.
Also, why solar power rather than the (cheaper, more reliable and higher-output) nuclear option? It's not like the radiation would be a problem there.
All in all, it's a nice thought, but most likely it'll go nowhere.
For crying out loud, the debates about post-modernism I attended in art school never achieved the bull-headed, pseudo-articulate, self-important levels of idiocy that this trial has.
Art students, unlike lawyers, at least care about the positive or negative aesthetics of what they are debating. They are just (generally) overeducated to the point that they actually think that 'subliminal counterinfluence of the overriding metaphor of substance' means something. Lawyers, on the other hand, are carefully trained to know exactly how to say something which sounds like it means something, while actually having no semantic content.
For years, Dvorak has basically been rehashing one theme: Apple's only purpose in life is to develop new products for M$ to steal. Time after time, his recommendation has been to kill off the Mac, and develop something new and radical, so that M$ can incorporate it into Windows; or to add new cool features with no sales value, so that new technologies can be matured for Windows. In all cases, he avoids saying that M$ should innovate. Apparently, taking a risk of failure should fall on those companies which compete with one's pet platform, in Mr. Dvorak's world.
If you have a different root password on each system, you have to write them down, which is much less secure than having one very difficult-to-crack root password. If these are external systems, I am assuming that the questioner has been smart enough to only allow ssh or similar access anyway, rather than something which passes passwords in the clear.
So make them act like a team. All admins are responsible for all servers. I am assuming that you the group doesn't have a lot of time to document (most groups don't), but there are still practical ways to make it work, with minimal time taken in advance:
1. common file system layouts (for example, all users in/home, all apps in/apps, all admin-only stuff in/admin (or whatever standards you want to use) 2. one person (team lead) owns all of the licenses, and keeps them up to date, as well as scheduling non-reactive work 3. if you're not responsible for the applications on the system, then everyone should be able to handle any machine, since no specialized knowledge is needed 4. of course, specialized knowledge is still needed, because some systems have quirks. Document the quirks only (not standard routines for the whole team) both on the machine (in/admin/local/README or whatever) and on your team webserver - if you don't have one, get one 5. keep a change log for each machine, in/admin/local and on the webserver, that describes any changes that aren't in someone's home directory and which survive a reboot - who did them, when and why 6. make sure than standing orders (that is to say, procedures to always be followed, like how to notify clients of an outage) are posted on each machine and on the website 7. use a common root password, known by the team lead and his manager. everyone else uses sudo su - to get to root, or some similar means. give them the root password if they need it (reinstall system, for example), then change it the next day. ideally, set up a system so that each admin saves to a different history file, so that you can tell who did what if you need to (tracking down mysterious file disappearances and such) - this isn't a tool for discipline, it's a tool for troubleshooting
Slashdot Mirror
C++ and Objective C were both in fact implemented originally as a set of macros which were converted by the preprocessor into C code. Object orientation is more a way of thinking than anything. Perl uses a method of implementing OO not too dissimilar from early C++ implementations. The key question to ask is this: can I think in an OO way, and code in that way, and have everything work like I expect? I can do that in Perl, Objective C, Java or Smalltalk. I can't do that in C++ - it's just too kludgy of a syntax for me. (I know, I know, this coming from a Perl user!)
What was your inspiration for "On the Uses of Torture," and do you find that your fans are more or less interested in this kind of story than in your more well-known works?
It would be nice if SU did provide a feature so that third parties could register their software with SU, and it could then be kept up to date transparently. Of course, this would only be a feature if the user got to pick the non-Apple software to be updated. Having a method where some client I install sets up SU to automatically keep spyware updated, and not telling me about it, would be most unpleasant.
Just think about this for a second. Which is the greater threat to the RIAA, 1000000 ripoffs of the latest Brittany single (maybe a thousand real sales lost) or the possibility of independent artists finding a way to distribute music and make money without needing the RIAA's member companies? I'd bet that RIAA is way more worried about the latter than the former.
computer 1 to computer 2: Chicken! computer 2 to computer 1: Turkey!
Why port at all? Slashcode obviously works, and scales really well. Porting would at best be make-work, unless there's some really necessary feature that can't be implemented without rearchitecting the entire codebase.
And if the coders have that much time on their hands, they can fire a few people and cut down on the amount of advertising they do to support the staff overhead.
It seems to me that the ideal solution would be for everyone to agree on a single protocol. This will not happen. You see, it used to be that someone would come out with a protocol and client and server implementations, and would release them into the wild. Then, people would either use it (like IRC) or not (like UNIX's talk command). If they did, then other and better implementations would come out, as long as the protocol was solid. This is how email, FTP, HTTP and many other common Internet protocols were developed.
Now, though, companies create the protocols and allow them only to the chosen few who use their software (think AOL for IM and Real for streaming content). The protocol is not generally available, meaning better clients can't be made, and there is often a dependence upon resources wholly owned by a single company. Sometimes (again AOL and Real come to mind) these are genuinely useful. In that case, someone (another company, generally) will produce a competing product, that does the same thing in a different way.
Some people will choose one method and some will choose another. Users cannot force standardization. The corporate developers are being paid to enforce balkanization, rather than to work towards standardization. Independent developers cannot get enough of a critical mass to make it feasible for users to migrate to their systems, or for corporations to adopt the independent methods as a matter of convenience.
The net result, no pun intended, is that there is no way to move to a standard. This leaves us with the options of using a client which speaks all of the different protocols, choosing to pocket ourselves into a small part of the possible Internet community (with corresponding obeisance to the local corporate power), or choosing to cover our screen with all of the various blessed programs. Only a unified client holds any real appeal to me, and that is fraught with problems. For example, try talking to AIM when AOL keeps changing the way the servers work on the back end! It's a nontrivial problem.
So I guess the point I'm trying to make is that expecting a unified IM system to appear, just because it makes sense from a user perspective, is not very likely to be worth anyone's while.
This method only works as long as all sites are equally trusted. If p2p software develops the idea of a web of trust, this method will fail quickly. Basically, a web of trust allows a user to mark a site as trusted or untrusted. You trust sites that sites you trust trust. In other words, I mark my client to trust foo.net and bar.com, because they always provide good stuff. They trust me as well, and a few other sites like fubar.cc. Since one or more of my trusted sites trusts fubar.cc, I trust fubar.cc.
Eventually this evolves such that sites which post bogus music, low-quality rips and the like will not get used, because no one will trust them. And a good web of trust allows you to see the trust path that led you to a server, so that if you get something bad you explicitly can mark as untrusted the nearest site to that (since they didn't do a good screening job) even though they would otherwise implicitly be trusted.
At least provide something useful like a Zenith terminal. VT terminals suck by comparison.
Because this project includes changing the computer hardware to include a PKI chip, it is possible to design the hardware such that it will not boot at all without a Palladium-enabled OS. It is possible to design the hardware such that all of the data on the hard drive is encrypted (transparently, in the background) and even removing the hard drive to a non-Palladium computer won't get you the data. Indeed, moving the hard drive to a different Palladium computer won't get you the data.
You seem unaware of the fact that it is not the job of the police or FBI to impose penalties for breaking the law. That is the job of a court. If the accused are found guilty, they are subject to punishment. With no charges filed and no arrests made, this reeks of arbitrary (and thus unconstitutional) siezure without due process.
Atmosphere isn't really the main problem; it's gravity. It is far more efficient to climb up the gravity well on wings than it is to blast up it on a rocket.
But you do have to lift a weight into orbit, of which most is not the payload but the vehicle. Reducing the weight of vehicle to be lifted increases the payload for the same amount of thrust. The structure has to withstand the same loads during boost, but the takeoff and landing loads are much smaller, and thus the undercarriage and body structure both get lighter. This reduces the mass fraction occupied by structure. In addition, using less energetic fuels (kerosene/LOX) makes it easier to abort if needed, and reduces costs/complexities in ferrying, over a hydrogen engine. But you pretty much need hydrogen if you're going to lift straight up, which eliminates any benefits to cheaper/safer fuels. Also note that you don't need as much oxidizer, because the oxygen required to lift the craft to fuelling height was not carried onboard, but rather came from the air. This accounts, by the way, for much of the oxidizer burned in a conventional rocket - just getting through the part of the air which has useful amounts of oxygen in it.
I'd rather not assume any technology that doesn't yet exist. I'd be willing to bet that the technology for getting SSTO using this method is available now, with perhaps some development needed on a wider high-altitude nozzle for the rockets. (Since they don't have to consider the boost phase with thick atmosphere, the nozzles could be wider, and thus give higher specific impulse for the fuel used, since the range of pressures they would have to operate in would be smaller.)
Most of the literature I've seen discussing this kind of technique assumes subsonic climb to altitude, subsonic fuelling (at maybe Mach 0.8) and a subsonic ferry mode - in other words, the jets wouldn't be powerful enough to reach supersonic speeds. Thus, the only time the aircraft would experience significant atmospheric friction would be for a short period during the boost phase and during reentry.
This, in fact, is the expectation of most companies which hire contractors: all of the contractor's knowledge sprang fully formed and without precedent into the contractor's head, and will similarly disappear when he leaves. The fact that they claim that this is how the world works does not mean that they are correct, but they all seem to claim this.
Rigorous inspection of all of those parts. Have you ever looked at the price of rebuilding a shuttle between launches?
It's actually remarkably difficult to get from the surface (or subsurface) of the Earth into space. There's a reason that they compare the difficulty of things to "rocket science". The payload is typically less than 10% of the weight lofted, with the rest being fuel/oxidizer (for simplicity, henceforth "fuel") and structure. And of that, most of the weight is oxidizer. The more you want to lift, the more fuel you need. But adding fuel adds the weight of both fuel and the structure to contain it. This means that you need more fuel to lift it. Eventually, you find a nice place where you can lift the appropriate payload and fuel and structure. If, that is, you can build something that big - depends on the payload size and orbit (which together determine the amount of energy needed to loft the payload), launch pads, assembly buildings and so forth. It's difficult and it's expensive.
Are there other ways to do this than big chemical rockets? You bet. You can use nuclear rockets, like the NERVA program. You can build a rocketplane (hybrid rocket/jet). There are other options (lifting under a balloon, for example), but they are not very attractive, for a variety of reasons.
Nuclear rockets are great from a technical standpoint. If you used minimal shielding (to minimize the weight while still protecting the cargo) and didn't care about radioactive exhaust, you could theoretically launch more for less, given the high specific impulse of the engines and the lack of oxidizer, which together make up for the weight of the reactor vs. a traditional rocket. Practically, this won't happen for political reasons, though nuclear rockets may some day be lifted into space as payload, then used to move things around.
Pathfinder takes a nice approach: put both jets and rockets onto the ship, and take off without oxidizer. The ship would use the jets to fly up to a tanker, which would provide the oxidizer. The ship would then separate from the tanker, point up and light the rockets. Since no oxidizer is carried to get through the majority of the atmosphere, the total weight of the ship is much less (it needs less structure to hold oxidizer, because it uses less oxidizer). The oxidizer is carried up by a tanker, which is airbreathing, and the net effect is to be much more efficient. You could argue whether or not to carry the rockets and jets both, or just to carry rockets, and enough oxidizer to get up to tanking altitude. There are advantages and disadvantages to either.
The other nice thing about this approach is that you have built an airplane. It can be tested incrementally, and can be fully reusable with minimal refurbishment between flights. It can self-ferry to whatever airport is appropriate for whatever mission it is going to fly, and could land at any large airport that can provide the fuel of your choice (probably kerosene). The problem with this approach is that it's never been done, and there is no real constituency to do it. Unless a private company like Pioneer Rocketplane manages to get the necessary funding, or a government suddenly decides to anger its current spaceflight constituency in order to boost a doubtful new spaceflight constituency, the concept won't get tested.
The end result of all of this is that it is unlikely that the current situation will change, and it is unlikely that a shuttle-like system will ever be built to replace the shuttle. We'll continue to use disposable rockets for most things, with huge failure rates, and refurbish the shuttles until we decide that manned spaceflight is too hard for us to do, the precedents of history notwithstanding.
Did it not occur to them that there are platforms on which they could test the effects of prolonged weightlessness? Or that studies have been done, including similar lab studies. Oh, well.
RTGs are cheaper than large solar arrays. Large solar arrays would have to either be orbital, with power beamed to the surface, which would be new (thus less likely to work well) and expensive. But a ground-based array would only get sunlight two weeks out of four. That is another measure of reliability - not that it's broken, but it's just not producing. This is not a couple-day thing like the Apollo landings were. You have to plan for long-term.
Don't carry nuclear reactors, carry RTGs. The general public will still panic, but then the general public are not generally capable of evaluating technical risks in the presence of emotional scaremongering, so that is to be expected.
Heck, in the Viet Nam war, the military was prevented from using sealed plastic strips filled with the chemical used in glow-in-the-dark watch hands to provide constant illumination around the perimeters of villages in order to prevent infiltration. After all, it was related to radiation in some way. (I believe radium was part of the chemical mix.)
No, in the last presidential election (in fact, in the last several), large organizations who don't care about the common citizen, but who want to be left alone by the government, battled large organizations who don't care about the common citizen, but want the government to grant them all kinds of money, monopolies, special rights and privileges. There is no way I can think of that a society can have personal liberty, and a two-party system, without this state of affairs prevailing.
There was no evidence of any attempt to actually reconnoiter the potential sites - this will require manned landings in advance of the establishment of a base. There was no evidence of an attempt to determine if there were sufficient water ice to actually support human habitation, or if not, to figure out the logistics of water and air resupply.
Also, why solar power rather than the (cheaper, more reliable and higher-output) nuclear option? It's not like the radiation would be a problem there.
All in all, it's a nice thought, but most likely it'll go nowhere.
-jeff
Never confuse your schooling with your education. - Mark Twain
Art students, unlike lawyers, at least care about the positive or negative aesthetics of what they are debating. They are just (generally) overeducated to the point that they actually think that 'subliminal counterinfluence of the overriding metaphor of substance' means something. Lawyers, on the other hand, are carefully trained to know exactly how to say something which sounds like it means something, while actually having no semantic content.
For years, Dvorak has basically been rehashing one theme: Apple's only purpose in life is to develop new products for M$ to steal. Time after time, his recommendation has been to kill off the Mac, and develop something new and radical, so that M$ can incorporate it into Windows; or to add new cool features with no sales value, so that new technologies can be matured for Windows. In all cases, he avoids saying that M$ should innovate. Apparently, taking a risk of failure should fall on those companies which compete with one's pet platform, in Mr. Dvorak's world.
If you have a different root password on each system, you have to write them down, which is much less secure than having one very difficult-to-crack root password. If these are external systems, I am assuming that the questioner has been smart enough to only allow ssh or similar access anyway, rather than something which passes passwords in the clear.
So make them act like a team. All admins are responsible for all servers. I am assuming that you the group doesn't have a lot of time to document (most groups don't), but there are still practical ways to make it work, with minimal time taken in advance:
/home, all apps in /apps, all admin-only stuff in /admin (or whatever standards you want to use) /admin/local/README or whatever) and on your team webserver - if you don't have one, get one /admin/local and on the webserver, that describes any changes that aren't in someone's home directory and which survive a reboot - who did them, when and why
1. common file system layouts (for example, all users in
2. one person (team lead) owns all of the licenses, and keeps them up to date, as well as scheduling non-reactive work
3. if you're not responsible for the applications on the system, then everyone should be able to handle any machine, since no specialized knowledge is needed
4. of course, specialized knowledge is still needed, because some systems have quirks. Document the quirks only (not standard routines for the whole team) both on the machine (in
5. keep a change log for each machine, in
6. make sure than standing orders (that is to say, procedures to always be followed, like how to notify clients of an outage) are posted on each machine and on the website
7. use a common root password, known by the team lead and his manager. everyone else uses sudo su - to get to root, or some similar means. give them the root password if they need it (reinstall system, for example), then change it the next day. ideally, set up a system so that each admin saves to a different history file, so that you can tell who did what if you need to (tracking down mysterious file disappearances and such) - this isn't a tool for discipline, it's a tool for troubleshooting
That should solve most of the problems.