Linux doesn't have a buggy awk, sed or tar.
Solaris 8 does.
Ignoring for a moment the question of whether it's buggy, who gives a damn about Solaris 8? That was the 90s, man. OpenSolaris is based on Solaris 10, the release of which is imminent. It's a boatload of new technology plus two full releases' worth of bug fixes removed from Solaris 8. If you had a bad experience, we're sorry, but please don't continue feeding people misinformation based on a badly outdated release. Should I talk about my experience with Yggdrasil Plug and Play Linux (based on kernel 0.99!) in 1993 and pretend my difficulties then are reasons to avoid Debian GNU/Linux 3.0?
Next, pedantry.
Yes, sed and awk have bugs filed against them. Probably everything except maybe/usr/bin/true does. Since you didn't say what kind of bugs, it's hard to assess the legitimacy of your complaint. If you'd care to elaborate, there's a chance your problem can be fixed. Otherwise everyone just assumes you're a crank.
Most of the "bugs" in Solaris userland that draw a lot of complaints from GNU users are not bugs at all but rather artifacts of painstaking maintenance of compatibility with long-extant standards. The GNU tools you're familiar with follow different (or their own) standards, because backwards-compatibility is not a GNU priority. It's a constraint imposed on Solaris development by our customers, who seem pleased with the results. You can in some cases make the GNU tools behave similarly if you wish. Solaris also has several different versions of these tools, each of which matches different incompatible standards. You might just be using the wrong one.
Finally, Linux doesn't have awk, sed, or tar. It's a kernel. I've assumed here that you mean the GNU tools, though of course each distro ships its own version and combination of specific tools, but it's certainly possible to build a system with a Linux kernel and non-GNU userland. In fact, soon it will be possible, at least in theory, to make a system with a Linux kernel and a mostly-Solaris userland, if you really want to.
Ok, on to your other concerns.
Most x86 hardware doesn't suffer from the transient error bug that the non-ECC cache of the ultrasparcII processor.
What does this have to do with Solaris? If you think x86 systems are more reliable, you can run Solaris on those instead.
Linux works on parking meters.
So does Windows CE. Should we all start using that? Standard Linux won't run on less than about 4MB of memory, even if you're talking about Linux 2.0. Newer means bigger. Solaris as shipped today by Sun also requires more resources than would normally be found in a small embedded system. It's a safe bet that, like Linux, the SunOS kernel could be reduced sufficiently for such an application. It's just software and work. The fact that a highly modified version of Linux can run a parking meter is a curiosity and a testament to the effort of the hackers who did it, not evidence of inherent software superiority.
Solaris doesn't work out of the box with an A1000.
I can only assume this is yet another reference to some past bad experience you've had. Since you're not telling us what it is, it's impossible (a) to know if it's still a problem, and (b) to fix it if so. Please, be specific if you want to complain. Hint: referencing bug IDs is a good idea.
Most quality nics work out of the box with linux.
Which nics would you like to use on Solaris? In the 10/100 space there's iprb (Intel), elxl (3Com 3c9xx), dnet (Tulip/21xx0), and about a half dozen others. In the Gb/10Gb space there's e1000g (Intel), bge (Broadcom), sk98sol (SysKonnect), and xge (S2IO). See the reference manual for drivers if you want to participate in an informed discussion. The examples I gave don't include the various vendor-supplied drivers or any of the Sun-specific d
The Ericsson pc card presents a standard serial port interface to the user, and a quick google will get you the needed commands and modifications to pppd to use it. I have done this with 100% success. Performance is roughly what you'd expect from a 56k modem; ie, not great, but it does work in a lot of places where no other connectivity is available.
Fortunately, you don't need flowery prose or concise diction to be an effective advocate for change. In fact, you don't even need to be able to speak or write in English or any other language. All you need to do is keep your wallet in your pocket: if you buy a product that needs firmware, and it's not available on terms you can accept, you are part of the problem. Like it or not, once you buy a product, you have no further influence on its maker. They've got your money and they really don't care what you think. Do the smart thing: don't buy it.
Just hire people from far away (who have no information about the local politics), give them population numbers (but no other information about the population) and have them draw the districts.
This isn't bad, but people with money and power have a way of corrupting this sort of thing, and it's not unlikely that randomly selected people, even those from far away, would be partisan. The check for no party affiliation is still important. And in a state the size of Texas or California, it's unlikely that randomly-selected citizens with no party affiliation will know much about the politics of regions other than the one they live in.
Better yet, come up with a computer program that will, given a population size and a number of districts to draw (equal population in each), draw districts with the minimum sum perimiter. Don't feed it any demographic information, just population and street locations and require that the boundries fall on streets.
First, who writes the program? Who evaluates it for correctness? Who decides which one to buy? I shy away from computers in this area even though the problem is best solved by them, simply because people trust computers too much, the solution is too hard for humans to verify correct, and the software to do this is an obvious point for tampering. Second, it's not quite so simple to implement, since in some areas streets and highways aren't sufficient to district properly - you also need rivers, streams, latitude and longitude lines, survey markers, and sometimes more to divide a region fairly because not all district boundaries are in cities (in fact, I'd argue that they shouldn't be if possible). That said, anything chosen should be natural or obvious for use as a boundary, but these things aren't trivial to represent to a computer. You also need to know the exact coords for every residence, which is not accurately known by any mapping database. This applies to human-generated maps, too, but at least in that case we aren't pretending it's perfect.
I guess I'd like to see a combination of the two proposals given in the article: jurors should be paid a fair wage, equal in fact to the wage they would have earned otherwise. That should eliminate the fundamental unfairness of requiring people to miss work (we already have laws prohibiting adverse treatment by employers, so that aspect is covered). It's expensive, but justice is beyond price. I certainly don't want ever to be tried by 12 unemployed people living in trailers for whom the $15 a day is a raise. I don't care if people want to have that lifestyle, but claiming that they're my peers is silly. One might also make the case that such people are less likely to be educated and/or intelligent enough to follow the trial, honestly assess the evidence, and respect the law. My peers are responsible men and women who work for a living, exactly the kind of people who usually get excused from duty.
While we're at it, the peremptory strike should be eliminated. If you can't show cause that the person is unfit for duty, he or she serves whether you like it or not. Voir dire should be limited as well: unless you have some relationship with a party or have significant knowledge of the case, you serve. Potential jurors don't need to answer questions about their childhood. Are you materially biased, or aren't you? Simple. In return, lying during voir dire should be made a high felony with a minimum 10 year sentence. Don't fuck with justice.
Once we've fixed the jury system, the next step is compulsory service on redistricting boards. I've had enough gerrymandering. 9 citizens who have never been members of, contributed to, or registered to vote as an affiliate of any political party should be randomly selected and forced to sit in a room until they're redrawn the districts according to a few simple anti-gerrymandering rules (only natural boundaries, number of boundaries must be minimised, population of all districts must be approximately equal). It'd take less time and be a hell of a lot more fair. Oh yeah - and any member who votes in favour of a gerrymandered district goes to prison for 20 years. Don't fuck with my representative democracy.
In general, juries in the United States are seriously flawed due to the exemptions provided to most educated professionals.
Contact your state legislature. Suggest that jury exemptions be eliminated for anything other than medical (mental or physical) inability to perform the duties expected of a juror. I've never understood this either; as a citizen you are expected to do certain things from time to time, and sitting on a jury is one of them. "I work for a living" isn't a valid excuse; we all do.
So why not just eliminate the no-liability clauses in credit card agreements to reflect that if you (the cardholder, accountholder, whatever) give away information that leads to a loss, you are solely liable for that loss without limitation? If your card is stolen by a mugger, that's entirely different than you giving someone the number because you're too dumb to:
Use a text-only mailer and see that the links in the message are completely bogus, OR
Heed the countless warnings that "we will never ask you for this information..., OR
Think about what's being asked and follow the very old rule that any time you give away confidential information it should be part of a transaction that you initiated (you make the phone call, send the first message, or whatever); this way you can be sure you're giving information to the people you think you are, OR
Follow the even older rule that if it seems hokey, you probably shouldn't trust it.
Clearly there are lots of ways to avoid this problem. So many in fact that I think it outweighs the banks' desire to build confidence in electronic transactions; it's fine to indemnify accountholders against fraud, interception of information when efforts are made to send it securely, and physical theft or extortion. It's another thing entirely to protect idiots at the expense of everyone else.
These guys are almost as bad as the oil companies. There might be global warming (or there might not), and if there is, it might be caused by excessive burning of coal (or it might be entirely natural, or it might be partly natural, we honestly don't have a clue), but whether there is or not, we know there's more carbon this year than there was last year! And a trend over a tiny fraction of the earth's existence, even in the complete absence of accurate records from any other part of its existence, is cause for immediate and drastic action! And lucky for you, we have the solution right here...why don't you step inside and we'll discuss it. How much would you be willing to pay?
What a crock. This "solution" isn't a solution at all. If liquid CO2 in deep wells or the ground were a long-term sustainable storage mechanism for carbon, why is it that there is no such carbon storage existing naturally? Limestone, biomass, (living things, oil, gas), and oceans are all viable carbon storage media. I have no reason to believe the process described is a safe or effective way to store carbon so as to ensure indefinitely that it does not end up in the atmosphere.
It would be much better to continue research on other power sources, some of which are already commercially viable, or continue research on making lime from something other than limestone. If all that sounds too hard, plant a fucking tree. It'll do more long-term good than trying to sell people a way to make CO2 some future generation's problem.
There are only three kinds of energy available to us: solar, nuclear, and kinetic. The kinetic energy is that of the planet's motion through space; it includes a rotational component, its motion around the sun, the sun's motion around the galaxy, and the galaxy's motion through intergalactic space. We do not want to tap either of the first two (this would result in much greater climate change, since earth would turn more slowly and/or move closer to the sun), and the other two are impractical to exploit. Therefore we are left with either nuclear power or solar (light) energy and its immediate derivatives: wind, falling water, solar heat, and thermal differential. If we cannot find ways to make use of the five solar energy sources, or a way to make exploitation of nuclear energy safe, we will find our current living standards unsustainable within 200 years. This junk is just a temporary hack that would cost more in the long run than just finding cleaner energy sources.
No mention is made as to whether the $1 (2.5%) is a gross margin or net margin. If it's gross, then indeed the manufacturers are in a world of hurt. But if that's based on net operating profits, it's not that bad. While most investors would like to earn more than a 2.5% return, any company that profits at all right now is in good shape, and only a very small improvement could translate to a very strong return. A diversification into another higher-margin business is given as an example; a shop earning 2.5% returns that can employ even a small measure that improves efficiency is likewise in a very good position.
Again, since the reporter didn't bother to find out the exact financial condition of these manufacturers, it's almost impossible to know what this number really means. As such, the article is of no value.
At best this illustrates either how useless an average is, or how useless the so-called political spectrum is. Libertarians have views on various issues that span the entire range. On average, perhaps a libertarian is centrist. But very few libertarian positions would individually be considered centrist in today's political landscape. The main problem with the so-called spectrum is that it has only one dimension - "left" to "right." I have seen attempts made to place political views into 2-dimensional space, which is only slightly better than the traditional model. In reality, a proper description of a person's or party's views would be a point in many-dimensional space, with one axis for each major issue relevant at any given time. So, at best, your comment is silly. I considered it misleading and attempted to provide enough information to actually make some level of understanding possible. The complete picture is of course far more complex than I even attempted to indicate - for example, what is individual responsibility?
In case you need a concrete example of how useless averages are: Northern Ireland is populated mainly by Catholics and Protestants of a few denominations. So, on average, its religious leaning might just be called "Christian," like that of many European nations, or even the ultra-PC "Judeo-Christian" so commonly used to describe the United States' religious tendencies. Silly, eh? Here's another: the average temperature on the moon is about 0 degrees C, like much of Earth's temperate areas. Surely the climate there would be as salubrious as that of, say, Minneapolis, right? Of course, the 100-degree-C days and minus-100-degree-C nights might be difficult to survive, but on average you'd be quite comfortable wearing a heavy jacket!
Like a lot of people, you seem to think demographics as a science has more value than it really does. In fact, two people belonging to the same political party and identifying their political beliefs the same way might have numerous differences of opinion. They identify themselves the same way mainly because they've been made to believe they have only two specific political choices, neither of which has ever been well-defined. Sometimes variance, real or perceived, is so large that an average is meaningless and the population as a whole must be described in greater detail. Politics and religion certainly qualify. Making a statement that libertarian and Republican views are somehow similar or related because they "average out" in your perception of some arbitrary (and quite poor) model is deceptive.
You mentioned you're a news director. I wonder whether that has influenced your thinking - I can't imagine trying to distill important and complex topics like the direction of a nation's foreign policy into a 2-minute segment containing mainly pompous gravitas from some actor and self-serving sound bites from politicians, or a 500-word op-ed column. And yet this is what passes for in-depth civil discourse in America - and many other places as well.
Putting Libertarian and Republican together there is not meant to suggest that they are the same; rather, the Libertarian party is further right on some issues and further left on others, but in the long run they tend to even out.
...
Also, as a news editor...
And as a libertarian, I'm very disappointed that a news editor doesn't understand even vaguely what libertarianism is. A libertarian believes in personal freedom and personal responsibility. Government interference in individuals' lives is the primary issue for libertarians. This means that, like most Republicans, we believe in reduced government regulation of business and lower tax rates. It means that, like most Greens, we believe in decriminalization of drug use. And it means that, like most Democrats, we believe in a less interventionist foreign policy. In short, libertarianism is a set of values that, expressed individually, have broad-based support among many people who do not identify themselves as libertarians or belong to the Libertarian Party. Libertarian viewpoints do not necessarily have an "opposite" in the way that most people assume left and right oppose one another. The parties libertarians would probably be least likely to vote for would be Communist and Nazi. Even then, however, a thoughtful libertarian probably would find a few issues with which he or she agrees with each party.
To suggest that libertarians hold views overall similar to the Republican Party is absurd. The major parties and major government structures in the United States today are by definition centrist. They are large corporate entities seeking primarily to maintain their power, privilege, and prestige. They do this in two ways: first, by manipulating election law to their own mutual advantage; second, by formulating public policy based not on any particular set of values or ideology but on the results of focus groups and polling. Therefore, in the current political climate, Democrats and Republicans have far more in common with each other than with any other party or political identity (left, right, etc.). Their platform is continued wealth and power for the political elite. The planks they develop for any particular election are merely a means to that end and bear little or no relation to any traditional positioning on the political spectrum.
Minor parties do not have any power base to protect, and are therefore free to develop platforms and strategies based on their opinions and values. Often these platforms are issue-oriented; that is, the minor parties define their platforms plank by plank based on their values as applied to each specific issue. Quite often these platforms do not as a whole fit comfortably in a particular slot on the political spectrum. In part this is because the spectrum itself is a model, a stylized view of reality suitable more for reducing a complicated situation to sound bites than for accurately describing a rich political landscape. In fact, this spectrum itself is mainly a tool for the major parties to use in trying to differentiate themselves from one another by selecting a small number of issues and using the spectrum to identify the "other" party as being on the opposite ("EXTREME!" "RADICAL!") end of the spectrum on these issues. In practice the two major parties have virtually identical platforms that both fit very neatly into a formulaic mold that the electorate has come to expect. Because most voters do not maintain awareness of any issues not being used as a differentiator in a particular well-covered election, the broader issues on which the major parties do not differ never receive any significant voter attention. Examples of such issues are some of the very cases I described above as key libertarian viewpoints. Voters are not interested, for example, in considering seriously whether the social security system is a viable and appropriate solution to the problems it was intended to solve. Because any party that even asks this question risks alienating a large voting bloc, neither will do so (and if one did, the other major party would be sure to seize the opportunity to attract that bloc and thus be nearly assured of victory), so the issue remains submerged.
Windows is the anti-Perl. It makes the easy things hard and the hard things impossible. I think at the end of the day it all reduces to the fact that Microsoft doesn't understand the kind of things I want to do. If I wanted to write a paper using Word, it probably would mostly work, provided I wasn't too picky about formatting or layout. But if I'm writing a paper, I want detailed control - the kind of control TeX gives me. And most of the time I'm not writing papers at all - I'm writing code, cross-compiling it, and netbooting the result on some other system via RARP and TFTP. This kind of task, admittedly, is hard. But Unix makes it possible, while Windows makes it impossible. And every single piece of software you add to Windows (1a) costs money or (1b) sucks or (1c) more likely, both; (2) installs its own libraries over the system copies, destabilizing the system irreversibly, and (3) suffers from the second-worst user interface ever designed (only the 1-button MacOS7/8/9 interface is worse). The sad truth is that Microsoft has made a system so complex that no other vendor can produce reliable software for the platform; unfortunately, Microsoft's products with few exceptions suck so badly (or are nonexistent - find me a Microsoft RARP server) as to be useless.
In other news, Budweiser doesn't taste good according to Pete Coors, and a new study commissioned by Mitsubishi found that Sony equipment causes cancer in laboratory rats.
I wish suits would stop blathering about each other's products because really it's just a waste of time. The source is so obviously biased that even reading is pointless.
Well thanks Stewart. I'm glad to know I won't have to worry about the infection rate of AIDS once most people have AIDS.
The virus only kills computers running Windows. Likewise, AIDS only kills people who have sex and/or shoot up. So if you don't meet the infection criteria, you're right, you won't have to worry. Once every computer/person who can be infected is, all you need to worry about is what to do with the lost data/bodies.
Not being glib, really, but a worm that kills its host is preferable to one that just lets the box be taken over. Imagine if AIDS never killed anyone but instead turned its victims into immortal zombies under the total control of $EVIL_ORGANIZATION_OF_YOUR_CHOICE.
More to the point, the last year or two worth of worms and trojans actually do the _least_ harm to the idiots that allow their systems to be infected or become zombies. Most of the harm is concentrated in two places: the ISPs whose users are stupid, and corporate/ISP admins on the receiving end of the spam, worm spread attempts, and DoS traffic that the zombies generate.
Meanwhile, the stupid user, being stupid after all, merely notices that his system "seems to be running a bit slow today" and promptly downloads a piece of spyware advertised to "Optimize your Internet Connection!"
I think we need a new law. That law might read:
1. Any person who circulates, spreads, activates, distributes, or causes to be circulated, spread, activated, or distributed, knowingly or unknowingly, any worm, trojan, or virus (see Definitions), shall be guilty of an A felony and shall be fined by the court an amount not less than one million dollars ($1,000,000) nor more than one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) for each such act, and shall be imprisoned for a period not less than twenty (20) years nor more than the term of his or her natural life for each such act. Additionally, any person who does so knowingly shall be sentenced to either of, subject to the court's discretion, (a) imprisonment for not less than the term of his or her natural life, or (b) death.
2. Any person who benefits from an act described in (1) above shall be guilty of an A felony and shall be subject to the same penalties described above.
3. If an act in (1) or (2) above gives rise to a cause of action for damages or injury in a civil proceeding, the injured parties shall be entitled to collect treble damages from the offenders, including any and all persons who benefited from the acts. If the beneficiary of such an act is a corporate entity, the shareholders and directors of that entity shall also be individually liable for all such damages, any indemnification agreement notwithstanding. In the event of the bankruptcy of one or more offenders, indebtedness for such a judgment shall be primary and shall survive the bankruptcy reorganization. In its sole discretion, the court may order up to one hundred percent (100%) of offender's earnings to be garnished until such time as this judgment is satisfied, and may attach to any of an offender's assets as deemed necessary to satisfy the judgment. If, in the discretion of the court, such steps will not be sufficient to satisfy the judgment, the court may order the offender to perform while incarcerated such labors as may be necessary to satisfy the judgment.
It's simple, really. Unleash a worm, and your life is over. Hire someone to do it, and your life is over. Use a botnet to spam, and your life is over. How much harsher can we make it? I invite comments, especially from lawyers, on making such a law airtight, ironclad, and as harsh as the Constition permits.
Get over it. When you've been reverse-engineering some broken piece of crap for 16 hours straight and finally figure out the exact way in which the documentation is wrong, it's not quite enough to write "/* The documentation says this value is in bits 16-22 of register 4 but it's really reversed, XOR'd with 0x16, and located in bits 20-27 in register 7. */" I mean, this is the kind of stuff we deal with, and quite honestly something like that warrants "/* Sun engineers like to fuck goats while on crack. You can tell because the documentation says... */" If you don't like this, don't read it.
Another argument is that the rumours (I didn't read the code myself) that flew around when the Windows code got out were that there was rampant profanity in it as well. This isn't to say that it's ok to do because Microsoft does it, just that it's probably nearly universal to swear in comments about broken hardware/software/whatever and the difficulties associated with working around it.
Honestly, I'd be worried about software that didn't have profanity in the comments. Mostly I'd assume the authors either trusted the documentation about everything (in which case it won't work) or just avoided completely doing the hard work (in which case it's a useless academic project) or perhaps just don't have a sense of humour (in which case I feel bad for them).
yeah no kidding!! is there a script to turn the pms daemon off?
No, it appears in the process table as [kpmsd], which means it's a kernel thread. It can't be killed, although if you wait long enough it'll terminate on its own.
Also, running the thing as a sysadmin-controlled port scanner means that you can tailor the payload to pop up a dialog box saying "Hey, Stupid, You clicked on the MyDoom Virus and got yourself infected, call the Help Desk at 1-555-555-31337 to get your machine cleaned up"
Or better yet, a popup message that says "Hey, Stupid, You clicked on the MyDoom Virus and got yourself infected, call Human Resources at 1-555-IM-FIRED to arrange your exit interview and turn in your cardkey and laptop."
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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Democracy is meaningless if the only choices you have are indistinguishable. If a Diebold machine is programmed to throw an election to (for example) Bush, or Gore, what difference would it make? They're identical candidates anyway. It's not like any other party would have the resources to buy an election, so whatever crooked voting machines do will be no worse than what we have right now. The guy who wrote the Diebold memo was right, really: if voting mattered, it would be illegal.
If for some reason a system doesn't work properly, or an injury or natural change over time makes the system unable to identify you, how will you ever prove you're really you? If you lose your password and can't get it back, maybe you lose your email. If you lose your biometric identity and can't get it back, you lose everything you've done in life to that point!
Sure government clerks are idiots, just like people with similar positions in the private sector. By involvement in government, I meant running the show, not collecting taxes or misrouting phone calls. People like congressmen or their equivalents, staffers and advisors, judges, FBI agents, NSA researchers, spies, consuls, and so on. Those are all highly skilled positions that attract top people.
You both have a point. The reality is that problem-solving is taught in the US. The ability or desire to learn it is what separates the successful from the failures. Those who never learn it are destined for the same kind of life that the Indians who don't learn it will have: subsistence semi-skilled labor (in a rural economy it would be subsistence farming; in a manufacturing economy perhaps assembly line work; in a service economy a call center or clerking position). That trip is NOWHERE, man. Learn it, though, and you've got potential. If you exhibit potential in a place like India, it's unfortunate because, statistically, you're likely too poor to complete your education and properly take advantage of your skills. Since there are millions of people with similar skills who did finish their education, you won't be able to compete with them for the relatively small number of decent (read: urban, technical) jobs.
Every American I've spoken with who works extensively with Indians or Southeast Asians makes the same observation: the workers can memorize a procedure but never display any initiative. I'm not 100% satisfied that this is a product of culture or education, although I'm sure both play a role. I have found that most American workers have the same problem. How many times do you hear "I'll have to ask my boss" or "I don't think we can do that, we only do X" from an American worker? Hint: order something from a telco sometime. Instead, I suspect the reason so many Americans experience this in Asia is simply that there are so many people there, that even if the proportion of unimaginative people were the same everywhere, there would still be more unimaginitive Asian workers than American companies will ever be able to hire at subsistence wages. The result is that those in India or elsewhere who do have imagination and problem-sovlving ability aren't going to work in call centers and factories. They're doing the same things their American counterparts are doing: engineering (software development isn't engineering), government, infrastructure development, and empire building. And why shouldn't they? But the end result is that the type of people most Americans who have Internet access are accustomed to interacting with are invisible in your typical outsourcing project. I would guess, however, that the typical Indian call center worker and his Texan counterpart have similar skills, abilities, and outlook on life.
And I'd lay 2-1 odds this California boy can't understand either of them.
It's fairly shocking how many people advocate monitoring, censorship, and shame as a substitute for guidance and teaching. The Internet is nothing new or special, it's just like everything else we have but more so. Your children can IM a friend, or they can call. They can send email, or they can write letters. They can download porn, or they can buy Hustler at the corner store. They can steal music on gnutella, or they can steal it from the record store. They can read subversive texts about drug use, rebellion, and weaponry by HTTP, or by the lights in the county library.
Face facts: all of these things exist and are real. You cannot shield or shelter your children from anything that is real. Eventually they will come in contact with some or all of these "hidden, naughty, inappropriate" ideas, images, and contacts. So as a parent, you have a choice: you can teach them to think for themselves, and introduce them over time to some of these things, guiding them and helping them to develop their own ideas about ethics, morality, and justice. Or, you can try to shield them until they inevitably leave your care. This can succeed or fail; it's difficult to know which has worse consequences. In one case, you have a child - now an adult - still incapable of dealing with the world around him or her, frightened and vulnerable with no independent thinking ability. In the other, you have a child - now an adult - with an unhealthy fascination and/or shame at knowing the existence of these things. And since you've failed to shield them from this dangerous knowledge, they've acquired it instead from others - riddled no doubt with inaccuracies and colored by fear of discovery. Is that any way for a 25-year-old to live? This will be your child...
In short, nothing on the Internet is any more or less dangerous than the real-world counterparts that so worried parents 20, 50, or 500 years ago. There's more of it, it's more accessible, and it's centralized. But there's nothing new here. Any parenting philosophy you have in the physical world can and should be applied as-is in the virtual world. And I hope for the sake of society and your own children's happiness that it's one of openness, honesty, and independence. Since nearly all children survive physically to adulthood today, your main function as a parent is to prepare your children mentally. Hiding reality will not serve them well.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignoring for a moment the question of whether it's buggy, who gives a damn about Solaris 8? That was the 90s, man. OpenSolaris is based on Solaris 10, the release of which is imminent. It's a boatload of new technology plus two full releases' worth of bug fixes removed from Solaris 8. If you had a bad experience, we're sorry, but please don't continue feeding people misinformation based on a badly outdated release. Should I talk about my experience with Yggdrasil Plug and Play Linux (based on kernel 0.99!) in 1993 and pretend my difficulties then are reasons to avoid Debian GNU/Linux 3.0?
Next, pedantry.
Yes, sed and awk have bugs filed against them. Probably everything except maybe /usr/bin/true does. Since you didn't say what kind of bugs, it's hard to assess the legitimacy of your complaint. If you'd care to elaborate, there's a chance your problem can be fixed. Otherwise everyone just assumes you're a crank.
Most of the "bugs" in Solaris userland that draw a lot of complaints from GNU users are not bugs at all but rather artifacts of painstaking maintenance of compatibility with long-extant standards. The GNU tools you're familiar with follow different (or their own) standards, because backwards-compatibility is not a GNU priority. It's a constraint imposed on Solaris development by our customers, who seem pleased with the results. You can in some cases make the GNU tools behave similarly if you wish. Solaris also has several different versions of these tools, each of which matches different incompatible standards. You might just be using the wrong one.
Finally, Linux doesn't have awk, sed, or tar. It's a kernel. I've assumed here that you mean the GNU tools, though of course each distro ships its own version and combination of specific tools, but it's certainly possible to build a system with a Linux kernel and non-GNU userland. In fact, soon it will be possible, at least in theory, to make a system with a Linux kernel and a mostly-Solaris userland, if you really want to.
Ok, on to your other concerns.
Most x86 hardware doesn't suffer from the transient error bug that the non-ECC cache of the ultrasparcII processor.
What does this have to do with Solaris? If you think x86 systems are more reliable, you can run Solaris on those instead.
Linux works on parking meters.
So does Windows CE. Should we all start using that? Standard Linux won't run on less than about 4MB of memory, even if you're talking about Linux 2.0. Newer means bigger. Solaris as shipped today by Sun also requires more resources than would normally be found in a small embedded system. It's a safe bet that, like Linux, the SunOS kernel could be reduced sufficiently for such an application. It's just software and work. The fact that a highly modified version of Linux can run a parking meter is a curiosity and a testament to the effort of the hackers who did it, not evidence of inherent software superiority.
Solaris doesn't work out of the box with an A1000.
I can only assume this is yet another reference to some past bad experience you've had. Since you're not telling us what it is, it's impossible (a) to know if it's still a problem, and (b) to fix it if so. Please, be specific if you want to complain. Hint: referencing bug IDs is a good idea.
Most quality nics work out of the box with linux.
Which nics would you like to use on Solaris? In the 10/100 space there's iprb (Intel), elxl (3Com 3c9xx), dnet (Tulip/21xx0), and about a half dozen others. In the Gb/10Gb space there's e1000g (Intel), bge (Broadcom), sk98sol (SysKonnect), and xge (S2IO). See the reference manual for drivers if you want to participate in an informed discussion. The examples I gave don't include the various vendor-supplied drivers or any of the Sun-specific d
The Ericsson pc card presents a standard serial port interface to the user, and a quick google will get you the needed commands and modifications to pppd to use it. I have done this with 100% success. Performance is roughly what you'd expect from a 56k modem; ie, not great, but it does work in a lot of places where no other connectivity is available.
Fortunately, you don't need flowery prose or concise diction to be an effective advocate for change. In fact, you don't even need to be able to speak or write in English or any other language. All you need to do is keep your wallet in your pocket: if you buy a product that needs firmware, and it's not available on terms you can accept, you are part of the problem. Like it or not, once you buy a product, you have no further influence on its maker. They've got your money and they really don't care what you think. Do the smart thing: don't buy it.
This isn't bad, but people with money and power have a way of corrupting this sort of thing, and it's not unlikely that randomly selected people, even those from far away, would be partisan. The check for no party affiliation is still important. And in a state the size of Texas or California, it's unlikely that randomly-selected citizens with no party affiliation will know much about the politics of regions other than the one they live in.
Better yet, come up with a computer program that will, given a population size and a number of districts to draw (equal population in each), draw districts with the minimum sum perimiter. Don't feed it any demographic information, just population and street locations and require that the boundries fall on streets.
First, who writes the program? Who evaluates it for correctness? Who decides which one to buy? I shy away from computers in this area even though the problem is best solved by them, simply because people trust computers too much, the solution is too hard for humans to verify correct, and the software to do this is an obvious point for tampering. Second, it's not quite so simple to implement, since in some areas streets and highways aren't sufficient to district properly - you also need rivers, streams, latitude and longitude lines, survey markers, and sometimes more to divide a region fairly because not all district boundaries are in cities (in fact, I'd argue that they shouldn't be if possible). That said, anything chosen should be natural or obvious for use as a boundary, but these things aren't trivial to represent to a computer. You also need to know the exact coords for every residence, which is not accurately known by any mapping database. This applies to human-generated maps, too, but at least in that case we aren't pretending it's perfect.
While we're at it, the peremptory strike should be eliminated. If you can't show cause that the person is unfit for duty, he or she serves whether you like it or not. Voir dire should be limited as well: unless you have some relationship with a party or have significant knowledge of the case, you serve. Potential jurors don't need to answer questions about their childhood. Are you materially biased, or aren't you? Simple. In return, lying during voir dire should be made a high felony with a minimum 10 year sentence. Don't fuck with justice.
Once we've fixed the jury system, the next step is compulsory service on redistricting boards. I've had enough gerrymandering. 9 citizens who have never been members of, contributed to, or registered to vote as an affiliate of any political party should be randomly selected and forced to sit in a room until they're redrawn the districts according to a few simple anti-gerrymandering rules (only natural boundaries, number of boundaries must be minimised, population of all districts must be approximately equal). It'd take less time and be a hell of a lot more fair. Oh yeah - and any member who votes in favour of a gerrymandered district goes to prison for 20 years. Don't fuck with my representative democracy.
Contact your state legislature. Suggest that jury exemptions be eliminated for anything other than medical (mental or physical) inability to perform the duties expected of a juror. I've never understood this either; as a citizen you are expected to do certain things from time to time, and sitting on a jury is one of them. "I work for a living" isn't a valid excuse; we all do.
Clearly there are lots of ways to avoid this problem. So many in fact that I think it outweighs the banks' desire to build confidence in electronic transactions; it's fine to indemnify accountholders against fraud, interception of information when efforts are made to send it securely, and physical theft or extortion. It's another thing entirely to protect idiots at the expense of everyone else.
What a crock. This "solution" isn't a solution at all. If liquid CO2 in deep wells or the ground were a long-term sustainable storage mechanism for carbon, why is it that there is no such carbon storage existing naturally? Limestone, biomass, (living things, oil, gas), and oceans are all viable carbon storage media. I have no reason to believe the process described is a safe or effective way to store carbon so as to ensure indefinitely that it does not end up in the atmosphere.
It would be much better to continue research on other power sources, some of which are already commercially viable, or continue research on making lime from something other than limestone. If all that sounds too hard, plant a fucking tree. It'll do more long-term good than trying to sell people a way to make CO2 some future generation's problem.
There are only three kinds of energy available to us: solar, nuclear, and kinetic. The kinetic energy is that of the planet's motion through space; it includes a rotational component, its motion around the sun, the sun's motion around the galaxy, and the galaxy's motion through intergalactic space. We do not want to tap either of the first two (this would result in much greater climate change, since earth would turn more slowly and/or move closer to the sun), and the other two are impractical to exploit. Therefore we are left with either nuclear power or solar (light) energy and its immediate derivatives: wind, falling water, solar heat, and thermal differential. If we cannot find ways to make use of the five solar energy sources, or a way to make exploitation of nuclear energy safe, we will find our current living standards unsustainable within 200 years. This junk is just a temporary hack that would cost more in the long run than just finding cleaner energy sources.
Again, since the reporter didn't bother to find out the exact financial condition of these manufacturers, it's almost impossible to know what this number really means. As such, the article is of no value.
In case you need a concrete example of how useless averages are: Northern Ireland is populated mainly by Catholics and Protestants of a few denominations. So, on average, its religious leaning might just be called "Christian," like that of many European nations, or even the ultra-PC "Judeo-Christian" so commonly used to describe the United States' religious tendencies. Silly, eh? Here's another: the average temperature on the moon is about 0 degrees C, like much of Earth's temperate areas. Surely the climate there would be as salubrious as that of, say, Minneapolis, right? Of course, the 100-degree-C days and minus-100-degree-C nights might be difficult to survive, but on average you'd be quite comfortable wearing a heavy jacket!
Like a lot of people, you seem to think demographics as a science has more value than it really does. In fact, two people belonging to the same political party and identifying their political beliefs the same way might have numerous differences of opinion. They identify themselves the same way mainly because they've been made to believe they have only two specific political choices, neither of which has ever been well-defined. Sometimes variance, real or perceived, is so large that an average is meaningless and the population as a whole must be described in greater detail. Politics and religion certainly qualify. Making a statement that libertarian and Republican views are somehow similar or related because they "average out" in your perception of some arbitrary (and quite poor) model is deceptive.
You mentioned you're a news director. I wonder whether that has influenced your thinking - I can't imagine trying to distill important and complex topics like the direction of a nation's foreign policy into a 2-minute segment containing mainly pompous gravitas from some actor and self-serving sound bites from politicians, or a 500-word op-ed column. And yet this is what passes for in-depth civil discourse in America - and many other places as well.
And as a libertarian, I'm very disappointed that a news editor doesn't understand even vaguely what libertarianism is. A libertarian believes in personal freedom and personal responsibility. Government interference in individuals' lives is the primary issue for libertarians. This means that, like most Republicans, we believe in reduced government regulation of business and lower tax rates. It means that, like most Greens, we believe in decriminalization of drug use. And it means that, like most Democrats, we believe in a less interventionist foreign policy. In short, libertarianism is a set of values that, expressed individually, have broad-based support among many people who do not identify themselves as libertarians or belong to the Libertarian Party. Libertarian viewpoints do not necessarily have an "opposite" in the way that most people assume left and right oppose one another. The parties libertarians would probably be least likely to vote for would be Communist and Nazi. Even then, however, a thoughtful libertarian probably would find a few issues with which he or she agrees with each party.
To suggest that libertarians hold views overall similar to the Republican Party is absurd. The major parties and major government structures in the United States today are by definition centrist. They are large corporate entities seeking primarily to maintain their power, privilege, and prestige. They do this in two ways: first, by manipulating election law to their own mutual advantage; second, by formulating public policy based not on any particular set of values or ideology but on the results of focus groups and polling. Therefore, in the current political climate, Democrats and Republicans have far more in common with each other than with any other party or political identity (left, right, etc.). Their platform is continued wealth and power for the political elite. The planks they develop for any particular election are merely a means to that end and bear little or no relation to any traditional positioning on the political spectrum.
Minor parties do not have any power base to protect, and are therefore free to develop platforms and strategies based on their opinions and values. Often these platforms are issue-oriented; that is, the minor parties define their platforms plank by plank based on their values as applied to each specific issue. Quite often these platforms do not as a whole fit comfortably in a particular slot on the political spectrum. In part this is because the spectrum itself is a model, a stylized view of reality suitable more for reducing a complicated situation to sound bites than for accurately describing a rich political landscape. In fact, this spectrum itself is mainly a tool for the major parties to use in trying to differentiate themselves from one another by selecting a small number of issues and using the spectrum to identify the "other" party as being on the opposite ("EXTREME!" "RADICAL!") end of the spectrum on these issues. In practice the two major parties have virtually identical platforms that both fit very neatly into a formulaic mold that the electorate has come to expect. Because most voters do not maintain awareness of any issues not being used as a differentiator in a particular well-covered election, the broader issues on which the major parties do not differ never receive any significant voter attention. Examples of such issues are some of the very cases I described above as key libertarian viewpoints. Voters are not interested, for example, in considering seriously whether the social security system is a viable and appropriate solution to the problems it was intended to solve. Because any party that even asks this question risks alienating a large voting bloc, neither will do so (and if one did, the other major party would be sure to seize the opportunity to attract that bloc and thus be nearly assured of victory), so the issue remains submerged.
Windows is the anti-Perl. It makes the easy things hard and the hard things impossible. I think at the end of the day it all reduces to the fact that Microsoft doesn't understand the kind of things I want to do. If I wanted to write a paper using Word, it probably would mostly work, provided I wasn't too picky about formatting or layout. But if I'm writing a paper, I want detailed control - the kind of control TeX gives me. And most of the time I'm not writing papers at all - I'm writing code, cross-compiling it, and netbooting the result on some other system via RARP and TFTP. This kind of task, admittedly, is hard. But Unix makes it possible, while Windows makes it impossible. And every single piece of software you add to Windows (1a) costs money or (1b) sucks or (1c) more likely, both; (2) installs its own libraries over the system copies, destabilizing the system irreversibly, and (3) suffers from the second-worst user interface ever designed (only the 1-button MacOS7/8/9 interface is worse). The sad truth is that Microsoft has made a system so complex that no other vendor can produce reliable software for the platform; unfortunately, Microsoft's products with few exceptions suck so badly (or are nonexistent - find me a Microsoft RARP server) as to be useless.
I wish suits would stop blathering about each other's products because really it's just a waste of time. The source is so obviously biased that even reading is pointless.
The virus only kills computers running Windows. Likewise, AIDS only kills people who have sex and/or shoot up. So if you don't meet the infection criteria, you're right, you won't have to worry. Once every computer/person who can be infected is, all you need to worry about is what to do with the lost data/bodies.
Not being glib, really, but a worm that kills its host is preferable to one that just lets the box be taken over. Imagine if AIDS never killed anyone but instead turned its victims into immortal zombies under the total control of $EVIL_ORGANIZATION_OF_YOUR_CHOICE.
Meanwhile, the stupid user, being stupid after all, merely notices that his system "seems to be running a bit slow today" and promptly downloads a piece of spyware advertised to "Optimize your Internet Connection!"
I think we need a new law. That law might read: 1. Any person who circulates, spreads, activates, distributes, or causes to be circulated, spread, activated, or distributed, knowingly or unknowingly, any worm, trojan, or virus (see Definitions), shall be guilty of an A felony and shall be fined by the court an amount not less than one million dollars ($1,000,000) nor more than one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) for each such act, and shall be imprisoned for a period not less than twenty (20) years nor more than the term of his or her natural life for each such act. Additionally, any person who does so knowingly shall be sentenced to either of, subject to the court's discretion, (a) imprisonment for not less than the term of his or her natural life, or (b) death. 2. Any person who benefits from an act described in (1) above shall be guilty of an A felony and shall be subject to the same penalties described above. 3. If an act in (1) or (2) above gives rise to a cause of action for damages or injury in a civil proceeding, the injured parties shall be entitled to collect treble damages from the offenders, including any and all persons who benefited from the acts. If the beneficiary of such an act is a corporate entity, the shareholders and directors of that entity shall also be individually liable for all such damages, any indemnification agreement notwithstanding. In the event of the bankruptcy of one or more offenders, indebtedness for such a judgment shall be primary and shall survive the bankruptcy reorganization. In its sole discretion, the court may order up to one hundred percent (100%) of offender's earnings to be garnished until such time as this judgment is satisfied, and may attach to any of an offender's assets as deemed necessary to satisfy the judgment. If, in the discretion of the court, such steps will not be sufficient to satisfy the judgment, the court may order the offender to perform while incarcerated such labors as may be necessary to satisfy the judgment.
It's simple, really. Unleash a worm, and your life is over. Hire someone to do it, and your life is over. Use a botnet to spam, and your life is over. How much harsher can we make it? I invite comments, especially from lawyers, on making such a law airtight, ironclad, and as harsh as the Constition permits.
Another argument is that the rumours (I didn't read the code myself) that flew around when the Windows code got out were that there was rampant profanity in it as well. This isn't to say that it's ok to do because Microsoft does it, just that it's probably nearly universal to swear in comments about broken hardware/software/whatever and the difficulties associated with working around it.
Honestly, I'd be worried about software that didn't have profanity in the comments. Mostly I'd assume the authors either trusted the documentation about everything (in which case it won't work) or just avoided completely doing the hard work (in which case it's a useless academic project) or perhaps just don't have a sense of humour (in which case I feel bad for them).
No, it appears in the process table as [kpmsd], which means it's a kernel thread. It can't be killed, although if you wait long enough it'll terminate on its own.
Or better yet, a popup message that says "Hey, Stupid, You clicked on the MyDoom Virus and got yourself infected, call Human Resources at 1-555-IM-FIRED to arrange your exit interview and turn in your cardkey and laptop."
Shouldn't that be +1, Heretic?
Democracy is meaningless if the only choices you have are indistinguishable. If a Diebold machine is programmed to throw an election to (for example) Bush, or Gore, what difference would it make? They're identical candidates anyway. It's not like any other party would have the resources to buy an election, so whatever crooked voting machines do will be no worse than what we have right now. The guy who wrote the Diebold memo was right, really: if voting mattered, it would be illegal.
If for some reason a system doesn't work properly, or an injury or natural change over time makes the system unable to identify you, how will you ever prove you're really you? If you lose your password and can't get it back, maybe you lose your email. If you lose your biometric identity and can't get it back, you lose everything you've done in life to that point!
Whoa. This is scary. This post could have been word for word written by my hand. Come work with me, man. :)
Sure government clerks are idiots, just like people with similar positions in the private sector. By involvement in government, I meant running the show, not collecting taxes or misrouting phone calls. People like congressmen or their equivalents, staffers and advisors, judges, FBI agents, NSA researchers, spies, consuls, and so on. Those are all highly skilled positions that attract top people.
Every American I've spoken with who works extensively with Indians or Southeast Asians makes the same observation: the workers can memorize a procedure but never display any initiative. I'm not 100% satisfied that this is a product of culture or education, although I'm sure both play a role. I have found that most American workers have the same problem. How many times do you hear "I'll have to ask my boss" or "I don't think we can do that, we only do X" from an American worker? Hint: order something from a telco sometime. Instead, I suspect the reason so many Americans experience this in Asia is simply that there are so many people there, that even if the proportion of unimaginative people were the same everywhere, there would still be more unimaginitive Asian workers than American companies will ever be able to hire at subsistence wages. The result is that those in India or elsewhere who do have imagination and problem-sovlving ability aren't going to work in call centers and factories. They're doing the same things their American counterparts are doing: engineering (software development isn't engineering), government, infrastructure development, and empire building. And why shouldn't they? But the end result is that the type of people most Americans who have Internet access are accustomed to interacting with are invisible in your typical outsourcing project. I would guess, however, that the typical Indian call center worker and his Texan counterpart have similar skills, abilities, and outlook on life.
And I'd lay 2-1 odds this California boy can't understand either of them.
Face facts: all of these things exist and are real. You cannot shield or shelter your children from anything that is real. Eventually they will come in contact with some or all of these "hidden, naughty, inappropriate" ideas, images, and contacts. So as a parent, you have a choice: you can teach them to think for themselves, and introduce them over time to some of these things, guiding them and helping them to develop their own ideas about ethics, morality, and justice. Or, you can try to shield them until they inevitably leave your care. This can succeed or fail; it's difficult to know which has worse consequences. In one case, you have a child - now an adult - still incapable of dealing with the world around him or her, frightened and vulnerable with no independent thinking ability. In the other, you have a child - now an adult - with an unhealthy fascination and/or shame at knowing the existence of these things. And since you've failed to shield them from this dangerous knowledge, they've acquired it instead from others - riddled no doubt with inaccuracies and colored by fear of discovery. Is that any way for a 25-year-old to live? This will be your child...
In short, nothing on the Internet is any more or less dangerous than the real-world counterparts that so worried parents 20, 50, or 500 years ago. There's more of it, it's more accessible, and it's centralized. But there's nothing new here. Any parenting philosophy you have in the physical world can and should be applied as-is in the virtual world. And I hope for the sake of society and your own children's happiness that it's one of openness, honesty, and independence. Since nearly all children survive physically to adulthood today, your main function as a parent is to prepare your children mentally. Hiding reality will not serve them well.