I have often thought that the Police should purchase a large number of indiscriminant short duration RF emitters that mimic the signal of expensive radar guns. These could be moved around, planted in locations all around cities and Interstate highways.
If properly designed there would be little or no way for people with radar detectors to know if it was a real police radar gun or a dummy-unit emitter. The emitters could be made very low cost and would not need to be attended.
It would really knock a hole in the whole 'Radar Detector' market.
Actually, the RFID will be installed early in each good citizen's life by well meaning liberals, at which time the person will also receive his National Health Insurance ID number. Machines at all fast food outlets will scan for these numbers to determine if the citizen is allowed to eat more fast food or if he has eaten his limit for the week.
I had sendmail running on all my Slackware 3.2 boxes back in the day, when I was fooling around and learning TCP/IP networking. It was amusing for a time to send email messages from box to box on my network of cheap 386sx systems (cheapest Linux boxes I could afford back in the day).
It was only amusing up to a point, though. These days with security-concious Linux default installs not enabling stuff like sendmail, it's just no fun at all.
I have always thought that an EMP generator would be a useful accessory to have on your robot in one of those Robot Wars programs they televise. Make a simple robot that only has hardened electron tube circuitry in it, but also an EMP generator. Your robot wheels out in the arena with the other battling robots. You press the 'EMP' button on your remote control (vaccum tube based, of course). The resulting EMP takes out all the electronics in all the other robots, the camera televising the event, all the spectator's PDAs, cell phones, and beepers.
Obviously, the broadcast signal would go to snow, but it would certainly be sweet to witness it in person. Your robot would obviously win.
Most Internet users could give a flying fsck wether their IP has any potential email server blocked. Most Internet users don't run mail servers. Since the real solution to Spam is shutting down the automatic freedom to run a mail server, and limiting the net to certified/white-listed servers, it's really a moot point. Why the hell should any idiot be allowed to put up a mail server? Why should any idiot NEED to? All it does it make it possible for viruses with built in SMTP capabilities to spread.
Or, until SPEWS provider does the natural thing, which is pitch SPEWS from their servers for being a bandwidth sink. Mail admins will then have to take the initiative of throwing out the old, stale SPEWS list, but then, that's life.
What goes around comes around, and all the spam/anti-spam games are dubious in varying ways.
If there were a Godwin corrolary, it would apply to Usenet, with it's week-month-year long rant threads. Not to a weblog where discussion threads almost never last more than 24 hours.
Acutally, Mozilla does so many irrelevant things that many people could never imagine needing or wanting to do. The 'themes' bloat is an example of this that adds significant overhead for no particular purpose.
It's almost like the 'compile a kernal, because you can, and you don't know what else to do to keep the machine busy' syndrome that some adopters of Linux fall into.
I don't get the 'jealosy' part. I don't look at idiot motorheads in their chromed-out whizzy-cars and feel jealously. I shrug and just think of them as 'tools' and/or people with a different obsession than mine.
The Internet is a consensus-based network, based on protocols which were intended to be robust, but never intended to scale to the degree that they have. Much of the Internet is based on the idea that the people using it could agree to external rules to keep it civil.
This whole scheme breaks down badly as the Internet and it's protocols are scaled to the 'big mean world'. Spam is the result in the domain of email. Things like this low bandwidth DoS attack are the result in the domain of TCP.
Problems like this are inherent in the very design of the Internet. Any global network whose rules are coached in terms like 'Request For Comment' is asking for problems.
These sorts of problems are what is going to force the balkanization of the Internet. Look for the net to slowly migrate toward a group of proprietary ISPs all talking to one another through gateways. It's not far off.
We can't all get along like this is 1987 and we're all happy Unix-heads at various scientific institutions much longer.
Judging from the sweet hardware that's now starting to show up at municipal auctions (i.e. three machines, all >= 400 MHz that I got recently, all three for $10), we're right on schedule with the tax raises.
I am predicting that this is the 'last shakeout' of hardware, though. Regular folk are getting smarter and won't let lazy programmers get away with the bloat much longer. I don't expect to be able to get skid-loads of CPUs for pennies much longer.
Imagine the problem at the landfills if everybody thought like you do.... All that nice hardware piling up. Instead, many people, most people, in fact, get along with what they have. For 95% of what people do with computers, and that includes (consuming) multimedia, a Pentium Pro 200 with the full load of RAM the motherboard can take would suffice.
Although they'd have to 'suffer' with less distracting eye-candy and 'themeable bullshit.'
Hot-dog gamers should go out and buy a console. Your upgrade-for-the-sake-of-upgrade dicksize lan parties are tiresome.
It's really embarassing that people turn ugly and hostile when somebody brings up something that was a strong criticism of Microsoft and a virtue of Linux and OSS not that long ago.
Bloat is bad. Software can and should converge. That means, as software technology gets better, it should become more bug-free and more optimized, and should run faster. We should be able to put the latest Linux distribution on the same 486 boxes we ran Slackware 3.2 on and have the option of it running faster and better.
However, so many people in the OSS community have become addicted to the exhaust fumes from chasing the tailpipe of Microsoft's Gee-Wizmobile that we're contaminated with the same sort of arrogant 'get new hardware, buster' comments that used to come from Microsoft zealots with every new bloated Windows release.
According to some defintions, Linux isn't an "operating system" at all. It's just a kernal that various people have incorporated into Operating Systems, that are often referred to as 'Linux distributions.'
As such, there are many, many permutations of combinations of libraries out there running on machines that people claim to be running 'The Linux Operating System.'
And Linux will remain the basis of hobbyist's OSes. I would hate for that to ever end. It also can and is rolled out by some distributors as a formal OS, and they do a pretty good job of it.
In some programming tasks I've accomplished well, 'the comments' were the first part of the code that I wrote. Peppered with TODO comments where there were holes in the code, the comments provide a framework for the code design.
From my way of thinking, that amounts to 'documenting before you write the code,' which is actually pretty important for any non-trivial task.
Most of the highly technical writing that I have seen in the workplace was written using FrameMaker. Microsoft Word is really poor at 'formally outlined' writing tasks. With any complicated Word document, the formatting explodes mysteriously the first time someone pokes at it.
It reminds me of Microsoft's product 'Visual Basic for MS-DOS' which they only released one version of. It's something I picked up the 'Professional' box set of at a swapmeet a few years back. And it's pretty cool if you want an ASCII Windows-like GUI environment that runs on the lowliest of DOS hardware.
You may have been meaning to be ironic, but you have a point.
Singers who have to pull the microphone halfway down their throat have airy, thin voices. Since almost all of 'pop music' is about having some 'gee whiz' difference or uniqueness (carefully confined to a narrow range of allowed 'uniqueneses, of course') it's no surprise that pop musicians sing that way.
There is a classic human musical voice and a proper way to sing, i.e. the way Opera Singers with years of voice training sing. If pop musicians tried to project their voice with their bent 'effect' way of vocalizing, they'd rip out their vocal chords (which often wouldn't be a loss).
Slashdot Mirror
Off Topic:
I have often thought that the Police should purchase a large number of indiscriminant short duration RF emitters that mimic the signal of expensive radar guns. These could be moved around, planted in locations all around cities and Interstate highways.
If properly designed there would be little or no way for people with radar detectors to know if it was a real police radar gun or a dummy-unit emitter. The emitters could be made very low cost and would not need to be attended.
It would really knock a hole in the whole 'Radar Detector' market.
Actually, the RFID will be installed early in each good citizen's life by well meaning liberals, at which time the person will also receive his National Health Insurance ID number. Machines at all fast food outlets will scan for these numbers to determine if the citizen is allowed to eat more fast food or if he has eaten his limit for the week.
I had sendmail running on all my Slackware 3.2 boxes back in the day, when I was fooling around and learning TCP/IP networking. It was amusing for a time to send email messages from box to box on my network of cheap 386sx systems (cheapest Linux boxes I could afford back in the day).
It was only amusing up to a point, though. These days with security-concious Linux default installs not enabling stuff like sendmail, it's just no fun at all.
I have always thought that an EMP generator would be a useful accessory to have on your robot in one of those Robot Wars programs they televise. Make a simple robot that only has hardened electron tube circuitry in it, but also an EMP generator. Your robot wheels out in the arena with the other battling robots. You press the 'EMP' button on your remote control (vaccum tube based, of course). The resulting EMP takes out all the electronics in all the other robots, the camera televising the event, all the spectator's PDAs, cell phones, and beepers.
Obviously, the broadcast signal would go to snow, but it would certainly be sweet to witness it in person. Your robot would obviously win.
Most Internet users could give a flying fsck wether their IP has any potential email server blocked. Most Internet users don't run mail servers. Since the real solution to Spam is shutting down the automatic freedom to run a mail server, and limiting the net to certified/white-listed servers, it's really a moot point. Why the hell should any idiot be allowed to put up a mail server? Why should any idiot NEED to? All it does it make it possible for viruses with built in SMTP capabilities to spread.
Or, until SPEWS provider does the natural thing, which is pitch SPEWS from their servers for being a bandwidth sink. Mail admins will then have to take the initiative of throwing out the old, stale SPEWS list, but then, that's life.
What goes around comes around, and all the spam/anti-spam games are dubious in varying ways.
If there were a Godwin corrolary, it would apply to Usenet, with it's week-month-year long rant threads. Not to a weblog where discussion threads almost never last more than 24 hours.
You handed your card deck to an 'operator.'
Basically a flunky.
I don't know where you got the 'engineer/priest' bit from. I was there and the 'operator' was not a high ranking fellow in the order of things.
His name is: Phillip Screwdriver.
Why would you install an expensive, licensed compiler on all 1000 nodes of a cluster???
Acutally, Mozilla does so many irrelevant things that many people could never imagine needing or wanting to do. The 'themes' bloat is an example of this that adds significant overhead for no particular purpose.
It's almost like the 'compile a kernal, because you can, and you don't know what else to do to keep the machine busy' syndrome that some adopters of Linux fall into.
I don't get the 'jealosy' part. I don't look at idiot motorheads in their chromed-out whizzy-cars and feel jealously. I shrug and just think of them as 'tools' and/or people with a different obsession than mine.
The Internet is a consensus-based network, based on protocols which were intended to be robust, but never intended to scale to the degree that they have. Much of the Internet is based on the idea that the people using it could agree to external rules to keep it civil.
This whole scheme breaks down badly as the Internet and it's protocols are scaled to the 'big mean world'. Spam is the result in the domain of email. Things like this low bandwidth DoS attack are the result in the domain of TCP.
Problems like this are inherent in the very design of the Internet. Any global network whose rules are coached in terms like 'Request For Comment' is asking for problems.
These sorts of problems are what is going to force the balkanization of the Internet. Look for the net to slowly migrate toward a group of proprietary ISPs all talking to one another through gateways. It's not far off.
We can't all get along like this is 1987 and we're all happy Unix-heads at various scientific institutions much longer.
Judging from the sweet hardware that's now starting to show up at municipal auctions (i.e. three machines, all >= 400 MHz that I got recently, all three for $10), we're right on schedule with the tax raises.
I am predicting that this is the 'last shakeout' of hardware, though. Regular folk are getting smarter and won't let lazy programmers get away with the bloat much longer. I don't expect to be able to get skid-loads of CPUs for pennies much longer.
Imagine the problem at the landfills if everybody thought like you do.... All that nice hardware piling up. Instead, many people, most people, in fact, get along with what they have. For 95% of what people do with computers, and that includes (consuming) multimedia, a Pentium Pro 200 with the full load of RAM the motherboard can take would suffice.
Although they'd have to 'suffer' with less distracting eye-candy and 'themeable bullshit.'
Hot-dog gamers should go out and buy a console. Your upgrade-for-the-sake-of-upgrade dicksize lan parties are tiresome.
It's really embarassing that people turn ugly and hostile when somebody brings up something that was a strong criticism of Microsoft and a virtue of Linux and OSS not that long ago.
Bloat is bad. Software can and should converge. That means, as software technology gets better, it should become more bug-free and more optimized, and should run faster. We should be able to put the latest Linux distribution on the same 486 boxes we ran Slackware 3.2 on and have the option of it running faster and better.
However, so many people in the OSS community have become addicted to the exhaust fumes from chasing the tailpipe of Microsoft's Gee-Wizmobile that we're contaminated with the same sort of arrogant 'get new hardware, buster' comments that used to come from Microsoft zealots with every new bloated Windows release.
... EVERYTHING on Linux must be installed ONLY from the source code.
Ummm....
This is a classic example of why Linux is still not quite ready for prime time on the desktop.
According to some defintions, Linux isn't an "operating system" at all. It's just a kernal that various people have incorporated into Operating Systems, that are often referred to as 'Linux distributions.'
As such, there are many, many permutations of combinations of libraries out there running on machines that people claim to be running 'The Linux Operating System.'
And Linux will remain the basis of hobbyist's OSes. I would hate for that to ever end. It also can and is rolled out by some distributors as a formal OS, and they do a pretty good job of it.
The mistake is pretending it's all one OS.
In some programming tasks I've accomplished well, 'the comments' were the first part of the code that I wrote. Peppered with TODO comments where there were holes in the code, the comments provide a framework for the code design.
From my way of thinking, that amounts to 'documenting before you write the code,' which is actually pretty important for any non-trivial task.
Most of the highly technical writing that I have seen in the workplace was written using FrameMaker. Microsoft Word is really poor at 'formally outlined' writing tasks. With any complicated Word document, the formatting explodes mysteriously the first time someone pokes at it.
Hell, MIPS is more open than PPC or x86, if you're going to be that way.
However, MIPS has even fewer desktop choices with regard to software than PPC.
Conversely, 'what happens if Unix dies?'
An equally inane question.
Do you have an actual cite of Microsoft doing that?
2003 called, and is so sick of all the eye-candy bloat that insulin may soon be needed.
It reminds me of Microsoft's product 'Visual Basic for MS-DOS' which they only released one version of. It's something I picked up the 'Professional' box set of at a swapmeet a few years back. And it's pretty cool if you want an ASCII Windows-like GUI environment that runs on the lowliest of DOS hardware.
You may have been meaning to be ironic, but you have a point.
Singers who have to pull the microphone halfway down their throat have airy, thin voices. Since almost all of 'pop music' is about having some 'gee whiz' difference or uniqueness (carefully confined to a narrow range of allowed 'uniqueneses, of course') it's no surprise that pop musicians sing that way.
There is a classic human musical voice and a proper way to sing, i.e. the way Opera Singers with years of voice training sing. If pop musicians tried to project their voice with their bent 'effect' way of vocalizing, they'd rip out their vocal chords (which often wouldn't be a loss).