Compatibility with web sites that are made exclusively for Microsoft Internet Explorer technology and for which there are no close substitutes.
Ha. I just logged into my MSDN account with Firefox to download an ISO, and the tree widget that lets you choose which applications/OSes/etc. you want to download now works. It used to function only with MSIE. Even **MICROSOFT** is ditching their proprietary extensions.
I was in high school, sophomore, in my, quite appropriately, earth/space sciences classroom. We were watching the launch live. It was one of those moments you never forget, like where you were when you learned of the 9/11 attacks (running late for work, TV on while getting dressed... didn't make it to work). I went on from high school to Purdue for aero/astro engineering.
What does Microsoft not want? Competition. In particular, they do not want open source competition in the server platform arena.
How will this aid that goal? That is the question to ask.
Why would Microsoft do this, rather than provide complete, accurate, usable documentation of the interface between Windows servers and client stations? Why license source code instead?
Simply, this provides another method for Microsoft to control competition through licensing and restrictions. This will not help the small developer, the startup or the small business. Will Microsoft really provide a license that is conducive to permitting Linux servers to replace Windows servers transparently?
Microsoft's ultimate goal as a business is to protect the interests of its shareholders, meaning protect Microsoft's market and maximize revenue and profitability. If this doesn't aid, or at least very minimally harm that goal, then they wouldn't be doing it without a knock-down drag-out fight.
I honestly don't think that the "Bush Court" would go too far either... the pendulum moves slowly. But I do think it will move further. The issues are often misconstrued as "state's rights" but rather it is an issue of grants and separation of power: does government have it, and which one? If the court shows less deference to legislative correctness, which, given the Alito hearings and the pointed questions of both Democrats and Republicans, is a great fear of the Congress, we will have made progress.
However, the "money with strings" power has been around for a very long time, and I don't think it would ever be overturned. The power of the federal government to tax is unlimited. The power to spend it is the question. That power will only be slowly eaten away, if at all, as the transfer of funds to local governments with the proper power to act is seen as more benign than the direct exerise of federal power where the power is questionable. I think it may rather move in the opposite direction: unfunded mandates. States are not administrative units of the federal government, and Congress cannot give orders to the states: merely money with strings.
Which is one reason I let my ACLU membership lapse. There is no historical support whatsoever for their interpretation. Virtually every founder wrote often of their belief in the right of the individual to own weapons as a defense against wayward government, be that government state, federal, or municipal water board. There is no support for the concept of a "collective" right of gun ownership in any contemporary documents that I have ever heard of.
The ACLU does nothing to support our liberty (the sovereignty of the people) in the most important way possible: limit the scope of government power. The ACLU does not make any attempt to enforce the 10th or 9th amendments, but rather has bought into the post-constitutional, post-37 concept of our federal constitution being a negative document rather than positive. Their viewpoint is that the federal government can do everything, except... A far safer viewpoint, and that which is the spirit of the actual body proper of the constitution sans amendments as intended by its authors and ratifiers, is that the government can do nothing, except...
In Lopez the Rehnquist Court struck down that gun free school zone law based on the blank check Commerce Clause. It has cited the 2nd as an example of an individual right on more than one occasion. Perhaps a Roberts Court will revisit the issue and provide some clarity beyond the, literally, one-sided Miller. I just pray that Bush gets another nomination or two, and a court develops that sees its duty as determining the underlying constitutional authority when deciding whether government action is proper, rather than attempting to divine whether said action violates some vague penumbra of some amendment. The presumption of legislative correctness is evil.
What I would hope to see big content providers do, doubtful as it may be, is fight back. Block all IP blocks assigned to BellSouth. Or rather, redirect all requests from BellSouth customers to pages explaining that due to BellSouth's attempted extortion, their customers are unable to access those sites. Were Google and Apple to do that, it would be very interesting to see where the chips fell. Of them all, Google and Apple are the two who I think would have the balls to do it. Also, a DNSBL for email originating from BellSouth netblocks.
Cut the air off, and see who wants to purchase their crippled product.
Larry
Re:really?
on
Spam is Dead
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· Score: 3, Interesting
So what? Your steps to avoid spam don't disprove that it is a massive problem, or that it is worsening or lessening.
I have had the exact same email address since 1990. It is just three letters long, and is plastered all over the place on Usenet from the 90s, various old web pages, mailing list subscription lists from before they were confidential. I receive about 1300 spam messages per day on average, every day. And that is AFTER the MTA (Postfix) eliminates a lot of spam through DNS blacklists, RFC and RDNS compliance checking, and so on. I'll be doing greylisting next.
I also help to run the mail system of an ISP. Spam and viruses, by far, are most of the email these days. By far.
Spam is a horrible disease on the Internet. It increases the cost to everybody, in bandwidth, the cost of staff at ISPs battling it, and in end-user time wasted on it.
These days? I've been writing macros in vi since the mid 80s, back when EMACS was Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping. The:map command has always let you do that, long before vim was thought of. I have used a single keystroke macro in vi for probably a decade, ever since people started sending email in that shitty one-long-line-paragraph format, that will take a paragraph of text from an email message, remove all the double spaces, word wrap it to 72 characters per line like God intended, and prepend a '>' for quote level. I just press the key X in edit mode. I love vi.
For the most part, for a regular joe blow end user, they should do a reboot when updating a *nix based system library, or installing a Windows app/update that requests it. It isn't a huge deal, and will make their life easier. Windows requires it more than *nix does, because *nix is designed from the ground up such that different components don't require one another to exist in the same boot state. The nice thing about *nix is that it usually requires just one reboot regardless of how many things you have updated. Windows has impoved in recent iterations such that the reboots are fewer and don't cascade as often, but it is still worse on whole.
However, the more valid complaint has long been in the server environment, where a *nix sys admin who knows what he is doing can perform every system update short of a core kernel change without rebooting or dramatically affecting usage of the server/downtime. Windows has not been able to claim that. It looks like Windows will still not be able to claim that, as this new system is intended to mitigate the problem, not fix it. The problem is twofold. First, Windows is still very monolithic in ways. To fix many of those monolithic components necessarily requires a reboot. Second, Windows has become dependent on a collection of tightly coupled processes communicating with one another, and they were not designed to cleanly handle one process going away and restarting itself. It's simply a design choice, and changing that choice will be a lot of work. Hence this new system to mitigate the effects of the choice.
The biggest problem Windows has is not technical so much it is design and cultural. Microsoft only recently got the religion that long motivated *nix, and to rework their operating environments enough to be on par with *nix when it comes to security, modularity and the separation of state. Allchin is a smart guy, and he recognizes these issues. Longhorn/Vista is way behind scheduled because he decided to not just put makeup on the pig any longer. But it will still be a long road to travel for Microsoft, because they must maintain application compatibility above all else. However, what I have read of Allchin's recognition of the core problems with Windows gives me hope, as a *nix person, that future renditions of Windows will be far better than the bad old days.
I called Microsoft for support once. It was back when Windows 3.0 came out in the 80s, and I installed it for a client. I completely forget the issue. But the response I will never forget. Essentially, it was that Microsoft does not support Windows if any non-Microsoft software, whatsoever, is installed. It may have been that one tech. No idea. But it definitely soured me on ever calling Microsoft support ever again.
To be fair though, most issues I have had with Microsoft software have been resolvable through their very good online support database, and I haven't had to resort to calling them. Either the problem can be fixed, or they often recognize the problem and simply state that that is the way it is. Often the problem fix is good for a laugh... most recently in mind, see the Office XP Excel issue with files stored on a server, and the recommended registry fix. Saskatchewan. Oh my.
Oh my lord. You are calling me a moron, and then you make that completely bullshit statement?
The X-MP, the Cray-2, the Y-MP. All introduced in the 1980s, and all multi-CPU. The Cray-2 and Y-MP with up to eight processors. How about you try to learn at least a tiny amount about what you write?
Uh... you simply don't know what you are talking about. EVERY Cray machine released in the 1980s was multi-CPU.
date model CPUs 1976 C1 1 1982 XMP 4 1985 C2 4/8 1988 YMP 8
You probably know the Cray-2 at least. C-shaped, transparent chassis with a cascading waterfall cooling tower. All computing components were submerged in the cooling liquid. Up to eight processors.
Back when I worked at Cray, one project I worked on was the Fortran 90 compiler. The Fortran 90 compiler was developed on Sun SPARC machines and it cross-compiled to the Cray. Crays, even the mighty C-90 back then, weren't that great interactively, and were pretty slow to compile code. Not to mention the fact that Cray CPU time was far more valuable than the Sun machine's. Pre SGI/Tera Cray machines came in two flavors, the original vector processors (C-90 up to 16 or 32 processors?), and the later massively parallel T3 series (with HUNDREDS of DEC Alpha processors). Both were specialized machines which excel at particular tasks. Wickedly fast at those tasks.
Too many people these days work only on PC architectures, and have no/little exposure to other, superior architectures. The PC was and is designed as a cheap, mass produced general purpose desktop device. It in no way compares to supercomputers, mainframes, or true server architectures. A computing environment is more than the sum of the raw megahertz and bandwidth claims of its disparate parts.
Larry
Re:beware of the "understanding friend" method.
on
Best Way to Manage Geeks?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The question is, what did Edison want his child to do? Toil away in a laboratory? Does the pro baseball player want his son to be one, living with the constant worry of a career-ending injury leaving him hobbled at 30 years of age? Man doesn't progress with the goal of having its children toil away long hours. One would hope that the Europeans are merely premature, not wrong, in attempting to orient society around greater leisure and less labor.
I do like my "job." Why would you think I don't? My business treats us well. But it is just my vocation, how I get money to pay for life. My life is with my wife, my son, my family, my friends. As for sailing professionally, no way. Then it would be work. I'd have to win a lot more often and probably start yelling about the Cunningham. I'd have to be away from my family often. Things you do for love change when you do them for money. To quote another famous dead person, Voltaire allegedly wrote "writing is like prostitution: first you do it for love, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for money."
My mentioning my membership in a yacht club, while indeed an ego-boosting aspect of my life, is more to illustrate a point: I am successful. I mingle with many successful people on a regular basis. And while we all may have labored hard and long when we were young, fresh out of college, most of us no longer do. Most of us have successful lives without having to work "only" 45 hours during "light" weeks. Most people I know measure success not by how many hours they work, but by how few. A 45 hour "light" week is something I would consider akin to failure.
Larry
Re:beware of the "understanding friend" method.
on
Best Way to Manage Geeks?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I like your signature. There was this fellow named John Adams who allegedly wrote:
I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathemetics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children the right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
Work is what we do to provide for our needs until we die and get put in the ground. Leisure is one of the needs for which work provides. For some, apparently, work is their leisure. More power to them. But to have the expectation that others will likewise find work to be a leisurable activity is not reasonable. There are many managers/business owners out there who do have such an expectation, and do expect their employees to be available continuously and to work quite lengthy hours on salary. Your point appears not to be that; rather, your point appears to be that in order to better provide for your needs, you should work hard enough to progress in your chosen career. Good and well. Fine advice. But if such hard work and attempts to progress mean working more than 40 hours or so a week on a rolling average because that is the expectation, rather than your own predilection, then it is time to find a new place of employment. Hell, back when I worked for a rather famous super-computer manufacturer, I recall somebody being ordered home and to work less because of all his hard work.
When people ask me about my life, I mention that I race sailboats, that I'm active in my yacht club, I race cars from time to time, that I'm rebuilding an engine at the moment to swap into the car, I talk about my wife, my son, so on. And I may mention that I own a business if they ask about work. It's certainly not a subject of conversation unless I sense opportunity. I schedule my work around the 40 hour ideal. Sometimes (but incredibly rarely) I work 80 hour weeks, sometimes eight hour weeks. I do not in the least equate what I do for money with my life, and I feel sorry for those who do.
Finally: something I have noticed with my fellow yacht club members, all rather successful people, is that they seem to feel the same. Most of us work 9-5, or irregularily. We mention work only in passing, or if we sense possible business oportunities of course. We all manage to show up every Saturday at 8:00 am for racing, and many at 5:30 pm weekdays after work, and to many social events which generally start at 6:00 pm. It is the rare person who must miss racing, club meetings or other events due to work. If we can all be successful, working less than grueling hours, then perhaps the fact that others must work lengthy hours routinely is indicative of something other than success. That's my take on it at least.
Now, when you see people dying or living like shit everywhere in the third world because of only economical reasons, you don't stop to think that it's WWII winners who made the world what it is now. I wouldn't call it non-evil.
Throughout the vast, vast majority of human history, nearly everybody died and lived like shit everywhere. The fact that a large proportion of the human population does not die and live like shit any longer is a testament to the progress of man, not something to be lamented as failure because utopia has not yet been extended to all of the world. To declare, as you apparently do, that the world today is some miserable place made miserable by the evil capitalist pigs who won WWII is patently dense. You are letting your fervor for, I imagine, some alleged birthright to free food, shelter, health care, education, and utter happiness blind you to the rather reasonable progress the human race has made to date in lifting itself from the primordial sludge. The only thing certain in life is that after being born, you will die. Everything else is gravy, and we should be thankful for it, not whine because it isn't good enough yet.
They only want to take away the bad rights, most notably the right to a limited government of specifically enumerated powers. Of course, "they" includes Democrats and Republicans on that count.
Heh. Just a few hours ago I had Excel 2003 SP2 crash two times (and nicely offer to restart) while diagnosing what turns out to be a known Excel bug. It was popping up a "the file may have changed, save a copy or overwrite?" dialog, which is apparently due to some lame time-stamp comparison method used to resolve contention, and which is apparently fixed in SP3. If any of you Samba users have experienced it, it appears that the underlying cause is that *nix has more resolution in timestamps than Windows expects. The non-SP3 fix is to mess with some registry key called, and I kid you not, QFE_Saskatchewan. See MS KB article 324491.
Are you going to claim that a mechanic who uses the computer in your car to tell him you have a bad sparkplug is a bad mechanic? Or are you going to be quietly grateful that he was able to fix your problem for $50 in 1/2 an hour instead of the old school "hard core" method of slowly replacing part after part until you figure out which was the broken one, which costs you lots of time and money?
Uh, this is a really bad analogy. The modern method *is* to replace parts until it magically works, at least for any engine management problem of any complexity. They use the computer to tell them which part to replace. When that doesn't fix it, well, the computer said it was bad, the computer is always right, so now this other mysterious electrical part must have gone bad. The vast majority of current mechanics do not actually diagnose electrical/sensor problems. They don't take the allegedly bad part out, take it to the bench, and test it to verify that it really is broken. They just pull a code out of the computer, order the replacement part, and swap them. In most cases it's cheaper than actually testing and verifying. I've run into this multiple times. I've had mechanics, supposed good ones, replace parts because the computer said they are bad, which logically would have NOTHING to do with the symptom. One example: my wife's car was dying at stops/slowing, stumbling on the highway, and failing to start. Happened more often when it rained. The dealer got it, and couldn't duplicate the problem of course, multiple times. They replaced a few parts because the computer said so. One was the fuel pump -- at least that makes some sense. Always had the same problem shortly after I picked it up. The last time I went to pick it up, thankfully it was raining. I escorted the dealer monkey to the car, and watched as he couldn't start the car. I told him to stop, run in, grab the mechanic, and have him bring the Consult with him. He plugged it in to the OBD. Car is not starting, and the computer is showing no problems. No codes. Real-time diagnostics fine. Mechanic tries some starter fluid in the PCV hose. Eventually starts. The mechanic, knowing we report stumbling, dying, hard starts, then says "well, we'll try replacing the starter next." WHAT!? Morons. Air, fuel, spark. Air, fuel, spark. Diagnose those you turds. Eventually they replaced the COMPUTER. Problem solved. Of course, for all I know the ECU harness was seated badly. They just replaced it because they couldn't figure out what it could be otherwise.
Good mechanics are not just code readers. Good mechanics know how the car works, and how to diagnose the car (in this case the engine management system) as a system (air, fuel, spark), not a collection of individual parts which the wonderful computer is nice enough to point out may be "broken" because a sensor allegedly fell outside of the recommended voltage range momentarily and thus raised a flag in the ECU.
I hate taking cars to mechanics.
And an aside on the IDE thing. Last time I used an IDE was DOS Borland Turbo C in 1990 or so. I've since developed and led the development of very large, very complex projects with nothing more than vi (I've tried the MS editors, but no vi bindings? ICK!), cc/CC/javac, and make. Along with rcs/cvs and other ancillary support tools. I suppose one reason I don't use IDEs is because I very rarely develop GUI user-facing applications and thus don't need to deal with those myriad OS interfaces and boiler-plate code. The other supposed benefits of an IDE I've never really needed. Good design, combined with top-down development of well-defined and well-documented discrete programatic units have always made large, complex projects very managable.
Heh... I once wrote a library function that took as arguments pointers to functions, which each had multiple pointers to functions as arguments. That was not easy to declare, especially not in ANSI vs. K&R C. The things you did to get object-oriented behavior in straight C...
It is fine to start with a high-level abstraction and give some instant gratification. A five line C program that prints "Hello World" is surely such an abstraction. But it is wrong to start from that point and never attempt to go back and understand what is happening under the hood. Every reputable CS program should have students programming assembly, or binary, at some point. Every student should write a compiler of some type that produces assembly or binary. Every student should develop an OS, or at least understand the concepts and develop a few fundamental components thereof. I haven't been in a CS program for fifteen years, but I have a feeling that lots don't do that, and that lots of developers today learn nothing but the high-level abstractions provided by Java or.NET or whatever other environment is in vogue. I hope I'm wrong.
So which is it, "America is the champion of justice, equality and the rule of law"? Or "America doesn't give a shit what you say, follow what we say"? The ease with which you seem to think you can flip between those two completely contradictory poisitions is what troubles everyone else.
I may respond to more of your message later, when I have time. But to respond to the above: both.
We believe that within sovereign nations, the people must be treated as sovereign, and they have fundamental rights to justice, equality, the rule of law and open democratic institutions. We believe that regimes which fail to provide such are illegitimate and should not be treated as legitimate.
However, we simulatenously do NOT believe in democracy between nations (e.g. the United Nations) in terms of it having the slightest control or precedence over the will of the sovereign people of the nation, or in a concept of international law beyond strictly voluntary treaty obligations.
Those two viewpoints are in no way contradictory. We believe people are sovereign and have the right to control their own governments, and we largely and generally, but certainly not perfectly, promote that viewpoint. We likewise do not believe that the United Nations, nor any other entity/nation, can or should have any power whatsoever over our government or our actions, beyond voluntary treaties we enter into, on our terms, subject to approval by our Congress and review by our courts, subject to our Constitution.
The world is free to disagree with us. They often do. We respect the fundamental right of free people in other nations to disagree. We aren't going to attack you for merely that. But believing you have the right to disagree does not mean we have to say "Oh, my, look at all the disagreement. We'll change our mind now. Sorry." It does not mean that disagreeing must engender no consequences, be they diplomatic or economic. The world (well, mainly Europe) seems quite happy to disparage the United States over, say, the Kyoto treaty or the ICC and contemplate consequences. Shouldn't the world instead say "OK, we disagree... we'll just accept that disagreement as pals and not bitch about it incessantly."
Regarding sticks and I presume Iraq: do not let the facts as understood today blind you to the facts as understood prior to the invasion. Iraq had been, for many years, violating the conditions of the ceasefire which ended hostilities in 1991, something which alone provided all the much vaunted "legitimacy" required to resume hostilities. But further, Iraq was believed to have, not only by the United States but by most western nations, an active covert weapons program. The debate was not whether Iraq had such a program or whether Iraq had illicit weapons. The debate was whether such was worthy of invading immediately, or whether Iraq should be pressed diplomatically longer and further and harder. And make no mistake, it was a protracted debate. The United States did not fly in during the dark of night and in a vicious and unannounced unilateral action overthrow the legitimate elected government of Iraq. There were many attempts to convince allies. There were slides and Powerpoint presentations. In the end, the people of the United States, by a good majority, supported invasion. Congress supported invasion. We warned Iraq we would invade and provided terms (perhaps impossible terms, but terms nonetheless) to avoid invasion. And then we invaded. It wasn't sudden, it wasn't unexpected, and it was not without justification given the facts as understood at the time. The facts of today change that not one tiny bit.
Sticks: it has long been the policy of the United States to "walk quietly but carry a big stick." When we feel threatened, we carry the same stick but we talk about it. But the stick has always been there. Just like after we used the big stick in Japan, we'll get quiet again, once we feel safe and secure.
The job of the government of the United States, and therefore its representative in the United Nations, is to promote and defend the interests of the United States and its citizens. If the United Nations is a convenient tool toward that end, then it is useful. If it is not, then it is not useful and is irrelevant to our needs. Nobody and no nation owes any allegience to it nor any respect or deference beyond its immediate and selfish usefulness. Our paramount goal in dealing with the world is to promote our interests, our needs, and to fiercely protect the sovereignty of the American people. If such happens to align with the goals of other nations, well and good, we will walk the same path. If not, we will walk our own.
In the time before DNS, there was HOSTS.TXT, which was a centralized text file containing maps of hostnames to addresses. We used to ftp the HOSTS.TXT file from the InterNIC on a regular basis. Ah, the good old days of the Internet Cabal. Kibo!
Slashdot Mirror
Compatibility with web sites that are made exclusively for Microsoft Internet Explorer technology and for which there are no close substitutes.
Ha. I just logged into my MSDN account with Firefox to download an ISO, and the tree widget that lets you choose which applications/OSes/etc. you want to download now works. It used to function only with MSIE. Even **MICROSOFT** is ditching their proprietary extensions.
Larry
I was in high school, sophomore, in my, quite appropriately, earth/space sciences classroom. We were watching the launch live. It was one of those moments you never forget, like where you were when you learned of the 9/11 attacks (running late for work, TV on while getting dressed ... didn't make it to work). I went on from high school to Purdue for aero/astro engineering.
Larry
What does Microsoft not want? Competition. In particular, they do not want open source competition in the server platform arena.
How will this aid that goal? That is the question to ask.
Why would Microsoft do this, rather than provide complete, accurate, usable documentation of the interface between Windows servers and client stations? Why license source code instead?
Simply, this provides another method for Microsoft to control competition through licensing and restrictions. This will not help the small developer, the startup or the small business. Will Microsoft really provide a license that is conducive to permitting Linux servers to replace Windows servers transparently?
Microsoft's ultimate goal as a business is to protect the interests of its shareholders, meaning protect Microsoft's market and maximize revenue and profitability. If this doesn't aid, or at least very minimally harm that goal, then they wouldn't be doing it without a knock-down drag-out fight.
Larry
I honestly don't think that the "Bush Court" would go too far either... the pendulum moves slowly. But I do think it will move further. The issues are often misconstrued as "state's rights" but rather it is an issue of grants and separation of power: does government have it, and which one? If the court shows less deference to legislative correctness, which, given the Alito hearings and the pointed questions of both Democrats and Republicans, is a great fear of the Congress, we will have made progress.
However, the "money with strings" power has been around for a very long time, and I don't think it would ever be overturned. The power of the federal government to tax is unlimited. The power to spend it is the question. That power will only be slowly eaten away, if at all, as the transfer of funds to local governments with the proper power to act is seen as more benign than the direct exerise of federal power where the power is questionable. I think it may rather move in the opposite direction: unfunded mandates. States are not administrative units of the federal government, and Congress cannot give orders to the states: merely money with strings.
Larry
Which is one reason I let my ACLU membership lapse. There is no historical support whatsoever for their interpretation. Virtually every founder wrote often of their belief in the right of the individual to own weapons as a defense against wayward government, be that government state, federal, or municipal water board. There is no support for the concept of a "collective" right of gun ownership in any contemporary documents that I have ever heard of.
The ACLU does nothing to support our liberty (the sovereignty of the people) in the most important way possible: limit the scope of government power. The ACLU does not make any attempt to enforce the 10th or 9th amendments, but rather has bought into the post-constitutional, post-37 concept of our federal constitution being a negative document rather than positive. Their viewpoint is that the federal government can do everything, except... A far safer viewpoint, and that which is the spirit of the actual body proper of the constitution sans amendments as intended by its authors and ratifiers, is that the government can do nothing, except...
In Lopez the Rehnquist Court struck down that gun free school zone law based on the blank check Commerce Clause. It has cited the 2nd as an example of an individual right on more than one occasion. Perhaps a Roberts Court will revisit the issue and provide some clarity beyond the, literally, one-sided Miller. I just pray that Bush gets another nomination or two, and a court develops that sees its duty as determining the underlying constitutional authority when deciding whether government action is proper, rather than attempting to divine whether said action violates some vague penumbra of some amendment. The presumption of legislative correctness is evil.
Larry
What I would hope to see big content providers do, doubtful as it may be, is fight back. Block all IP blocks assigned to BellSouth. Or rather, redirect all requests from BellSouth customers to pages explaining that due to BellSouth's attempted extortion, their customers are unable to access those sites. Were Google and Apple to do that, it would be very interesting to see where the chips fell. Of them all, Google and Apple are the two who I think would have the balls to do it. Also, a DNSBL for email originating from BellSouth netblocks.
Cut the air off, and see who wants to purchase their crippled product.
Larry
So what? Your steps to avoid spam don't disprove that it is a massive problem, or that it is worsening or lessening.
I have had the exact same email address since 1990. It is just three letters long, and is plastered all over the place on Usenet from the 90s, various old web pages, mailing list subscription lists from before they were confidential. I receive about 1300 spam messages per day on average, every day. And that is AFTER the MTA (Postfix) eliminates a lot of spam through DNS blacklists, RFC and RDNS compliance checking, and so on. I'll be doing greylisting next.
I also help to run the mail system of an ISP. Spam and viruses, by far, are most of the email these days. By far.
Spam is a horrible disease on the Internet. It increases the cost to everybody, in bandwidth, the cost of staff at ISPs battling it, and in end-user time wasted on it.
Larry
These days? I've been writing macros in vi since the mid 80s, back when EMACS was Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping. The :map command has always let you do that, long before vim was thought of. I have used a single keystroke macro in vi for probably a decade, ever since people started sending email in that shitty one-long-line-paragraph format, that will take a paragraph of text from an email message, remove all the double spaces, word wrap it to 72 characters per line like God intended, and prepend a '>' for quote level. I just press the key X in edit mode. I love vi.
Larry
For the most part, for a regular joe blow end user, they should do a reboot when updating a *nix based system library, or installing a Windows app/update that requests it. It isn't a huge deal, and will make their life easier. Windows requires it more than *nix does, because *nix is designed from the ground up such that different components don't require one another to exist in the same boot state. The nice thing about *nix is that it usually requires just one reboot regardless of how many things you have updated. Windows has impoved in recent iterations such that the reboots are fewer and don't cascade as often, but it is still worse on whole.
However, the more valid complaint has long been in the server environment, where a *nix sys admin who knows what he is doing can perform every system update short of a core kernel change without rebooting or dramatically affecting usage of the server/downtime. Windows has not been able to claim that. It looks like Windows will still not be able to claim that, as this new system is intended to mitigate the problem, not fix it. The problem is twofold. First, Windows is still very monolithic in ways. To fix many of those monolithic components necessarily requires a reboot. Second, Windows has become dependent on a collection of tightly coupled processes communicating with one another, and they were not designed to cleanly handle one process going away and restarting itself. It's simply a design choice, and changing that choice will be a lot of work. Hence this new system to mitigate the effects of the choice.
The biggest problem Windows has is not technical so much it is design and cultural. Microsoft only recently got the religion that long motivated *nix, and to rework their operating environments enough to be on par with *nix when it comes to security, modularity and the separation of state. Allchin is a smart guy, and he recognizes these issues. Longhorn/Vista is way behind scheduled because he decided to not just put makeup on the pig any longer. But it will still be a long road to travel for Microsoft, because they must maintain application compatibility above all else. However, what I have read of Allchin's recognition of the core problems with Windows gives me hope, as a *nix person, that future renditions of Windows will be far better than the bad old days.
Larry
I called Microsoft for support once. It was back when Windows 3.0 came out in the 80s, and I installed it for a client. I completely forget the issue. But the response I will never forget. Essentially, it was that Microsoft does not support Windows if any non-Microsoft software, whatsoever, is installed. It may have been that one tech. No idea. But it definitely soured me on ever calling Microsoft support ever again.
... most recently in mind, see the Office XP Excel issue with files stored on a server, and the recommended registry fix. Saskatchewan. Oh my.
To be fair though, most issues I have had with Microsoft software have been resolvable through their very good online support database, and I haven't had to resort to calling them. Either the problem can be fixed, or they often recognize the problem and simply state that that is the way it is. Often the problem fix is good for a laugh
Larry
Oh my lord. You are calling me a moron, and then you make that completely bullshit statement?
The X-MP, the Cray-2, the Y-MP. All introduced in the 1980s, and all multi-CPU. The Cray-2 and Y-MP with up to eight processors. How about you try to learn at least a tiny amount about what you write?
Larry
Uh... you simply don't know what you are talking about. EVERY Cray machine released in the 1980s was multi-CPU.
date model CPUs
1976 C1 1
1982 XMP 4
1985 C2 4/8
1988 YMP 8
You probably know the Cray-2 at least. C-shaped, transparent chassis with a cascading waterfall cooling tower. All computing components were submerged in the cooling liquid. Up to eight processors.
Larry
Back when I worked at Cray, one project I worked on was the Fortran 90 compiler. The Fortran 90 compiler was developed on Sun SPARC machines and it cross-compiled to the Cray. Crays, even the mighty C-90 back then, weren't that great interactively, and were pretty slow to compile code. Not to mention the fact that Cray CPU time was far more valuable than the Sun machine's. Pre SGI/Tera Cray machines came in two flavors, the original vector processors (C-90 up to 16 or 32 processors?), and the later massively parallel T3 series (with HUNDREDS of DEC Alpha processors). Both were specialized machines which excel at particular tasks. Wickedly fast at those tasks.
Too many people these days work only on PC architectures, and have no/little exposure to other, superior architectures. The PC was and is designed as a cheap, mass produced general purpose desktop device. It in no way compares to supercomputers, mainframes, or true server architectures. A computing environment is more than the sum of the raw megahertz and bandwidth claims of its disparate parts.
Larry
The question is, what did Edison want his child to do? Toil away in a laboratory? Does the pro baseball player want his son to be one, living with the constant worry of a career-ending injury leaving him hobbled at 30 years of age? Man doesn't progress with the goal of having its children toil away long hours. One would hope that the Europeans are merely premature, not wrong, in attempting to orient society around greater leisure and less labor.
I do like my "job." Why would you think I don't? My business treats us well. But it is just my vocation, how I get money to pay for life. My life is with my wife, my son, my family, my friends. As for sailing professionally, no way. Then it would be work. I'd have to win a lot more often and probably start yelling about the Cunningham. I'd have to be away from my family often. Things you do for love change when you do them for money. To quote another famous dead person, Voltaire allegedly wrote "writing is like prostitution: first you do it for love, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for money."
My mentioning my membership in a yacht club, while indeed an ego-boosting aspect of my life, is more to illustrate a point: I am successful. I mingle with many successful people on a regular basis. And while we all may have labored hard and long when we were young, fresh out of college, most of us no longer do. Most of us have successful lives without having to work "only" 45 hours during "light" weeks. Most people I know measure success not by how many hours they work, but by how few. A 45 hour "light" week is something I would consider akin to failure.
Larry
I like your signature. There was this fellow named John Adams who allegedly wrote:
I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study
mathemetics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and
philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture,
navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children
the right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary,
tapestry and porcelain.
Work is what we do to provide for our needs until we die and get put in the ground. Leisure is one of the needs for which work provides. For some, apparently, work is their leisure. More power to them. But to have the expectation that others will likewise find work to be a leisurable activity is not reasonable. There are many managers/business owners out there who do have such an expectation, and do expect their employees to be available continuously and to work quite lengthy hours on salary. Your point appears not to be that; rather, your point appears to be that in order to better provide for your needs, you should work hard enough to progress in your chosen career. Good and well. Fine advice. But if such hard work and attempts to progress mean working more than 40 hours or so a week on a rolling average because that is the expectation, rather than your own predilection, then it is time to find a new place of employment. Hell, back when I worked for a rather famous super-computer manufacturer, I recall somebody being ordered home and to work less because of all his hard work.
When people ask me about my life, I mention that I race sailboats, that I'm active in my yacht club, I race cars from time to time, that I'm rebuilding an engine at the moment to swap into the car, I talk about my wife, my son, so on. And I may mention that I own a business if they ask about work. It's certainly not a subject of conversation unless I sense opportunity. I schedule my work around the 40 hour ideal. Sometimes (but incredibly rarely) I work 80 hour weeks, sometimes eight hour weeks. I do not in the least equate what I do for money with my life, and I feel sorry for those who do.
Finally: something I have noticed with my fellow yacht club members, all rather successful people, is that they seem to feel the same. Most of us work 9-5, or irregularily. We mention work only in passing, or if we sense possible business oportunities of course. We all manage to show up every Saturday at 8:00 am for racing, and many at 5:30 pm weekdays after work, and to many social events which generally start at 6:00 pm. It is the rare person who must miss racing, club meetings or other events due to work. If we can all be successful, working less than grueling hours, then perhaps the fact that others must work lengthy hours routinely is indicative of something other than success. That's my take on it at least.
Larry
Now, when you see people dying or living like shit everywhere in the third world because of only economical reasons, you don't stop to think that it's WWII winners who made the world what it is now. I wouldn't call it non-evil.
Throughout the vast, vast majority of human history, nearly everybody died and lived like shit everywhere. The fact that a large proportion of the human population does not die and live like shit any longer is a testament to the progress of man, not something to be lamented as failure because utopia has not yet been extended to all of the world. To declare, as you apparently do, that the world today is some miserable place made miserable by the evil capitalist pigs who won WWII is patently dense. You are letting your fervor for, I imagine, some alleged birthright to free food, shelter, health care, education, and utter happiness blind you to the rather reasonable progress the human race has made to date in lifting itself from the primordial sludge. The only thing certain in life is that after being born, you will die. Everything else is gravy, and we should be thankful for it, not whine because it isn't good enough yet.
Larry
They only want to take away the bad rights, most notably the right to a limited government of specifically enumerated powers. Of course, "they" includes Democrats and Republicans on that count.
Larry
Heh. Just a few hours ago I had Excel 2003 SP2 crash two times (and nicely offer to restart) while diagnosing what turns out to be a known Excel bug. It was popping up a "the file may have changed, save a copy or overwrite?" dialog, which is apparently due to some lame time-stamp comparison method used to resolve contention, and which is apparently fixed in SP3. If any of you Samba users have experienced it, it appears that the underlying cause is that *nix has more resolution in timestamps than Windows expects. The non-SP3 fix is to mess with some registry key called, and I kid you not, QFE_Saskatchewan. See MS KB article 324491.
Larry
Are you going to claim that a mechanic who uses the computer in your car to tell him you have a bad sparkplug is a bad mechanic? Or are you going to be quietly grateful that he was able to fix your problem for $50 in 1/2 an hour instead of the old school "hard core" method of slowly replacing part after part until you figure out which was the broken one, which costs you lots of time and money?
Uh, this is a really bad analogy. The modern method *is* to replace parts until it magically works, at least for any engine management problem of any complexity. They use the computer to tell them which part to replace. When that doesn't fix it, well, the computer said it was bad, the computer is always right, so now this other mysterious electrical part must have gone bad. The vast majority of current mechanics do not actually diagnose electrical/sensor problems. They don't take the allegedly bad part out, take it to the bench, and test it to verify that it really is broken. They just pull a code out of the computer, order the replacement part, and swap them. In most cases it's cheaper than actually testing and verifying. I've run into this multiple times. I've had mechanics, supposed good ones, replace parts because the computer said they are bad, which logically would have NOTHING to do with the symptom. One example: my wife's car was dying at stops/slowing, stumbling on the highway, and failing to start. Happened more often when it rained. The dealer got it, and couldn't duplicate the problem of course, multiple times. They replaced a few parts because the computer said so. One was the fuel pump -- at least that makes some sense. Always had the same problem shortly after I picked it up. The last time I went to pick it up, thankfully it was raining. I escorted the dealer monkey to the car, and watched as he couldn't start the car. I told him to stop, run in, grab the mechanic, and have him bring the Consult with him. He plugged it in to the OBD. Car is not starting, and the computer is showing no problems. No codes. Real-time diagnostics fine. Mechanic tries some starter fluid in the PCV hose. Eventually starts. The mechanic, knowing we report stumbling, dying, hard starts, then says "well, we'll try replacing the starter next." WHAT!? Morons. Air, fuel, spark. Air, fuel, spark. Diagnose those you turds. Eventually they replaced the COMPUTER. Problem solved. Of course, for all I know the ECU harness was seated badly. They just replaced it because they couldn't figure out what it could be otherwise.
Good mechanics are not just code readers. Good mechanics know how the car works, and how to diagnose the car (in this case the engine management system) as a system (air, fuel, spark), not a collection of individual parts which the wonderful computer is nice enough to point out may be "broken" because a sensor allegedly fell outside of the recommended voltage range momentarily and thus raised a flag in the ECU.
I hate taking cars to mechanics.
And an aside on the IDE thing. Last time I used an IDE was DOS Borland Turbo C in 1990 or so. I've since developed and led the development of very large, very complex projects with nothing more than vi (I've tried the MS editors, but no vi bindings? ICK!), cc/CC/javac, and make. Along with rcs/cvs and other ancillary support tools. I suppose one reason I don't use IDEs is because I very rarely develop GUI user-facing applications and thus don't need to deal with those myriad OS interfaces and boiler-plate code. The other supposed benefits of an IDE I've never really needed. Good design, combined with top-down development of well-defined and well-documented discrete programatic units have always made large, complex projects very managable.
Larry
Heh... I once wrote a library function that took as arguments pointers to functions, which each had multiple pointers to functions as arguments. That was not easy to declare, especially not in ANSI vs. K&R C. The things you did to get object-oriented behavior in straight C...
Larry
He was using some amorphous entity called C/C++.
.h s
:-)
using the *depreciated* C-style
Say, what was the depreciation period for the C-style #include values?
Larry
It is fine to start with a high-level abstraction and give some instant gratification. A five line C program that prints "Hello World" is surely such an abstraction. But it is wrong to start from that point and never attempt to go back and understand what is happening under the hood. Every reputable CS program should have students programming assembly, or binary, at some point. Every student should write a compiler of some type that produces assembly or binary. Every student should develop an OS, or at least understand the concepts and develop a few fundamental components thereof. I haven't been in a CS program for fifteen years, but I have a feeling that lots don't do that, and that lots of developers today learn nothing but the high-level abstractions provided by Java or .NET or whatever other environment is in vogue. I hope I'm wrong.
Larry
So which is it, "America is the champion of justice, equality and the rule of law"? Or "America doesn't give a shit what you say, follow what we say"? The ease with which you seem to think you can flip between those two completely contradictory poisitions is what troubles everyone else.
... we'll just accept that disagreement as pals and not bitch about it incessantly."
I may respond to more of your message later, when I have time. But to respond to the above: both.
We believe that within sovereign nations, the people must be treated as sovereign, and they have fundamental rights to justice, equality, the rule of law and open democratic institutions. We believe that regimes which fail to provide such are illegitimate and should not be treated as legitimate.
However, we simulatenously do NOT believe in democracy between nations (e.g. the United Nations) in terms of it having the slightest control or precedence over the will of the sovereign people of the nation, or in a concept of international law beyond strictly voluntary treaty obligations.
Those two viewpoints are in no way contradictory. We believe people are sovereign and have the right to control their own governments, and we largely and generally, but certainly not perfectly, promote that viewpoint. We likewise do not believe that the United Nations, nor any other entity/nation, can or should have any power whatsoever over our government or our actions, beyond voluntary treaties we enter into, on our terms, subject to approval by our Congress and review by our courts, subject to our Constitution.
The world is free to disagree with us. They often do. We respect the fundamental right of free people in other nations to disagree. We aren't going to attack you for merely that. But believing you have the right to disagree does not mean we have to say "Oh, my, look at all the disagreement. We'll change our mind now. Sorry." It does not mean that disagreeing must engender no consequences, be they diplomatic or economic. The world (well, mainly Europe) seems quite happy to disparage the United States over, say, the Kyoto treaty or the ICC and contemplate consequences. Shouldn't the world instead say "OK, we disagree
Regarding sticks and I presume Iraq: do not let the facts as understood today blind you to the facts as understood prior to the invasion. Iraq had been, for many years, violating the conditions of the ceasefire which ended hostilities in 1991, something which alone provided all the much vaunted "legitimacy" required to resume hostilities. But further, Iraq was believed to have, not only by the United States but by most western nations, an active covert weapons program. The debate was not whether Iraq had such a program or whether Iraq had illicit weapons. The debate was whether such was worthy of invading immediately, or whether Iraq should be pressed diplomatically longer and further and harder. And make no mistake, it was a protracted debate. The United States did not fly in during the dark of night and in a vicious and unannounced unilateral action overthrow the legitimate elected government of Iraq. There were many attempts to convince allies. There were slides and Powerpoint presentations. In the end, the people of the United States, by a good majority, supported invasion. Congress supported invasion. We warned Iraq we would invade and provided terms (perhaps impossible terms, but terms nonetheless) to avoid invasion. And then we invaded. It wasn't sudden, it wasn't unexpected, and it was not without justification given the facts as understood at the time. The facts of today change that not one tiny bit.
Sticks: it has long been the policy of the United States to "walk quietly but carry a big stick." When we feel threatened, we carry the same stick but we talk about it. But the stick has always been there. Just like after we used the big stick in Japan, we'll get quiet again, once we feel safe and secure.
Larry
And this is surprising or bad how?
The job of the government of the United States, and therefore its representative in the United Nations, is to promote and defend the interests of the United States and its citizens. If the United Nations is a convenient tool toward that end, then it is useful. If it is not, then it is not useful and is irrelevant to our needs. Nobody and no nation owes any allegience to it nor any respect or deference beyond its immediate and selfish usefulness. Our paramount goal in dealing with the world is to promote our interests, our needs, and to fiercely protect the sovereignty of the American people. If such happens to align with the goals of other nations, well and good, we will walk the same path. If not, we will walk our own.
Larry
In the time before DNS, there was HOSTS.TXT, which was a centralized text file containing maps of hostnames to addresses. We used to ftp the HOSTS.TXT file from the InterNIC on a regular basis. Ah, the good old days of the Internet Cabal. Kibo!
Larry