Want some real fun? Try being a newbie on the last surviving UNIX helpdesk for a huge corporation while its cutting 2/3+ of its staff and equipment. Suddenly you inherit responsibility for thousands of workstations and servers you've never touched in all their years, you have no idea how they've been administered, just that they're now your responsibility now (responsibility but not control - you're not allowed to change anything).
Now just for added fun, have someone start going through the server room yanking out anything that "doesn't look important" ( licence servers, NFS servers, NIS servers... ). Oh - and meanwhile burnt-out management is trying to decide which of your burnt-out coworkers and burnt-out callers to boot off the island next.
(I wonder, if/when it's my turn for my torch to finally burn out or be snuffed out, if I'll feel that it was all better than unemployment?)
There are a lot of people lammenting the poor work ethic of this generation who are posting on slashdot instead of working.
A person should be rewarded according to the value of their work, not according to how much _more_ they worked than someone else. It's not supposed to be a zero-sum game, or at least that's what the capitalist fundementalists keep telling me.
I don't understand why parent was modded up - the method of authentication is not relevant to the security model.
The underlying OS has to uniquely identify users - the username is just an alias for you (uids in *nix). The password is a challenge that you must answer and can be altered if discovered by a would-be identity thief.
Smart cards are the way to go. You program them to hold the userids and passwords and handles all the drudgery of entering a userid and password. However, it's still the same system underneath.
Biometrics combines userids and passwords into one, great for forensics, awful for authentication. As soon as the scanner can be fooled with false input (contact lens, fake fingerprint, etc), the entire system is useless until replaced/upgraded to read a new metric. Just look at all the success thieves have had with designing covers to put over bank machines to grab card numbers - now imagine not being able to ever change your account/pin number after it is stolen.
If you want a security model that doesn't require using su, you build your OS/apps around group permissions and check for gid=0 instead of checking for uid=0 (to use *nix terminology).
Something to realize is that Paul Martin, the new PM, is "cleaning house", removing the loyalists of the old PM. It's exposing a lot of accumulated dirty laundry after three majority governments.
This is also the same PM whose famous "come hell or high water" attitude towards balancing the budget as finance minister pushed Canada from huge deficits to a long string of surpluses(*), so I think he's earned his reputation for intolerance to waste, so really what we're seeing is a big cleanup now that he's in charge. I say this as someone who will vote against him on principal (I don't like any of the other parties better, I just feel that no one party should be in power for four straight terms - it's bad for democracy).
This is the fundemental problem with the patent system now - it's essentially a nuscience system not a reward system. If it's a big enough nuscience, the patent will go away either in the courts, patent office or arm-twisting. Otherwise, it just keeps knowledge and processes from moving freely, favouring large entities with a specialized legal team over small groups/individuals actually working with the ideas. Sure big companies engage in a lot of research because of patent protection, but is it really more productive to society than millions of people coming up with incremental improvements on their own and eliminating the paperwork tax on individual innovation?
( sure I'm making a sweeping statement based on limited information, but until I have the resources to do a statistical analysis based on random samples of patents and experimental studies on different legal/economic systems, I have little choice but to hold unscientific opinions on the issue )
I dunno... I liked the new D&D (Dilbert-and-Demons) format. At first the show seemed like a poor clone of Forever Knight and I had given up on it a couple of years ago but was lured back this year by the strange and frightening parallels to my company (it's nice to think that not all executives are evil... they're just bloodsucking vampires trapped in a corrupt system... but they do have souls).
Woah! Wait! Stop! Say that again?! Only the rich have the capital recequired to create jobs therefore we should give more to the rich? Have you considered the posibility that if the poor weren't so poor that maybe they would have the capital to make jobs too. Aren't self-employed people more productive, more efficient and a lot less likely to hold government hostage with threats of leaving/closing than those who command legions of wage-slaves?
I was a loyal trekkie for a long time, but there was a growing uneasiness towards the end of TNG - there were some really good stories, but they were growing fewer and further between. DS9 had a great premise and my favourite opening scene of any pilot I've ever seen, but the writers seemed to balk at it's mid-east politics premise ( Bajor = Lebanon ) and abandoned it. Technobabble ceased to be "music" and became noise.
There was a single week in which I suddenly realized wasn't a Trek fan any more. DS9 and B5 were playing "payoff" episodes against each other. The DS9 payoff was random and unearned - stuff blew up as if there was a quota, plot twists were thrown in without setup and people walked around like zombies and by the end everything was restored to the safety of where it had begun (give or take a few ominous worries). On B5, two major well-developed races went to the brink of war - one could feel the rush of inevitability, the weight of years of foreshadowing, the frantic desperation to find a way out, the brutality of errors... and in the end, it didn't end well, the inevitable couldn't be averted and series made a right-hand turn.
What struck me is that B5 in its prime had a story to tell and time was a precious resource that needed to be used carefully to be able to tell it all. Star Trek had nothing left to say and story was just sand to fill the void.
The simple solution seems to be to have different rules on different servers and let people decide for themselves where they want to "settle". People who want anarchy can have a server to spew on, people who want different levels of peace and tranquility can sign up for other servers. Then have some way for players to "cash out" a character so they can make new characters on a new server if they want to emmigrate without starting all over from scratch.
Alas, I think the only way to deal with corporate censorship is to take the game away from corporations. I think at some point, the game engine will seperate from the skins applied to it and there will be more community-run options. I feel the only reason corporate MMRPGs took off was because open-source MUDs didn't go graphical when the rest of the world was ready for it.
Re:Everybody deserves a fair trial -- look at Germ
on
Saddam Hussein Arrested
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Everybody deserves a fair trial.
But by what set of laws? International law - which the US flouts whenever it suits them? US law? New Iraq law (if there is a new legal system)? Old Iraq law? ("I was the dictator, my world was law"?). Can anyone honestly imagine any trial where a verdict of "not guilty, he's free to go" would be allowed? I do agree with your post, I guess I'm just a little too cynical about the new world order.
Does either Bush have to go on trial for the civilian deaths his orders led to? Does Blair have to face trial for possibly taking his country to war under false pretenses? Does Dick Cheney have to go on trial to explain who provided Iraq with chemical weapons technology and materials in the first place? (actually, I'd be rather curious to hear Saddam has to say at his trial about this one)
If the US president is the leader of the democratic world, why doesn't the rest of the world get a vote?
um... how many widows have the Americans made in Iraq?
Why do the Americans, of all people, not understand that concept that a foriegn power interfering in a county's internal affairs might make some people upset?
( I want to be happy that this might be another step towards peace in Iraq, but honestly I fear it will just be another step in increasing the US far-right's confidence that they can impose their will by force of arms across the world )
Good lord! Good thing there's no forking or abandonment of projects by the developers to increase the TCO of Windows like there is with all that open source Linux stuff:)
Speaking as one of the wannabe's who's already managed as if he was already flipping burgers, I would like to drop-kick all the wannabe coders who have passed through in the past few years.
What most coders don't understand is that I have to support several thousand workstations and servers. Every few weeks, some application appears on the network that I've never seen and never heard of. I have no idea what it does or what resources it needs. It has no documentation nor any interface the likes of which I've ever seen. All I know is that I have an irate user on the phone who needs it to work now, ten other users in queue calling about ten other apps or scripts and all they know is that the developer said to call the helpline if there were any problems before leaving to the next shiny project.
If anything is going to be used on the network, I want it to be rock-solid, have a consistant interface (and ascii data dumps for crying out loud - I'm so tired of trying to perl together obscurely formatted excel spreadsheets "dumped" from databases to be used by HPUX users), be well documented (including how to diagnose its failures not just a list of what cool stuff it theoretically does). I want there to be a plan for how it is going to be deployed, how it is going to be supported and how to uninstall it when it's discovered to be full of unrepairable security holes.
Personally, I feel like too many coders and developers and planners who complain about admins are just the next generation of people who didn't want to add comments to their code.
Personally, I'd like to see a verion of the Arthurian Legend done as a distant sequel to LotR. Consider: a sword of kings, an ancient noble bloodline, strange immortal sorrowful lady of the lake hanging out in the woods and a wize wizard of a long-faded order. It would take an extremely good writer to pull it off in a way respectful to both legends, but it would be fun to see.
Why aren't CEO jobs being all outsourced overseas? I'm sure there are lots of buisness people in other countries who would be glad to do the work for a fraction of the price. There's certainly no need to be onsite - I've never seen a senior executive in my life.
The economy is just the web of excuses why farmers should feed us.
The National Post often reads like a well-funded "I for one welcome our new corporate overlords" infomercial.
It's painful that in a country with one of the most highly educated populations in the world, Canada's published newspapers consistantly have a scientific literacy somewhere below the average.advocacy newsgroup.
OS age is a good measure of dust. Even without the need for patches and vender support, even in an environment where there are attempts to keep everything standard, computers aquire configuration quirks over time and eventually everyone who remembered how and why an OS was configured have moved on. The age of an OS is a good proxy measurement for how quirky a machine has become.
The client-server model isn't going away, the cloths are changing. Most business apps are just a skin over a multi-user database. The users are dispersed, the data has to be centrally managed. Client, server.
There are still non TCP/IP networks? I've never encounted one ( except maybe the first fifty feet of cord from my phone )
Tapes are *so* painful for day-to-day non-disaster/forensics/archive issues. It's a dream to be able to tell users "don't call me if you 'rm test *' instead of 'rm test*', just look at/backup/yesterday/ and/backup/lastweek/."
Visual Basic? hunh? There's something other than Perl + HTML?:)
First, an essay, or anything else written in a human language, is about communication. Has the student managed to communicate their idea? Personally, I feel this is more important than whether or not the student actually had a good idea to begin with. As a writer, you need to learn not only the formalities of the language, but how to play to your audience. There's no such thing as an objective reader and students shouldn't be taught to believe that there is an objectively perfect essay for which to strive. A computer, or a centrally controlled set of "grading standards" are simply other subjective readers. The value of a teacher of languages is in their unique subjective viewpoint, not just their ability to scan the page.
Second, language is a constant struggle between conformity and ingenuity. Spell-checkers and grammer checkers (when I use them) allow me to express my ideas without offending the eyes of typo-sensitive readers, but they are also "locking down" English and collapsing the variants (alas, poor "colour"). Automated checking and intolerance to mutation is causing us to lose the ability to evolve our language.
I fear that English is becoming the QWERTY keyboard of languages.
My employer is still shut down to comply with a request from the provincial government to cut power usage by 50% while generation continues slowly coming online. I guess it's better than having us doing round after round of fscks if rolling blackouts hit. I'm not looking forward to cleaning up the mess of all the scripts I was running at the time of the original blackout but it's frustrating to be of no use to anyone right now.
My relatives in the country are amused at all the fuss - they were without power for weeks in the dead of winter during the ice storm of '89, so a day or two in the summer is pretty laughable to them:)
SARS, Mad Cow, power failures... what's CNN got lined up for us next week, an earthquake?
Slashdot Mirror
But there's that commercial with the guy whose the stuntman
That ad always makes me want to pirate movies to get people to quit risking their lives to make movies ... that stuntman needs to get a life!
If you only have one head, it's very hard to hold a conversation.
Tell that to Gollum.A guy who was clinging to the side of the rocket when it was launched has been awarded the X-Prize postumously.
I would reword that as "he won the X-Prize and a Darwin Award"
Want some real fun? Try being a newbie on the last surviving UNIX helpdesk for a huge corporation while its cutting 2/3+ of its staff and equipment. Suddenly you inherit responsibility for thousands of workstations and servers you've never touched in all their years, you have no idea how they've been administered, just that they're now your responsibility now (responsibility but not control - you're not allowed to change anything).
Now just for added fun, have someone start going through the server room yanking out anything that "doesn't look important" ( licence servers, NFS servers, NIS servers ... ). Oh - and meanwhile burnt-out management is trying to decide which of your burnt-out coworkers and burnt-out callers to boot off the island next.
(I wonder, if/when it's my turn for my torch to finally burn out or be snuffed out, if I'll feel that it was all better than unemployment?)
There are a lot of people lammenting the poor work ethic of this generation who are posting on slashdot instead of working.
A person should be rewarded according to the value of their work, not according to how much _more_ they worked than someone else. It's not supposed to be a zero-sum game, or at least that's what the capitalist fundementalists keep telling me.
I don't understand why parent was modded up - the method of authentication is not relevant to the security model.
The underlying OS has to uniquely identify users - the username is just an alias for you (uids in *nix). The password is a challenge that you must answer and can be altered if discovered by a would-be identity thief.
Smart cards are the way to go. You program them to hold the userids and passwords and handles all the drudgery of entering a userid and password. However, it's still the same system underneath.
Biometrics combines userids and passwords into one, great for forensics, awful for authentication. As soon as the scanner can be fooled with false input (contact lens, fake fingerprint, etc), the entire system is useless until replaced/upgraded to read a new metric. Just look at all the success thieves have had with designing covers to put over bank machines to grab card numbers - now imagine not being able to ever change your account/pin number after it is stolen.
If you want a security model that doesn't require using su, you build your OS/apps around group permissions and check for gid=0 instead of checking for uid=0 (to use *nix terminology).
It's a free email service.
Curiously, you don't seem to be dealing very well with this problem with your free news service.
Something to realize is that Paul Martin, the new PM, is "cleaning house", removing the loyalists of the old PM. It's exposing a lot of accumulated dirty laundry after three majority governments.
This is also the same PM whose famous "come hell or high water" attitude towards balancing the budget as finance minister pushed Canada from huge deficits to a long string of surpluses(*), so I think he's earned his reputation for intolerance to waste, so really what we're seeing is a big cleanup now that he's in charge. I say this as someone who will vote against him on principal (I don't like any of the other parties better, I just feel that no one party should be in power for four straight terms - it's bad for democracy).
(*) assuming the accounting is accurate.
This is the fundemental problem with the patent system now - it's essentially a nuscience system not a reward system. If it's a big enough nuscience, the patent will go away either in the courts, patent office or arm-twisting. Otherwise, it just keeps knowledge and processes from moving freely, favouring large entities with a specialized legal team over small groups/individuals actually working with the ideas. Sure big companies engage in a lot of research because of patent protection, but is it really more productive to society than millions of people coming up with incremental improvements on their own and eliminating the paperwork tax on individual innovation?
( sure I'm making a sweeping statement based on limited information, but until I have the resources to do a statistical analysis based on random samples of patents and experimental studies on different legal/economic systems, I have little choice but to hold unscientific opinions on the issue )
I dunno ... I liked the new D&D (Dilbert-and-Demons) format. At first the show seemed like a poor clone of Forever Knight and I had given up on it a couple of years ago but was lured back this year by the strange and frightening parallels to my company (it's nice to think that not all executives are evil ... they're just bloodsucking vampires trapped in a corrupt system ... but they do have souls).
Woah! Wait! Stop! Say that again?! Only the rich have the capital recequired to create jobs therefore we should give more to the rich? Have you considered the posibility that if the poor weren't so poor that maybe they would have the capital to make jobs too. Aren't self-employed people more productive, more efficient and a lot less likely to hold government hostage with threats of leaving/closing than those who command legions of wage-slaves?
I was a loyal trekkie for a long time, but there was a growing uneasiness towards the end of TNG - there were some really good stories, but they were growing fewer and further between. DS9 had a great premise and my favourite opening scene of any pilot I've ever seen, but the writers seemed to balk at it's mid-east politics premise ( Bajor = Lebanon ) and abandoned it. Technobabble ceased to be "music" and became noise.
There was a single week in which I suddenly realized wasn't a Trek fan any more. DS9 and B5 were playing "payoff" episodes against each other. The DS9 payoff was random and unearned - stuff blew up as if there was a quota, plot twists were thrown in without setup and people walked around like zombies and by the end everything was restored to the safety of where it had begun (give or take a few ominous worries). On B5, two major well-developed races went to the brink of war - one could feel the rush of inevitability, the weight of years of foreshadowing, the frantic desperation to find a way out, the brutality of errors ... and in the end, it didn't end well, the inevitable couldn't be averted and series made a right-hand turn.
What struck me is that B5 in its prime had a story to tell and time was a precious resource that needed to be used carefully to be able to tell it all. Star Trek had nothing left to say and story was just sand to fill the void.
The simple solution seems to be to have different rules on different servers and let people decide for themselves where they want to "settle". People who want anarchy can have a server to spew on, people who want different levels of peace and tranquility can sign up for other servers. Then have some way for players to "cash out" a character so they can make new characters on a new server if they want to emmigrate without starting all over from scratch.
Alas, I think the only way to deal with corporate censorship is to take the game away from corporations. I think at some point, the game engine will seperate from the skins applied to it and there will be more community-run options. I feel the only reason corporate MMRPGs took off was because open-source MUDs didn't go graphical when the rest of the world was ready for it.
Everybody deserves a fair trial.
But by what set of laws? International law - which the US flouts whenever it suits them? US law? New Iraq law (if there is a new legal system)? Old Iraq law? ("I was the dictator, my world was law"?). Can anyone honestly imagine any trial where a verdict of "not guilty, he's free to go" would be allowed? I do agree with your post, I guess I'm just a little too cynical about the new world order.
Does either Bush have to go on trial for the civilian deaths his orders led to? Does Blair have to face trial for possibly taking his country to war under false pretenses? Does Dick Cheney have to go on trial to explain who provided Iraq with chemical weapons technology and materials in the first place? (actually, I'd be rather curious to hear Saddam has to say at his trial about this one)
If the US president is the leader of the democratic world, why doesn't the rest of the world get a vote?
um ... how many widows have the Americans made in Iraq?
Why do the Americans, of all people, not understand that concept that a foriegn power interfering in a county's internal affairs might make some people upset?
( I want to be happy that this might be another step towards peace in Iraq, but honestly I fear it will just be another step in increasing the US far-right's confidence that they can impose their will by force of arms across the world )
Good lord! Good thing there's no forking or abandonment of projects by the developers to increase the TCO of Windows like there is with all that open source Linux stuff :)
I'm holding out for the new features of vi 2004.
Speaking as one of the wannabe's who's already managed as if he was already flipping burgers, I would like to drop-kick all the wannabe coders who have passed through in the past few years.
What most coders don't understand is that I have to support several thousand workstations and servers. Every few weeks, some application appears on the network that I've never seen and never heard of. I have no idea what it does or what resources it needs. It has no documentation nor any interface the likes of which I've ever seen. All I know is that I have an irate user on the phone who needs it to work now, ten other users in queue calling about ten other apps or scripts and all they know is that the developer said to call the helpline if there were any problems before leaving to the next shiny project.
If anything is going to be used on the network, I want it to be rock-solid, have a consistant interface (and ascii data dumps for crying out loud - I'm so tired of trying to perl together obscurely formatted excel spreadsheets "dumped" from databases to be used by HPUX users), be well documented (including how to diagnose its failures not just a list of what cool stuff it theoretically does). I want there to be a plan for how it is going to be deployed, how it is going to be supported and how to uninstall it when it's discovered to be full of unrepairable security holes.
Personally, I feel like too many coders and developers and planners who complain about admins are just the next generation of people who didn't want to add comments to their code.
(OK, I feel better now)
Personally, I'd like to see a verion of the Arthurian Legend done as a distant sequel to LotR. Consider: a sword of kings, an ancient noble bloodline, strange immortal sorrowful lady of the lake hanging out in the woods and a wize wizard of a long-faded order. It would take an extremely good writer to pull it off in a way respectful to both legends, but it would be fun to see.
Why aren't CEO jobs being all outsourced overseas? I'm sure there are lots of buisness people in other countries who would be glad to do the work for a fraction of the price. There's certainly no need to be onsite - I've never seen a senior executive in my life.
The economy is just the web of excuses why farmers should feed us.
African or ... oops, I mean ... French or English?
The National Post often reads like a well-funded "I for one welcome our new corporate overlords" infomercial.
It's painful that in a country with one of the most highly educated populations in the world, Canada's published newspapers consistantly have a scientific literacy somewhere below the average .advocacy newsgroup.
This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
First, an essay, or anything else written in a human language, is about communication. Has the student managed to communicate their idea? Personally, I feel this is more important than whether or not the student actually had a good idea to begin with. As a writer, you need to learn not only the formalities of the language, but how to play to your audience. There's no such thing as an objective reader and students shouldn't be taught to believe that there is an objectively perfect essay for which to strive. A computer, or a centrally controlled set of "grading standards" are simply other subjective readers. The value of a teacher of languages is in their unique subjective viewpoint, not just their ability to scan the page.
Second, language is a constant struggle between conformity and ingenuity. Spell-checkers and grammer checkers (when I use them) allow me to express my ideas without offending the eyes of typo-sensitive readers, but they are also "locking down" English and collapsing the variants (alas, poor "colour"). Automated checking and intolerance to mutation is causing us to lose the ability to evolve our language.
I fear that English is becoming the QWERTY keyboard of languages.
My employer is still shut down to comply with a request from the provincial government to cut power usage by 50% while generation continues slowly coming online. I guess it's better than having us doing round after round of fscks if rolling blackouts hit. I'm not looking forward to cleaning up the mess of all the scripts I was running at the time of the original blackout but it's frustrating to be of no use to anyone right now. My relatives in the country are amused at all the fuss - they were without power for weeks in the dead of winter during the ice storm of '89, so a day or two in the summer is pretty laughable to them :)
SARS, Mad Cow, power failures ... what's CNN got lined up for us next week, an earthquake?