Do you run Bernsteins software or his personality?
I tried putting his personality in a file and running it, but damn if it would not resolve any names.
Then I tried using his code and ohfuck does it work SO MUCH better than the Buggy Internet Name Daemon.
I've seen Dan about for 20 years on usenet. He's always been a prick but so am I; we get along fine. Don't waste his time and he's one of the nicest and smartest people you'll meet. He does not suffer fools well.
I have no problem getting along with people than get along with him, and when somebody says "he's a jerk" they usually are saying "I'm a clueless irritating fuckwit".
"Honestly, I'm getting pretty sick of slashdot lately. I'm finding a lot more interesting articles over at digg. The only thing missing is the witty satire of the slashdot crowd."
"Gone with the Wind" was the original blockbuster."
I was taught "For whom the bell tolls" was - it was the first full length color film (Wizard of Oz just was color and earlier but it wasn't all in color).
There was a paper that came out of Georgetown Universtity several year back that advocated a jurisdiction of cyberspace, to say nothing of Barlow's famous "We are children of cyberspace: screen.
"As a system administrator, I will continue to run my network. my routers, and my servers as I see fit. If the UN wants to play power games and screw it all up, then I as an operator and administrator will do everything technically possible to be sure that UN screwups don't affect my customers. My network, my rules."
...my own DNS root server. There, now you don't care what the asshats do. Atta boy.
"Jon Postel, why did you have to leave us to these asshats? "
First, he died. Second, he's the guy that handed power to these asshats, through Darth Cerf.
I liked Jon, he was great, but all this DNS mess happened on his watch.
The origin of this problem dated back to when Steve Wolff privatized the NSF backbone thus creating the non-governemnt controlled internet.
The problem is he forgot to privatize the name and address spaces (and in retrospect says this was a big mistake - duh). So, administration of these remained under US contract, where it exists today. This is a natural choke point and acts like a magnet for power seekers.
But, once you understand the net is not centrally controlled, it's edge cotnrolled, and you can decide where you point your DNS then you really don't care what any government does.
So the US and ICANN have screwed up the root servers? Big deal, I havn't used them in a decade, nor have millions of others.
Primary the root for yourself; become your own root server, then what ICANN or the UN does is utterly irrelevant to you.
What he said. Enough hasn't been said about physical securuty either. Much easier than hacking in.
Anybody old enough to remember back during the DNS wars when CORE had it's two servers stolen from a locked cage in a major colo with cameras in broad daylight? Unsolved to this day.
As a profession we need to do better. Look at all the identity and CC # thefts so far.
Always assume your computers will all be stolen. How much information can they get when (not if that happens?
"Most countries have servers for their own TLD's (.au in Australia). Come to think of it there is nothing to stop countries with firewalls (Iran, China, Sauda Arabia, etc) from diverting root server traffic to their own root servers. Personally this is the type of control which I would _not_ want my Government to have"
You're complaining because China and Saudi Arabia censor their countries Internet but don't mind the US censors the worlds DNS? No government ever approved.com/net/org/us/uk/de/ca/fr/...etc and now the US is saying "Either we like any proposed change to the root or it won't happen".
This is not about the computers that are the root servers, it is about who gets to edit the file that is a list of all the TLD servers - the DNS ROOT (".") zone file.
The top level DNS namespace is so stagnant it might as well be dead. We've gone from 315 to 321 tlds in ONLY TEN YEARS of explosive internet growth - a time when all other Internet namespaces scaled appropropriately. But, because of the US stanglehold, Jon Postel's plan to create another 300 tlds, 150 the first year (in 1997) never came to be.
But, bad as USG control is, giving that control to ICANN, would be worse, as ICANN are overpaid doodyheads that make the US government look small, honest, efficient, smart, wise and sensible by comparison.
Those of you here who think the ITU is cool should read Carl Malamud's "Exploring the Internet" to see exacly how anti-internet the ITU is. They're meerely seeking relevance in a world where all the phones work now, thank you very much.
"'You should always find a job that is above your skill level so that you can learn and be challenged.'"
So do the computer thing as a hobby and become a plumber. From a lot of the code I've seen out there, plumbing would be a good step up and challenging.
As a plumber you'll be the richest guy in your city. And you'll know how to fix your own toilet. Never hire a programmer than can't fix a toilet (ref: US Army study in the 70s).
Either way you'll be putting up with the same shit from different assholes. So what's the difference?
The study was used as a tactic by the trademark lobby to impede deplyment of new tlds. "We must assess the effect on stability of the internet by doing such a thing". NTIA nodded its pointy little head and commissioned the report. You'll notice all new tlds added by ICANN todate are considered and declared "experimental". Never mind that 100 new cctlds were quietly added in the past decade.
And now the report says "dozens of new tlds should be added each year".
Duh. Double duh. This what Jon Postel said in 1996.
We now return you to your regularly schedulred ICANN who will do as close to nothing as possible in the area of new tld creation as they can get away with and still pretend to represent the consensus of the Internet community.
Saaaaaaaay, notice how many lawyers and IP guys are on the ICANN board now? Just a coincidence I'm sure, I'm certain we'll see lots of new tlds RSN.
1) Sitefinder: At the time NSI did this two doezen other cctlds did this. NSI's point was "hey, either we can all do it or nobody can". That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
2).net rebid: Have a look inside all the facilities that bid on.net and tell me you'd have picked someplace else. I dare you.
3) Location location location: Like the US govt was gonna let.net outside the the borders of the US. Good one.
Frankly I sleep a bit more easy about my 3.net names now. (Hows that funky.org whois workin out for ya?)
"While I agree that C's golden age has come and gone, it shouldn't be relegated to the dust-bin of history yet"
No, that's where it came from not where it's going.
If C goes away people will have to use assembly instead. It's not going anywhere. Mutations of it. like C++ may come and go...
Interestingly there were two langauages that came out of the Bell Labs post C era. Muttey Hill did C++ and Napierville did C+@ (pronounced "Cat"). The Napierville guys claimed "the east code boys never did understand objects properly".
The langauge ended up in the hands of the guy that ran ihnpss.UUCP. BS was good armerketing.
The C+@ compiler, written in C+@, fits on a floppy. I have a copy here someplace.
" It wasn't invented with the i386, try sometime in the 1960's (I'd have to crack out an OS book to be sure of the date)."
Earlier than that actually: in 1956 Manchester University began work on the ATLAS computer project, capable of primitive multitasking. In other words multi tasking has been around for very nearly 50 years.
Good. I don't feel quite so old now. Although I suppose I should for remembering this. I think this is docuemnted in Andy Tannenbaum's Computer Architecture book which I read in the 70s at Waterloo.
"provide tabs is nice. Having a window manager that support window shading is nice. Having a window manager that supported window groups (to help manage, for instance, a variety of emacs frames) would be better (and yes, GNOME doesn't. Grrr). Having a pager that shows me my desktop layouts is nice. Having an easy way to bind menu items to key shortcuts on all my apps is nice. Having good utility software (like character maps, a decent email and calendar etc.) is always useful too. If you're that devoted to just focussign on programming with no distractions, boot to the console and use Emacs from there."
Man you smalltalk programmers stick out like a sore thumb.
What we seem to want of an OS these days (besides GPL) is:
1) Runs well as a server
2) Runs well as CLI desktop
3) Runs ok as a desktop of you like to fiddle
4) Works seamless with random peripehrals (ie OSX)
I already know it does 1 and 2 better than (gasp) PC BSD, I'm assuming 3) but until it's at 4) Apple will continue to sell a lot of hardware. That's gonna be the one to beat and as OSX gets better (hire Brian Reid, you morons) Apple as a unix distro company will continue it's ascendancy despite the hardware lock-in.
Solaris' legendary stabiity and Apple's seamlessness and interface will be a great mix; I don't predict Linux or even BSD beating Sun there, I think Apple won this and will continue on an upward trest and will eventually dominate unix sales, again, despite the hardware lock in.
As somebody that could only use school's Unix (by '76 you could use it at almost every university if you poked around enough to find it and asked for an account, thank you Rob Beach) as they were the only ones who could get it, the choices we have today are stunning. There is no news and even less product coming out of Microsoft for a change, they wowed the world with their basic, c, msdos, windows, desktop apps and an almost endless series of bizarre mutations of windoes 3.1, (in tha order) none of which worked, but now they're done and we can get back to where we should have been in the early 80's before every asshole bought a computer - making unix ubiquitous, usable and cheap if not free by a generation that grew up with unix and wndows and know what things should look like and how they should properly work. Now that they're old enough to have some sway in the corporate world we're finally seeing some decent product, choices and pricing. It's quite refeshing.
Whereas in 1984 Digital Research sold operating systems (CP/M) and Microsoft sold languages (BASIC, later C that they'd bought) the unwritten truce was broken when DR went into langauages; MS decided to compete in the OS arena, the rest is PC history. Apple did that to sun by selling unix machines, Sun is now selling Mac's (buy your own hardware, ok). Solaris on an Apple now riases inertresting questions. Sun selling $500 OSX workalines even more. Bout friggin time boys, I could buy a color Apollo in 68K 87 for $3K and its taken you this long to even think about it? This is why Apollos were better than suns; Suns vision has always been the campus terminal room. That's finally changed. My God, it's full of... consumers.
Uinx had a rough sart of of the box; Bell Labs owned it, period and it took years of things like BSD and lawsuits to get it to the point where anybody could have it. But now in a world where there is Sun, Apple and the geek distros of unix (MS will get into the unix distro market eventually, they're just being more stubborn than they were about the internet, that's all) there is finally a criteria and to get work done sensibly instead of wowing the readers of PC Magazines cheap ad section and reviews. And the reasons colleges all switched to unix back then even though they had perfectly good legacy apps on their (GCOS, OS/360, etc) legacy systems was they a) could use unix and b) could get more work done due to it's elgance and simplicity.// execute my ass
But mom and pop have never had their chance. General PC flakines and current availability of OSC and soon Mini-Sun boxes that give you decent access to the music, video, camera, et. al. domain will change that.
As microsofts inept technology fades into oblivion with only their user base to keep them relevant, the next war is the home unix applance; unix may or may not be transparent to the user; for explicitly non-transparent ones there is not much serious competition for the everyman-better-UI than-windows-system but that changes now when people can buy workable unix-for-home from companies that are ancient in computer years.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you run Bernsteins software or his personality?
I tried putting his personality in a file and running it, but damn if it would not resolve any names.
Then I tried using his code and ohfuck does it work SO MUCH better than the Buggy Internet Name Daemon.
I've seen Dan about for 20 years on usenet. He's always been a prick but so am I; we get along fine. Don't waste his time and he's one of the nicest and smartest people you'll meet. He does not suffer fools well.
I have no problem getting along with people than get along with him, and when somebody says "he's a jerk" they usually are saying "I'm a clueless irritating fuckwit".
"Cool. You can share it with your LUG at the local library. Now pardon me while I return to rearchitecting an 8,000 server environment."
You'll be using DJBDNS instead of BIND then I take it?
"Honestly, I'm getting pretty sick of slashdot lately. I'm finding a lot more interesting articles over at digg. The only thing missing is the witty satire of the slashdot crowd."
Sardonic patch v1.3 installed. c u th3r3.
"Gone with the Wind" was the original blockbuster."
I was taught "For whom the bell tolls" was - it was the first full length color film (Wizard of Oz just was color and earlier but it wasn't all in color).
"Ok, so it's totaly crazy"
There was a paper that came out of Georgetown Universtity several year back that advocated a jurisdiction of cyberspace, to say nothing of Barlow's famous "We are children of cyberspace: screen.
Remember Shaw's quote about "unreasonable men"?
"Jon Postel, why did you have to leave us to these asshats? "
First, he died. Second, he's the guy that handed power to these asshats, through Darth Cerf.
I liked Jon, he was great, but all this DNS mess happened on his watch.
The origin of this problem dated back to when Steve Wolff privatized the NSF backbone thus creating the non-governemnt controlled internet.
The problem is he forgot to privatize the name and address spaces (and in retrospect says this was a big mistake - duh). So, administration of these remained under US contract, where it exists today. This is a natural choke point and acts like a magnet for power seekers.
But, once you understand the net is not centrally controlled, it's edge cotnrolled, and you can decide where you point your DNS then you really don't care what any government does.
So the US and ICANN have screwed up the root servers? Big deal, I havn't used them in a decade, nor have millions of others.
Primary the root for yourself; become your own root server, then what ICANN or the UN does is utterly irrelevant to you.
What he said. Enough hasn't been said about physical securuty either. Much easier than hacking in.
Anybody old enough to remember back during the DNS wars when CORE had it's two servers stolen from a locked cage in a major colo with cameras in broad daylight? Unsolved to this day.
As a profession we need to do better. Look at all the identity and CC # thefts so far.
Always assume your computers will all be stolen. How much information can they get when (not if that happens?
"Most countries have servers for their own TLD's (.au in Australia). Come to think of it there is nothing to stop countries with firewalls (Iran, China, Sauda Arabia, etc) from diverting root server traffic to their own root servers. Personally this is the type of control which I would _not_ want my Government to have"
.com/net/org/us/uk/de/ca/fr/...etc and now the US is saying "Either we like any proposed change to the root or it won't happen".
You're complaining because China and Saudi Arabia censor their countries Internet but don't mind the US censors the worlds DNS? No government ever approved
This is not about the computers that are the root servers, it is about who gets to edit the file that is a list of all the TLD servers - the DNS ROOT (".") zone file.
The top level DNS namespace is so stagnant it might as well be dead. We've gone from 315 to 321 tlds in ONLY TEN YEARS of explosive internet growth - a time when all other Internet namespaces scaled appropropriately. But, because of the US stanglehold, Jon Postel's plan to create another 300 tlds, 150 the first year (in 1997) never came to be.
But, bad as USG control is, giving that control to ICANN, would be worse, as ICANN are overpaid doodyheads that make the US government look small, honest, efficient, smart, wise and sensible by comparison.
Those of you here who think the ITU is cool should read Carl Malamud's "Exploring the Internet" to see exacly how anti-internet the ITU is. They're meerely seeking relevance in a world where all the phones work now, thank you very much.
"'You should always find a job that is above your skill level so that you can learn and be challenged.'"
So do the computer thing as a hobby and become a plumber. From a lot of the code I've seen out there, plumbing would be a good step up and challenging.
As a plumber you'll be the richest guy in your city. And you'll know how to fix your own toilet. Never hire a programmer than can't fix a toilet (ref: US Army study in the 70s).
Either way you'll be putting up with the same shit from different assholes. So what's the difference?
No kidding. Try adding disk drives and raid controllers till you're happy. Typically this might be around 3 controllers and 9 drives.
See how your cheap grey PSU works then. Hint: if the PSU is not quite heavy, your disk drives will not work properly.
You can test your PSU to see if it's any good. Simply turn the power off, connect the floppy power cable backwards, then turn it back on.
Cound the number of seconds until the power supply wires going to the floppy vapourize. A good one would be subsecond.
In the 80's I worked at Cado Systems Corporation on the "Tiger" computer.
I believe a few of them are still in service today.
The only reason they're so healthy despite being fat is that masturbation is such a great cardiovascular exercise.
The study was used as a tactic by the trademark lobby to impede deplyment of new tlds. "We must assess the effect on stability of the internet by doing such a thing". NTIA nodded its pointy little head and commissioned the report. You'll notice all new tlds added by ICANN todate are considered and declared "experimental". Never mind that 100 new cctlds were quietly added in the past decade.
And now the report says "dozens of new tlds should be added each year".
Duh. Double duh. This what Jon Postel said in 1996.
We now return you to your regularly schedulred ICANN who will do as close to nothing as possible in the area of new tld creation as they can get away with and still pretend to represent the consensus of the Internet community.
Saaaaaaaay, notice how many lawyers and IP guys are on the ICANN board now? Just a coincidence I'm sure, I'm certain we'll see lots of new tlds RSN.
1) Sitefinder: At the time NSI did this two doezen other cctlds did this. NSI's point was "hey, either we can all do it or nobody can". That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
.net rebid: Have a look inside all the facilities that bid on .net and tell me you'd have picked someplace else. I dare you.
.net outside the the borders of the US. Good one.
.net names now. (Hows that funky .org whois workin out for ya?)
2)
3) Location location location: Like the US govt was gonna let
Frankly I sleep a bit more easy about my 3
"While I agree that C's golden age has come and gone, it shouldn't be relegated to the dust-bin of history yet"
No, that's where it came from not where it's going.
If C goes away people will have to use assembly instead. It's not going anywhere. Mutations of it. like C++ may come and go...
Interestingly there were two langauages that came out of the Bell Labs post C era. Muttey Hill did C++ and Napierville did C+@ (pronounced "Cat"). The Napierville guys claimed "the east code boys never did understand objects properly".
The langauge ended up in the hands of the guy that ran ihnpss.UUCP. BS was good armerketing.
The C+@ compiler, written in C+@, fits on a floppy. I have a copy here someplace.
" "Enterprise." What does this mean anyhow?"
You can use it on spaceships.
" It wasn't invented with the i386, try sometime in the 1960's (I'd have to crack out an OS book to be sure of the date)."
Earlier than that actually: in 1956 Manchester University began work on the ATLAS computer project, capable of primitive multitasking. In other words multi tasking has been around for very nearly 50 years.
Good. I don't feel quite so old now. Although I suppose I should for remembering this. I think this is docuemnted in Andy Tannenbaum's Computer Architecture book which I read in the 70s at Waterloo.
"Multithreading is very important for virtually every major business (think j2ee/server) app around"
It makes you wonder how those Bell lab-rats ever invented unix on a machine that didn't have it; they didn't even have memory maagement.
"HOW DO I FRICKING ADD USERS?"
/export/home/dir -s /bin/bash user
useradd -g group -d
Pussy. Like you have users.
"provide tabs is nice. Having a window manager that support window shading is nice. Having a window manager that supported window groups (to help manage, for instance, a variety of emacs frames) would be better (and yes, GNOME doesn't. Grrr). Having a pager that shows me my desktop layouts is nice. Having an easy way to bind menu items to key shortcuts on all my apps is nice. Having good utility software (like character maps, a decent email and calendar etc.) is always useful too. If you're that devoted to just focussign on programming with no distractions, boot to the console and use Emacs from there."
Man you smalltalk programmers stick out like a sore thumb.
"Speaking as an old school sunOS fan (Anything pre-Solaris), CDE was almost as big a mistake as going sysV for Solaris."
Nothing's that big. But, what happened to NeWS? That's where we should be and we finally have the computing resources to make is snappy for cheap.
"What? People run Windows on big iron?"
Ebay?
" And as the takeup of OS X among the Unix crowd shows, people want usability and new technology over some ideological purity"
Bingo.
"Linux is dying - Netcraft".
Sincerely
Bee S. Dee.
What we seem to want of an OS these days (besides GPL) is:
// execute my ass
1) Runs well as a server
2) Runs well as CLI desktop
3) Runs ok as a desktop of you like to fiddle
4) Works seamless with random peripehrals (ie OSX)
I already know it does 1 and 2 better than (gasp) PC BSD, I'm assuming 3) but until it's at 4) Apple will continue to sell a lot of hardware. That's gonna be the one to beat and as OSX gets better (hire Brian Reid, you morons) Apple as a unix distro company will continue it's ascendancy despite the hardware lock-in.
Solaris' legendary stabiity and Apple's seamlessness and interface will be a great mix; I don't predict Linux or even BSD beating Sun there, I think Apple won this and will continue on an upward trest and will eventually dominate unix sales, again, despite the hardware lock in.
As somebody that could only use school's Unix (by '76 you could use it at almost every university if you poked around enough to find it and asked for an account, thank you Rob Beach) as they were the only ones who could get it, the choices we have today are stunning. There is no news and even less product coming out of Microsoft for a change, they wowed the world with their basic, c, msdos, windows, desktop apps and an almost endless series of bizarre mutations of windoes 3.1, (in tha order) none of which worked, but now they're done and we can get back to where we should have been in the early 80's before every asshole bought a computer - making unix ubiquitous, usable and cheap if not free by a generation that grew up with unix and wndows and know what things should look like and how they should properly work. Now that they're old enough to have some sway in the corporate world we're finally seeing some decent product, choices and pricing. It's quite refeshing.
Whereas in 1984 Digital Research sold operating systems (CP/M) and Microsoft sold languages (BASIC, later C that they'd bought) the unwritten truce was broken when DR went into langauages; MS decided to compete in the OS arena, the rest is PC history. Apple did that to sun by selling unix machines, Sun is now selling Mac's (buy your own hardware, ok). Solaris on an Apple now riases inertresting questions. Sun selling $500 OSX workalines even more. Bout friggin time boys, I could buy a color Apollo in 68K 87 for $3K and its taken you this long to even think about it? This is why Apollos were better than suns; Suns vision has always been the campus terminal room. That's finally changed. My God, it's full of... consumers.
Uinx had a rough sart of of the box; Bell Labs owned it, period and it took years of things like BSD and lawsuits to get it to the point where anybody could have it. But now in a world where there is Sun, Apple and the geek distros of unix (MS will get into the unix distro market eventually, they're just being more stubborn than they were about the internet, that's all) there is finally a criteria and to get work done sensibly instead of wowing the readers of PC Magazines cheap ad section and reviews. And the reasons colleges all switched to unix back then even though they had perfectly good legacy apps on their (GCOS, OS/360, etc) legacy systems was they a) could use unix and b) could get more work done due to it's elgance and simplicity.
But mom and pop have never had their chance. General PC flakines and current availability of OSC and soon Mini-Sun boxes that give you decent access to the music, video, camera, et. al. domain will change that.
As microsofts inept technology fades into oblivion with only their user base to keep them relevant, the next war is the home unix applance; unix may or may not be transparent to the user; for explicitly non-transparent ones there is not much serious competition for the everyman-better-UI than-windows-system but that changes now when people can buy workable unix-for-home from companies that are ancient in computer years.
Oh my what a lovely war it will be.
Gates deserv