"you're at the mercy of your dns provider's choice of root servers."
True, but you do have the choice of DNS providers, I've almost never used the one from my ISP, but rather the servers I keep alive at work. You can pick a name server and use it from anywhere in the world, regardless of what your ISP wants you to do.
A single root for the entire Domain Name Space is NOT required. It is only required for each TLD. If I want to get uniform handling of.COM,.NET, etc.. I just have to respect the conventions that have been agreed on so far by telling my DNS serves to use the existing root servers, for those TLDs. This is consistent with existing TLDs and doesn't break anything.
When I want to support a new TLD such as.BIZ, or whatever, and I don't agree with ICANN, I just update my root.db to reflect my own choice for that TLD, which does break things, but only for that TLD.
So, you can have your cake (interoperable.COM, etc) and choose your own icing (.BIZ, etc) instead of letting ICANN tell you what to do.
I've build my own root.db for my DNS servers to feed off of. It's simple to do, even a Windows user like myself can deal with it. It's tempting to add my own domains, which I may do at some time in the future, but for now it was just to get some independence from ICANN.
I've got the file saved as "rebeldb.root" in my c:\bind directory, and updated named.boot with the following info at the bottom... ;
; prime the DNS with root server 'hint' information ; ;cache . db.cache
cache . rebeldb.root ;
So there it is, you too can declare independance from ICANN, and decide for yourself who you trust to be the authority for each domain. Let the vanity TLD games begin.
I don't use Microsoft's DNS server, so your milage may vary, I suspect this should work with newer versions of BIND.
--Mike--
Ok, so I'm stuck in the land of Micro$oft. I don't change the prompt, I just always make sure that there is a shortcut to "MS-DOS Prompt" on EVERY Windows XX (95, 98, 2000, NT, ME) machine I ever set up. That way I can go Ctrl-ESC, M, and I'm in C:\FUBAR no matter where I am.
I'm not going to to.NET, in fact, I'm not going to move past Win98 for many things, pulling back the line to Win98, Office97 where I can, and Win2k servers. I'm not willing to trust my infrastructure or privacy to a company that doesn't even know enough to have redundant DNS servers on different networks. I was able to do this with our companies servers, with just me in the IS department.
When I can put a record in our DNS server that tells people where our users can be authenticated, then we'll have a workable solution, not before. Why should we subject everything to a unneccesary single point of failure (M$) when we don't need to, don't have to, and it's not even prudent?
We should use the email address as a key, the DNS server for the user's domain could then be easily specified to point anywhere, even M$. It would be simple, consistent with existing protocols and memes, and easy to understand by the masses.
When I can write my own SERVER for the passport protocol, in my own choice of language and OS, then I'll consider doing it... until then, I'll stick with the woefully inadequate, but much preferable unique username/password per site method.
I once had a dual D/A, 8 relay system set up off of a parallel port, controled 450 volts at 6 amps, and 12 volts at 10 amps to do "seasoning" of Tungsten-Halogen lamps in a "weightless" (not really, of course) environment.
If this is a home network, which you seem to imply, the most accurate measurement would be to use the very power meter which is being used to bill you with. You'll have to turn off EVERYTHING else in the house, then time a few rotations of the disk on the electric meter. If you can't turn everything else off, try to get a feel for the steady state by measuring everything else, then turn your network back on, and do the difference.
It usually tells you how many Watt hours a rotation is somewhere on the meter.
--Mike--
I switched my DNS servers, have you done yours?
on
Legitimacy Of ICANN?
·
· Score: 2
Yesterday I recieved an email titled "RE: URGENT:.BIZ Registry Phase I has opened - take steps to get the name you want..."
It's obviously a ploy by Network Solutions/Verisign to legitimize their new offer of the.BIZ TLD. They want to get as many users as possible to send them money, and build thier legitimacy at the same time. They want to prod people into action. In my case it worked, but I did the opposite of what they wanted, and you should too.
It appears that the legitimate holder of the.BIZ registry is biztld.net, and that NSI saw this as too much money to let someone else take, and is in the process of a coup d'état to grab it for themselves.
Instead of acting like a sheep to be fleeced, I took the following actions:
Replied to their email with this: It's my understanding that Network Solutions is NOT the legitimate operator of the.BIZ domain, what agreement have you reached with the current holders of that domain??
Set up a new db.cache, for our companies name servers, which lists all the roots for each domain, including countries, and now I determine who is the legitimate registrar for every TLD
The blatant agrression on the part of NSI finally got me to act, and it was easy, only about an hour to research, implement, and test. Now I've taken back control and put government back in my hands for our companies part of the internet.
In my mind this is a stopgap measure, as my choice was arbitrary, and I really don't want the maintenance headache of having to keep a few hundred TLD entries up to date. I've taken our 30 users out of the ICANN/NSI pool, and will now seeks a better authority to trust in the long run.
It'll be interesting to see what grass roots efforts evolve from this, and what a democratically run Domain Name System looks like.
I strongly suggest everyone else do the same, and vote with your bits.
DSL pushes a high bandwidth analog signal down your phone lines. It relies completely on the absence of telephone company equipment between the DSL modems on each end of the line.
The phone company expects to only deal with 8,000 samples of 8 bits each per second, and when they multiplex the signals for 24 lines into one (to get 23 more phone services through a single pair of wires), then sample everything at that rate. They don't care about DSL, they only expect to provide voice service, and engineer appropriately.
If you were willing to pay for the labor and materials and increased expense of having to run completely new lines... they would still probably turn you down, because they are only interested in delivering voice service, at the aformentioned 64kbits/second encoding.
I takes a tremendous amount of time an effort to write good software.
Wrong - Writing software is easy! It takes a tremendous amount of time to make software good. Anyone, including myself, can hack out a piece of code that functions for the limited use of a single person. It takes a community of users to use the software, and in the process find the rough edges, and wear them down. The polishing process is what is responsible for truely great software, with many users putting it through it's paces, pushing the limitations and extending it into unintended new applications.
I once wrote a Forth compiler for OS/2, in assembler. I did it just to learn about assembler in OS/2. A user of the software decided my documentation truely sucked and wrote better documentation. Other users submitted feedback, and it did fairly well, finding use all over the place. My efforts were really just in providing the rough hewn stone, the users provided the true grit and polish.
If Microsoft were truely consistent, users would be paid to find problems in their products. This is because when a user finds a problem, and assists in fixing it, they are giving time and experience (value) to Microsoft.
Microsoft and crew try to push the idea that any person involved in creating software has to some how be paid, or it's a communist/socialist conspiracy against the world. They obscure/overlook the fact that most of the work in open source/free software is actually done by the users of the software, just by using the software . If I'm using Microsoft Word to write a document, and it does something wierd, I have have very few options, mostly all involving paying money to Microsoft, and NOT getting my problem fixed to my satisfaction. If I'm using something written as open source, or shareware, I'm either going to give feedback to the author(s), or fix it myself, and possibly make that fix available to others.
Fortunately for Microsoft, in the real world, the users of software aren't expected to be paid for using the software in any software model. They paid to be users, in terms of money if it's commercial, and time learning in ALL cases. Free software doesn't make any socialistic or altruistic demands on the users, just the people who provide the rough hewn starting material.
I believe RMS when he says just processing the feedback was almost overwhelming. A thousand real users can do at least a hundred times the work of a crew of 10 paid debuggers. They can do this because they have a vested interest in the software doing what they want it to do. They will notice things, and make all sorts of suggestions and comments which might never cross the mind of someone set out to build a product for one specific, highly engineered use. This is incredible leverage, and it's free, and even in the interest of the users.
The folks and FermiLab and CERN regularly have hardware filter 7 Terabytes per second down to "reasonable" data levels. It's mostly done in hardware. I would think it would be fairly easy to filter out half of the traffic (MP3 files, etc), and use a similar fiber to transport all or a filtered portion of the data streams back to friendly territory.
I would be VERY surprised if they don't also have less secret hardware in place on the US ends of these links.
Look, you're connected to the internet, you only have one subnet, with X addresses. This company gives you a VPN service, with it's own set of addresses, probably all virtual. How does this differ from VPN and/or NAT? It's fluff... NAT is nice for getting devices to be able to see the internet, but it's not a replacement for security. VPN is a good idea, but only if there are no chinks anywhere in the armor. (Yes, running Microsoft code is a BIG chink)
I used to buy CDs... then napster came along, and I found more interesting songs and bought more GOOD CDs, and didn't get roped into buying crap because of the artificially high price of $17 for a single good song.
The mass digitization of our heritage needs a driver, and it's not going to happen if we're so paranoid about copyright that we don't act now, while the source materials are still available.
The RIAA had a GOOD THING in Napster, then they fucked themselves (and us) by getting greedy, being penny wise, and pound foolish to a degree which just pisses me off every single time I think about it.
We need to revisit the concepts of copyright and cut DOWN the time frame to 10 years, no more. We need to cut down the patent to 7 years. It's obvious that you shouldn't be able to patent software or business methods (which are all ideas for using existing systems, not improving a machine.)
The Germans didn't leak out any design information about there cryptography, we can thank the Poles, and later the French and English for that. What I was referring to was the fact that they used redundancy in the information they encrypted, for example there was a post that almost every day reporting "Post xxx, nothing to report"... which made it easier by orders of magnatude to do an automated scan for the right keys to the data for that day.
The amount of intellect thrown at this and the other technical problems of the war still astounds me, both sides had some VERY clever people working on it.
The last World War was won because of many factors, one that figured very heavily was encryption and secrecy. The fact that the Germans leaked a bit of information through Enigma (always starting with the same introduction to a message, for example) enabled the Allies to have a large strategic advantage which they used fairly effectively throughout the war.
We need to use this to OUR advantage to make sure that we, the citizens of the world, keep control instead of the Corporations and Governments.
--Mike--
What the %$%!@$ is it?? Seems useless to me.
on
Sun Launches JXTA
·
· Score: 2
Exactly, I downloaded it, got the shell up and running, only to discover it doesn't DO ANYTHING. I can't even TALK to anyone, because there's no way to see who's "Logged in to talk"... so it's not even as capable as IRC.
Without an application to see SOME functionality, even if it's just an IRC clone, I don't get it.
Well, there's no laughter....
"From what I've been told, we will not be able to make our broadcast
available on our website. The only way to access it will be through MLB and
their deal with Real Networks. This decision was made by MLB and we have
no control over it."
#1. Light tends to act like discrete packets of energy called Photons, which have a distinct energy level.
#2. Photons tend NOT to interact, and pass right by each other.
#3. The human eye has a range of color perception, called a color space. This range includes colors that can NOT be accurately reproduced by CRT or LCD displays. This has been known since before the design of color TV.
#4. There is strong evidence that some people can actually percieve a fourth color, in the blue-green range, that most people can't. Slashdot had a story about this about 2 months ago. These people would be able to distinguish between to sets of carefully balanced lights which were composed from different colors of red, green, and blue LEDS, but appear identical to everyone without this extra sense.
#5. Slashdot needs another axis for rating, funny, correctness, etc.
These guys should be building custom silicon, with one bit processors in an array... everything clocked... they could get the cost down to almost zip. They should FORGET the need to reprogram the thing in anything less than 1 minute. If you need high speed hardware, you've got to be able to trade away something, and program setup time is it.
--Mike--
Re:I want one, and have for a long time!
on
FPGA Supercomputers
·
· Score: 2
Think of each cell in the array as a few bits of a fairly large SRAM block. The only difference is that the memory stored is actually the program for a 1,000,000 bit cpu. Data has to be piped in via the edges, I would probably bond out 32 bits from each corner to make a reasonable package size.
As far as "storage" (RAM) in the traditional sense, there is none... just the states of the individual bit computers. Taken in combination, you can program anything from a pipeline multiplier through string comparison, etc. Pipe the data in one corner, and out the other, using DMA to feed it from the main system bus.
I hope that all makes sense... I'm tired, and need my bandwidth fix, thanks to NorthPoint's demise.
I've played with this idea since college back in the 80s... if you have a massively parallel grid of single bit computing cells with a delay of a single clock on ALL operations, almost all timing problems can be resolved and race conditions are only a matter of looking for circular references. If you use a graphical editor to lay out your data flows, you can program the thing in a fairly simple manner. You can get phenominal flow rates for data, searching for a data string could happen at the maximum transfer rate of the hard drive, for example. Doing pipelined operations at 100Mhz (a very conservative clock rate) could allow for all of the feature recognition that the human eye does in hardware, in real time, with more precision. The possiblities that fall out of abandoning the Von Neuman architecture are so varied and vast, it's like trying to describe what's possible when you switch from animal to steam power.
I want to see a grid of 1000x1000 single bit clocked cells that can be reprogrammed on the fly... I'll pay up to US$300 for one to play with, provided it does the clocking as I specified above. At a bare minimum I could do FFTS in real time on a 100Mhz 12 bit data stream with it.
If you can get a rotating camera system to do the 3d source for this puppy, imagine the level of detail a movie could have. You could loop through an event, say a heartbeat (from MRI data), and look at it from every concieveable angle. This wouldn't be as realistic as output from a video source, but it would suffice for showing medical uses.
For a really cool demo, get a camcorder on a spinning mount to match your products, then do a time lapse of a plant germinating. This would allow you to do a frame every second or two in high resolution, making the capture process easy, then you can avoid having to do any hidden surface removal for playback. You could also do the math and do all that to compress it for the finished demo.
It would be a VERY cool, high resolution demo that wouldn't be replicable on ANY other type of display out there.
Ok, get a camcoder, a pivot point, some potting soil and seeds... and make me a very cool demo. (I want to see this if you actually do it).
Slashdot Mirror
True, but you do have the choice of DNS providers, I've almost never used the one from my ISP, but rather the servers I keep alive at work. You can pick a name server and use it from anywhere in the world, regardless of what your ISP wants you to do.
--Mike--
When I want to support a new TLD such as .BIZ, or whatever, and I don't agree with ICANN, I just update my root.db to reflect my own choice for that TLD, which does break things, but only for that TLD.
So, you can have your cake (interoperable .COM, etc) and choose your own icing (.BIZ, etc) instead of letting ICANN tell you what to do.
--Mike--
I've got the file saved as "rebeldb.root" in my c:\bind directory, and updated named.boot with the following info at the bottom...
;
;
;cache . db.cache
;
; prime the DNS with root server 'hint'
information
cache . rebeldb.root
So there it is, you too can declare independance from ICANN, and decide for yourself who you trust to be the authority for each domain. Let the vanity TLD games begin.
I don't use Microsoft's DNS server, so your milage may vary, I suspect this should work with newer versions of BIND.
--Mike--
--Curious Mike--
--Mike--
When I can put a record in our DNS server that tells people where our users can be authenticated, then we'll have a workable solution, not before. Why should we subject everything to a unneccesary single point of failure (M$) when we don't need to, don't have to, and it's not even prudent?
We should use the email address as a key, the DNS server for the user's domain could then be easily specified to point anywhere, even M$. It would be simple, consistent with existing protocols and memes, and easy to understand by the masses.
--Mike--
--Mike--
--Mike--
It usually tells you how many Watt hours a rotation is somewhere on the meter.
--Mike--
It's obviously a ploy by Network Solutions/Verisign to legitimize their new offer of the .BIZ TLD. They want to get as many users as possible to send them money, and build thier legitimacy at the same time. They want to prod people into action. In my case it worked, but I did the opposite of what they wanted, and you should too .
It appears that the legitimate holder of the .BIZ registry is biztld.net, and that NSI saw this as too much money to let someone else take, and is in the process of a coup d'état to grab it for themselves.
Instead of acting like a sheep to be fleeced, I took the following actions:
- Replied to their email with this:
.BIZ domain, what agreement have you reached with the current holders of that domain??
- Set up a new db.cache, for our companies name servers, which lists all the roots for each domain, including countries, and now I determine who is the legitimate registrar for every TLD
The blatant agrression on the part of NSI finally got me to act, and it was easy, only about an hour to research, implement, and test. Now I've taken back control and put government back in my hands for our companies part of the internet.It's my understanding that Network Solutions is NOT the legitimate operator of the
In my mind this is a stopgap measure, as my choice was arbitrary, and I really don't want the maintenance headache of having to keep a few hundred TLD entries up to date. I've taken our 30 users out of the ICANN/NSI pool, and will now seeks a better authority to trust in the long run.
It'll be interesting to see what grass roots efforts evolve from this, and what a democratically run Domain Name System looks like.
I strongly suggest everyone else do the same, and vote with your bits.
--Mike--
The phone company expects to only deal with 8,000 samples of 8 bits each per second, and when they multiplex the signals for 24 lines into one (to get 23 more phone services through a single pair of wires), then sample everything at that rate. They don't care about DSL, they only expect to provide voice service, and engineer appropriately.
If you were willing to pay for the labor and materials and increased expense of having to run completely new lines... they would still probably turn you down, because they are only interested in delivering voice service, at the aformentioned 64kbits/second encoding.
--Mike--
Wrong - Writing software is easy! It takes a tremendous amount of time to make software good. Anyone, including myself, can hack out a piece of code that functions for the limited use of a single person. It takes a community of users to use the software, and in the process find the rough edges, and wear them down. The polishing process is what is responsible for truely great software, with many users putting it through it's paces, pushing the limitations and extending it into unintended new applications.
I once wrote a Forth compiler for OS/2, in assembler. I did it just to learn about assembler in OS/2. A user of the software decided my documentation truely sucked and wrote better documentation. Other users submitted feedback, and it did fairly well, finding use all over the place. My efforts were really just in providing the rough hewn stone, the users provided the true grit and polish.
If Microsoft were truely consistent, users would be paid to find problems in their products. This is because when a user finds a problem, and assists in fixing it, they are giving time and experience (value) to Microsoft.
Microsoft and crew try to push the idea that any person involved in creating software has to some how be paid, or it's a communist/socialist conspiracy against the world. They obscure/overlook the fact that most of the work in open source/free software is actually done by the users of the software, just by using the software . If I'm using Microsoft Word to write a document, and it does something wierd, I have have very few options, mostly all involving paying money to Microsoft, and NOT getting my problem fixed to my satisfaction. If I'm using something written as open source, or shareware, I'm either going to give feedback to the author(s), or fix it myself, and possibly make that fix available to others.
Fortunately for Microsoft, in the real world, the users of software aren't expected to be paid for using the software in any software model. They paid to be users, in terms of money if it's commercial, and time learning in ALL cases. Free software doesn't make any socialistic or altruistic demands on the users, just the people who provide the rough hewn starting material.
I believe RMS when he says just processing the feedback was almost overwhelming. A thousand real users can do at least a hundred times the work of a crew of 10 paid debuggers. They can do this because they have a vested interest in the software doing what they want it to do. They will notice things, and make all sorts of suggestions and comments which might never cross the mind of someone set out to build a product for one specific, highly engineered use. This is incredible leverage, and it's free, and even in the interest of the users.
--Mike--
I would be VERY surprised if they don't also have less secret hardware in place on the US ends of these links.
--Mike--
--Mike--
The mass digitization of our heritage needs a driver, and it's not going to happen if we're so paranoid about copyright that we don't act now, while the source materials are still available.
The RIAA had a GOOD THING in Napster, then they fucked themselves (and us) by getting greedy, being penny wise, and pound foolish to a degree which just pisses me off every single time I think about it.
We need to revisit the concepts of copyright and cut DOWN the time frame to 10 years, no more. We need to cut down the patent to 7 years. It's obvious that you shouldn't be able to patent software or business methods (which are all ideas for using existing systems, not improving a machine.)
This topic ALWAYS gets my blood boiling. /FLAME
--Mike--
The Germans didn't leak out any design information about there cryptography, we can thank the Poles, and later the French and English for that. What I was referring to was the fact that they used redundancy in the information they encrypted, for example there was a post that almost every day reporting "Post xxx, nothing to report"... which made it easier by orders of magnatude to do an automated scan for the right keys to the data for that day.
The amount of intellect thrown at this and the other technical problems of the war still astounds me, both sides had some VERY clever people working on it.
--Mike--
We need to use this to OUR advantage to make sure that we, the citizens of the world, keep control instead of the Corporations and Governments.
--Mike--
Without an application to see SOME functionality, even if it's just an IRC clone, I don't get it.
--Mike--
"From what I've been told, we will not be able to make our broadcast available on our website. The only way to access it will be through MLB and their deal with Real Networks. This decision was made by MLB and we have no control over it."
--Mike--
#2. Photons tend NOT to interact, and pass right by each other.
#3. The human eye has a range of color perception, called a color space. This range includes colors that can NOT be accurately reproduced by CRT or LCD displays. This has been known since before the design of color TV.
#4. There is strong evidence that some people can actually percieve a fourth color, in the blue-green range, that most people can't. Slashdot had a story about this about 2 months ago. These people would be able to distinguish between to sets of carefully balanced lights which were composed from different colors of red, green, and blue LEDS, but appear identical to everyone without this extra sense.
#5. Slashdot needs another axis for rating, funny, correctness, etc.
--Mike--
--Mike--
As far as "storage" (RAM) in the traditional sense, there is none... just the states of the individual bit computers. Taken in combination, you can program anything from a pipeline multiplier through string comparison, etc. Pipe the data in one corner, and out the other, using DMA to feed it from the main system bus.
I hope that all makes sense... I'm tired, and need my bandwidth fix, thanks to NorthPoint's demise.
--Mike--
I want to see a grid of 1000x1000 single bit clocked cells that can be reprogrammed on the fly... I'll pay up to US$300 for one to play with, provided it does the clocking as I specified above. At a bare minimum I could do FFTS in real time on a 100Mhz 12 bit data stream with it.
--Mike--
I could also put up a list of Telecom companies (that really suck) executives up for the same treatment?
It's interesting to ponder this at length.
--Mike--
For a really cool demo, get a camcorder on a spinning mount to match your products, then do a time lapse of a plant germinating. This would allow you to do a frame every second or two in high resolution, making the capture process easy, then you can avoid having to do any hidden surface removal for playback. You could also do the math and do all that to compress it for the finished demo.
It would be a VERY cool, high resolution demo that wouldn't be replicable on ANY other type of display out there.
Ok, get a camcoder, a pivot point, some potting soil and seeds... and make me a very cool demo. (I want to see this if you actually do it).
--Mike--