I would have hated to have been the tech support guy on that call:
Me: "So the machine is spontaneously rebooting every hour or so?" JPL: "Yeah, it looks like it's having a problem reloading the flash filesystem" Me: "Can we do an "ls" on that directory to see what's in it?" JPL: "Hold on..."
... 45 minutes later...
JPL: "ls came back with an error... no such file or directory" Me: "Hm, did you type the command correctly" JPL: "Yeah we typed 'lf' and that's the error we got." Me: "L... F.... no no no..."
E-mail? You must be crazy... Just stick to messaging the fokes on your local BBS. I just got done downloading this kicking game called Lemonade Stand!
At first, I thought this was just a lame joke, but then I realized this poster, one Mork29, has just allowed me to relive one game title I devoted endless hours of my childhood to.
Lemonade Stand.
Sadly enough, it wasn't even on my computer. It was on a neighbor's computer. I watched him play it most of the time. Bastard.
Show me a reason why OS X should have ldd when the superior otool exists. C'mon! To make you feel more comfortable? To make you feel more loved?
Dude, if you're a developer doing cross platform development, then turn around and complain how annoyed you were at not finding ldd, discontinue cross-platform development. If you can't even be bothered to check the unix rosetta stone for something that simple, then you're not the kind of battle-hardened, talented person that is required to do real cross-platform development.
Cross-platform development requires *standards* to work, not the balls of any particular developer. I could give a damn about how cool a coder you are... if what you write isn't compliant with the rest of the stuff that's out there, then it might as well not have been written at all.
Do I have any choice *but* to install the default configuration? Particularly if I have to install several hundred clients? I don't think so. It needs to work out of the box, security-wise, before it works, period.
Parent obviously is not aware of the realities of Mac OS X today. It practically./configure ; make; make install's out of box. It's posix compliant, it comes with X, etc...
Very likely I will admit this is true. I have to keep track of 15 different Unix platforms, due to my job.:P
But... if you're a customer it is likely that you will try to have the most standards-compliant box out there just for supportability reasons. If the operating system "out of the box" doesn't support a feature, then it is likely that a customer will not implement that feature.
In other words, if it doesn't work after I double-click on the pretty icon, then it doesn't work at all... I speak with experience in both the sysadmin and the tech support world on this assertion.
Hm, ya know, with me having to work with 15 different platforms, I could actually be wrong. But.. I don't have a convenient AIX machine to look at right at this moment.
/me tries the usual tech support escape out of a situation...
1. No shared library problems on OS X. Frameworks include versioning to solve that particular problem.
You're not quite correct. Like I said, this was due to a troubleshooting problem. Your assertion is proven false simply because I had to learn this stuff to troubleshoot a problem with shared library compatibility problems.
2. ldd is hardly universal.
Show me an operating system that *doesn't* have ldd as a utility. Other than MacOS X. I know AIX, Solaris, Linux, HP-UX support that utility. I'm not sure about Tru64, but I'm pretty sure that it does, too. MacOS was the only operating system I had problems with with regards to troubleshooting "ldd" problems.
Actually, what he was talking about is the fact that a Mac OS X box when first turned on is as close to impregnable as we can hope to see in this life. No services are running, not even SSH. If nobody's listening, you ain't getting in.
Well, that is in fact what I call good security. It's hard to break into a door when the door doesn't exist in the first place.
Admittedly, I missed that part when I read the article the first time. No more Summit Winter Ale for me tonight, I guess.;)
The "experienced Unix user" can handle different directory structures
Actually, I have direct experience of "experienced" Unix users being confused by MacOS X. I'm one of those people on that list. Others are included as well.
Also, try applying Solaris knowledge of device files to Linux, AIX, HP, or Tru64 systems. It's not going to bew horribly effective; the important details (the underlying architecture of the OS) is what is going to kick you in the end. Compare how you would configure for LUN's higher than 1 for Solaris and Linux. The configuration files are different, the underlying kernel is different, requiring different thinking on how to get the darned things to work.
The tool you want is "otool" (with -l) - and sources are available, and it comes standard with the system (possibly with developer tools, but that comes in the standard package).
Not by default. This makes it a problem with production servers, which often use "default" configurations for supportability reasons.
I have minimal experience with the new MacOS X, but what little I know is enough to convince me that MacOS X is "different" enough to confuse even experienced Unix users. The directory structure is vastly different in a number of ways, and the GUI isn't X. It's really what Unix would have looked like if we lived in an alternate universe and the naming conventions were wildly different.
Old tried and tested tools also aren't available. Have a shared libary incompatibility problem? Forget using "ldd" to figure out how to resolve the situation. It just doesn't exist (unless something changed since the original MacOS X release, which is right around when I ran into this troubleshooting problem). From what I eventually learned, a proprietary utility from Apple was required that had equivalent functionality to ldd.
I suppose this was the "securuty" the FBI agent was talking about. If you don't know how to use the system, then you won't be able to figure out how to break into it.
But security through obscurity is a temporary solution at best. Someone, someday, *will* invest the time to figure out the environment. Obscurity will provide no protection whatsoever against individuals or groups who know the system.
Ok, you know, there are some jokes that never get old. Others were born that way. Back in my day, all the jokes were old! Why, some of our jokes were so old that we would just we wouldn't have to tell the whole joke for it
You know, back in *my* day, we didn't have these fancy-schmancy SCSI cables to help us write our data to disk. No, in my day, we had to write it down using burnt sticks we pulled from smoldering camp fires. Then we ran across the savana, burnt stick and all. And when we got to our destination to write that data to disk, when we got an error, we had to run all the way back to our camp and yell out at the top of our lungs "WRITE ERROR! CHECK CONDITION!" Then we had to run all the way back just to get the sense key data.
Come one, think about a career in Patent Law for one second. It's like the guy who runs the "next day carpet" business. Both are doing it because they had nothing better to do with their lives and found a niche.
I don't think this is the end of the world. While I, too, would love to live in a perfect world, sometimes extra protection is a nice "feature" that comes bundled with the product.
Also, keep in mind this does not affect Linux users, per se. It affects Novell customers. There's a great deal of overlap, to be sure, but I think it's a company's right to take the extra step to protect customers from legal B.S. like this.
Unfortunate this has to happen? Maybe. Indemnification (I think) usually involves contracts, agreed to by both parties (like one company buying another company's product), so it really doesn't affect the license issue.
You know, I thought of this when I followed this Mars landing from Day One: "They're complaining about an airbag being in the way!? Whatever happened to worrying about the darned thing landing in one piece?"
Ah well, this is honestly the type of technical problem I like to see when watching this. It sure beats the alternatives.
> We have succesfully completed the most complex engineering sequence ever created by man.
And I always thought that was the Win98 Install CD...:)
I wouldn't exactly use the word "engineering" to describe that process. Besides, Windows has yet to cause my computer to rocket into the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, resulting in it landing on the ground and bouncing for a few kilometers before resting in the middle of an old lake bed.
Hold on, there was that incident in '96... nah, must be a coincidence.
So, ya reply to one point but ignore the rest? I think his (ultimate) point is valid. If the test was rigged, the folks involved with developing the kernel would catch on and take IBM to task for fudging the results. No, I'm not talking about the Slashdot/Fark crowd. I'm talking about REAL developers.
Also, Linux has weathered some unfavorable (and honost!) critiques before. Linus Torvalds said it best when he said (and I paraphrase since I am too lazy ATM to look up the actual quote) that it doesn't matter if there's negative publicity in the press about Linux. It just meant he got his bug reports from the Wall Street Journal as opposed to the regular kernel mailng list.
It's not unprecedented. I believe the old story goes that the makers of horse-drawn carriages tried the same tactic on Henry Ford's customers, though I can't recall if patents were involved (I don't think so).
The man's gotta point, sir. A Indianian or a Minnesotian or a Mainian isn't going to have any influence in Utah (regarding Senator elections). However, the senators working for our states... hmmm...
Sad thing indeed... every time I try to engage in a debate with a moderate point of view against some of my conservative buddies who's ready with some sort of ready-made talking-point-of-the-day prepared by DrudegeReport or FoxNews to try to shoot me down, I grin with anticipation.:)
The positive bonus is, as a "moderate", I read both sides of the story (neo-conservative and neo-liberal and neo-political-cause-of-the-day). I shoot 'em down by citing the articles they like to cite. I read Fox and Drudge too. It's a great feeling watching them squirm because I caught them repeating, verbatim, what they read on the internet or listening to talk radio. "You've got some sort of independent thought, right?" A lot of stammering ensues.
Ok, eventually, I'm going to say something on-topic regarding this thread somehow.. next reply soming up...
The only way for us to see travelers from 2050 is simply because 2050 hasn't happened yet
Ack... missed a part of a sentence there... what I *meant* to say was:
The only way for us to see travelers from 2050 is for 2050 to happen first. Therefore it is impossible to see travellers from 2050 simply because 2050 hasn't happened yet
The whole "why don't we see travelers from the future" question is basically moot. Think of this era as a "pristine timeline". The only way for us to see travelers from 2050 is simply because 2050 hasn't happened yet. Once someone does figure out a way to go back in time, then a non-pristine timeline is developed. The odds of any one of us being in this kind of timeline (the type of theoretical nonsense you'd find in comic books) is literally infinitesimal.
This of course is based on the assumption that time travel (into the past) is even possible. Every theory I've looked at indicates that the straight arrow of time is precisely that; a straight arrow going one-way.
Of course, having read this guy's work, he's doing thought-experiments, but fails to account for basic laws of physics in doing so. So he gets points for doing "mostly correct" theoretical work. That doesn't fly too far with those who take these sort of subjects seriously though.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have hated to have been the tech support guy on that call:
... 45 minutes later ...
:)
Me: "So the machine is spontaneously rebooting every hour or so?"
JPL: "Yeah, it looks like it's having a problem reloading the flash filesystem"
Me: "Can we do an "ls" on that directory to see what's in it?"
JPL: "Hold on..."
JPL: "ls came back with an error... no such file or directory"
Me: "Hm, did you type the command correctly"
JPL: "Yeah we typed 'lf' and that's the error we got."
Me: "L... F.... no no no..."
Dont tell me you don't feel my pain, too.
E-mail? You must be crazy... Just stick to messaging the fokes on your local BBS. I just got done downloading this kicking game called Lemonade Stand!
At first, I thought this was just a lame joke, but then I realized this poster, one Mork29, has just allowed me to relive one game title I devoted endless hours of my childhood to.
Lemonade Stand.
Sadly enough, it wasn't even on my computer. It was on a neighbor's computer. I watched him play it most of the time. Bastard.
Good times, good times.
Lemonade Stand. Sheesh...
Show me a reason why OS X should have ldd when the superior otool exists. C'mon! To make you feel more comfortable? To make you feel more loved?
Dude, if you're a developer doing cross platform development, then turn around and complain how annoyed you were at not finding ldd, discontinue cross-platform development. If you can't even be bothered to check the unix rosetta stone for something that simple, then you're not the kind of battle-hardened, talented person that is required to do real cross-platform development.
Cross-platform development requires *standards* to work, not the balls of any particular developer. I could give a damn about how cool a coder you are... if what you write isn't compliant with the rest of the stuff that's out there, then it might as well not have been written at all.
Do I have any choice *but* to install the default configuration? Particularly if I have to install several hundred clients? I don't think so. It needs to work out of the box, security-wise, before it works, period.
Parent obviously is not aware of the realities of Mac OS X today. It practically ./configure ; make; make install's out of box. It's posix compliant, it comes with X, etc...
:P
Very likely I will admit this is true. I have to keep track of 15 different Unix platforms, due to my job.
But... if you're a customer it is likely that you will try to have the most standards-compliant box out there just for supportability reasons. If the operating system "out of the box" doesn't support a feature, then it is likely that a customer will not implement that feature.
In other words, if it doesn't work after I double-click on the pretty icon, then it doesn't work at all... I speak with experience in both the sysadmin and the tech support world on this assertion.
Hm, ya know, with me having to work with 15 different platforms, I could actually be wrong. But.. I don't have a convenient AIX machine to look at right at this moment.
/me tries the usual tech support escape out of a situation...
1. No shared library problems on OS X. Frameworks include versioning to solve that particular problem.
;)
You're not quite correct. Like I said, this was due to a troubleshooting problem. Your assertion is proven false simply because I had to learn this stuff to troubleshoot a problem with shared library compatibility problems.
2. ldd is hardly universal.
Show me an operating system that *doesn't* have ldd as a utility. Other than MacOS X. I know AIX, Solaris, Linux, HP-UX support that utility. I'm not sure about Tru64, but I'm pretty sure that it does, too. MacOS was the only operating system I had problems with with regards to troubleshooting "ldd" problems.
Actually, what he was talking about is the fact that a Mac OS X box when first turned on is as close to impregnable as we can hope to see in this life. No services are running, not even SSH. If nobody's listening, you ain't getting in.
Well, that is in fact what I call good security. It's hard to break into a door when the door doesn't exist in the first place.
Admittedly, I missed that part when I read the article the first time. No more Summit Winter Ale for me tonight, I guess.
The "experienced Unix user" can handle different directory structures
Actually, I have direct experience of "experienced" Unix users being confused by MacOS X. I'm one of those people on that list. Others are included as well.
Also, try applying Solaris knowledge of device files to Linux, AIX, HP, or Tru64 systems. It's not going to bew horribly effective; the important details (the underlying architecture of the OS) is what is going to kick you in the end. Compare how you would configure for LUN's higher than 1 for Solaris and Linux. The configuration files are different, the underlying kernel is different, requiring different thinking on how to get the darned things to work.
The tool you want is "otool" (with -l) - and sources are available, and it comes standard with the system (possibly with developer tools, but that comes in the standard package).
Not by default. This makes it a problem with production servers, which often use "default" configurations for supportability reasons.
I have minimal experience with the new MacOS X, but what little I know is enough to convince me that MacOS X is "different" enough to confuse even experienced Unix users. The directory structure is vastly different in a number of ways, and the GUI isn't X. It's really what Unix would have looked like if we lived in an alternate universe and the naming conventions were wildly different.
Old tried and tested tools also aren't available. Have a shared libary incompatibility problem? Forget using "ldd" to figure out how to resolve the situation. It just doesn't exist (unless something changed since the original MacOS X release, which is right around when I ran into this troubleshooting problem). From what I eventually learned, a proprietary utility from Apple was required that had equivalent functionality to ldd.
I suppose this was the "securuty" the FBI agent was talking about. If you don't know how to use the system, then you won't be able to figure out how to break into it.
But security through obscurity is a temporary solution at best. Someone, someday, *will* invest the time to figure out the environment. Obscurity will provide no protection whatsoever against individuals or groups who know the system.
Spinal cords!?
Ok, you know, there are some jokes that never get old. Others were born that way. Back in my day, all the jokes were old! Why, some of our jokes were so old that we would just we wouldn't have to tell the whole joke for it
You know, back in *my* day, we didn't have these fancy-schmancy SCSI cables to help us write our data to disk. No, in my day, we had to write it down using burnt sticks we pulled from smoldering camp fires. Then we ran across the savana, burnt stick and all. And when we got to our destination to write that data to disk, when we got an error, we had to run all the way back to our camp and yell out at the top of our lungs "WRITE ERROR! CHECK CONDITION!" Then we had to run all the way back just to get the sense key data.
Beat *that*!
I doubt anything sinister is going on here. :)
Come one, think about a career in Patent Law for one second. It's like the guy who runs the "next day carpet" business. Both are doing it because they had nothing better to do with their lives and found a niche.
I don't think this is the end of the world. While I, too, would love to live in a perfect world, sometimes extra protection is a nice "feature" that comes bundled with the product.
Also, keep in mind this does not affect Linux users, per se. It affects Novell customers. There's a great deal of overlap, to be sure, but I think it's a company's right to take the extra step to protect customers from legal B.S. like this.
Unfortunate this has to happen? Maybe. Indemnification (I think) usually involves contracts, agreed to by both parties (like one company buying another company's product), so it really doesn't affect the license issue.
You know, I thought of this when I followed this Mars landing from Day One: "They're complaining about an airbag being in the way!? Whatever happened to worrying about the darned thing landing in one piece?"
Ah well, this is honestly the type of technical problem I like to see when watching this. It sure beats the alternatives.
And I always thought that was the Win98 Install CD... :)
I wouldn't exactly use the word "engineering" to describe that process. Besides, Windows has yet to cause my computer to rocket into the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, resulting in it landing on the ground and bouncing for a few kilometers before resting in the middle of an old lake bed. Hold on, there was that incident in '96... nah, must be a coincidence.
Actually I kinda like his show (though admittedly I am from the MTV generation :).
:)
Incidentally. I think billnye.com got hit with a secondary slashdot effect... go to his flash web site and it asks you to come back again later.
CmdrTaco, how could you!? You Slashdotted Bill Nye!
So, ya reply to one point but ignore the rest? I think his (ultimate) point is valid. If the test was rigged, the folks involved with developing the kernel would catch on and take IBM to task for fudging the results. No, I'm not talking about the Slashdot/Fark crowd. I'm talking about REAL developers.
Also, Linux has weathered some unfavorable (and honost!) critiques before. Linus Torvalds said it best when he said (and I paraphrase since I am too lazy ATM to look up the actual quote) that it doesn't matter if there's negative publicity in the press about Linux. It just meant he got his bug reports from the Wall Street Journal as opposed to the regular kernel mailng list.
It's not unprecedented. I believe the old story goes that the makers of horse-drawn carriages tried the same tactic on Henry Ford's customers, though I can't recall if patents were involved (I don't think so).
Actually, can you specify the application you speak of?
The man's gotta point, sir. A Indianian or a Minnesotian or a Mainian isn't going to have any influence in Utah (regarding Senator elections). However, the senators working for our states... hmmm...
Sad thing indeed... every time I try to engage in a debate with a moderate point of view against some of my conservative buddies who's ready with some sort of ready-made talking-point-of-the-day prepared by DrudegeReport or FoxNews to try to shoot me down, I grin with anticipation. :)
The positive bonus is, as a "moderate", I read both sides of the story (neo-conservative and neo-liberal and neo-political-cause-of-the-day). I shoot 'em down by citing the articles they like to cite. I read Fox and Drudge too. It's a great feeling watching them squirm because I caught them repeating, verbatim, what they read on the internet or listening to talk radio. "You've got some sort of independent thought, right?" A lot of stammering ensues.
Ok, eventually, I'm going to say something on-topic regarding this thread somehow.. next reply soming up...
cee-ripes, will anyone ever learn?
Ack... missed a part of a sentence there... what I *meant* to say was:
The only way for us to see travelers from 2050 is for 2050 to happen first. Therefore it is impossible to see travellers from 2050 simply because 2050 hasn't happened yet
The whole "why don't we see travelers from the future" question is basically moot. Think of this era as a "pristine timeline". The only way for us to see travelers from 2050 is simply because 2050 hasn't happened yet. Once someone does figure out a way to go back in time, then a non-pristine timeline is developed. The odds of any one of us being in this kind of timeline (the type of theoretical nonsense you'd find in comic books) is literally infinitesimal.
This of course is based on the assumption that time travel (into the past) is even possible. Every theory I've looked at indicates that the straight arrow of time is precisely that; a straight arrow going one-way.
Of course, having read this guy's work, he's doing thought-experiments, but fails to account for basic laws of physics in doing so. So he gets points for doing "mostly correct" theoretical work. That doesn't fly too far with those who take these sort of subjects seriously though.