I turned on CNBC a little while ago. The US markets closed up. In fact, they were reporting that every major index closed at a record high today. Here's a story about it. That is a sure indication that there is very little Y2K panic going on.
Now that the "millenium" is almost over, Tom, I have a confession. I want some of your karma. I've wanted it for years. Say you'll be a donor for a karma-transplant operation...:)
Wow, a karma transplant to an anonymous coward. That's going to be a challenge. How will we know it's you? Will you be the one wearing a Slashdot T-shirt and running Linux? Seriously, if you want karma, you could try posting under your own name. It isn't like anything you said was controversial.
I work at Symantec, and CNN is shivering with anticipation waiting in our antivirus research lab to hear about juicy computer problems. Me and some friends were thinking it would be fun to pull a couple breakers at 4:00 Pacific (GMT midnight) after hyping it up to them to see if we could get them to broadcast live panic.
I think, given the likely reactions of your employers, their customers, the government and the public, you should follow the example of a group of Iraqi soldiers from the beginning of the decade. Surrender to the CNN news crew when you are done. It is your only hope to avoid an early and unpleasant death. And it is a slim hope.
And in Rochester, the local telephone company has been telling people "Don't pick up your phone at 12:01 to see if it works; you might overload the circuits," which leads me to believe that people might not be Y2K compliant even if machinery is.
Okay, I have two comments on this. First, I'm familiar with the issue with getting dial tone. The dial tone is generated by the switch and it can only generate dial tone for a fraction of the total lines it is connected to. It makes sense when you think about the facts. Dialing only happens during a small fraction of the duration of the call and only one party to the call needs that dial tone.
The second is for fable2112 herself. It's nice to see that I'm not the only person here from sunny Rochester.
There is a reason that Y2K problems are going to be primarily local time issues. The problem is in the representation of dates for human readability in many cases. Those are scattered through many user interfaces, reports, etc. Not all of them will have been fixed. But they are communicating with users, usually in their own local time.
Why don't we track actual Y2K events here on Slashdot as well as non-events? The relevant data would be the time it occurred, and where. But we should also track the things that continue working. Is the power still on? Did money come out of the ATM, and was the balance correct? And every single event posted will indicate someone who has a working computer and a functional network connection.
All of this information could serve as a good counterpoint to the Y2K hysteria. And speaking of that, I want to hear everyone's votes for the most hysterical Y2K disaster book. I think it deserves a review here around the Ides of March. We can stab the author in the back with a review that point out every false prophesy.
A comparison of the maximum uptime with the length of time that particular OS version (down to the kernel rev in the case of Linux) has been available is useful. If an OS can consistently stay up until the system administrator wants to upgrade the kernel, it is stable. Of course, one other number is needed for that. What percentage of the systems running that OS and running 24x7 actually approach that maximum uptime?
Unix sys admins have learned to like statistics like this. They are a decent indication of how often the pager will go off. Back in my sys admin days I loved the fact that our uptime was good. It meant I got more sleep.
To a certain extent this also measures the frequency of major kernel upgrades. While Unices can stay up with virtually any piece of software being installed or upgraded, everybody reboots for a new kernel. I don't think that installing a new kernel a couple times a year is necessarily a sign of weakness in an OS. There will be security patches, bug fixes and the occasional new feature.
Personally, I would like to see the practice of "fusion" legalized and/or instituted in Presidential elections. "Fusion" is the practice whereby multiple political parties can nominate the same candidate.
That is already done here in New York State. It is normal to see the Conservative Party endorse one of the Republican candidates and the Liberal Party endorse a Democrat. It has often gotten them accused of just being cheerleaders for the two big parties.
The current Slashdot Poll is getting stale anyway. Why not make the 2000 election the next poll. Take the complete list of candidates from the candidate selector and see who we say we'd vote for. CmdrTaco, Hemos, are you listening?
It is still early enough in the race to consider a meta-view of what this is all about. I suggest the chapter T he Political Marketplace from David Friedman's book Price Theory: An Intermediate Text. I think the average Slashdot reader can handle the math. Friedman gives a lengthy discussion of the undesirability of tariffs. If that doesn't interest you, or you don't like all that math, skip to the section labelled, PUBLIC CHOICE: ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF THE POLITICAL MARKET about halfway through.
The reason for all of that it is a lawyer-repellant. Any company that gets caught with a Y2K bug that causes a loss of service is going to have a liability problem. And even if they don't, there is going to be an issue of comparison with similar products. Think of Y2K-compliance as a bullet item on glossy ads for a product. By a couple of months from now, all that is going to matter is that you avoided not having it. The companies that blew it are going to get beaten up pretty badly. Microsoft is taking a bit of a ribbing on Wired for getting the dates wrong on some documents. Arguably, those dates don't matter much. But it looks bad.
Well, I finally caved in and went back to track down the URL for the Star Wars Holiday Special because you guys brought it up again. The reviews were all too true. And from what I could tell, the stars were trying to stay off-camera as much as possible, perhaps with the hope that no one would remember their association with it.
Linux isn't exactly without open source databases. Postgres is the one that comes to my mind immediately, but there are others. However, I suspect that we (Linux users/programmers) would be thrilled to see an open source solution that was palatable to the corporate world as well. An open source database engine, with supporting language interfaces, available for multiple platforms, with a company selling support contracts for it could be just the ticket. Inprise would get the benefit of a lot of open source development effort. They are still the best positioned company to provide the support. Linux would get a mature, commercially accepted database engine. Done right, this could be a big win.
There is a big difference between the thanks he has earned from the Hotmail users and from Microsoft. He did something nice for the other users of Hotmail. Microsoft on the other hand, is a corporation. It cannot be grateful. Gratitude is a feeling. Perhaps he should tell them that he really wanted to see something in a red hat for Christmas.
I don't mean this to suggest that corporations should be taken advantage of, defrauded or such. But the only gratitude they can show is that of the people they represent: share holders, employees or customers. The share holders and customers should be grateful in this particular case. I suspect that there are some employees who are not grateful at all.
It doesn't hurt that there are some similarities between Tim Allen and William Shatner. Were they played up? And does he, even once, get to say, "Get a life"?
Since the design criteria for Java were published, there is a clear source available warning of the dangers of allowing arbitrary pieces of code to be executed without the knowledge and consent of the user. Setting the security switches that would prevent this to the choice that allows it to happen by default is only slightly better than providing no way to turn it off. In essence, designing a way for arbitrary pieces of code to be sent to a machine and executed automatically is designing in a security flaw. That is an error of commission, not one of omission.
While both open source and shrink wrap licenses disclaim liability, what about support contracts? When a security hole is known, especially when it is reported to the company providing the support by someone with a support contract, I would think that the courts would be much more likely to find that company liable if they made no attempt to remedy the problem or at least warn their customers of it.
The source of the second issue you brought up is mentioned in the article referenced just a little while ago here on Slashdot. The Netcraft survey is counting unique domain names, not number of servers according to the article.
I haven't looked into the details of the cheating. Hey, I haven't even read the code in question. However, there are protocols that allow for fair games of chance over a network. Basically, a set of encrypted values are passed from server to client. The client picks and returns on to the server. The server uses it. Using public key encryption each party can verify that the other hasn't cheated. Presumably, the server is trusted in this particular case, but a protocol like this even leaves the option of verifying all of the options against their encrypted counterparts to ensure that the server didn't use a rigged deck.
This requires a significant amount of the control to be in the server. And to some extent for a workable game it requires that the server be trusted. All I can do in this case is point at a good reference, Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier, and ask whether such a solution is a viable alternative to locking up part of the source again.
The bottom line is that human bodies are different from each other. We don't just come in different shapes and sizes, we have different work patterns too. Let me give an example. While I don't normally work that way, there are days when I spend hours on my feet running between labs and hovering over a number of different keyboards as I gather information to track a bug. When I get back to my desk, there is nothing I want to do more than get the weight off my feet. Certainly, putting my feet up on my desk and my keyboard on my lap violates several rules for good posture that or ergo people taught us at work. And it is indispensible for 15 minutes or so.
Probably one of the contributing factors in my lack of carpal tunnel is the fact that I use five different keyboards regularly. I use them in different positions. I use a variety of software with a variety of different typing patterns. I fear if I were to trying to make all of the various work environments that I use ergonomically correct, and presumably much more similar to each other, that I might do damage because I would develop a similarly bad posture or pattern of use in each one.
I was just looking through the documentation for my wife's new Palm (and O'Reilly's book on getting the most out of it). It strikes me that it wouldn't work terribly well for languages other than those supported by iso-8859-1 (latin 1). That is an excellent default, but won't support my I18N work completely.
When I ordered stuff last night then made it quite clear that even with overnight delivery it wouldn't arrive in time for Christmas. I thought that was rather redundant since I was pre-ordering the rerelease of Vernor Vinge's True Names which isn't due out until December 31st. They should have said it wouldn't arrive this year.;-)
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I turned on CNBC a little while ago. The US markets closed up. In fact, they were reporting that every major index closed at a record high today. Here's a story about it. That is a sure indication that there is very little Y2K panic going on.
Now that the "millenium" is almost over, Tom, I have a confession. I want some of your karma. I've wanted it for years. Say you'll be a donor for a karma-transplant operation...:)
Wow, a karma transplant to an anonymous coward. That's going to be a challenge. How will we know it's you? Will you be the one wearing a Slashdot T-shirt and running Linux? Seriously, if you want karma, you could try posting under your own name. It isn't like anything you said was controversial.
I work at Symantec, and CNN is shivering with anticipation waiting in our antivirus research lab to hear about juicy computer problems. Me and some friends were thinking it would be fun to pull a couple breakers at 4:00 Pacific (GMT midnight) after hyping it up to them to see if we could get them to broadcast live panic.
I think, given the likely reactions of your employers, their customers, the government and the public, you should follow the example of a group of Iraqi soldiers from the beginning of the decade. Surrender to the CNN news crew when you are done. It is your only hope to avoid an early and unpleasant death. And it is a slim hope.
And in Rochester, the local telephone company has been telling people "Don't pick up your phone at 12:01 to see if it works; you might overload the circuits," which leads me to believe that people might not be Y2K compliant even if machinery is.
Okay, I have two comments on this. First, I'm familiar with the issue with getting dial tone. The dial tone is generated by the switch and it can only generate dial tone for a fraction of the total lines it is connected to. It makes sense when you think about the facts. Dialing only happens during a small fraction of the duration of the call and only one party to the call needs that dial tone.
The second is for fable2112 herself. It's nice to see that I'm not the only person here from sunny Rochester.
There is a reason that Y2K problems are going to be primarily local time issues. The problem is in the representation of dates for human readability in many cases. Those are scattered through many user interfaces, reports, etc. Not all of them will have been fixed. But they are communicating with users, usually in their own local time.
Why don't we track actual Y2K events here on Slashdot as well as non-events? The relevant data would be the time it occurred, and where. But we should also track the things that continue working. Is the power still on? Did money come out of the ATM, and was the balance correct? And every single event posted will indicate someone who has a working computer and a functional network connection.
All of this information could serve as a good counterpoint to the Y2K hysteria. And speaking of that, I want to hear everyone's votes for the most hysterical Y2K disaster book. I think it deserves a review here around the Ides of March. We can stab the author in the back with a review that point out every false prophesy.
I can't get a connection to them. They are probably drowning by now.
A comparison of the maximum uptime with the length of time that particular OS version (down to the kernel rev in the case of Linux) has been available is useful. If an OS can consistently stay up until the system administrator wants to upgrade the kernel, it is stable. Of course, one other number is needed for that. What percentage of the systems running that OS and running 24x7 actually approach that maximum uptime?
Unix sys admins have learned to like statistics like this. They are a decent indication of how often the pager will go off. Back in my sys admin days I loved the fact that our uptime was good. It meant I got more sleep.
To a certain extent this also measures the frequency of major kernel upgrades. While Unices can stay up with virtually any piece of software being installed or upgraded, everybody reboots for a new kernel. I don't think that installing a new kernel a couple times a year is necessarily a sign of weakness in an OS. There will be security patches, bug fixes and the occasional new feature.
Personally, I would like to see the practice of "fusion" legalized and/or instituted in Presidential elections. "Fusion" is the practice whereby multiple political parties can nominate the same candidate.
That is already done here in New York State. It is normal to see the Conservative Party endorse one of the Republican candidates and the Liberal Party endorse a Democrat. It has often gotten them accused of just being cheerleaders for the two big parties.
The current Slashdot Poll is getting stale anyway. Why not make the 2000 election the next poll. Take the complete list of candidates from the candidate selector and see who we say we'd vote for. CmdrTaco, Hemos, are you listening?
It is still early enough in the race to consider a meta-view of what this is all about. I suggest the chapter T he Political Marketplace from David Friedman's book Price Theory: An Intermediate Text. I think the average Slashdot reader can handle the math. Friedman gives a lengthy discussion of the undesirability of tariffs. If that doesn't interest you, or you don't like all that math, skip to the section labelled, PUBLIC CHOICE: ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF THE POLITICAL MARKET about halfway through.
The reason for all of that it is a lawyer-repellant. Any company that gets caught with a Y2K bug that causes a loss of service is going to have a liability problem. And even if they don't, there is going to be an issue of comparison with similar products. Think of Y2K-compliance as a bullet item on glossy ads for a product. By a couple of months from now, all that is going to matter is that you avoided not having it. The companies that blew it are going to get beaten up pretty badly. Microsoft is taking a bit of a ribbing on Wired for getting the dates wrong on some documents. Arguably, those dates don't matter much. But it looks bad.
Well, I finally caved in and went back to track down the URL for the Star Wars Holiday Special because you guys brought it up again. The reviews were all too true. And from what I could tell, the stars were trying to stay off-camera as much as possible, perhaps with the hope that no one would remember their association with it.
Seriously Wierded Out Life Day, guys!
Linux isn't exactly without open source databases. Postgres is the one that comes to my mind immediately, but there are others. However, I suspect that we (Linux users/programmers) would be thrilled to see an open source solution that was palatable to the corporate world as well. An open source database engine, with supporting language interfaces, available for multiple platforms, with a company selling support contracts for it could be just the ticket. Inprise would get the benefit of a lot of open source development effort. They are still the best positioned company to provide the support. Linux would get a mature, commercially accepted database engine. Done right, this could be a big win.
There is a big difference between the thanks he has earned from the Hotmail users and from Microsoft. He did something nice for the other users of Hotmail. Microsoft on the other hand, is a corporation. It cannot be grateful. Gratitude is a feeling. Perhaps he should tell them that he really wanted to see something in a red hat for Christmas.
I don't mean this to suggest that corporations should be taken advantage of, defrauded or such. But the only gratitude they can show is that of the people they represent: share holders, employees or customers. The share holders and customers should be grateful in this particular case. I suspect that there are some employees who are not grateful at all.
It doesn't hurt that there are some similarities between Tim Allen and William Shatner. Were they played up? And does he, even once, get to say, "Get a life"?
Since the design criteria for Java were published, there is a clear source available warning of the dangers of allowing arbitrary pieces of code to be executed without the knowledge and consent of the user. Setting the security switches that would prevent this to the choice that allows it to happen by default is only slightly better than providing no way to turn it off. In essence, designing a way for arbitrary pieces of code to be sent to a machine and executed automatically is designing in a security flaw. That is an error of commission, not one of omission.
While both open source and shrink wrap licenses disclaim liability, what about support contracts? When a security hole is known, especially when it is reported to the company providing the support by someone with a support contract, I would think that the courts would be much more likely to find that company liable if they made no attempt to remedy the problem or at least warn their customers of it.
The source of the second issue you brought up is mentioned in the article referenced just a little while ago here on Slashdot. The Netcraft survey is counting unique domain names, not number of servers according to the article.
I haven't looked into the details of the cheating. Hey, I haven't even read the code in question. However, there are protocols that allow for fair games of chance over a network. Basically, a set of encrypted values are passed from server to client. The client picks and returns on to the server. The server uses it. Using public key encryption each party can verify that the other hasn't cheated. Presumably, the server is trusted in this particular case, but a protocol like this even leaves the option of verifying all of the options against their encrypted counterparts to ensure that the server didn't use a rigged deck.
This requires a significant amount of the control to be in the server. And to some extent for a workable game it requires that the server be trusted. All I can do in this case is point at a good reference, Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier, and ask whether such a solution is a viable alternative to locking up part of the source again.
The bottom line is that human bodies are different from each other. We don't just come in different shapes and sizes, we have different work patterns too. Let me give an example. While I don't normally work that way, there are days when I spend hours on my feet running between labs and hovering over a number of different keyboards as I gather information to track a bug. When I get back to my desk, there is nothing I want to do more than get the weight off my feet. Certainly, putting my feet up on my desk and my keyboard on my lap violates several rules for good posture that or ergo people taught us at work. And it is indispensible for 15 minutes or so.
Probably one of the contributing factors in my lack of carpal tunnel is the fact that I use five different keyboards regularly. I use them in different positions. I use a variety of software with a variety of different typing patterns. I fear if I were to trying to make all of the various work environments that I use ergonomically correct, and presumably much more similar to each other, that I might do damage because I would develop a similarly bad posture or pattern of use in each one.
I was just looking through the documentation for my wife's new Palm (and O'Reilly's book on getting the most out of it). It strikes me that it wouldn't work terribly well for languages other than those supported by iso-8859-1 (latin 1). That is an excellent default, but won't support my I18N work completely.
When I ordered stuff last night then made it quite clear that even with overnight delivery it wouldn't arrive in time for Christmas. I thought that was rather redundant since I was pre-ordering the rerelease of Vernor Vinge's True Names which isn't due out until December 31st. They should have said it wouldn't arrive this year. ;-)