I just want, once, someone to stand up in the middle of the school assembly, or PTA meeting, and recite this little piece:
You have killed a person. A person who never drew one drop of blood from you is dead, and its your fault. Someone whose biggest real crime was doing something you can't, you just broke his neck as easily as snapping the spine of a chicken for Sunday dinner. If you looked at the autopsy photos, you'd see a disturbing similarity between the rope burn patterns and your fingerprints. You are a murderer. I hope you enjoy the sobriquet, because it should haunt you until you, yourself, die.
The worst is you didn't have to kill this soul. You could have listened to it. You could have tried to figure out why it was seeking what it found. You could have stepped aside with your mighty ego and tried to figure something out. You could have elevated it.
You did none of these things.
Enjoy your dreams.
What I'm really wishing for is a physical version of the FITALY keyboard (http://www.fitaly.com). The original is mostly a software construct for Palms and other handhelds because typing with one hand/finger/stylus is a whole different environment than the usual style.
Unfortunately, due to some physical limitations, I've been typing with just a knuckle on my right hand since kindergarten. Even though I can hit about 28wpm when I'm in a good groove on a nice keyboard, I'd really rather own a Fitaly; the layout looks wonderful, and with toggling shift/ctrl/alt (which I achieve through software now), it'd be glorious.
Anyone with the urge to build one for me... my hatchday is in April.:)
Having been in the Atlanta area for years and sampled the Geek House opportunities, I found it, in the end, much wiser to simply have my own house, wire it up the way I want it, then never, ever, on the pain of death, let any other geeks live in my domain.
Non-geeks are alright to live with; they don't understand Hacker's Zen, nor what I do in my room all night, but that's perfectly fine. Geeks are high-ego, high-maintainance creatures with enormous territoriality. Non-geeks don't register as threats. A whole nest of them, well...
I found it much, much better for my stress not to go that way.:)
None of the presented options are really exclusive of the others; myself, I'm rather fond of a combination.
Certainly, give free access to part of the material to help the community. No one will begrudge you banner ads on that portion; the community has become used to overlooking them, for the most part, as long as no extraneous JavaScript windows go popping up.
Certainly, sell subscriptions. Real Programmers(tm) are used to subscribing to various publications which track fast-moving standards. At $12/yr, this is cheaper by an order of magnitude than most.
Have each section attached to some means of readers (perhaps only registered readers) leaving marginalia. During the update sweeps, some of this marginalia might be folded into the main text. This gives you Open Source/peer review flexibility without having to embed it right on the page immediately, Wiki-like.
Overall, I think you're in a good position, as long as the interface is clean, consistant, and direct.
Of course, the more bandwidth they have to their miners, the better the mining. The Internet doesn't "get in the way of" said process; all they have to do is crypt the connection to and from the TiVo, and the thing could tell home-base every what and wherefore of your setup, taste, and desires in REALTIME, not even in bursts.
I don't object to that, after all, I have the option to not buy a TiVo, or even not connect it. In exchange for letting them mine me, I'm sure I get a price break. Not an issue. What is an issue is the fact that a $20 NIC wasn't standard on the platform.
At this point, the ONLY game I'm playing on my PC is Diablo II. Everything else, I have a Sega Dreamcast (Gauntlet Legends is a beautiful, fun updating of the classic) or PSX for. My PC is typically too busy running a browser to play games on anyway.
I've put another network tap in my den, however, so that when the DC gets its Ethernet connection, I can masquerade it out over the cablemodem. Heavily multi-user games are the major advantage of the PC over the console now, and soon, that will be gone as well.
There's a good reason Tech Support generally wants you to go through the problem isolation steps again while you're handy:
Because 9 out of 10 customers don't know their buttocks from a hole in the ground when it comes to noting error messages, log notes, and system events. 0 out of 10 times the techie hears the client tell him something either wrong or COMPLETELY fabricated.
This has led me to a couple of very clear Rules posted obviously in my cube:
Rule #1: The client always LIES.
Rule #2: The client is an idiot.
Sounds harsh, doesn't it? Unfortunately, by using those two very basic assumptions, I gain very low call cycle times compared to my compatriots. Check everything yourself, don't assume the client is competent to hold his job, don't assume he WANTS to get things fixed. All too often, I get the problem solution presented despite the desires of the client, who wants nothing more than someone to yell at and complain because HE destroyed his own system and I have neither magic wand nor crystal ball for him.
Are these Rules ever wrong? Occasionally. And then you adapt, you smile, you nod, and you get things actually done. And then you tell everyone around you that something unbelievable happened, because its not news to get an idiot but its on par with seeing an angel to see a competent SysAdmin calling tech support.
(I'm still amazed at the number of people who call up and yell, scream, raise a ruckus because we're doing our jobs the right way. And then expect to be treated like princes. Hint: You abuse one techie, you abuse them all, because they TALK. And you'll get the full support available to you... if you're an ass. Your contract says you get an initial callback in 4hrs? Expect to wait 3.58 before it comes, while the guy who says "thank you" and is calm hets one in 2min. Expect to be ruthlessly dropped into the research queue after 15min to get a callback at our leisure instead of a guy who's interested in getting your problem solved FOR YOU. Make friends with the techs and you can save hundreds of thousands a year because instead of buying the next support contract up, you get guys who want to see you working. Piss them off, and you get kicked to the curb as often as possible, all within the rules.
There are three groups never to piss off: police, the office secretary, and tech support.)
Thankfully, for we physically limited folks who have to type one-handed (in my case, one-fingered), there are some alleviations:
Windows (bless their soul) ships Win98 with "Accessibility Options" in the Settings folder; with it you can turn one-fingered ctrl/alt/shift toggling on. They stay on until you hit another key, or you double-tap to lock the mode until you hit it again.
Under most professional Unixes, AccessX has been around for a bit. Even when its not, with Deep Magic, you can get xmodmap to remap the necessaries to strict toggles.
Still, I'd love a physical version of the Fitaly keyboard. Less motion means, at the end of a 12hr hacking session, my shoulder doesn't feal like a chainsaw's eating me.
Keep in mind, these are the same folks who, just after I started working at DEC, had a major outtage of one of the Alpha / OSF/1 clusters that monitor MCC (Mission Control) while the shuttle was looking for a landing window. After working with them for 9hrs straight and then handing off the call to someone else, and eventually sending someone physically OUT there, the problem turneed out to be:
6mo before, they had the exact same problem. At that time they were instructed that their disk firmware on the shared SCSI bus were all horribly out of date, and needed updating, and the disks WOULD fall asleep if they didn't upgrade it. If they didn't, the side effect would be the cluster would take a bit longer to fail over. Oh, and it'd be nice if they upgraded to both a version of the OS still supported and put on the latest patches.
Needless to say, NONE of that was ever done and the big lash up was one of their monkies trying to FORCE a failover of NFS services and disks from node to node. In direct contravention to what they were told by DEC.
This was just the beginning of my disillusionment with every corporate group I've ever thought highly of.
Perhaps the most important reason to use:VM in any environment is the lack of hardware solutions to striping, concating or mirroring across busses, increasing your redundancy in the case of a controller failure.
At this point in time, hardware RAIDing and mirroring are pure wins in terms of performance if you just want to manage one bus, but if you're creating a highly available server, one that must stay up, no matter the situation, then you're going to need an LVM approach to the problem.
[And remember, kiddies,
mirror
then
stripe or RAID
. Reducing redundancy in the quest for high-availability is a fool's game.]
While it might amuse you to know that I suspect the watchers while fire was first harnessed were thinking the same thing, I'd counter that, if anything, such a Luddite attitude is actually pretty insulting to at least some of us out here working to try and make human existance better, healthier, and more whole. Perhaps science is moving too fast for your ability (or even the masses' ability) to readily forcast new developments' impacts. Perhaps the act of research is creating new methods and approaches, entire suites of understanding, that require humanity to develop new social structures and mores. Perhaps, just perhaps, the flaw is not in science moving too swiftly, but in individuals being too foolish and reactionary to follow suit.
One of the primary motivations and goals of science is the pressure it places on society to grow, adapt, and change to accomodate eternally new situations and events. Without that, you might as well live in Imperial China, where scientific innovation could have gotten you beheaded (though society was 'protected' for thousands of years at a stretch). Perhaps you are willing to exchange a little safety for the liberty afforded by new ideas, new ways of thinking, new perceptions which we are granted by the strenuous efforts of thousands of scientists. The Internet, for example, is not an inherently safe thing, but a medium of facilitation unmatched in human history (save by the telegraph, or before that, speech).
Given the opportunity, I'd more than happily upload my personality and move into an immortal world of silver and silicon, leaving behind my useless arms, my insufficient sight, and the slowness of meat-memory. Give me a single opportunity and I'll happily exchange my left eye for an implant, my right arm for cybernetics, and my blood for nanotech-enhanced immunity to disease and wounds.
Bring to me the future!
In the end, it comes down to a simple axiom: Those who do not partake of the new fruits of the vine will suffer, wither, and die, while those who do, who move, who evolve, transmutate, transcend, will not. In the end, its that simple.
The fact that all of the things that Tim says are coming in the next decade are available and possible/now/ in the set of languages he dismisses so casually in the first decade really told me everything I needed to know about his mindset going in.
"I can't be bothered to learn these Ivory Tower languages, so I'll just say I reviewed and discarded them as 'not good enough.'"
Pretty frustrating to me, especially when you recognize that the OCaml and GHC compilers (for OCAML and Haskell, respectively) have been known to create faster binaries than C on analogous algorithms. This leaves aside the whole field of/better algorithms/ that can be expressed and realized with the functiuonal languages.
Uh, you/do/ realize that a battery that just outputs water and CO2 will be the biggest boon to plant life on this planet you've ever seen, right, since with increased CO2, they become more efficient producers of... wait for it... Oxygen. This gas might be familliar to you; I can only hope it is.
Carbon monoxide is a problem because its slow and difficult to biocompose. CO2 biocomposes in plants/extremely/ readily.
Yes, cities could become the centers of an ecological renaissance as plants crowd close to draw in that much more CO2. Lovelock's Gaia to the rescue.
Disturbingly, this doesn't get any better if you're working in support for large indstallations and not PCs; at least when doing PC-scale support you can almost understand why the guy on the other end of the phone is a little intimidated.
When talking to, say, Joe Random Consultant at Lawrence Livermore or NASA who's pulling in $130k+/yr (way,/way/ more than you are) and can't be bothered to learn or know/anything/ about the system, or read the release notes for patches, or/install/ patches, or give you at least the respect they give to stray dogs rotting on the side of the road since you/are/ the fellow trying to save/their/ butt when the "database system's down that costs THIS company $10,00 a minute!"... well, it gets stressful.
They're lucky we just draw comics and tell one another nasty jokes about them rather than sending out assassins or tactical weaponry, as I've been pushing for.
(If I never hear "I'm not really a Unix guy, I do VMS," or "I'm just the secretary; they said this machine needed an Administrator; I'm an Administrative Assistant!" or "I don't know the configuration of this machine, I've been here 6mo but I didn't install it and I couldn't be bothered to learn it," it will be too deucedly soon.)
Well, more accurately, as a Tru64 Support Tech, Alpha/Tru64 doesn't really have Wave 5 clustering, either, not yet. Instead, we have ASE/TruCluster, which gives me nightmares every time I go home from work about misconfigured IP routing and 'custom scripts' that don't bother reporting proper failure codes... but I digress. To the point, while Wave 5 clustering, with shared/mirrored roots and all the other gobsmacky goodness comes out to public consumption, it/might/ be keen. I've already corrected several errors in the docs they're trying to teach their support folks with. Hades below knows what their customer-released docs look like.
Honestly, I would run Tru64 on my Alpha if I needed cute administration tools (well, what they do have), and corporate liability. If I just want to crank cycles, I'll get a copy of DEC CC and run the binaries under Linux.
Btw, if the GoldRush/GS/DS/TurboLaser series machines "aren't intended to be used as supercomputers," someone better tell LLNL, the NSA, and a couple of the other folks it seems I deal with on a daily basis because they're pushing their Alphas to supercomputer-class operations; on a pure transactions-per-dollar measure, they blow anything in their own or/higher/ classes away.
This is actually a pretty keen solution, but it would only work until 2nd Gen AimBots came along which check the locations and textures of targets before firing; that check can be made near instantaneous, certainly within ping time, and as such would have no net effect overall.
But its still a very keen idea.:)
I think the NetTrek solution is about the best compromise to be reached in this situation; if you don't want hacked clients running on your server, make it require a crypto challenge/response from a target client based on its CRC. Yeah, it can be hacked all to pieces, but at least its more than notionally difficult.
OK, I admit, I'm more than notionally curious about the idea of implimenting Bots for Quake; its a fine genre for the field of development.
>> ( y2k, global warming, Ozone hole, these are all fixed right, after all i havent heard anything about the last two in awhile, and the first one our government says is fixed, which is exactly what they would say whether it is or not)
Actually, none of these problems were ever truly a threat to the Earth or to us personally, they all have great demogoguery power, however, as they strike fear into the hearts of the uninformed.
The "Y2K problem" is always laid at the feet of embedded systems (most of which never know what the date is in the first place) or the banks/infrastructure, most of which have been dealing with the implications for 20 years or more (after all, a 30 year corporate loan taken in 1970 is terminating sometime in the year 2000).
"Global warming" is about as natural as anything else that ever happened to the world; in ten minutes, Mount Saint Helens vented more carbon monoxide and other nasties into the air than humanity has over the complete existance of the species, and more than they ever could even giving a Malthian expansion of population.
"Ozone hole" prophecies, like the global warming issues, are based on a flawed understanding of both the natural processes of the planet and a hugely overblown panic-button mentality that immediately brands anything that we don't understand completely at the moment as a deadly threat. In truth, the 'ozone hole' is only a 'hole' in the loosest sense of the word, and its over Antarctica, for Hades sake! If the eco-freaks were right about the causes, don't you think it'd be over the worlds' largest users and abusers of CFCs or downwind thereof?
In short, when you see a panic, step back and consider who profits because of it.
Probably because that's really the kind of environment most of the hackers I know prefer. I've taken out all the flourescents over my cube at the office. The running joke is I'm due to hang a big styrofoam cave-like roof over it next, complete with dripping stalactites.
Slashdot Mirror
I just want, once, someone to stand up in the middle of the school assembly, or PTA meeting, and recite this little piece: You have killed a person. A person who never drew one drop of blood from you is dead, and its your fault. Someone whose biggest real crime was doing something you can't, you just broke his neck as easily as snapping the spine of a chicken for Sunday dinner. If you looked at the autopsy photos, you'd see a disturbing similarity between the rope burn patterns and your fingerprints. You are a murderer. I hope you enjoy the sobriquet, because it should haunt you until you, yourself, die. The worst is you didn't have to kill this soul. You could have listened to it. You could have tried to figure out why it was seeking what it found. You could have stepped aside with your mighty ego and tried to figure something out. You could have elevated it. You did none of these things. Enjoy your dreams.
What I'm really wishing for is a physical version of the FITALY keyboard (http://www.fitaly.com). The original is mostly a software construct for Palms and other handhelds because typing with one hand/finger/stylus is a whole different environment than the usual style.
... my hatchday is in April. :)
Unfortunately, due to some physical limitations, I've been typing with just a knuckle on my right hand since kindergarten. Even though I can hit about 28wpm when I'm in a good groove on a nice keyboard, I'd really rather own a Fitaly; the layout looks wonderful, and with toggling shift/ctrl/alt (which I achieve through software now), it'd be glorious.
Anyone with the urge to build one for me
Having been in the Atlanta area for years and sampled the Geek House opportunities, I found it, in the end, much wiser to simply have my own house, wire it up the way I want it, then never, ever, on the pain of death, let any other geeks live in my domain.
...
:)
Non-geeks are alright to live with; they don't understand Hacker's Zen, nor what I do in my room all night, but that's perfectly fine. Geeks are high-ego, high-maintainance creatures with enormous territoriality. Non-geeks don't register as threats. A whole nest of them, well
I found it much, much better for my stress not to go that way.
None of the presented options are really exclusive of the others; myself, I'm rather fond of a combination.
Certainly, give free access to part of the material to help the community. No one will begrudge you banner ads on that portion; the community has become used to overlooking them, for the most part, as long as no extraneous JavaScript windows go popping up.
Certainly, sell subscriptions. Real Programmers(tm) are used to subscribing to various publications which track fast-moving standards. At $12/yr, this is cheaper by an order of magnitude than most.
Have each section attached to some means of readers (perhaps only registered readers) leaving marginalia. During the update sweeps, some of this marginalia might be folded into the main text. This gives you Open Source/peer review flexibility without having to embed it right on the page immediately, Wiki-like.
Overall, I think you're in a good position, as long as the interface is clean, consistant, and direct.
Of course, the more bandwidth they have to their miners, the better the mining. The Internet doesn't "get in the way of" said process; all they have to do is crypt the connection to and from the TiVo, and the thing could tell home-base every what and wherefore of your setup, taste, and desires in REALTIME, not even in bursts.
I don't object to that, after all, I have the option to not buy a TiVo, or even not connect it. In exchange for letting them mine me, I'm sure I get a price break. Not an issue. What is an issue is the fact that a $20 NIC wasn't standard on the platform.
The Dreamcast is supposed to have an Ethernet connection to replace the modem bfore the end of the year.
... clever. Hang an extra 56k modem off a Linux box, set up PPP. Oddly enough, that's just what the DC uses ...
That said, you can still be
At this point, the ONLY game I'm playing on my PC is Diablo II. Everything else, I have a Sega Dreamcast (Gauntlet Legends is a beautiful, fun updating of the classic) or PSX for. My PC is typically too busy running a browser to play games on anyway.
I've put another network tap in my den, however, so that when the DC gets its Ethernet connection, I can masquerade it out over the cablemodem. Heavily multi-user games are the major advantage of the PC over the console now, and soon, that will be gone as well.
There's a good reason Tech Support generally wants you to go through the problem isolation steps again while you're handy:
... if you're an ass. Your contract says you get an initial callback in 4hrs? Expect to wait 3.58 before it comes, while the guy who says "thank you" and is calm hets one in 2min. Expect to be ruthlessly dropped into the research queue after 15min to get a callback at our leisure instead of a guy who's interested in getting your problem solved FOR YOU. Make friends with the techs and you can save hundreds of thousands a year because instead of buying the next support contract up, you get guys who want to see you working. Piss them off, and you get kicked to the curb as often as possible, all within the rules.
Because 9 out of 10 customers don't know their buttocks from a hole in the ground when it comes to noting error messages, log notes, and system events. 0 out of 10 times the techie hears the client tell him something either wrong or COMPLETELY fabricated.
This has led me to a couple of very clear Rules posted obviously in my cube:
Rule #1: The client always LIES.
Rule #2: The client is an idiot.
Sounds harsh, doesn't it? Unfortunately, by using those two very basic assumptions, I gain very low call cycle times compared to my compatriots. Check everything yourself, don't assume the client is competent to hold his job, don't assume he WANTS to get things fixed. All too often, I get the problem solution presented despite the desires of the client, who wants nothing more than someone to yell at and complain because HE destroyed his own system and I have neither magic wand nor crystal ball for him.
Are these Rules ever wrong? Occasionally. And then you adapt, you smile, you nod, and you get things actually done. And then you tell everyone around you that something unbelievable happened, because its not news to get an idiot but its on par with seeing an angel to see a competent SysAdmin calling tech support.
(I'm still amazed at the number of people who call up and yell, scream, raise a ruckus because we're doing our jobs the right way. And then expect to be treated like princes. Hint: You abuse one techie, you abuse them all, because they TALK. And you'll get the full support available to you
There are three groups never to piss off: police, the office secretary, and tech support.)
Thankfully, for we physically limited folks who have to type one-handed (in my case, one-fingered), there are some alleviations:
Windows (bless their soul) ships Win98 with "Accessibility Options" in the Settings folder; with it you can turn one-fingered ctrl/alt/shift toggling on. They stay on until you hit another key, or you double-tap to lock the mode until you hit it again.
Under most professional Unixes, AccessX has been around for a bit. Even when its not, with Deep Magic, you can get xmodmap to remap the necessaries to strict toggles.
Still, I'd love a physical version of the Fitaly keyboard. Less motion means, at the end of a 12hr hacking session, my shoulder doesn't feal like a chainsaw's eating me.
Keep in mind, these are the same folks who, just after I started working at DEC, had a major outtage of one of the Alpha / OSF/1 clusters that monitor MCC (Mission Control) while the shuttle was looking for a landing window. After working with them for 9hrs straight and then handing off the call to someone else, and eventually sending someone physically OUT there, the problem turneed out to be:
6mo before, they had the exact same problem. At that time they were instructed that their disk firmware on the shared SCSI bus were all horribly out of date, and needed updating, and the disks WOULD fall asleep if they didn't upgrade it. If they didn't, the side effect would be the cluster would take a bit longer to fail over. Oh, and it'd be nice if they upgraded to both a version of the OS still supported and put on the latest patches.
Needless to say, NONE of that was ever done and the big lash up was one of their monkies trying to FORCE a failover of NFS services and disks from node to node. In direct contravention to what they were told by DEC.
This was just the beginning of my disillusionment with every corporate group I've ever thought highly of.
At this point in time, hardware RAIDing and mirroring are pure wins in terms of performance if you just want to manage one bus, but if you're creating a highly available server, one that must stay up, no matter the situation, then you're going to need an LVM approach to the problem.
[And remember, kiddies,
- mirror
then- stripe or RAID
. Reducing redundancy in the quest for high-availability is a fool's game.]"... too advanced for its own good."
While it might amuse you to know that I suspect the watchers while fire was first harnessed were thinking the same thing, I'd counter that, if anything, such a Luddite attitude is actually pretty insulting to at least some of us out here working to try and make human existance better, healthier, and more whole. Perhaps science is moving too fast for your ability (or even the masses' ability) to readily forcast new developments' impacts. Perhaps the act of research is creating new methods and approaches, entire suites of understanding, that require humanity to develop new social structures and mores. Perhaps, just perhaps, the flaw is not in science moving too swiftly, but in individuals being too foolish and reactionary to follow suit.
One of the primary motivations and goals of science is the pressure it places on society to grow, adapt, and change to accomodate eternally new situations and events. Without that, you might as well live in Imperial China, where scientific innovation could have gotten you beheaded (though society was 'protected' for thousands of years at a stretch). Perhaps you are willing to exchange a little safety for the liberty afforded by new ideas, new ways of thinking, new perceptions which we are granted by the strenuous efforts of thousands of scientists. The Internet, for example, is not an inherently safe thing, but a medium of facilitation unmatched in human history (save by the telegraph, or before that, speech).
Given the opportunity, I'd more than happily upload my personality and move into an immortal world of silver and silicon, leaving behind my useless arms, my insufficient sight, and the slowness of meat-memory. Give me a single opportunity and I'll happily exchange my left eye for an implant, my right arm for cybernetics, and my blood for nanotech-enhanced immunity to disease and wounds.
Bring to me the future!
In the end, it comes down to a simple axiom: Those who do not partake of the new fruits of the vine will suffer, wither, and die, while those who do, who move, who evolve, transmutate, transcend, will not. In the end, its that simple.
I choose life.
The fact that all of the things that Tim says are coming in the next decade are available and possible /now/ in the set of languages he dismisses so casually in the first decade really told me everything I needed to know about his mindset going in.
/better algorithms/ that can be expressed and realized with the functiuonal languages.
"I can't be bothered to learn these Ivory Tower languages, so I'll just say I reviewed and discarded them as 'not good enough.'"
Pretty frustrating to me, especially when you recognize that the OCaml and GHC compilers (for OCAML and Haskell, respectively) have been known to create faster binaries than C on analogous algorithms. This leaves aside the whole field of
Uh, you /do/ realize that a battery that just outputs water and CO2 will be the biggest boon to plant life on this planet you've ever seen, right, since with increased CO2, they become more efficient producers of ... wait for it ... Oxygen. This gas might be familliar to you; I can only hope it is.
/extremely/ readily.
Carbon monoxide is a problem because its slow and difficult to biocompose. CO2 biocomposes in plants
Yes, cities could become the centers of an ecological renaissance as plants crowd close to draw in that much more CO2. Lovelock's Gaia to the rescue.
Disturbingly, this doesn't get any better if you're working in support for large indstallations and not PCs; at least when doing PC-scale support you can almost understand why the guy on the other end of the phone is a little intimidated.
/way/ more than you are) and can't be bothered to learn or know /anything/ about the system, or read the release notes for patches, or /install/ patches, or give you at least the respect they give to stray dogs rotting on the side of the road since you /are/ the fellow trying to save /their/ butt when the "database system's down that costs THIS company $10,00 a minute!" ... well, it gets stressful.
When talking to, say, Joe Random Consultant at Lawrence Livermore or NASA who's pulling in $130k+/yr (way,
They're lucky we just draw comics and tell one another nasty jokes about them rather than sending out assassins or tactical weaponry, as I've been pushing for.
(If I never hear "I'm not really a Unix guy, I do VMS," or "I'm just the secretary; they said this machine needed an Administrator; I'm an Administrative Assistant!" or "I don't know the configuration of this machine, I've been here 6mo but I didn't install it and I couldn't be bothered to learn it," it will be too deucedly soon.)
Well, more accurately, as a Tru64 Support Tech, Alpha/Tru64 doesn't really have Wave 5 clustering, either, not yet. Instead, we have ASE/TruCluster, which gives me nightmares every time I go home from work about misconfigured IP routing and 'custom scripts' that don't bother reporting proper failure codes ... but I digress. To the point, while Wave 5 clustering, with shared/mirrored roots and all the other gobsmacky goodness comes out to public consumption, it /might/ be keen. I've already corrected several errors in the docs they're trying to teach their support folks with. Hades below knows what their customer-released docs look like.
/higher/ classes away.
Honestly, I would run Tru64 on my Alpha if I needed cute administration tools (well, what they do have), and corporate liability. If I just want to crank cycles, I'll get a copy of DEC CC and run the binaries under Linux.
Btw, if the GoldRush/GS/DS/TurboLaser series machines "aren't intended to be used as supercomputers," someone better tell LLNL, the NSA, and a couple of the other folks it seems I deal with on a daily basis because they're pushing their Alphas to supercomputer-class operations; on a pure transactions-per-dollar measure, they blow anything in their own or
This is actually a pretty keen solution, but it would only work until 2nd Gen AimBots came along which check the locations and textures of targets before firing; that check can be made near instantaneous, certainly within ping time, and as such would have no net effect overall.
:)
But its still a very keen idea.
I think the NetTrek solution is about the best compromise to be reached in this situation; if you don't want hacked clients running on your server, make it require a crypto challenge/response from a target client based on its CRC. Yeah, it can be hacked all to pieces, but at least its more than notionally difficult.
OK, I admit, I'm more than notionally curious about the idea of implimenting Bots for Quake; its a fine genre for the field of development.
>> ( y2k, global warming, Ozone hole, these are all fixed right, after all i havent heard anything about the last two in awhile, and the first one our government says is fixed, which is exactly what they would say whether it is or not)
Actually, none of these problems were ever truly a threat to the Earth or to us personally, they all have great demogoguery power, however, as they strike fear into the hearts of the uninformed.
The "Y2K problem" is always laid at the feet of embedded systems (most of which never know what the date is in the first place) or the banks/infrastructure, most of which have been dealing with the implications for 20 years or more (after all, a 30 year corporate loan taken in 1970 is terminating sometime in the year 2000).
"Global warming" is about as natural as anything else that ever happened to the world; in ten minutes, Mount Saint Helens vented more carbon monoxide and other nasties into the air than humanity has over the complete existance of the species, and more than they ever could even giving a Malthian expansion of population.
"Ozone hole" prophecies, like the global warming issues, are based on a flawed understanding of both the natural processes of the planet and a hugely overblown panic-button mentality that immediately brands anything that we don't understand completely at the moment as a deadly threat. In truth, the 'ozone hole' is only a 'hole' in the loosest sense of the word, and its over Antarctica, for Hades sake! If the eco-freaks were right about the causes, don't you think it'd be over the worlds' largest users and abusers of CFCs or downwind thereof?
In short, when you see a panic, step back and consider who profits because of it.
Probably because that's really the kind of environment most of the hackers I know prefer. I've taken out all the flourescents over my cube at the office. The running joke is I'm due to hang a big styrofoam cave-like roof over it next, complete with dripping stalactites.