I agree that kickstart stinks. But I find that centralized YaST tool to be deadly. If you look carefully, much of it is a simple front-end wrapper to distinct configuration tools. That's a fine approach, but those sub-tools are simply *awful*. The DNS, grub, network and package management tools each have major, major flaws that require hand-manipulation of configuration files to get sensible behavior, then overwrite those edits when you run the YaST toolkit. Frankly, I've preferred to throw out the YaST tools and switch to Webmin wherever feasible, because Webmin doesn't try to outsmart itself the way YaST does.
I also agree about RHEL's package management before RHEL 5, and RHEL 5's yum has limitations, too. The solution is either to install and use CentOS, which sensibly uss yum, or to create a local mirror repository (which can be done with up2date) and install yum from CentOS on top and access that.
Thinking with your pocketbook is reasonable. The difficulty is that they badly underestimated Microsoft's willingness to lie, cheat, steal, and poison the well for other travelers who can't afford such large caravans with water, carried in from somewhere else. It's like dealing with Wal-mart: dealing with such a large and profitable company can be a salvation of a small business in tight times, and in theory can be leveraged into making you a larger business. But like Wal-mart, Microsoft squeezes its partners very, very hard. And where Wal-Mart uses sweat shop labor to keep their prices down, Microsoft has been repeatedly caught stealiing directly from their partners as well as their competitors.
Any company that shows their development roadmap to Microsoft as a partner and doesn't expect Microsoft to pluck out the profitable bits and "invent" them internally hasn't been paying attention.
Separating political speech from work speech is sometimes very difficult: union support, military policy support, and family planning all affect work performance directly or indirectly. This is what anonymous and pseudonymous services are for, and why I appreciate Slashdot's policies. There used to be much better pseudonymous services, such as anon.penet.fi for Usenet and email, but they're very difficult to administer well, and they come under tremendous pressure from attack lawyers.
Hello, editors of Slashdot? The faked URL's to Minicity are a continuing problem. Can you arrange to add a new moderation categary of "Minicy", or "fake URL", because they're really a pain.
Unless Spiner himself took it back to his dressing room, precisely to give it or sell it off. That was a neat scene, with Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair playing himself in the holodeck. Mr. Hawking was apparently delighted to portray himself.
Oh, I've read a few issues. Most of them are dreck, but a few are so funny they make up for the rest. The presentation for the coffee made by having animals eat the beans, and using the semi-digested beans from their feces took me 5 minutes to stop laughing when I saw the video of the awards ceremenony.
Who knew the real Nobel Prize winners who were giving the awards could be so funny?
Maybe extensive computer games with lots of sophisticated graphics and cut scenes. But really, we're not yet hitting the limits on DVD drivesx for typical games, where complex visual environments need to be manipulated in the available memory and graphics of the computer itself to reflect dynamic changes.
Until the graphics take a serious leap in capability, there's not much use for Blu-Ray capability for computer software. For backup systems? Maybe it would be useful, but it's still very expensive for that.
And at the same time we can solve the 3-body problem! Yeah, that'll work!
More seriously, it's full of random factors and phenomena that are fractal in their complexity: the more you spend energy and time measuring the factors, the more you'd wind up taking away the person's life and freedom, and even risking their health from the testing.
Space is critical. You need space to put inactive equipment (spare components, tools, cables, servers being worked on, etc.) And make sure you can *reach* everything in the cabinets that you need to, and your cables are long enough that you don't have to spaghetti wire them. And whether they admit it, bureaucrats automatically associate space with power: having enough space for a decent desk will help get them to take you more seriously, and having it cluttered with equipment will not.
Cabinet space nearby for the software licenses, backup tapes, CD's and software boxes is vital. So is a place to meet with people while you fix their laptop, along with whatever network ports on different LAN's or wireless access points you need to plug directly into them and debug. A safe place to put your coffee mug is useful, and a place to put *THEIR* coffee cup and folder of paperwork while you meet them is even more vital, or they're going to put their cups on your servers being repaired and they *will* spill.
Cabinet doors that open enough to let you use the slide-out KVM consoles, remove the servers, but close well enough to reduce the noise are going to be really helpful. So is cooling that keeps you from baking with the servers, and doesn't chill you to the bone, or you're going to need a parka when you're working.
Good 3-ring binders and shelf space to put the CD's and their license literature will help you keep things organized.
I disagree. There are notable military uses, and civilian ones, where entire countries are blocked from easily buying high-quality GPS technologies for political reasons. Battlefield transponders with soldier locations where you absolutely do not want the transponder to be pre-managed or built by the US military with automatic decryption keys comes to mind, coupled with a GPS-like system where the US government cannot manipulate your local data or trivially install blockers or man-in-the-middle intercept and replace the transmissions come to mind.
That's one sort of paranoia. The other sort is that a general failure of the GPS satellites due to a common system flaw or a cracker breaking into ground-control signals and disabling them is a very real risk: having a separate system with different satellites and fundamentally different technology is an excellent reason to have a secondary system. Like backing up your systems to 2 different media, it helps prevent a systemic bug from destroying *all* of your critical resource.
Oh, good plate armor was built with sloping surfaces to deflect *everything*, not just arrows! There's no point in javing sticking out ornamental bits to catch a sword blow or a hammer, you want that glancing off if possible.
At 5 feet, thorugh a television camera? Try it yourself with an old monitor and a webcam. You have to get the camera up extremely close to see the damage, but your eye notices it quite well. And scratches accumulate.
Even my hand bow would probably have knocked the monitor off the table. I'd guess it would have at least twice the energy. Withstanding the sharp tips of those bolts is good, but given the obvious chicanery of using such a pitiful bow and the obvious pulling of the hammer blows, the demonstration is pretty obviously cooked.
Withstanding abuse is fine. But if you're going to marvel at "withstanding a crossbow", use a real crossbow.
Yes, and if you take an old LCD monitor outside and throw a pencil at it it will bounce off too. And since the monitor display was a dark background color and we never saw the screen closely after the various attempts to damage it, we don't really know if it was damaged.
Holding together is one thing: not being scratched up, so that you don't have permanent marks on it, is another and is far more valuable.
I agree about the power of a typical longbow, or a typical crossbow. Compound bows are wonderful, but expensive and difficult to maintain in the field, so they're not a combat weapon.
There was a fascinating NPR special about the longbow versus plate armor claims. English longbows, according to modern tests of the soft iron used for their heads and tested against plate iron similar to that of plate armor, simply bent the tip and was deflected. What the arrows *did* do was go easily through chain, leather, unarmored bits, and horses when fired in an arrow storm, and knock armored knights off their feet. A decent English archer, who was basically a farmboy who practiced at least once a month, could easily fire 10 times a minute. The result was that very, very expensive armored or mounted knights were easily disabled by farmboys who could kill them from 100 yards away, then close in at leisure and use hammers or long daggers on the remaining knights.
Theh result is similar to that of RPG's versus a modern tank. Enough cheap RPG's will destroy any modern armor, the trick is to kill the armor before it can fire on the infantry.
That crossbow is a sad, sad joke, the sort of thing you'd sell to an ignorant tourist or use in a target range for a child. Pulling it casually with one hand the way he did, with the crossbow raised, means that it has no more power than a child's bow. 30 lb. pull, tops, and thorugh the noticeably shorter length through which the crossbow accelerates the bolt, it's going to have noticeably less energy deposited in the quarrel or the bolt than a bow of similar pull. Frankly, I've got a stronger crossbow in my workshop, an old Sharper Image one-hand crossbow, that I've used on machinery I've given up on. (I shoot cheap wooden dowels with it, with a notch for the string cut in one end and the other end sharpened iwth a pencil sharpener.)
It makes me wonder how they skewed the other tests: the deep red background that the screen displayed, for example, will tend to hide scratches or even the marker that the girl used on it and wiped off.
Oh, my. Yes, good security does cost some effort to do, and sometimes clients don't want to spend the work and resources. You have my sympathy for this situation.
I don't suppose you could, very quietly, contact the BBB or the IRS about people being so cavalier with such information?
Ohh, that's a separate issue. I've certainly had that happen: it's always in my contract that the company owns it, but credit within the company is vital to your career. I've also spun things this way way with my boss's cooperation, so that it looked like the idea came from him with the bureaucratic status to get it actually looked at, and we both carefully kept our mouths shut at meetings about where it really came froml. I was saving up my personal political capital for a different set of issues that needed me there to hammer out the technical requirements, and needed to spend my meeting time on that project.
In fact, this happens all the time, especially for graduate students doing research. Learning to deal with it is an art form. Learning to read notes and attend presentations and figure out who actually did the work and knows the subject is also a skill that is not formally taught, but that is extremely useful.
Ahem. I'm well over college age, and in fact was drinking well before the average PhD was born. I make my living writing, and dealing with, open source software. My work is usually specifically GPL published, and much of my commercially authored writing is under the Creative Commons. I get paid to write it the *first* time, and to add to that work, and do quite well because the other tools are available to me that my peers have also published with similar goals.
So before you take this editorial piece's view that college kids don't believe in "intellectual property" at all, remember that some of us have careers that break the models of such things as propounded by "intellectual peroperty" lawyers, and even do so legally.
Notice that the author never actually says what group he was speaking to, just "100% young people". Given his topic, does anyone else think he either made up the part about 500 people showing up, or they were forced to attend and didn't feel like raising their hands? Or they're from one of those groups where if someone already has their hands up, you don't raise your own because you don't want to stand out? And can anyone else vouch for the numbers present, or the response of the audience?
If he wrote a review of a new cell phone with a particular feature, we'd demand to know the model or at least some examples. But to take this kind of conclusion from an unverifiable, and somewhat unbelievable anecdote? I think the article is alarmist, and easier to write based on such an anecdote than it would be based on verifiable facts.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that kickstart stinks. But I find that centralized YaST tool to be deadly. If you look carefully, much of it is a simple front-end wrapper to distinct configuration tools. That's a fine approach, but those sub-tools are simply *awful*. The DNS, grub, network and package management tools each have major, major flaws that require hand-manipulation of configuration files to get sensible behavior, then overwrite those edits when you run the YaST toolkit. Frankly, I've preferred to throw out the YaST tools and switch to Webmin wherever feasible, because Webmin doesn't try to outsmart itself the way YaST does.
I also agree about RHEL's package management before RHEL 5, and RHEL 5's yum has limitations, too. The solution is either to install and use CentOS, which sensibly uss yum, or to create a local mirror repository (which can be done with up2date) and install yum from CentOS on top and access that.
Thinking with your pocketbook is reasonable. The difficulty is that they badly underestimated Microsoft's willingness to lie, cheat, steal, and poison the well for other travelers who can't afford such large caravans with water, carried in from somewhere else. It's like dealing with Wal-mart: dealing with such a large and profitable company can be a salvation of a small business in tight times, and in theory can be leveraged into making you a larger business. But like Wal-mart, Microsoft squeezes its partners very, very hard. And where Wal-Mart uses sweat shop labor to keep their prices down, Microsoft has been repeatedly caught stealiing directly from their partners as well as their competitors.
Any company that shows their development roadmap to Microsoft as a partner and doesn't expect Microsoft to pluck out the profitable bits and "invent" them internally hasn't been paying attention.
Separating political speech from work speech is sometimes very difficult: union support, military policy support, and family planning all affect work performance directly or indirectly. This is what anonymous and pseudonymous services are for, and why I appreciate Slashdot's policies. There used to be much better pseudonymous services, such as anon.penet.fi for Usenet and email, but they're very difficult to administer well, and they come under tremendous pressure from attack lawyers.
Hello, editors of Slashdot? The faked URL's to Minicity are a continuing problem. Can you arrange to add a new moderation categary of "Minicy", or "fake URL", because they're really a pain.
It's designed to confuse log analyzers and casual log readers, not sneak past firewalls.
Unless Spiner himself took it back to his dressing room, precisely to give it or sell it off. That was a neat scene, with Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair playing himself in the holodeck. Mr. Hawking was apparently delighted to portray himself.
Yes, you'll go blind if you keep doing that, or wind up living in your parent's basement and posting on /.
Oh, I've read a few issues. Most of them are dreck, but a few are so funny they make up for the rest. The presentation for the coffee made by having animals eat the beans, and using the semi-digested beans from their feces took me 5 minutes to stop laughing when I saw the video of the awards ceremenony.
Who knew the real Nobel Prize winners who were giving the awards could be so funny?
Maybe extensive computer games with lots of sophisticated graphics and cut scenes. But really, we're not yet hitting the limits on DVD drivesx for typical games, where complex visual environments need to be manipulated in the available memory and graphics of the computer itself to reflect dynamic changes.
Until the graphics take a serious leap in capability, there's not much use for Blu-Ray capability for computer software. For backup systems? Maybe it would be useful, but it's still very expensive for that.
And at the same time we can solve the 3-body problem! Yeah, that'll work!
More seriously, it's full of random factors and phenomena that are fractal in their complexity: the more you spend energy and time measuring the factors, the more you'd wind up taking away the person's life and freedom, and even risking their health from the testing.
Space is critical. You need space to put inactive equipment (spare components, tools, cables, servers being worked on, etc.) And make sure you can *reach* everything in the cabinets that you need to, and your cables are long enough that you don't have to spaghetti wire them. And whether they admit it, bureaucrats automatically associate space with power: having enough space for a decent desk will help get them to take you more seriously, and having it cluttered with equipment will not.
Cabinet space nearby for the software licenses, backup tapes, CD's and software boxes is vital. So is a place to meet with people while you fix their laptop, along with whatever network ports on different LAN's or wireless access points you need to plug directly into them and debug. A safe place to put your coffee mug is useful, and a place to put *THEIR* coffee cup and folder of paperwork while you meet them is even more vital, or they're going to put their cups on your servers being repaired and they *will* spill.
Cabinet doors that open enough to let you use the slide-out KVM consoles, remove the servers, but close well enough to reduce the noise are going to be really helpful. So is cooling that keeps you from baking with the servers, and doesn't chill you to the bone, or you're going to need a parka when you're working.
Good 3-ring binders and shelf space to put the CD's and their license literature will help you keep things organized.
I disagree. There are notable military uses, and civilian ones, where entire countries are blocked from easily buying high-quality GPS technologies for political reasons. Battlefield transponders with soldier locations where you absolutely do not want the transponder to be pre-managed or built by the US military with automatic decryption keys comes to mind, coupled with a GPS-like system where the US government cannot manipulate your local data or trivially install blockers or man-in-the-middle intercept and replace the transmissions come to mind.
That's one sort of paranoia. The other sort is that a general failure of the GPS satellites due to a common system flaw or a cracker breaking into ground-control signals and disabling them is a very real risk: having a separate system with different satellites and fundamentally different technology is an excellent reason to have a secondary system. Like backing up your systems to 2 different media, it helps prevent a systemic bug from destroying *all* of your critical resource.
Hurray for the Sun God!
He is the One God!
Ra!! Ra!! Ra!!
Of course, you do have to drill holes or melt it down to check if it's hollow. But if you melt it, you can douse it in the water and save a step!
Oh, good plate armor was built with sloping surfaces to deflect *everything*, not just arrows! There's no point in javing sticking out ornamental bits to catch a sword blow or a hammer, you want that glancing off if possible.
At 5 feet, thorugh a television camera? Try it yourself with an old monitor and a webcam. You have to get the camera up extremely close to see the damage, but your eye notices it quite well. And scratches accumulate.
Even my hand bow would probably have knocked the monitor off the table. I'd guess it would have at least twice the energy. Withstanding the sharp tips of those bolts is good, but given the obvious chicanery of using such a pitiful bow and the obvious pulling of the hammer blows, the demonstration is pretty obviously cooked.
Withstanding abuse is fine. But if you're going to marvel at "withstanding a crossbow", use a real crossbow.
Yes, and if you take an old LCD monitor outside and throw a pencil at it it will bounce off too. And since the monitor display was a dark background color and we never saw the screen closely after the various attempts to damage it, we don't really know if it was damaged.
Holding together is one thing: not being scratched up, so that you don't have permanent marks on it, is another and is far more valuable.
I agree about the power of a typical longbow, or a typical crossbow. Compound bows are wonderful, but expensive and difficult to maintain in the field, so they're not a combat weapon.
There was a fascinating NPR special about the longbow versus plate armor claims. English longbows, according to modern tests of the soft iron used for their heads and tested against plate iron similar to that of plate armor, simply bent the tip and was deflected. What the arrows *did* do was go easily through chain, leather, unarmored bits, and horses when fired in an arrow storm, and knock armored knights off their feet. A decent English archer, who was basically a farmboy who practiced at least once a month, could easily fire 10 times a minute. The result was that very, very expensive armored or mounted knights were easily disabled by farmboys who could kill them from 100 yards away, then close in at leisure and use hammers or long daggers on the remaining knights.
Theh result is similar to that of RPG's versus a modern tank. Enough cheap RPG's will destroy any modern armor, the trick is to kill the armor before it can fire on the infantry.
That crossbow is a sad, sad joke, the sort of thing you'd sell to an ignorant tourist or use in a target range for a child. Pulling it casually with one hand the way he did, with the crossbow raised, means that it has no more power than a child's bow. 30 lb. pull, tops, and thorugh the noticeably shorter length through which the crossbow accelerates the bolt, it's going to have noticeably less energy deposited in the quarrel or the bolt than a bow of similar pull. Frankly, I've got a stronger crossbow in my workshop, an old Sharper Image one-hand crossbow, that I've used on machinery I've given up on. (I shoot cheap wooden dowels with it, with a notch for the string cut in one end and the other end sharpened iwth a pencil sharpener.)
It makes me wonder how they skewed the other tests: the deep red background that the screen displayed, for example, will tend to hide scratches or even the marker that the girl used on it and wiped off.
So to test all these rings and things to non-destructively see if they're titanium, we should just give them to you to wear?
Oh, my. Yes, good security does cost some effort to do, and sometimes clients don't want to spend the work and resources. You have my sympathy for this situation.
I don't suppose you could, very quietly, contact the BBB or the IRS about people being so cavalier with such information?
Isn't the lack of paranoia on the part of those who run adult websites how this happened?
Ohh, that's a separate issue. I've certainly had that happen: it's always in my contract that the company owns it, but credit within the company is vital to your career. I've also spun things this way way with my boss's cooperation, so that it looked like the idea came from him with the bureaucratic status to get it actually looked at, and we both carefully kept our mouths shut at meetings about where it really came froml. I was saving up my personal political capital for a different set of issues that needed me there to hammer out the technical requirements, and needed to spend my meeting time on that project.
In fact, this happens all the time, especially for graduate students doing research. Learning to deal with it is an art form. Learning to read notes and attend presentations and figure out who actually did the work and knows the subject is also a skill that is not formally taught, but that is extremely useful.
Ahem. I'm well over college age, and in fact was drinking well before the average PhD was born. I make my living writing, and dealing with, open source software. My work is usually specifically GPL published, and much of my commercially authored writing is under the Creative Commons. I get paid to write it the *first* time, and to add to that work, and do quite well because the other tools are available to me that my peers have also published with similar goals.
So before you take this editorial piece's view that college kids don't believe in "intellectual property" at all, remember that some of us have careers that break the models of such things as propounded by "intellectual peroperty" lawyers, and even do so legally.
Notice that the author never actually says what group he was speaking to, just "100% young people". Given his topic, does anyone else think he either made up the part about 500 people showing up, or they were forced to attend and didn't feel like raising their hands? Or they're from one of those groups where if someone already has their hands up, you don't raise your own because you don't want to stand out? And can anyone else vouch for the numbers present, or the response of the audience?
If he wrote a review of a new cell phone with a particular feature, we'd demand to know the model or at least some examples. But to take this kind of conclusion from an unverifiable, and somewhat unbelievable anecdote? I think the article is alarmist, and easier to write based on such an anecdote than it would be based on verifiable facts.