Hugh Daniel also died June 3, apparently of a heart attack. Hugh did a lot of open-source work, particularly the FreeS/WAN IPSEC project. He was well-known for being part of the Cypherpunks and Project Xanadu, and also worked on recovering data from old secret police computer records for the recent Guatemala genocide trials.
The Inuit's primary source of iron was meteors (which are relatively findable in snowy low-vegetation areas), and researchers in the Antarctic have also found them.
This is a dumb question, but is there a recommended way to share operating system virtual disks between VMs, so you don't need 100 copies of the same Ubuntu? I realize you could set up one server VM and advertise/usr/share over nfs or samba across a virtual switch, but are there better approaches?
Back in the 80s and early 90s I was working in New Jersey and often doing projects in DC. Taking the train was a lot less stressful than flying, and typically took only about 15 minutes longer, but sometimes I'd fly from Newark to National Airport. There were shuttle planes every hour, you only needed about 15 minutes at the airport to catch your plane, and if you missed it there'd be another one an hour later. (Except occasionally, with bad weather or whatever.) So we'd usually aim to get to the airport 20-30 minutes before our flight, and if you didn't get a bad Metro connection downtown you could walk at the airport, or if you did you could run and usually still get on.
Between Boston, NYC, and DC, Amtrak runs the really fast Acela trains, the pretty fast Metroliners, and the slower local trains. There's also lots of commuter train service in the Northeast that isn't Amtrak, such as New Jersey Transit, the Long Island Railroad, SEPTA, DC Metro, etc. Back in the 1980s and early 90s I used to take the trains from New Jersey to DC (before the Acela started, so Metroliner if I could, or the slow trains otherwise.) Depending on where I was going in DC, it was often faster to take the train, because there's a lot less "hurry up and wait" and the train stations were more centrally located.
Outside the northeast, Amtrak runs passenger service, mostly long-haul, with occasional shorter-distance service like the trains from San Francisco Bay Area up to Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. That service runs on the same rails that carry freight trains, and freight has higher priority, so sometimes the passenger trains have to wait. I've never been on one that mixed passengers and freight, but I suppose it's possible that they're doing some of that these days.
Back when I was taking the trains, Wifi hadn't been invented, most people didn't have cell phones, and cell phones mainly worked near the city; there was a big service gap between Baltimore and Philly. I was once in one of the dining cars, and the old guy sitting across from me had the smallest cellphone I'd ever seen (a Motorola flip-phone analog), the smallest laptop I'd ever seen (a 6-pound IBM model you could only get in Japan), and an alphanumeric Skytel pager (which was also cool.) He was Professor Dave Farber, then of UPenn, and he'd just been working on the EFF founding:-)
Lots of big corporations have more complicated tax liabilities that can't be handled by being registered in just one company. It's not uncommon to have multiple layers of corporate shells, with different layers being the ones that officially do some part of the business in that country so as to minimize overall taxes. One such approach is the Double Irish Arrangement often with a "Dutch Sandwich" in between, and Wikipedia identifies Google as one of a number of well-known large companies doing things like this.
At $DAYJOB, the IT department supports the long-term-support versions, currently at 17.0.5. It crashes a lot, and often gets into a runaway burn-the-whole-CPU trap (I've got an 8-CPU-core PC, so it shows up as 12-13% CPU utilization, so the rest of my machine's ok even though the browser stalls.) The main add-ons I'm running are NoScript, Ad-Block-Plus, and Ghostery.
It does seem to recover much better from crashes than 10.x long-term-support did, but it's still annoying.
Re:multiple social providers on the desktop
on
Firefox 21 Arrives
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· Score: 1
Lynx is a stripped-down browser, without enough artificial intelligence capability to have "feelings". EMACS, on the other hand? Sure, it's just meta-x-cokebottle and RMS's your uncle.
Back in the old days, when Netflix worked by mailing physical DVDs, their bandwidth was about 1/3 of the total bandwidth of the Internet. They had a much higher latency (~48 hours), but a huge amount of parallelism and 4GB packet sizes.
Thanks! I didn't have anything funny to say, and the previous sig was post-election snarkiness which had gotten dated, so I figured I'd do something useful with the space:_)
When my mother was growing up, the ice man delivered ice for the icebox; they didn't get mechanical refrigeration at home until after the war (and that was in a medium-large city.) If you drank milk, it didn't keep very long, and most people didn't have cars, so delivery made sense.
When I was growing up, milk companies still delivered in the suburbs, and some bakeries delivered, as well as a few more specialized products like potato chips. Most Americans didn't have two cars, and they tended to do large grocery shopping runs on Saturday. My mom learned to drive around 1960 so she could haul us to pre-school, and my dad carpooled to work; they probably got a second car in the late 60s, and they switched over to supermarket milk around 1970, and supermarkets were starting to have enough shelf space by the late 70s to carry more variety of products like potato chips than corner stores could.
If I had had kids, they would have grown up around the time of the internet boom. Webvan and Kozmo briefly delivered a wide variety of convenience foods (and weed:-) and while I never used them, my mother-in-law was elderly and less mobile and found them really useful; they improved her nutritional choices just as AOL improved her ability to socialize (and she'd quit smoking, so she no longer had to go to the store a couple times a week to get cigarettes.)
Good bread can last just fine if you treat it well (and don't eat it all, of course.) Refrigeration keeps it from going moldy, plastic bags keep it from drying out in the fridge. And here in the San Francisco Bay Area (or up in Seattle), there's lots of choices of good bread, even if you don't like sourdough. (Maybe soft spongey breads don't last as long without preservatives, but I don't eat those.)
Also lottery tickets and tobacco. In much of the US, mom&pop corner stores have been replaced by 7-11 or similar chains, but the functions are still similar. Ethnic neighborhoods are more likely to have mom&pop stores with a bit more specialized food varieties, but they're still selling the high-profit-margin goods that keep them in business.
The classic Unix password salt was 12 bits, and that was good enough to help protect a good 8-character password on a PDP-11 or VAX or even a Sun-3, back in the days when everybody could still read the password file. It did stop you from building a rainbow table that covered all 56 bits of password space, and even today there are very few (if any) organizations that can store that big a rainbow table.
But rainbow tables don't need to store the whole password space to be useful. A rainbow table of 1000 overly common passwords are enough to catch a non-trivial fraction of real-world passwords, and a table for 64K passwords with a 12-bit salt will still fit on a cheap thumb drive, though if you want to handle a million still-too-easy passwords, you'll probably want to use rotating disks. If you're trying to break root's password, hopefully root has more sense than to use a wimpy password. If you're trying to crack some user's email account to send spam from, or a blog account to drop comment spam, and don't care whose, there's probably somebody using weak passwords.
So if you're building a password system, and you're going to bother adding salt, please use at least 64 bits of it, or preferably 128 bits. Make the attacker do at least some per-victim work, even if the user's not going to bother.
Doubling internet speed only gets you an economic advantage if it lets you do new stuff, or do old stuff better.
- Modems were transformative, and let people connect with the outside world, send email, use BBSs, read Usenet, read the early mostly-text web, access Wikipedia, get access to market prices for farmers and merchants, send greeting cards to their mom over AOL, and change the world.
- 384 kbps really was transformatively better than modems, mostly because it was always-on and because it let web pages have more still-picture content, so businesses and individuals could do commerce on the web, but it was enough to run corporate-quality video-conferencing, and codecs have gotten better since then (and even before that, you could run ham-radio-quality talking heads video over modems), and it was enough to do stock-market day-trading back when people thought that was a good idea.
- 1.5 Mbps was enough to let you watch cat videos on YouTube, which has been transformative, and lets you download Linux updates and pirated movies fast enough that they don't have to run overnight.
- 1.5 Mbps with a static IP address lets you actually distribute content from home instead of from a hosting provider like YouTube/Flickr. Oh, you don't have a static IP address, do you?
- 3 Mbps lets you watch higher-resolution cat videos, but if you don't have a static IP address, you're still just a media consumer. Yes, it's slightly better television, but it's still just consumer TV.
Yes, Old People In South Korea have 100 Mbps internet at home. What are they doing with it besides online gaming that they couldn't do at 1 Mbps?
I'm currently running 3 Mbps DSL at home. It's been adequate for almost everything I do (though I've recently upgraded my TV, and might want to upgrade my internet connection to get a better selection of programming than the 750 Mbps cable company broadcast system gives me.) YouTube runs just fine on my DSL, since 3 Mbps is faster than real-time (if only YT had a play-faster choice like most PC DVD playing programs do!) I seldom watch live TV; the Tivo catches more programming than I actually get around to watching, though maybe Netflix download speeds will become annoying enough that I'll upgrade to 6 Mbps. The only thing I do that's really been limited by download speed is update Linux, and that's only a problem because I don't have enough RAM to leave all my virtual machines open in the background while doing other things.
Sure, there's lots of stuff you can do with extra bandwidth, but if all of it's "watching TV on a competing content provider", I don't see how that's a big economic advantage. 1.5 Mbps was a big step up from 384 kbps, which was a big step up from dialup. 3 Mbps was a fairly small step up from 1.5 Mbps, and mostly just improves my video watching speed (and means that I never bother running YouTube in low-res.) It hasn't been transformative.
I used an IBM 403 to run a Boy Scout mailing list in the early 1970s. It's the successor to the 402, and has 133 vertical bars with the character set on them, which slide into position based on the program and punch card data and then get whacked with a hammer to print. The kids and most of the adults weren't allowed to mess with the plug board on the side, but we could do anything we wanted with the paper-tape driver and the keypunch and card sorter, so there was still a fair bit of hacking room. (There was one adult who knew what he was doing with the wires.)
Later, when I got to high school, the girls in the secretarial-track training got taught how to actually program the things (I think; they definitely learned keypunch typing and drum programming, but I think they also got to do the wires.)
There's a lot of different and vague stuff running around under the name SDN lately, but a lot of it seems to be a replacement for the complex networks of expensive Cisco switches are used in data centers, instead of all of the different Spanning Tree Protocol variants that lead to inefficiency and long convergence delays when equipment breaks ("long" being defined as "more than a few seconds", often accompanied by a couple of minutes of BGP reconvergence.)
Telephone networks in the US had Signalling System 7, which ran over X.25 separate from the circuit-switched data, and one advantage of having a separate control plane for routing was that you could have a backup X.25-over-satellite network, so that the signalling system would work even if you lost the fiber or copper trunks between two or more sites.
Actually, the Republicans got a few Democrats to join them in a filibuster, because they were too cowardly to let the actual bill come up for a vote. They would have easily defeated it in the House, but they'd rather not lose a vote to the Democrats, and the House GOP reps would rather not have to go on record for the vote.
I'm against the bill, but I think the Republicans should at least have the courage to do a talking filibuster if they're going to filibuster.
I'll occasionally read the freebie weekly newspaper, and there are airline magazines that I'll read on a plane at the times you're not allowed to use electronics, but that's about it. Lots of magazines online, though - The Atlantic in particular.
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Hugh Daniel also died June 3, apparently of a heart attack. Hugh did a lot of open-source work, particularly the FreeS/WAN IPSEC project. He was well-known for being part of the Cypherpunks and Project Xanadu, and also worked on recovering data from old secret police computer records for the recent Guatemala genocide trials.
The Inuit's primary source of iron was meteors (which are relatively findable in snowy low-vegetation areas), and researchers in the Antarctic have also found them.
So you're saying they had televisions with time travel built in?
This is a dumb question, but is there a recommended way to share operating system virtual disks between VMs, so you don't need 100 copies of the same Ubuntu? I realize you could set up one server VM and advertise /usr/share over nfs or samba across a virtual switch, but are there better approaches?
Back in the 80s and early 90s I was working in New Jersey and often doing projects in DC. Taking the train was a lot less stressful than flying, and typically took only about 15 minutes longer, but sometimes I'd fly from Newark to National Airport. There were shuttle planes every hour, you only needed about 15 minutes at the airport to catch your plane, and if you missed it there'd be another one an hour later. (Except occasionally, with bad weather or whatever.) So we'd usually aim to get to the airport 20-30 minutes before our flight, and if you didn't get a bad Metro connection downtown you could walk at the airport, or if you did you could run and usually still get on.
Between Boston, NYC, and DC, Amtrak runs the really fast Acela trains, the pretty fast Metroliners, and the slower local trains. There's also lots of commuter train service in the Northeast that isn't Amtrak, such as New Jersey Transit, the Long Island Railroad, SEPTA, DC Metro, etc. Back in the 1980s and early 90s I used to take the trains from New Jersey to DC (before the Acela started, so Metroliner if I could, or the slow trains otherwise.) Depending on where I was going in DC, it was often faster to take the train, because there's a lot less "hurry up and wait" and the train stations were more centrally located.
Outside the northeast, Amtrak runs passenger service, mostly long-haul, with occasional shorter-distance service like the trains from San Francisco Bay Area up to Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. That service runs on the same rails that carry freight trains, and freight has higher priority, so sometimes the passenger trains have to wait. I've never been on one that mixed passengers and freight, but I suppose it's possible that they're doing some of that these days.
Back when I was taking the trains, Wifi hadn't been invented, most people didn't have cell phones, and cell phones mainly worked near the city; there was a big service gap between Baltimore and Philly. I was once in one of the dining cars, and the old guy sitting across from me had the smallest cellphone I'd ever seen (a Motorola flip-phone analog), the smallest laptop I'd ever seen (a 6-pound IBM model you could only get in Japan), and an alphanumeric Skytel pager (which was also cool.) He was Professor Dave Farber, then of UPenn, and he'd just been working on the EFF founding :-)
Lots of big corporations have more complicated tax liabilities that can't be handled by being registered in just one company. It's not uncommon to have multiple layers of corporate shells, with different layers being the ones that officially do some part of the business in that country so as to minimize overall taxes. One such approach is the Double Irish Arrangement often with a "Dutch Sandwich" in between, and Wikipedia identifies Google as one of a number of well-known large companies doing things like this.
At $DAYJOB, the IT department supports the long-term-support versions, currently at 17.0.5. It crashes a lot, and often gets into a runaway burn-the-whole-CPU trap (I've got an 8-CPU-core PC, so it shows up as 12-13% CPU utilization, so the rest of my machine's ok even though the browser stalls.)
The main add-ons I'm running are NoScript, Ad-Block-Plus, and Ghostery.
It does seem to recover much better from crashes than 10.x long-term-support did, but it's still annoying.
Lynx is a stripped-down browser, without enough artificial intelligence capability to have "feelings". EMACS, on the other hand? Sure, it's just meta-x-cokebottle and RMS's your uncle.
Back in the old days, when Netflix worked by mailing physical DVDs, their bandwidth was about 1/3 of the total bandwidth of the Internet. They had a much higher latency (~48 hours), but a huge amount of parallelism and 4GB packet sizes.
It's possible that that figure was only on Internet2, which has mostly academic users. Or is Netflix using BitTorrent for their downloads?
Thanks for the explanation; many of us here only know the Star Trek definition of red shirt :-)
Thanks! I didn't have anything funny to say, and the previous sig was post-election snarkiness which had gotten dated, so I figured I'd do something useful with the space :_)
When my mother was growing up, the ice man delivered ice for the icebox; they didn't get mechanical refrigeration at home until after the war (and that was in a medium-large city.) If you drank milk, it didn't keep very long, and most people didn't have cars, so delivery made sense.
When I was growing up, milk companies still delivered in the suburbs, and some bakeries delivered, as well as a few more specialized products like potato chips. Most Americans didn't have two cars, and they tended to do large grocery shopping runs on Saturday. My mom learned to drive around 1960 so she could haul us to pre-school, and my dad carpooled to work; they probably got a second car in the late 60s, and they switched over to supermarket milk around 1970, and supermarkets were starting to have enough shelf space by the late 70s to carry more variety of products like potato chips than corner stores could.
If I had had kids, they would have grown up around the time of the internet boom. Webvan and Kozmo briefly delivered a wide variety of convenience foods (and weed :-) and while I never used them, my mother-in-law was elderly and less mobile and found them really useful; they improved her nutritional choices just as AOL improved her ability to socialize (and she'd quit smoking, so she no longer had to go to the store a couple times a week to get cigarettes.)
Good bread can last just fine if you treat it well (and don't eat it all, of course.) Refrigeration keeps it from going moldy, plastic bags keep it from drying out in the fridge. And here in the San Francisco Bay Area (or up in Seattle), there's lots of choices of good bread, even if you don't like sourdough. (Maybe soft spongey breads don't last as long without preservatives, but I don't eat those.)
Also lottery tickets and tobacco. In much of the US, mom&pop corner stores have been replaced by 7-11 or similar chains, but the functions are still similar. Ethnic neighborhoods are more likely to have mom&pop stores with a bit more specialized food varieties, but they're still selling the high-profit-margin goods that keep them in business.
The classic Unix password salt was 12 bits, and that was good enough to help protect a good 8-character password on a PDP-11 or VAX or even a Sun-3, back in the days when everybody could still read the password file. It did stop you from building a rainbow table that covered all 56 bits of password space, and even today there are very few (if any) organizations that can store that big a rainbow table.
But rainbow tables don't need to store the whole password space to be useful. A rainbow table of 1000 overly common passwords are enough to catch a non-trivial fraction of real-world passwords, and a table for 64K passwords with a 12-bit salt will still fit on a cheap thumb drive, though if you want to handle a million still-too-easy passwords, you'll probably want to use rotating disks. If you're trying to break root's password, hopefully root has more sense than to use a wimpy password. If you're trying to crack some user's email account to send spam from, or a blog account to drop comment spam, and don't care whose, there's probably somebody using weak passwords.
So if you're building a password system, and you're going to bother adding salt, please use at least 64 bits of it, or preferably 128 bits. Make the attacker do at least some per-victim work, even if the user's not going to bother.
Doubling internet speed only gets you an economic advantage if it lets you do new stuff, or do old stuff better.
Yes, Old People In South Korea have 100 Mbps internet at home. What are they doing with it besides online gaming that they couldn't do at 1 Mbps?
I'm currently running 3 Mbps DSL at home. It's been adequate for almost everything I do (though I've recently upgraded my TV, and might want to upgrade my internet connection to get a better selection of programming than the 750 Mbps cable company broadcast system gives me.) YouTube runs just fine on my DSL, since 3 Mbps is faster than real-time (if only YT had a play-faster choice like most PC DVD playing programs do!) I seldom watch live TV; the Tivo catches more programming than I actually get around to watching, though maybe Netflix download speeds will become annoying enough that I'll upgrade to 6 Mbps. The only thing I do that's really been limited by download speed is update Linux, and that's only a problem because I don't have enough RAM to leave all my virtual machines open in the background while doing other things.
Sure, there's lots of stuff you can do with extra bandwidth, but if all of it's "watching TV on a competing content provider", I don't see how that's a big economic advantage. 1.5 Mbps was a big step up from 384 kbps, which was a big step up from dialup. 3 Mbps was a fairly small step up from 1.5 Mbps, and mostly just improves my video watching speed (and means that I never bother running YouTube in low-res.) It hasn't been transformative.
I used an IBM 403 to run a Boy Scout mailing list in the early 1970s. It's the successor to the 402, and has 133 vertical bars with the character set on them, which slide into position based on the program and punch card data and then get whacked with a hammer to print. The kids and most of the adults weren't allowed to mess with the plug board on the side, but we could do anything we wanted with the paper-tape driver and the keypunch and card sorter, so there was still a fair bit of hacking room. (There was one adult who knew what he was doing with the wires.)
Later, when I got to high school, the girls in the secretarial-track training got taught how to actually program the things (I think; they definitely learned keypunch typing and drum programming, but I think they also got to do the wires.)
SELECT Name, Date, Time, Lat, Long, Photo FROM humans WHERE Name = "Sarah Connor"
There's a lot of different and vague stuff running around under the name SDN lately, but a lot of it seems to be a replacement for the complex networks of expensive Cisco switches are used in data centers, instead of all of the different Spanning Tree Protocol variants that lead to inefficiency and long convergence delays when equipment breaks ("long" being defined as "more than a few seconds", often accompanied by a couple of minutes of BGP reconvergence.)
Telephone networks in the US had Signalling System 7, which ran over X.25 separate from the circuit-switched data, and one advantage of having a separate control plane for routing was that you could have a backup X.25-over-satellite network, so that the signalling system would work even if you lost the fiber or copper trunks between two or more sites.
Of course it's sort of boring. Having broken drivers, now that's exciting! You'd really hope that Dell would ship a machine where that doesn't happen.
And most people in the market for a Linux laptop have been running Linux long enough that they expect the operating system to let them do real work.
Actually, the Republicans got a few Democrats to join them in a filibuster, because they were too cowardly to let the actual bill come up for a vote. They would have easily defeated it in the House, but they'd rather not lose a vote to the Democrats, and the House GOP reps would rather not have to go on record for the vote.
I'm against the bill, but I think the Republicans should at least have the courage to do a talking filibuster if they're going to filibuster.
I'll occasionally read the freebie weekly newspaper, and there are airline magazines that I'll read on a plane at the times you're not allowed to use electronics, but that's about it. Lots of magazines online, though - The Atlantic in particular.