I'd delete it. You don't have to read the rest of the guy's mail to do so, and so are violating no one's privacy. The mail system (pick any) doesn't have some sort of unimpugnable integrity. This is pretty much the equivalent of picking a sealed envelope with a pink slip in it up off of someone's desk, before they come into work in the morning, but after HR says they made a mistake.
I'd also tell the boss that in order to fulfill his request, I need a quick look at the original in his sent mail. I would then confirm that there were no BCCs, for obvious reasons.
Otherwise, barring some sort of registered email scheme, you aren't violating ethics or rules of evidence.
Certainly this isn't behavior to encourage in the boss, any more than building a mailserver and recovering a message store in order to recover an accidentally deleted message is. But if the dumb mistake isn't a habit, help both parties out.
As admins, we have to be able _not_ to see things that we shouldn't, and occasionally even to forget that we saw things. When you're helping a user troubleshoot their email, you'll see more about their personal lives than you would ever want to know. Those aren't things I speak about to no-one.
Just to provide more data points, I've only replaced a dozen or so drives under warranty in the last couple of years, but I'd say a good quarter or more of those were replaced with an ugrade. I've never gotten a drive older than a couple of years.
PPP is the protocol you'll probably need to use, but you have a couple of problems.
The easy one: One of you will have to act as a PPP server.
Harder:
Mac OSX 10.1 doesn't support the IR ports on some powerbooks. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106 617
MS has added some layers that complicate basic IRDA behavior, and implemented their own IrNET network protocol instead of the IrLAN standard. I'm not even sure you can get raw access to the IRCOMM layer that allows you to treat an IR port as an ordinary serial port. http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/tech/network /infrar ed/WinXP-IrDa.asp
http://www.irda.org/
The real difficulties of "building a small network" are difficulties of software, not hardware.
There is one advantage of stringing a crossover cable across the aisle. You could end up with both laptops flying towards the ankles of the person you trip.
He is helping these people out. He's volunteering at the center. You have a better idea, then volunteer yourself.
Certain drugs are far more addictive than any computer game. Learn a little about the biology of addiction, with nicotine or alcohol as examples.
This is why I'm impatient with phrases like chocaholism, or computer addiction. Sure, it's possible to put such an emphasis on an activity that it's destructive, but if you've ever dealt with people with biological addiction problems you'll recognize the difference. Don't trivialize biological addiction. It is not the same, and the psychiatric profession knows this.
Get out and play soccer? Look, he's talking about teaching these people the fundamentals of working with others. He's talking about fundamental problem solving skills and emotional control. Soccer would probably be nice, but might be a little ambitious.
Ideally, they should have loving functional families & tailored educational activities, but considering that many of these people die from medicable problems but don't have access to care, or starve, or die of exposure on the street, the benefits of computer games at a job training program are a bonus. (It's not easy to die of exposure in San Diego, but there are enough sick and malnourished homeless that it happens.)
They are talking about jobs. That's what the computer lab is for, but face it: Without basic problem solving skills or the ability to work with others, they aren't working at McDonalds.
To the guy who said he couldn't imagine the benefits of computer games other than getting "the kids interested in compter science" Read the article. He specified other benefits.
Please don't think I'm being sarcastic, but if you think these people need help they aren't getting, I think you shoud get involved with helping them yourself. They need the help.
This is pretty encouraging. It also draws a terrible conclusion.
Seems to me that better than 50% odds means that splints help most people. Surgery continues to be an option after using splints, but I'm not sure how much use splints are once the surgical recuperation is over.
I also suspect that people who have surgery have little choice but to really not use their wrists.
I don't think most people have any idea how seriously to take RSI. I think the words "permanent" and "crippling" should be used more often. I've seen both.
I'm surprised by the conclusion suggesting surgery as a first resort before splinting too. That violates the medical principle the parent was implicitly referring to, of using the least invasive and drastic procedures first when they show promise.
Sounds to me like we need to do a better job of encouraging people limit their typing once they start to suffer (or worse, as I've seen, taking splints off because they make typing hard.)
As the admin, I get the requests for ergo gear. I do my damndest to encourage use of whatever we can make available. Ergo keyboards, keyboard trays, trackballs, tablets, and ultimately rest. I also think excercise and variety are important. If all you use your fingers for is typing, you'll use them up.
Now, it also sounds like I have a book to read & put on the shelf for my people. Is the RSI handbook by Quilter well regarded by the Slashdot Science readers? Lots of people have lots to say, but it isn't all right.
Good: I love IBM's hermaphroditic token ring connectors. Who cares which end is plug, and which is device? It's all the same to them. They are awful big though, but it's like RS-232. Simple hardware (over?)engineered to a purpoose, because when these were designed they were not expected to be consumer level items.
Bad: Proprietary unavailable fscking connectors. Zaurus, Palm, Visor, Clie, all different. Thanks guys, 'cause what I really wanted was to pay you for a big box with a ttl-serial level converter and cable that removes my keyboard functionality.
Ugly: If you want ugly, try twinaxe with vampire taps. The connection is made by puncturing the cable with the fangs of the tap. You get all the fragility of BNC ethernet and all the flexibility of a network made out of sticks. I'm probably prejudiced, beause by the time I was using it, I also resented wrestling with SNA for a corporate network where TCP/IP would serve better. Since done.
I remember my first dance lessons almost twenty years ago. It would have been better to have practiced with a machine first. Without some minimal level of either social or physical skills, real dance lessons can just aggravate the geek social isolation problems you describe. Trust me, it didn't make me _more_ comfortable with people. It was just humiliating.
Later, I was slapped by a girlfriend for trying to dance with her. She thought I was making fun of her.
Taking lessons with my wife (about fifty bucks for about an hour in prep for our wedding) more recently was great fun, but I'm a little more practiced at dancing, and socially a tad more graceful now.
Last year's contest was cancelled because falling out of the sky suddenly became terribly unfunny on September Eleventh, 2000. So said a friend who was doing setup for the event.
I thought he'd said they went ahead and had some sort of party instead though.
Attributing intention to an artist is an arrogant thing to do, so here I go. My interpretation is based on my feelings about the picture.
Escher knew what went in the middle. One of the beauties of certain mathematical curves is that they can be intuitively obvious. You can visualize them far better than you can draw them, and far more easily than you could detail the mathematics. Experience with with psychedelics demonstrates this for fractals in particular.
The picture you cited with the center filled in is less interesting than Eschers's original. I remember being troubled by the white space too, thinking he was just too lazy to finish the picture. It has grown on me, and to me, that space places the viewer inside the picture.
In my opinion, that sort of ambiguity is one of the things that can take what would just be glib graphic design, and make art of it, involving the viewer. Commercial art can't afford ambiguity in interpretation, but fine art can.
Escher may not have been making an intentional mathematical statement, but he intuited the shape quite well. He also realized that the picture is more interesting oriented around that empty space.
I think you're right about the flipped bit. Copy the file with dd, specifying the right output size.
I'd bet there are problems with the whole filesystem, but to continue with what he asked:
It seems to me that he should be able to rm the file without any worries, after making a good copy. Only the inode that points to the falsely enlarged file will be removed, and the data blocks won't be touched, right?
If there is other data in the misallocated blocks, that dat should either have its own references, or it's already as good as deleted anyway.
Link a joystick with all springs removed to a big outdoor thermometer's bimetallic element, so that as the element moves (as it would move the needle) it moves the joystick.
I was spelunking storm drains with friends from school, and we popped up in the middle of a tiny ornamental lake in a park (Swan Lake in Tulsa, for the few who will know.)
The drain is in the middle of the lake and about eight feet across, so we were all able to sit on the edge at once & look around. Kids on BMX bikes pointed at us & yelled. We snarled & hollered things like "Haven't you ever seen sewer people before!"
More recently I suggested exploring some disused missile silos I'd heard about, but a good friend pointed out that if we got caught, we'd go to jail. I forget that I'm an adult less often now.
Did I convict anyone? Sorry, I don't have that power. I accused them, and provided my own evidence. You don't buy the illegal patterns of behavior? 'Sokay, the court did. They've been convicted, more than once.
To your second point, criminals often have their rights curtailed. Particlar remedies are often applied to prevent criminal behavior in the future.
Embrace and extend. Like with Kerberos. This isn't alarmist, it's MS Standard Operating Procedure. Unfortunately the remedy for their criminal behavior probably won't take this into account.
So your sensitive data is either on this machine, or pointed to by this machine. The bad guys watch you for long enough to figure out the likely locations of your dead man switches, and then follow them to your sensitive data.
Your car breaks down stranding you for a week while you're on your Belize holiday, and the first thing you do when you get to an internet cafe is to post a content free message to alt.cypherpunks. Which one of your associates reads alt.cypherpunks religiously, or what servers have you had access to? As long as you never screw up, you should be safe, but you could be defeated by simple traffic analysis.
I hope you didn't entrust that blackmail evidence to someone you love.
Editors: Anonymize the Amazon Links
on
General IT Books?
·
· Score: 1
Could the editors please either remove the referrer-id from the Amazon links, or maybe even insert a referrer-id for a good cause? This does reek of somebody trying to get beer money via Slashdot.
It is an interesting thread, and I replied seperately.
Linux Administration Handbook-Nemeth,Synder,Hein
on
General IT Books?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Or the _Unix Administration Handbook_ by the same authors. I read it straight through, and enjoyed it.
Although it is a Unix book, because so many of the issues of modern IT (and especially networked systems) have already been addressed under Unix, even (particularly) an NT admin would benefit. I was referring someone to it for Serial communications information yesterday.
Newton's Telecommunications Dictionary, as mentioned by another poster is great too.
_TCP/IP Illustrated_ W. Richard Stevens _Interconnections_ 2nd Ed. Radia Perlman
First, bullets & sparks: They say bullets are lead and copper, and won't strike a spark. Cheap bullets may have mild steel cases. These are forbidden at most ranges specifically because of fears of sparking. Bullets also sometimes have steel cores.
Second, Glass and injuries: I ran through a glass storm door once because I didn't know it was there. It was an interesting experience because it took me a sec to figure out what happened. I just heard a boom, and felt as if I'd been hit. I stopped and was surrounded by tiny cubes of glass I had a few pricks but no bleeding cuts whatsoever. I know, it wasn't plate glass, so it's not the best counterexample.
He said it drops off at faster than the inverse square due to absorption. That is: On top of the energy cost of the inverse square law, absorption takes even more energy.
EM radiation obeys the inverse square law.
Light & inverse square should have been covered in your High School physics class. Your reference to an expanding sphere is accurate though. See the experiment below.
I put some snapshots up on my personal site. I'm probably a fool for publishing it here but it's about dead anyhow, and besides as far as I can tell, regrettably few people read science.slashdot.
They aren't images of the projected sun or sun through a glass (darkly?) but of the effect of the crescent sun on dappled shade. There was one really nice image I missed because by the time I got home from work, the peak was well past. It's a fun phenomenon to look for during an eclipse. http://golem.best.vwh.net
There was a neat Scientific American article about twenty years ago about fast analog solutions to hard problems.
The example that sticks in my mind was sorting numbers with dry spaghetti, where the spaghetti was broken at a lenght that represented the size of the number. If you hold the spaghetti vertically in a column and touch the top you will have selected the largest number. Iterate until numbers are sorted from greatest to least. You have a linear time sorting algorithm.
They also had a factoring machine.
Unfortunately, all of these solutions lose big on setup time. Building the analog solving tools is generally difficult, and becomes difficult faster than standard mathematical methods. I suspect this may be universal.
What I want most of all is good VT100 emulation, a serial port, ethernet adapter, and a TCP/IP stack. All of this is irrelevant without adequate battery life. A decent keyboard is nice, but at odds with the fact that the smaller it is, the more likely I am to actually carry it.
Dumb terminals are still awfully useful.
I thought I was almost there with my Clie, but it doesn't like my cellphone. I just want something I can easily SSH or dial up a machine with, and get a command line. I could still be happy with a CLI for most things, and could do anything I wanted on my own server.
A real browser would be nice, too, but most connectivity is so expensive in terms of battery & money that I'm not eager to try to download images.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd delete it. You don't have to read the rest of the guy's mail to do so, and so are violating no one's privacy. The mail system (pick any) doesn't have some sort of unimpugnable integrity. This is pretty much the equivalent of picking a sealed envelope with a pink slip in it up off of someone's desk, before they come into work in the morning, but after HR says they made a mistake.
I'd also tell the boss that in order to fulfill his request, I need a quick look at the original in his sent mail. I would then confirm that there were no BCCs, for obvious reasons.
Otherwise, barring some sort of registered email scheme, you aren't violating ethics or rules of evidence.
Certainly this isn't behavior to encourage in the boss, any more than building a mailserver and recovering a message store in order to recover an accidentally deleted message is. But if the dumb mistake isn't a habit, help both parties out.
As admins, we have to be able _not_ to see things that we shouldn't, and occasionally even to forget that we saw things. When you're helping a user troubleshoot their email, you'll see more about their personal lives than you would ever want to know. Those aren't things I speak about to no-one.
Don't tell me your password!
Just to provide more data points, I've only replaced a dozen or so drives under warranty in the last couple of years, but I'd say a good quarter or more of those were replaced with an ugrade. I've never gotten a drive older than a couple of years.
PPP is the protocol you'll probably need to use, but you have a couple of problems.
6 617
k /infrar ed/WinXP-IrDa.asp
The easy one: One of you will have to act as a PPP server.
Harder:
Mac OSX 10.1 doesn't support the IR ports on some powerbooks. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=10
MS has added some layers that complicate basic IRDA behavior, and implemented their own IrNET network protocol instead of the IrLAN standard. I'm not even sure you can get raw access to the IRCOMM layer that allows you to treat an IR port as an ordinary serial port.
http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/tech/networ
http://www.irda.org/
The real difficulties of "building a small network" are difficulties of software, not hardware.
There is one advantage of stringing a crossover cable across the aisle. You could end up with both laptops flying towards the ankles of the person you trip.
He is helping these people out. He's volunteering at the center. You have a better idea, then volunteer yourself.
Certain drugs are far more addictive than any computer game. Learn a little about the biology of addiction, with nicotine or alcohol as examples.
This is why I'm impatient with phrases like chocaholism, or computer addiction. Sure, it's possible to put such an emphasis on an activity that it's destructive, but if you've ever dealt with people with biological addiction problems you'll recognize the difference. Don't trivialize biological addiction. It is not the same, and the psychiatric profession knows this.
Get out and play soccer? Look, he's talking about teaching these people the fundamentals of working with others. He's talking about fundamental problem solving skills and emotional control. Soccer would probably be nice, but might be a little ambitious.
Ideally, they should have loving functional families & tailored educational activities, but considering that many of these people die from medicable problems but don't have access to care, or starve, or die of exposure on the street, the benefits of computer games at a job training program are a bonus. (It's not easy to die of exposure in San Diego, but there are enough sick and malnourished homeless that it happens.)
They are talking about jobs. That's what the computer lab is for, but face it: Without basic problem solving skills or the ability to work with others, they aren't working at McDonalds.
To the guy who said he couldn't imagine the benefits of computer games other than getting "the kids interested in compter science" Read the article. He specified other benefits.
Please don't think I'm being sarcastic, but if you think these people need help they aren't getting, I think you shoud get involved with helping them yourself. They need the help.
Dude! The lines you just posted will be my new sig. Thanks!
This is pretty encouraging. It also draws a terrible conclusion.
Seems to me that better than 50% odds means that splints help most people. Surgery continues to be an option after using splints, but I'm not sure how much use splints are once the surgical recuperation is over.
I also suspect that people who have surgery have little choice but to really not use their wrists.
I don't think most people have any idea how seriously to take RSI. I think the words "permanent" and "crippling" should be used more often. I've seen both.
I'm surprised by the conclusion suggesting surgery as a first resort before splinting too. That violates the medical principle the parent was implicitly referring to, of using the least invasive and drastic procedures first when they show promise.
Sounds to me like we need to do a better job of encouraging people limit their typing once they start to suffer (or worse, as I've seen, taking splints off because they make typing hard.)
As the admin, I get the requests for ergo gear. I do my damndest to encourage use of whatever we can make available. Ergo keyboards, keyboard trays, trackballs, tablets, and ultimately rest. I also think excercise and variety are important. If all you use your fingers for is typing, you'll use them up.
Now, it also sounds like I have a book to read & put on the shelf for my people. Is the RSI handbook by Quilter well regarded by the Slashdot Science readers? Lots of people have lots to say, but it isn't all right.
Good: I love IBM's hermaphroditic token ring connectors. Who cares which end is plug, and which is device? It's all the same to them. They are awful big though, but it's like RS-232. Simple hardware (over?)engineered to a purpoose, because when these were designed they were not expected to be consumer level items.
Bad: Proprietary unavailable fscking connectors. Zaurus, Palm, Visor, Clie, all different. Thanks guys, 'cause what I really wanted was to pay you for a big box with a ttl-serial level converter and cable that removes my keyboard functionality.
Ugly: If you want ugly, try twinaxe with vampire taps. The connection is made by puncturing the cable with the fangs of the tap. You get all the fragility of BNC ethernet and all the flexibility of a network made out of sticks. I'm probably prejudiced, beause by the time I was using it, I also resented wrestling with SNA for a corporate network where TCP/IP would serve better. Since done.
I remember my first dance lessons almost twenty years ago. It would have been better to have practiced with a machine first. Without some minimal level of either social or physical skills, real dance lessons can just aggravate the geek social isolation problems you describe. Trust me, it didn't make me _more_ comfortable with people. It was just humiliating.
Later, I was slapped by a girlfriend for trying to dance with her. She thought I was making fun of her.
Taking lessons with my wife (about fifty bucks for about an hour in prep for our wedding) more recently was great fun, but I'm a little more practiced at dancing, and socially a tad more graceful now.
Last year's contest was cancelled because falling out of the sky suddenly became terribly unfunny on September Eleventh, 2000. So said a friend who was doing setup for the event.
I thought he'd said they went ahead and had some sort of party instead though.
Attributing intention to an artist is an arrogant thing to do, so here I go. My interpretation is based on my feelings about the picture.
Escher knew what went in the middle. One of the beauties of certain mathematical curves is that they can be intuitively obvious. You can visualize them far better than you can draw them, and far more easily than you could detail the mathematics. Experience with with psychedelics demonstrates this for fractals in particular.
The picture you cited with the center filled in is less interesting than Eschers's original. I remember being troubled by the white space too, thinking he was just too lazy to finish the picture. It has grown on me, and to me, that space places the viewer inside the picture.
In my opinion, that sort of ambiguity is one of the things that can take what would just be glib graphic design, and make art of it, involving the viewer. Commercial art can't afford ambiguity in interpretation, but fine art can.
Escher may not have been making an intentional mathematical statement, but he intuited the shape quite well. He also realized that the picture is more interesting oriented around that empty space.
I think you're right about the flipped bit. Copy the file with dd, specifying the right output size.
I'd bet there are problems with the whole filesystem, but to continue with what he asked:
It seems to me that he should be able to rm the file without any worries, after making a good copy. Only the inode that points to the falsely enlarged file will be removed, and the data blocks won't be touched, right?
If there is other data in the misallocated blocks, that dat should either have its own references, or it's already as good as deleted anyway.
Did you say the Insight uses D-cells? HAH! The car runs on 120 flashlight batteries!
I'm sure it's quite economical to use such a commodity, but it still sounds like the engineering work of a bright eight year old.
Who do you think answered the questions?
All the Net's a Turing test,
and all the Trolls & Surfers merely sims
Link a joystick with all springs removed to a big outdoor thermometer's bimetallic element, so that as the element moves (as it would move the needle) it moves the joystick.
I was spelunking storm drains with friends from school, and we popped up in the middle of a tiny ornamental lake in a park (Swan Lake in Tulsa, for the few who will know.)
The drain is in the middle of the lake and about eight feet across, so we were all able to sit on the edge at once & look around. Kids on BMX bikes pointed at us & yelled. We snarled & hollered things like "Haven't you ever seen sewer people before!"
More recently I suggested exploring some disused missile silos I'd heard about, but a good friend pointed out that if we got caught, we'd go to jail. I forget that I'm an adult less often now.
Did I convict anyone? Sorry, I don't have that power. I accused them, and provided my own evidence. You don't buy the illegal patterns of behavior? 'Sokay, the court did. They've been convicted, more than once.
To your second point, criminals often have their rights curtailed. Particlar remedies are often applied to prevent criminal behavior in the future.
Evidence?
Embrace and extend. Like with Kerberos. This isn't alarmist, it's MS Standard Operating Procedure. Unfortunately the remedy for their criminal behavior probably won't take this into account.
So your sensitive data is either on this machine, or pointed to by this machine. The bad guys watch you for long enough to figure out the likely locations of your dead man switches, and then follow them to your sensitive data.
Your car breaks down stranding you for a week while you're on your Belize holiday, and the first thing you do when you get to an internet cafe is to post a content free message to alt.cypherpunks. Which one of your associates reads alt.cypherpunks religiously, or what servers have you had access to? As long as you never screw up, you should be safe, but you could be defeated by simple traffic analysis.
I hope you didn't entrust that blackmail evidence to someone you love.
Could the editors please either remove the referrer-id from the Amazon links, or maybe even insert a referrer-id for a good cause? This does reek of somebody trying to get beer money via Slashdot.
It is an interesting thread, and I replied seperately.
Or the _Unix Administration Handbook_ by the same authors. I read it straight through, and enjoyed it.
Although it is a Unix book, because so many of the issues of modern IT (and especially networked systems) have already been addressed under Unix, even (particularly) an NT admin would benefit. I was referring someone to it for Serial communications information yesterday.
Newton's Telecommunications Dictionary, as mentioned by another poster is great too.
_TCP/IP Illustrated_ W. Richard Stevens
_Interconnections_ 2nd Ed. Radia Perlman
I have two complaints:
First, bullets & sparks:
They say bullets are lead and copper, and won't strike a spark. Cheap bullets may have mild steel cases. These are forbidden at most ranges specifically because of fears of sparking. Bullets also sometimes have steel cores.
Second, Glass and injuries:
I ran through a glass storm door once because I didn't know it was there. It was an interesting experience because it took me a sec to figure out what happened. I just heard a boom, and felt as if I'd been hit. I stopped and was surrounded by tiny cubes of glass I had a few pricks but no bleeding cuts whatsoever. I know, it wasn't plate glass, so it's not the best counterexample.
He said it drops off at faster than the inverse square due to absorption. That is: On top of the energy cost of the inverse square law, absorption takes even more energy.
r se_square _law.html
EM radiation obeys the inverse square law.
Light & inverse square should have been covered in your High School physics class. Your reference to an expanding sphere is accurate though. See the experiment below.
Exploratorium experiment, light & inverse square:
http://www.exploratorium.edu/snacks/inve
I put some snapshots up on my personal site. I'm probably a fool for publishing it here but it's about dead anyhow, and besides as far as I can tell, regrettably few people read science.slashdot.
They aren't images of the projected sun or sun through a glass (darkly?) but of the effect of the crescent sun on dappled shade. There was one really nice image I missed because by the time I got home from work, the peak was well past. It's a fun phenomenon to look for during an eclipse.
http://golem.best.vwh.net
There was a neat Scientific American article about twenty years ago about fast analog solutions to hard problems.
The example that sticks in my mind was sorting numbers with dry spaghetti, where the spaghetti was broken at a lenght that represented the size of the number. If you hold the spaghetti vertically in a column and touch the top you will have selected the largest number. Iterate until numbers are sorted from greatest to least. You have a linear time sorting algorithm.
They also had a factoring machine.
Unfortunately, all of these solutions lose big on setup time. Building the analog solving tools is generally difficult, and becomes difficult faster than standard mathematical methods. I suspect this may be universal.
What I want most of all is good VT100 emulation, a serial port, ethernet adapter, and a TCP/IP stack. All of this is irrelevant without adequate battery life. A decent keyboard is nice, but at odds with the fact that the smaller it is, the more likely I am to actually carry it.
Dumb terminals are still awfully useful.
I thought I was almost there with my Clie, but it doesn't like my cellphone. I just want something I can easily SSH or dial up a machine with, and get a command line. I could still be happy with a CLI for most things, and could do anything I wanted on my own server.
A real browser would be nice, too, but most connectivity is so expensive in terms of battery & money that I'm not eager to try to download images.
The new Zaurus looks like a good candidate.