I agree. When you say http is 'simpler', though, I think that presumes that you're already running an http server anyway (so why run two apps?). However, if you have never run a webserver, and just want to serve files, an ftp server is probably simpler to set up. (umm, or I suppose you could just do 'apt-get install apache' - butta bing, butta boom) Of course, security wise, you can screw either one up pretty easily if you don't know what you're doing.
My preference: don't use either one. Use https. Apache + SSL (+ mod_auth_pam if you need to restrict access). I'm sure some jackass is going to give me some bunk about processor overhead for SSL, but give me a break. Put those GHz to good use, for christsakes...
apt-get install apache-ssl libapache-mod-auth-pam. Keep in mind if you use mod_auth_pam and use a shadow password file, that you need to give the user your webserver runs as read permission to the shadow password file.
It's just someone posting their thoughts on/., an activity certainly much less significant than the activities of IANA.
Don't you think it's maybe a little ironic to passionately object to someone feeling passionately about something?
A little perspective maybe.
Moreover, the numbers are not pretend or unimportant. Notwithstanding your intentional mischaracterization, I'm sure you know that. A power grab is a power grab is a power grab. Myself, I passionately object to that kind of bad behavior.
Not just Miguel. I was intrigued by Ian Clark's latest project, Locutus, until I read that it was built on the.NET framework. Knowing that, I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
Re:AS long as thay have anonomous cash
on
The Future of Money
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
David Chaum has been concerning himself with these issues for years. If you read some of his writings you will find that he shares your concerns.
Rather than badly paraphrase his thinking, I'll just quote the introduction to "Security without Identification":
Computerization is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used. Already, public and private sector organizations acquire extensive personal information and exchange it amongst themselves. Individuals have no way of knowing if this information is inaccurate, outdated, or otherwise inappropriate, and may only find out when they are accused falsely or denied access to services. New and more serious dangers derive from computerized pattern recognition techniques: even a small group using these and tapping into data gathered in everyday consumer transactions could secretly conduct mass surveillance, inferring individuals' lifestyles, activities, and associations. The automation of payment and other consumer transactions is expanding these dangers to an unprecedented extent.
Organizations, on the other hand, are attracted to the efficiency and cost-cutting opportunities of such automation. Moreover, they too are vulnerable, as when cash, checks, consumer credit, insurance, or social services are abused by individuals. The obvious solution for organizations is to computerize in ways that use more pervasive and interlinked records, perhaps in combination with national identity cards or even fingerprints. But the resulting potential for misuse of data would have a chilling effect on individuals. Nevertheless, this is essentially the approach of the electronic payment and other automated systems now being tried. Although these systems will require massive investment and years to complete, their underlying architecture is already quietly being decided and their institutional momentum is growing.
This momentum is driving us toward a seemingly irreconcilable conflict, between organizations' need for security and the benefits of automation on one side, and individuals' need for ensured privacy and other protections on the other. But this conflict may be avoided by early adoption of a fundamentally different approach to automating transaction systems. This new approach is mutually advantageous: it actually increases organizations' benefits from automating, including improved security, while it frees individuals from the surveillance potential of data linking and other dangers of unchecked record keeping. Its more advanced techniques offer not only wider use at reduced cost, but also greater consumer convenience and protection. In the long run, it holds promise for enhancing economic freedom, the democratic process, and informational rights.
Of course the technology Chaum advocates is not the only way to conduct monetary (and other) transactions. You can be sure that there are powerful forces that would like nothing better than to have improved access into people's private business. At the very least, people should realize there are other options.
In addition to being a way to introduce people who'd otherwise have no access to Solaris, I think this is a desktop play. Apple has shown that a truly useable consumer desktop for *nix is possible. Sun is working closely w/ Gnome. The KDE folks are getting money from the German government. The next few years promise to be very interesting. It's still a pretty wide open playing field, and what I see happening is Sun throwing their hat in the ring. My next prediction is that they'll be too half-assed about the effort to really gain any traction.
As much as I like Sun, I have to admit that Linux is better than Solaris. Probably because the Linux community values politics and ideology in addition to technology.
OK, of course the real question we all have is how the hell do you get rid of them? Well, I'll tell you. At the risk of incurring aspersions from the little jonnie scientists among us, I now share with you my secret cure:
Hold a paper towel tightly over a glass of water and drink the water through the towel.
There you have it. One of the world's most vexing problems solved by a doofus on/.
There are apparently a lot of people who think that goal of Linux based distributions should be to provide an ubiquitous turn-key OS that every Grandma can use. Fine and dandy. But then many of these same people feel the need to continue on and say that they don't give a damn whether the software is free or not. Why is it so important to them to say that?
Here's my question: If the philosophy behind the free software and open source movements doesn't interest all the Jonny-come-lately's, then why the f*** don't they go use Microsoft or some other proprietary OS? The argument here seems to be that the free software movement should just go away, so that Linux can become more like Windows. This is so beyond clueless that I don't even know if it's possible to straighten this kind of thinking out. Help out Grandma, that's great. Erase the fundamental premise of free software to satisfy the clueless and apathetic, give me a frickin' break.
It also says a lot about our society that so many people think the only measure of success is world domination.
Tell you what I like, is those guys with the ponds and reedbeds at the bottom of their gardens for processing their liquid waste.
Where I live, if you install a new sceptic system within 50' of bordering vegetated wetlands, you will need special permission from the conservation commission, or risk jail time and mongo fines. I've had to deal with this type of issue recently. Unsurprisingly, the local volunteers who oversee this process were among the most incompetent doofuses I've ever encountered. Think about it: who would volunteer, gratis, to oversee their neighbor's business? Busybodys and people with axes to grind. No one should ever be able to volunteer to assume positions of power.
Some nice folks at Stanford are also creating a different flavor of network backup called rdiff-backup. I'll just plagiarize the description from the homepage:
rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership (if it is running as root), and modification times. Finally, rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted.
The homepage also links to a project called duplicity, which operates on a similar principle, but uses GnuPG to encrypt data to prevent spying/modification.
SGI has also integrated NUMA technology into the linux kernel to support their new Altix servers. How do these two efforts relate? Is SGI's code generic enough that it could also be considered for inclusion in the mainstream kernel? Or is it specific to SGI's NUMA architecture? Is IBM's code generic enough that it would work on an Altix? What functional characteristics distinguish the two?
I should probably point out that the price of human capital, i.e. labor, must, on a macroeconomic scale, obey the same strictures as any other good. Supply siders like to point out that Henry Ford's advice to Hoover had a less than salutory effect on the Depression era economy...
But the best thing to do is to pressure them to do 1 and send those $ to the US.
One of the first things you learn in any elementary economics course, or by simply scratching your butt and thinking for a minute, is that Ponzi schemes are all eventually destined to collapse. This applies to Microsoft and the US stock market just as it does to any other enterprise that thinks it can continue to outpace real growth by simply sucking in more customers. And it applies to your view of international trade as well.
The real economy is a network, not a pyramid. Whether you are a supply sider who believes supply creates it's own demand, or whether you believe the economy is driven from the bottom by consumers, there is nothing in either of these prevailing theories to suggest that maintaining artificially high monopoly pricing for a product capable of being commoditized is good for the economy as a whole.
Nor is there evidence to suggest that other countries losses are our gains. The goal is not to suck the money from point 'A' to point 'B'. Capital is not some kind of incompressible fluid that should be hoarded like gold. That kind of economy died long ago. The goal is to lift everybody up, simultaneously. Yes, really for goodness truly.
Nearly everything in this country is too high priced. The only thing that should be high priced in this country is the man that works. Wages must not come down, they must not even stay on their present level; they must go up. And even that is not sufficient of itself -- we must see to it that the increased wages are not taken away from the people by increased prices that do not represent increased values.
So you can "chop the head off" the consultant, because they're less important than internal employees. Therefore they are more valuable. Yeah, whatever.
I have to say, I'm pretty suspicious of any management theory which is predicated on the notion that your best option is the one that allows you treat people the shittiest. And god forbid anyone would do the "right thing".
Just exactly why do you think an internal employees idea of what constitutes the "right thing" would be inconsistent with managment's anyway? If indeed you find yourself dealing with employees who let the world collapse around them while they fritter away their time on trivia, they should, in fact, have their heads chopped off. But personally, I know precious few people who would behave in such a manner.
Re:what about Robert Alexander Watson-Watt?
on
Tuxedo Park
·
· Score: 1
That seems to be the consensus. However, like most complex technologies, there were a lot of people involved in the development of what we now call radar. I can't ever really fathom the need to give one cowboy all the credit for what are almost always large collaborative efforts. Anyway, here's a funny anecdote about the invention of the T/R switch.
You forgot one part: you go into a public booth with a curtain all around it.
Let's say all this identification verification stuff gets worked out, and people can vote from home. Are you more or less likely to have your vote coercerced in or out of public view?
Beyond that, there are much bigger problems, which have nothing to do with technology. More than anything, we need to revise our voting procedures.
I'd really like to have a more detailed and more accurate picture of who went where
Me too. Just because the know-how survives, doesn't mean it will ever see the light of day. I had it in my head that a lot of these guys were now working on Itanium - but I have no idea why I think that..
I'm not so worried about the existing Alpha technology disappearing as I am about the potential for less competition to slow the pace of innovation. If a bunch of these guys have gone over to AMD, I would be very relieved to know it.
I don't think it's quite right to characterize the Alpha as being dead or dying. Alpha is just a brand name. The engineers who worked on it live on. Don't be surprised to see a lot of the Alpha's better architectural features resurface elsewhere.
Or perhaps Objective CAML. I don't know as much about it as I'd like, but looks very interesting. Supports both functional and imperative programming, objects, etc. You can run code interactively, compile machine independant bytecode, or for speed, architecture specific binaries.
I'm not sure I'm understanding this. The proposed policy does not allow patent holders to demand royalties, correct? Does it place any restriction whatever on the restrictions the patent holders can place on people who implement the patent? E.G. - if I have a patent, can I contribute my work to a W3C standard, on the explicit condition that code with implements the patent not be GPL'd, or linked to GPL'd code? If so, the the MIT license work around isn't really a work around at all, no?
Re:If you are, so am I.
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Posolutely. I couldn't agree more.
I'd even take this a step further. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that we reach Marc's promised land of "it just works" hands off IT administration. Then what?
Marc is missing the point. IT is not a necessary evil, it's a competitive advantage. I've sometimes told people who spend too much time attributing their problems to their computer that they should stop using it then. If you can do your job better without the computer, then by all means do.
I have yet to see anyone take me up on this challenge. They know, we all know, that despite their occasionally infuriating peccadillos, that computers make us more productive.
You cannot remain competitive by sitting on your hands. Marc's world of "it's all better so we can rest now" is pure fantasy. The problem with this article is that it portrays IT as a problem, rather than a solution and a competitive advantage. Who wouldn't like to compete against the company that decides it's achieved all essential IT objectives? You want to get your ass kicked, then stop trying to figure out better ways of doing things.
I just went to the supermarket. An old person who was in the checkout line with me noticed I was buying tissue paper.
"Hey, have you noticed how much smaller tissue paper has become?"
"Well, no, not really. Maybe things have changed. I'm not as old as you. You look like you're ready to croak any day now. That must really suck."
But now that I'm home, I'm wondering... is there a vast tissue paper conspirancy? I always thought that I was just blowing my nose, but now I'm concerned. Am I just another stooge supporing The Man?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. When you say http is 'simpler', though, I think that presumes that you're already running an http server anyway (so why run two apps?). However, if you have never run a webserver, and just want to serve files, an ftp server is probably simpler to set up. (umm, or I suppose you could just do 'apt-get install apache' - butta bing, butta boom) Of course, security wise, you can screw either one up pretty easily if you don't know what you're doing.
My preference: don't use either one. Use https. Apache + SSL (+ mod_auth_pam if you need to restrict access). I'm sure some jackass is going to give me some bunk about processor overhead for SSL, but give me a break. Put those GHz to good use, for christsakes...
apt-get install apache-ssl libapache-mod-auth-pam. Keep in mind if you use mod_auth_pam and use a shadow password file, that you need to give the user your webserver runs as read permission to the shadow password file.
What the hell are you getting inflamed about?
/., an activity certainly much less significant than the activities of IANA.
It's just someone posting their thoughts on
Don't you think it's maybe a little ironic to passionately object to someone feeling passionately about something?
A little perspective maybe.
Moreover, the numbers are not pretend or unimportant. Notwithstanding your intentional mischaracterization, I'm sure you know that. A power grab is a power grab is a power grab. Myself, I passionately object to that kind of bad behavior.
Not just Miguel. I was intrigued by Ian Clark's latest project, Locutus, until I read that it was built on the .NET framework. Knowing that, I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
David Chaum has been concerning himself with these issues for years. If you read some of his writings you will find that he shares your concerns.
Rather than badly paraphrase his thinking, I'll just quote the introduction to "Security without Identification":
Computerization is robbing individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways information about them is used. Already, public and private sector organizations acquire extensive personal information and exchange it amongst themselves. Individuals have no way of knowing if this information is inaccurate, outdated, or otherwise inappropriate, and may only find out when they are accused falsely or denied access to services. New and more serious dangers derive from computerized pattern recognition techniques: even a small group using these and tapping into data gathered in everyday consumer transactions could secretly conduct mass surveillance, inferring individuals' lifestyles, activities, and associations. The automation of payment and other consumer transactions is expanding these dangers to an unprecedented extent.
Organizations, on the other hand, are attracted to the efficiency and cost-cutting opportunities of such automation. Moreover, they too are vulnerable, as when cash, checks, consumer credit, insurance, or social services are abused by individuals. The obvious solution for organizations is to computerize in ways that use more pervasive and interlinked records, perhaps in combination with national identity cards or even fingerprints. But the resulting potential for misuse of data would have a chilling effect on individuals. Nevertheless, this is essentially the approach of the electronic payment and other automated systems now being tried. Although these systems will require massive investment and years to complete, their underlying architecture is already quietly being decided and their institutional momentum is growing.
This momentum is driving us toward a seemingly irreconcilable conflict, between organizations' need for security and the benefits of automation on one side, and individuals' need for ensured privacy and other protections on the other. But this conflict may be avoided by early adoption of a fundamentally different approach to automating transaction systems. This new approach is mutually advantageous: it actually increases organizations' benefits from automating, including improved security, while it frees individuals from the surveillance potential of data linking and other dangers of unchecked record keeping. Its more advanced techniques offer not only wider use at reduced cost, but also greater consumer convenience and protection. In the long run, it holds promise for enhancing economic freedom, the democratic process, and informational rights.
Of course the technology Chaum advocates is not the only way to conduct monetary (and other) transactions. You can be sure that there are powerful forces that would like nothing better than to have improved access into people's private business. At the very least, people should realize there are other options.
In addition to being a way to introduce people who'd otherwise have no access to Solaris, I think this is a desktop play. Apple has shown that a truly useable consumer desktop for *nix is possible. Sun is working closely w/ Gnome. The KDE folks are getting money from the German government. The next few years promise to be very interesting. It's still a pretty wide open playing field, and what I see happening is Sun throwing their hat in the ring. My next prediction is that they'll be too half-assed about the effort to really gain any traction.
As much as I like Sun, I have to admit that Linux is better than Solaris. Probably because the Linux community values politics and ideology in addition to technology.
OK, of course the real question we all have is how the hell do you get rid of them? Well, I'll tell you. At the risk of incurring aspersions from the little jonnie scientists among us, I now share with you my secret cure:
/.
Hold a paper towel tightly over a glass of water and drink the water through the towel.
There you have it. One of the world's most vexing problems solved by a doofus on
There are apparently a lot of people who think that goal of Linux based distributions should be to provide an ubiquitous turn-key OS that every Grandma can use. Fine and dandy. But then many of these same people feel the need to continue on and say that they don't give a damn whether the software is free or not. Why is it so important to them to say that?
Here's my question: If the philosophy behind the free software and open source movements doesn't interest all the Jonny-come-lately's, then why the f*** don't they go use Microsoft or some other proprietary OS? The argument here seems to be that the free software movement should just go away, so that Linux can become more like Windows. This is so beyond clueless that I don't even know if it's possible to straighten this kind of thinking out. Help out Grandma, that's great. Erase the fundamental premise of free software to satisfy the clueless and apathetic, give me a frickin' break.
It also says a lot about our society that so many people think the only measure of success is world domination.
Tell you what I like, is those guys with the ponds and reedbeds at the bottom of their gardens for processing their liquid waste.
Where I live, if you install a new sceptic system within 50' of bordering vegetated wetlands, you will need special permission from the conservation commission, or risk jail time and mongo fines. I've had to deal with this type of issue recently. Unsurprisingly, the local volunteers who oversee this process were among the most incompetent doofuses I've ever encountered. Think about it: who would volunteer, gratis, to oversee their neighbor's business? Busybodys and people with axes to grind. No one should ever be able to volunteer to assume positions of power.
if it were just me and my friends
And your friends friends, and their friends, etc. Google for 'web of trust'.
Some nice folks at Stanford are also creating a different flavor of network backup called rdiff-backup. I'll just plagiarize the description from the homepage:
rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership (if it is running as root), and modification times. Finally, rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted.
The homepage also links to a project called duplicity, which operates on a similar principle, but uses GnuPG to encrypt data to prevent spying/modification.
Maybe true at home, but not true for campus networks w/ Gb+ infrastructure in place.
SGI has also integrated NUMA technology into the linux kernel to support their new Altix servers. How do these two efforts relate? Is SGI's code generic enough that it could also be considered for inclusion in the mainstream kernel? Or is it specific to SGI's NUMA architecture? Is IBM's code generic enough that it would work on an Altix? What functional characteristics distinguish the two?
I should probably point out that the price of human capital, i.e. labor, must, on a macroeconomic scale, obey the same strictures as any other good. Supply siders like to point out that Henry Ford's advice to Hoover had a less than salutory effect on the Depression era economy...
But the best thing to do is to pressure them to do 1 and send those $ to the US.
One of the first things you learn in any elementary economics course, or by simply scratching your butt and thinking for a minute, is that Ponzi schemes are all eventually destined to collapse. This applies to Microsoft and the US stock market just as it does to any other enterprise that thinks it can continue to outpace real growth by simply sucking in more customers. And it applies to your view of international trade as well.
The real economy is a network, not a pyramid. Whether you are a supply sider who believes supply creates it's own demand, or whether you believe the economy is driven from the bottom by consumers, there is nothing in either of these prevailing theories to suggest that maintaining artificially high monopoly pricing for a product capable of being commoditized is good for the economy as a whole.
Nor is there evidence to suggest that other countries losses are our gains. The goal is not to suck the money from point 'A' to point 'B'. Capital is not some kind of incompressible fluid that should be hoarded like gold. That kind of economy died long ago. The goal is to lift everybody up, simultaneously. Yes, really for goodness truly.
Nearly everything in this country is too high priced. The only thing that should be high priced in this country is the man that works. Wages must not come down, they must not even stay on their present level; they must go up. And even that is not sufficient of itself -- we must see to it that the increased wages are not taken away from the people by increased prices that do not represent increased values.
-Henry Ford, New York Times, November 22, 1929
So you can "chop the head off" the consultant, because they're less important than internal employees. Therefore they are more valuable. Yeah, whatever.
I have to say, I'm pretty suspicious of any management theory which is predicated on the notion that your best option is the one that allows you treat people the shittiest. And god forbid anyone would do the "right thing".
Just exactly why do you think an internal employees idea of what constitutes the "right thing" would be inconsistent with managment's anyway? If indeed you find yourself dealing with employees who let the world collapse around them while they fritter away their time on trivia, they should, in fact, have their heads chopped off. But personally, I know precious few people who would behave in such a manner.
That seems to be the consensus. However, like most complex technologies, there were a lot of people involved in the development of what we now call radar. I can't ever really fathom the need to give one cowboy all the credit for what are almost always large collaborative efforts. Anyway, here's a funny anecdote about the invention of the T/R switch.
I go into a booth with a curtain all around it
You forgot one part: you go into a public booth with a curtain all around it.
Let's say all this identification verification stuff gets worked out, and people can vote from home. Are you more or less likely to have your vote coercerced in or out of public view?
Beyond that, there are much bigger problems, which have nothing to do with technology. More than anything, we need to revise our voting procedures.
I'd really like to have a more detailed and more accurate picture of who went where
Me too. Just because the know-how survives, doesn't mean it will ever see the light of day. I had it in my head that a lot of these guys were now working on Itanium - but I have no idea why I think that..
I'm not so worried about the existing Alpha technology disappearing as I am about the potential for less competition to slow the pace of innovation. If a bunch of these guys have gone over to AMD, I would be very relieved to know it.
I don't think it's quite right to characterize the Alpha as being dead or dying. Alpha is just a brand name. The engineers who worked on it live on. Don't be surprised to see a lot of the Alpha's better architectural features resurface elsewhere.
Or perhaps Objective CAML. I don't know as much about it as I'd like, but looks very interesting. Supports both functional and imperative programming, objects, etc. You can run code interactively, compile machine independant bytecode, or for speed, architecture specific binaries.
And check out it's position on this performance shootout.
I'm not sure I'm understanding this. The proposed policy does not allow patent holders to demand royalties, correct? Does it place any restriction whatever on the restrictions the patent holders can place on people who implement the patent? E.G. - if I have a patent, can I contribute my work to a W3C standard, on the explicit condition that code with implements the patent not be GPL'd, or linked to GPL'd code? If so, the the MIT license work around isn't really a work around at all, no?
Posolutely. I couldn't agree more.
I'd even take this a step further. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that we reach Marc's promised land of "it just works" hands off IT administration. Then what?
Marc is missing the point. IT is not a necessary evil, it's a competitive advantage. I've sometimes told people who spend too much time attributing their problems to their computer that they should stop using it then. If you can do your job better without the computer, then by all means do.
I have yet to see anyone take me up on this challenge. They know, we all know, that despite their occasionally infuriating peccadillos, that computers make us more productive.
You cannot remain competitive by sitting on your hands. Marc's world of "it's all better so we can rest now" is pure fantasy. The problem with this article is that it portrays IT as a problem, rather than a solution and a competitive advantage. Who wouldn't like to compete against the company that decides it's achieved all essential IT objectives? You want to get your ass kicked, then stop trying to figure out better ways of doing things.
I just went to the supermarket. An old person who was in the checkout line with me noticed I was buying tissue paper.
... is there a vast tissue paper conspirancy? I always thought that I was just blowing my nose, but now I'm concerned. Am I just another stooge supporing The Man?
"Hey, have you noticed how much smaller tissue paper has become?"
"Well, no, not really. Maybe things have changed. I'm not as old as you. You look like you're ready to croak any day now. That must really suck."
But now that I'm home, I'm wondering
Good point. I'm a beer man, myself. But I had a few scotch and sodas the other week, and they were pretty damn good. Haven't made them myself, though.
I don't think you can buy liters of scotch. What are two common sizes of each that would be proportionaly correct, and consumable in a single sitting?