The whole book is about the systems and social processes at the time - How fatal disease was common and the way people reacted to it, the role of revolution in the growth of economies, etc. There was this problem at that place and time with bladder stones. They killed a _lot_ of people. Today, there's none: Why[0]? It's just something jarring that he can bring up to remind you that the characters aren't modern people in funny clothes. The central thrust of the series, to me, is an attempt to put the reader entirely in a very alien frame of mind, and the bladder stone issue is a good reference point to use to constantly remind you that the world you're in is _different_.
[0] No clean water. Everyone drank beer, ale, wine, or something similar when they were thirsty. There wasn't any public works system in London to bring in clean water, so people were more or less completely dehydrated all the time. Hence bladder stones.
There would be substantially less water being consumed by the FAB? Not that Albuquerque is sitting in the middle of the desert, quietly draining the aquifer, happily skipping toward a future where every drop has to be shipped in from the other side of the Sandias. Truly, I can't think of a better place to have built an industrial complex as thirsty as a semiconductor FAB. Oh, wait, I just did - Anywhere. It was a stupid, shortsighted decision to put the FAB in to begin with, and now that its economically critical it will just continue to sit there and suck the only resource of consequence - water. Because honestly, who cares if the Rio Grande is so dry that you can walk across it? Housing sure is cheap out in RR!
Remember, though, what Sun did to the Blackdown folks. Sun wants to control the Java market entirely, which is fine - That's their perogative as a company. They've shown a history of dominating and destroying open source groups that work with and for them, and given that they're in a weaker position overall now than they were in 1998 I see no reason to assume that they won't do the same to Eclipse.
There are two types of DNS servers - Authoritative servers and recusive resolvers. The default BIND configuration conflates these two services into a single running instance, but you'll notice that even the BIND documentation recommends operating your authoritative servers sepparately from your resolvers.
With djbdns you typically run tinydns (the authoritative dns server) on 127.0.0.1, and dnscache (the recursive resolver) on your public IP, configured to look for your authoritative records at localhost. This configuration is extremely stable and very fast.
When I started using qmail and djbdns I was astounded by the number of Sendmail- and BIND-isms that I assumed to be aspects of the SMTP and DNS protocols. Working with djb's tools have given me a _much_ clearer understanding of the difference between what makes up the standard and what makes up the most common implementation of that standard.
Give the djbdns package another look - It's more than worth your time.
The direction I see RedHat taking with the RHAS line is in pushing it as a target platform for Big Name Products like Oracle and WebSphere. You can be sure that other enterprise software vendors will be relieved to have a slightly slower-moving target on which to develop their products.
The result? Right now you can get enterprise linux software for "RedHat Linux 7.x, RHAS 2.x". In the future it will be "RedHat Advanced Server version " full-stop, and given that the "hacker" versions of RedHat will be more current in terms of kernel and glibc, that platform requiremient will likely mean something.
4 words easily explain why a flat-rate plan will never work for slashdot:
username: cypherpunks password: cypherpunks
What's to stop someone from signing up with one account and distributing the authentication information to all their friends? Complicated, expensive technical measures I suppose, but that chews away their profit.
I've been thinking about this over the past few days, and I can't think of any way other than per-page that slashdot subscriptions can work. It may very well be that per-page won't work either, in which case we all get a lesson in capitalism.
There's an ongoing trend to criminalize the tools and speech used to conduct security research; This is the single most frustrating aspect of the government's involvement in network security. Lists like bugtraq and tools like nessus and nmap are absolutely vital to the health of a network-connected system. Some suggested legislation would make all security discussions criminal, some would allow such work to only be conducted by approved organizations; Both would shatter the ability of the individual administrator to effectively secure his systems. If I could make one and only one request it would be to specifically disallow legislation that attempts to let companies involved with the internet take the security ball to their private court and bounce it around, leaving individual system administrators with no tools and no forums in which to discuss their own defences. In short: keep public, individual security research legal.
The submitter says that IIS needs to be rewritten, something that "[Gartner says] has an 80% chance of happening by the end of next year." This is incorrect.
The actual quote is: "Gartner believes that this rewriting will not occur before year-end 2002 (0.8 probability)." That means there's an 80% probability that the preceeding statement is true, and that statement is that MS will _not_ have completed a rewrite in that timeframe.
So instead of MS being 80% likely to fix the problem, they're 80% UNlikely to do so in the timeframe specified.
This was the first question I asked at the end of the address. I havn't heard any discussion concerning ownership, but I do wonder how many lines are in private (vs. public university) hands.
Java is owned in every way by Sun. We (as a community) have absolutely no control over its cross-platform issues or anything else to do with it. If C# is actually submitted and accepted and defined as a standard, that's Good. If there's a C# compiler and runtime environment (which is what Mono is attempting to build) that's Free, even Better. If Sun sees the very real threat of such a combination and (re)submits Java for standards approval, that's Perfect.
Free Java simplementations are starting to overshadow the JDK, especially in the Linux community.
What implementations are you talking about? I know of only the sun and IBM jdks, and I can't tell if you mean free or Free because of the word position.
$company announced today that they will be moving into $field software, with product details to be announced in roughly six months. At the news, developer interest in $field products from companies already in the market have dried up, as $company's version will likely become a major, if not the primary, industry standard.
Then, in the intervening months, all competition in the market goes belly-up, $company buys whatever former competitor they think is most useful, and becomes the Only Game In Town.
Set $company to "Microsoft" and everyone knows this story. It hasn't worked if set to "RedHat" until now.
why do afford physical property the privilege of protection under law?
One primary reason: exclusivity. If I'm using a plot of land, or a hammer, or a hamburger, or any other valuable physical thing, then nobody else can use it until I'm done. If I have a digital copy of a novel, or a song, or a piece of software, or any other valuable informational thing, other people's use of it has no effect whatsoever on me.
Q: Do you view Linux and the open-source movement as a threat to Microsoft?
A: Yeah. It's good competition. It will force us to be innovative. It will force us to justify the prices and value that we deliver. And that's only healthy. The only thing we have a problem with is when the government funds open-source work. Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody. Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.
I gave him the benefit of the doubt as well, and was rewarded with this:) He's saying that any company that uses open source software must give away all of their software, which is true only as long as "use" means "incorporate source code from". He's implying that anybody using linux to run a print server or somesuch is going to be forced to give away every line of code they've ever written. It's very well worded, extremely effective, and completely dishonest.
The DMCA is the US's implementing language of the WIPO treaty. If the DMCA were to be ruled unconstitutional by the Court, congress would be under treaty obligation to draft another piece of legislation doing exactly the same thing. I've heard many people talk about the companies that bought the DMCA, but it's been a long time since I heard someone correct them: Those companies bought the WIPO treaty, and got the DMCA as an added option.
Think about it this way: The fixed cost of producing a major label CD is $300,000 (just a random figure that I assume is a decent average). The record company can produce 100 albums like this, each of which sells 100 thousand copies. Their profits will not be anywhere near what it will be if they produce 10 albums that each sell 1,000,000 copies. They have _no incentive at all_ to produce more and varied music. Their financial incentive is to create superhigh sales for a few specific albums. They make their money through CD sales, and every sale over a target minimum is pure profit. That's why the radio plays the same 15 songs over and over and over instead of 150 songs in a rotation.
since most mp3s sound like shit to me, i consider napster to be the equivalent of a radio station - and i fail to see why they aren't allowed to be licensed by BMI, ASCAP, etc., in a similar fashion.
I suspect that they refuse to license it as such because they have no playlist to not only exert control over. Radio isn't there as a public service, it's advertising for a very specific minority of published music. Napster has none of the features that record companies like about radio, with the added liability that it's a non-analog medium.
For what it's worth, I know far more people that have used napster as a music preview service (like the radio without having the playlist dictated by the record companies) than I've known that use it as a CD replacement service. I think that most people are at worst balanced, and more often than not more the former than the latter.
The notion that the internet is fully redundant only applies (as it did in its very early stages) if every host is also capable of routing traffic, and every network has more than one connection. Neither of these (windows PCs and single leased lines are extremely common) true anymore.
The implication here is that CERT notifies government agencies 45 days before they notify the public (which is why CERT advisories always seem to be extremely late to anyone reading bugtraq). The suggestion here is that they're going to start letting companies buy into the original notification round, a full month and a half before they announce it to everyone else.
Re:I'm worried about this. It could be a disaster.
on
Microchips That Evolve
·
· Score: 4
'(1991) Can you imagine the devastation that could be wrought by malicious thugs when everyone's home computer is connected to everyone else's via this "internet"? I urge slashdot readers to boycott any PCs which use this dangerous new technology.'
The point I'm making here is that any technology, whether it's GPFPGAs, the Internet, Guns, Solar power, or Hydrogenization of vegetable oils is capable of both benefit and harm. The view that anything potentially dangerous should be shunned is detrimental to everyone. The only safe way to handle potentially dangerous technology is to understand it, and spread that understanding. You can rest assured that if the open scientific community avoids a technology out of fear, the closed criminal community will only take more dangerous advantage of it. Understanding and knowledge is the only safeguard from the harm that can be caused by technology.
Actually, MS released their required specification for a pc that will be allowed to carry the "Windows XP' logo (like that little metal sticker saying "Designed for (list of windows versions)) not that long ago, and it included a clause that the case not allow access to the internals. They basically stipulate that for a machine to be deemed 'XP Compatible' it cannot be upgraded by the end user. That's how they plan to get around the problem: The service tech. gets a new key from MS after the hardware has been upgraded at his shop.
This is the first couple months following a major revision, and bugs are still being stomped out. A kernel release is important to many people because it addresses bugs that are affecting them (I'm in this position). If you don't want to install the kernel, don't:) I suspect, btw, that MS-centric information channels light up when a service pack happens. Slashdot is linux-centric, which is why you don't see that here.
Currently I'm being affected by issues resolved by the 'x86 PAE update for thread-safe page table handling' mentioned under -pre8, the 'new and much improved aic7xxx driver 6.1.5', and the loopback problems (which I've patched to fix until 2.4.3). Many people are using 2.2 or 2.4.3, and many of them are indeed just fine. I've been waiting for this release, though, and was happy to see the announcement.
Slashdot Mirror
Bladder stones.
The whole book is about the systems and social processes at the time - How fatal disease was common and the way people reacted to it, the role of revolution in the growth of economies, etc. There was this problem at that place and time with bladder stones. They killed a _lot_ of people. Today, there's none: Why[0]? It's just something jarring that he can bring up to remind you that the characters aren't modern people in funny clothes. The central thrust of the series, to me, is an attempt to put the reader entirely in a very alien frame of mind, and the bladder stone issue is a good reference point to use to constantly remind you that the world you're in is _different_.
[0] No clean water. Everyone drank beer, ale, wine, or something similar when they were thirsty. There wasn't any public works system in London to bring in clean water, so people were more or less completely dehydrated all the time. Hence bladder stones.
There would be substantially less water being consumed by the FAB? Not that Albuquerque is sitting in the middle of the desert, quietly draining the aquifer, happily skipping toward a future where every drop has to be shipped in from the other side of the Sandias. Truly, I can't think of a better place to have built an industrial complex as thirsty as a semiconductor FAB. Oh, wait, I just did - Anywhere. It was a stupid, shortsighted decision to put the FAB in to begin with, and now that its economically critical it will just continue to sit there and suck the only resource of consequence - water. Because honestly, who cares if the Rio Grande is so dry that you can walk across it? Housing sure is cheap out in RR!
Remember, though, what Sun did to the Blackdown folks. Sun wants to control the Java market entirely, which is fine - That's their perogative as a company. They've shown a history of dominating and destroying open source groups that work with and for them, and given that they're in a weaker position overall now than they were in 1998 I see no reason to assume that they won't do the same to Eclipse.
There are two types of DNS servers - Authoritative servers and recusive resolvers. The default BIND configuration conflates these two services into a single running instance, but you'll notice that even the BIND documentation recommends operating your authoritative servers sepparately from your resolvers.
With djbdns you typically run tinydns (the authoritative dns server) on 127.0.0.1, and dnscache (the recursive resolver) on your public IP, configured to look for your authoritative records at localhost. This configuration is extremely stable and very fast.
When I started using qmail and djbdns I was astounded by the number of Sendmail- and BIND-isms that I assumed to be aspects of the SMTP and DNS protocols. Working with djb's tools have given me a _much_ clearer understanding of the difference between what makes up the standard and what makes up the most common implementation of that standard.
Give the djbdns package another look - It's more than worth your time.
The direction I see RedHat taking with the RHAS line is in pushing it as a target platform for Big Name Products like Oracle and WebSphere. You can be sure that other enterprise software vendors will be relieved to have a slightly slower-moving target on which to develop their products.
The result? Right now you can get enterprise linux software for "RedHat Linux 7.x, RHAS 2.x". In the future it will be "RedHat Advanced Server version " full-stop, and given that the "hacker" versions of RedHat will be more current in terms of kernel and glibc, that platform requiremient will likely mean something.
4 words easily explain why a flat-rate plan will never work for slashdot:
username: cypherpunks
password: cypherpunks
What's to stop someone from signing up with one account and distributing the authentication information to all their friends? Complicated, expensive technical measures I suppose, but that chews away their profit.
I've been thinking about this over the past few days, and I can't think of any way other than per-page that slashdot subscriptions can work. It may very well be that per-page won't work either, in which case we all get a lesson in capitalism.
There's an ongoing trend to criminalize the tools and speech used to conduct security research; This is the single most frustrating aspect of the government's involvement in network security. Lists like bugtraq and tools like nessus and nmap are absolutely vital to the health of a network-connected system. Some suggested legislation would make all security discussions criminal, some would allow such work to only be conducted by approved organizations; Both would shatter the ability of the individual administrator to effectively secure his systems. If I could make one and only one request it would be to specifically disallow legislation that attempts to let companies involved with the internet take the security ball to their private court and bounce it around, leaving individual system administrators with no tools and no forums in which to discuss their own defences. In short: keep public, individual security research legal.
Thanks, and good luck.
The submitter says that IIS needs to be rewritten, something that "[Gartner says] has an 80% chance of happening by the end of next year." This is incorrect.
The actual quote is: "Gartner believes that this rewriting will not occur before year-end 2002 (0.8 probability)." That means there's an 80% probability that the preceeding statement is true, and that statement is that MS will _not_ have completed a rewrite in that timeframe.
So instead of MS being 80% likely to fix the problem, they're 80% UNlikely to do so in the timeframe specified.
This was the first question I asked at the end of the address. I havn't heard any discussion concerning ownership, but I do wonder how many lines are in private (vs. public university) hands.
Java is owned in every way by Sun. We (as a community) have absolutely no control over its cross-platform issues or anything else to do with it. If C# is actually submitted and accepted and defined as a standard, that's Good. If there's a C# compiler and runtime environment (which is what Mono is attempting to build) that's Free, even Better. If Sun sees the very real threat of such a combination and (re)submits Java for standards approval, that's Perfect.
The findings of fact stand, and Microsoft still violated anti-trust law. The breakup order is what was overturned, not the underlying judgement.
Free Java simplementations are starting to overshadow the JDK, especially in the Linux community.
What implementations are you talking about? I know of only the sun and IBM jdks, and I can't tell if you mean free or Free because of the word position.
How often have you heard this story:
Headline: $company Announces Move Into $field.
$company announced today that they will be moving into $field software, with product details to be announced in roughly six months. At the news, developer interest in $field products from companies already in the market have dried up, as $company's version will likely become a major, if not the primary, industry standard.
Then, in the intervening months, all competition in the market goes belly-up, $company buys whatever former competitor they think is most useful, and becomes the Only Game In Town.
Set $company to "Microsoft" and everyone knows this story. It hasn't worked if set to "RedHat" until now.
why do afford physical property the privilege of protection under law?
One primary reason: exclusivity. If I'm using a plot of land, or a hammer, or a hamburger, or any other valuable physical thing, then nobody else can use it until I'm done. If I have a digital copy of a novel, or a song, or a piece of software, or any other valuable informational thing, other people's use of it has no effect whatsoever on me.
Q: Do you view Linux and the open-source movement as a threat to Microsoft?
:) He's saying that any company that uses open source software must give away all of their software, which is true only as long as "use" means "incorporate source code from". He's implying that anybody using linux to run a print server or somesuch is going to be forced to give away every line of code they've ever written. It's very well worded, extremely effective, and completely dishonest.
A: Yeah. It's good competition. It will force us to be innovative. It will force us to justify the prices and value that we deliver. And that's only healthy. The only thing we have a problem with is when the government funds open-source work. Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody. Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.
I gave him the benefit of the doubt as well, and was rewarded with this
The DMCA is the US's implementing language of the WIPO treaty. If the DMCA were to be ruled unconstitutional by the Court, congress would be under treaty obligation to draft another piece of legislation doing exactly the same thing. I've heard many people talk about the companies that bought the DMCA, but it's been a long time since I heard someone correct them: Those companies bought the WIPO treaty, and got the DMCA as an added option.
Think about it this way: The fixed cost of producing a major label CD is $300,000 (just a random figure that I assume is a decent average). The record company can produce 100 albums like this, each of which sells 100 thousand copies. Their profits will not be anywhere near what it will be if they produce 10 albums that each sell 1,000,000 copies. They have _no incentive at all_ to produce more and varied music. Their financial incentive is to create superhigh sales for a few specific albums. They make their money through CD sales, and every sale over a target minimum is pure profit. That's why the radio plays the same 15 songs over and over and over instead of 150 songs in a rotation.
since most mp3s sound like shit to me, i consider napster to be the equivalent of a radio station - and i fail to see why they aren't allowed to be licensed by BMI, ASCAP, etc., in a similar fashion.
I suspect that they refuse to license it as such because they have no playlist to not only exert control over. Radio isn't there as a public service, it's advertising for a very specific minority of published music. Napster has none of the features that record companies like about radio, with the added liability that it's a non-analog medium.
For what it's worth, I know far more people that have used napster as a music preview service (like the radio without having the playlist dictated by the record companies) than I've known that use it as a CD replacement service. I think that most people are at worst balanced, and more often than not more the former than the latter.
The notion that the internet is fully redundant only applies (as it did in its very early stages) if every host is also capable of routing traffic, and every network has more than one connection. Neither of these (windows PCs and single leased lines are extremely common) true anymore.
This is my understanding, at least.
The implication here is that CERT notifies government agencies 45 days before they notify the public (which is why CERT advisories always seem to be extremely late to anyone reading bugtraq). The suggestion here is that they're going to start letting companies buy into the original notification round, a full month and a half before they announce it to everyone else.
'(1991) Can you imagine the devastation that could be wrought by malicious thugs when everyone's home computer is connected to everyone else's via this "internet"? I urge slashdot readers to boycott any PCs which use this dangerous new technology.'
The point I'm making here is that any technology, whether it's GPFPGAs, the Internet, Guns, Solar power, or Hydrogenization of vegetable oils is capable of both benefit and harm. The view that anything potentially dangerous should be shunned is detrimental to everyone. The only safe way to handle potentially dangerous technology is to understand it, and spread that understanding. You can rest assured that if the open scientific community avoids a technology out of fear, the closed criminal community will only take more dangerous advantage of it. Understanding and knowledge is the only safeguard from the harm that can be caused by technology.
Actually, MS released their required specification for a pc that will be allowed to carry the "Windows XP' logo (like that little metal sticker saying "Designed for (list of windows versions)) not that long ago, and it included a clause that the case not allow access to the internals. They basically stipulate that for a machine to be deemed 'XP Compatible' it cannot be upgraded by the end user. That's how they plan to get around the problem: The service tech. gets a new key from MS after the hardware has been upgraded at his shop.
This is the first couple months following a major revision, and bugs are still being stomped out. A kernel release is important to many people because it addresses bugs that are affecting them (I'm in this position). If you don't want to install the kernel, don't :) I suspect, btw, that MS-centric information channels light up when a service pack happens. Slashdot is linux-centric, which is why you don't see that here.
Currently I'm being affected by issues resolved by the 'x86 PAE update for thread-safe page table handling' mentioned under -pre8, the 'new and much improved aic7xxx driver 6.1.5', and the loopback problems (which I've patched to fix until 2.4.3). Many people are using 2.2 or 2.4.3, and many of them are indeed just fine. I've been waiting for this release, though, and was happy to see the announcement.