Extreme fundamentalist groups have historically either been cults or the proxy soldiers of Machiavellian guerilla leaders. Their relationship to the tenets of whatever religion they claim to represent is tenuous at best, in nearly every instance.
Regardless, the primary mechanism for carrying out the most horrific crimes by sane, ostensibly well-adjusted people has historically been a shift in belief to portray what they're planning as "right" and "just". And if there's another refuge for wrongheadedness quite as expansive as religion (can't prove it right or wrong -- when's the last time God bought you a drink?), I haven't ever seen it. The Nazis used the next-best excuse, the "good of humanity". Regardless, if you can't see what I'm getting at here, you're in denial.
Whether I'm a bigot and/or an asshole remains the subject of some debate amongst my peers, but I wanted to clarify this point.
This is the most balanced, incisive, and original presentation I've seen on the topic. It was written several years ago and was not rushing to meet some deadline or focused on the current agent du jour. It's fantastic.
Anyone who likes Laurie Garrett's work (or Ken Alibek's) will find this site worth digging into, deeply.
You're kidding yourself if you think that unemployed scientists from the Soviet biopreparat program would be totally unwilling to cart out some specimens and go work for another nation, provided the pay was good enough.
Inspections of the Soviet and Iraqi research facilities in the 1990's indicated that both had been actively working on biological agents. Yeltsin went ahead and publicly stated this, then dismantled the Russian programs. Hussein, of course, has not called any press conferences on the matter.
So, you are stating that both US military inspectors and the former president of Russia are liars. You need to provide some solid evidence of your position in order to be taken seriously!
I guess we didn't bomb Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan in the last 15 years. Nor did $300M of Saudi inheritance and an organization devoted to the destruction of the USA (and by proxy, our Western allies) spring up. Right?
The huge difference between an entity like the Soviet Union and a network like Al Qaeda is that, while the USSR was highly prepared and enamored of the will to power, the people holding the reins were not particularly interested in dying as a means of killing others. So while the cynical machinations of the Soviet power elite produced the finest weaponization programs for biowarfare yet seen, they were only intended for use as mop-up agents after a nuclear attack.
The Islamic fundies (not particularly worse than Christian fundies or ultranationalist Israelis, just more prominent) that have taken center stage lately are perfectly willing to die for their cause, as long as they can kill a few unarmed women and children while they're at it. What better for the slaughter of innocents than an epidemic? It worked for Genghis Khan (cf. catapulting plague-ridden corpses into sieged cities). These are not conventional enemies and they are not limiting themselves to conventional warfare. Moreover, a network of semi-autonomous individuals without a distinct nationality, i.e., nothing to lose, is a much more elusive target than a static nation-state like Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan. So the consequences of being "caught" are also different.
That, in conjunction with the underfunding and collapse of the public health systems around the world, is why I submit that a response to biowarfare is more crucial now than 15 years ago.
And the rebuilding of a worldwide public health infrastructure would be a damn nice side effect of this new urgency, IMHO.
I used to be an avid Tick and PTS fan. Collected them and Milk And Cheese, that about covers the comics I actually found amusing. The Tick was great because it wasn't so horribly cynical and angry as Dorkin's (Milk and Cheese) work, but was almost as funny. Then at some point the Tick stopped being funny. Man Eating Cow, Karma Tornado, all the spin-offs besides Paul The Samurai were terrible from the beginning. I never could figure out why this was.
Did you break with NEC at some point, leaving the Tick and Paul the Samurai series to be written by somebody else? The first dozen or so Ticks were hysterical, as was the first Paul the Samurai, and then everything dissipated. (the original Tick cartoon show was pretty funny, but nowhere near as good as the comic book)
I don't collect comics anymore (gave them all to my little brother) but I did enjoy the Tick and M&C. M&C lost a lot of its punch after a while, maybe everyone runs out of material, but it seemed like much more of an abrupt transition with the Tick, and I was wondering what happened. Also I hope you're back for good, some of my college friends had never heard of the Tick and really got hooked on it after I dug out some old issues of the comic. The comics were great stuff.
"Unnecessary Rockets: On/Off"
lxr may help... once your code is in CVS, at least
on
Java IDEs?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's a cron-job type of thing and you'd have to write some elisp to integrate it with the lxr output (or hook into the fragment database), but it could be done:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lxr
It looks like they're nearing a 1.0 release and have got the database integration and CVS integration cleaned up a lot lately. You'd still have some work to do if you wanted a fully-automated in-editor version of what you're asking for, but it would be fun stuff to implement, I think most of the drudgery is taken care of by now. Wow LXR has come a long way!!!
When I was a full-time Java/C/C++ developer I often used DDD + XEmacs + the combination of LXR and CVSweb to keep my wits about me and could therefore point other developers to whatever I'd done recently, how it worked, and what it involved. Now I'm more of an admin/loose cannon...
Haven't used LXR in a while and it seems like all my code has degenerated into componentized Perl, C, and Bash lately, but I still use CVSweb, JavaDoc-style docs (POD, JavaDoc, PHPdoc, Doxygen, whatever works), and a syntax-hilighting editor (Vim or XEmacs) whenever I write anything that'll be deployed for more than a week.
I know that the Gnome and Mozilla projects use LXR integrated with CVSWeb, but don't judge it harshly just because of that;-). (actually I'm using Galeon and kind of like it better than IE, so scratch my bitching about Mozilla)
1) Use port forwarding over ssh instead of DISPLAY=insecure_as_hell. Please, firewall X (6001-6006)!
2) Component programs like Gnumeric are cute, but with Gnome it's kind of all-or-nothing for the novice user. This is an issue since X performance is not up to par with Windows in many respects. Believe me, I've set users up with both Gnome and other WM's (fvwm, Windowmaker, etc.) and they all prefer Gnome. Even though it sucks;-)
3) Ok, maybe the Mutt comment bears the Insightful label:-).
Bottom line is that most X apps run well on a local workstation, and if you're not tunneling X from, say, an SGI Onyx in New York to a demonstration on a workstation in DC, you may not really want the overhead of being able to do so. Don't get me wrong, X is magically delicious for a handful of users, but most admins (myself included) can control things very well with a terminal or VNC, and most users are never going to use the most powerful features of X, rendering it needless bloat for them. DirectFB solutions would make Linux far more attractive for these sorts of users are their managers.
I'm using Galeon to write this. I don't recall ever using Mozilla for anything important, but Galeon rocks -- even my nontechnical girlfriend likes it. It's fast, simple, and aside from the Galeon team's apparent decision to make Backspace not go back one page in 0.94/0.12.whatever, it's very similar to IE. Which, of course, is pretty much the benchmark these days.
Bottom line, I don't hate my Linux web browser anymore, and Gecko/Galeon is the reason why. If AOL can use Gecko to, say, spit out shitloads of cheap Linux X terminals for clients, so much the better.
And if they're only using it to strongarm MS, that's okay too.
1) left bad feedback on the sellers,
2) filled out fraud reports, and
3) finally moved on.
What exactly is he supposed to do? Track down the sellers, shave their cats, and blow up their houses? Realistically, you take a risk when you use eBay, and it's probably best attenuated by using PayPal/Billpoint and merchant agreements to insure yourself.
Umm, in the past year, there have been at least 3 how-to articles in SysAdmin using OpenBSD. You need to get your eyes checked.
Read OBSDJ or the cvs-commits if OpenBSD is all you care about. Personally, I've found several of the articles (eg. on Snort and Cisco ACLs) quite useful, and the high-availability jury-rigging tips are invaluable.
The Perl Journal had gone downhill quite a bit (IMHO) as of last issue. I hope it will return to its former glory, but I'm not holding my breath.
Don't compare with Solaris... compare with Linux
on
IBM Launches p690
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· Score: 3, Interesting
AIX 5L is designed to run Linux apps with a recompile, or AIX apps without. Find me a Linux box that I can stuff 32 dual-core processors into.
Unless you're insane I don't believe you're going to tell me that there are more Solaris apps than Linux apps. AIX 5L runs the latter kind.
Besides, IBM techies have usually struck me as better qualified than Sun guys, although both are leagues ahead of almost any other company's.
Pgsql has subselects, joins, replication, write-ahead logging, transactions, and has had Perl as a procedural language for years. It's not quite as fast as MySQL, and it doesn't have as many idiots writing knicknacks for it in PHP, but the most useful ones IMHO (Thoth, ACID, PgMyAdmin, OpenACS, etc.) run fine on top of it. If you need transactional/sp features and do not want to pay for Oracle, it may be your best choice.
My experience with most datacenters is that they hire idiots and/or contractors in order to avoid paying reasonable salaries, and therefore the face presented to the customer is one of "duh...". While barging into the NOC and making long distance calls on someone else's phones (!) is obviously way out of line, there are procedures and processes at Exodus and Above.net which just plain don't work.
FGC (now part of Exodus) required customers to sign a contract that stated no customer UPS units were allowed. Then FGC's "failover" UPS system did not fail over and customers in several of their datacenters had entire sites go down when there was a power outage. It is not unreasonable to be unhappy with the shitty service offered by most datacenters. In fact, it's something of a running joke.
FWIW, the company I work at now has built our own goddamn datacenter and its uptime is far, far better than the nearest Exodus (Herndon). We've been pulling machines from Exodus for a while now, not because Exodus is particularly bad, but because if they go under or have to keep firing their best people, we won't have to notice;-).
Nonetheless, there's something to be said for civility, and apparently internet.com hasn't figured that out yet. (Even when dealing with FGC I always tried to be professional, as did everyone else I worked with... they ARE people.)
Somehow I managed to omit that rather critical detail. The world did not make Sankoh the leader of the rebels; rather, it rewarded his savage violence as expressed through the RUF (chopping children's legs and arms off, sewing womens' vaginas shut with fishing line, and padlocking villagers' mouths shut for the simple crime of being outside the RUF) by endorsing a peace accord which made him Vice President of the entire country.
It's as if the UN had endorsed Hitler for Prime Minister of Israel.
No wonder most of Africa continues to starve in poverty. With 'friends' like the US, who needs enemies? Note to self: there are organizations even more cynical than Microsoft and Monsanto, and my tax dollars are paying for them. Woohoo!
In any event, no amount of fiber optic cable is going to improve the lives of people in countries like Sierra Leone until decent leaders are nudged into power and the economies can be built up to the point that ordinary citizens are not preoccupied with starvation, AIDS, and fleeing from murderous warlords.
Bonus: foreign aid workers will also be less likely targets for torture, murder, and mutilation if there is some incentive for leaders to act like moderately civilized human beings (as opposed to criminally insane sadists). This means you, Network Boy...
And I would have to say that is more critical than internet connectivity.
Hard to use a keyboard when RUF rebels have chopped your hands off (Sierra Leone), when your entire city has been murdered (Rwanda), or you're dizzy from exhaustion because the food and supplies to your region have been obliterated by land mines for the third time in as many months and you're starving to death (Angola), or you're busy dying of AIDS (one out of every four people in subsaharan Africa). An ISP is not going to help the common man in these countries nearly as much as an international body with a spine (eg. one that would not agree to make Foday Sankoh, the leader of the vicious, terrorist RUF rebels in Sierra Leone) or something akin to dignity, especially on the part of the US and France. God knows it couldn't hurt to have more of the world's masses aware of the hell that exists in most of West and Central Africa, though -- if.JPGs and fiber optics will do the trick, by all means, that's a worthy goal. Still, the only useful wealth in the long term comes from within an economy, never from without.
As usual, foreign 'aid' is best suited for generating contempt and dependency. Vietnam, for example, is doing quite well these days, in spite of America's best efforts. Meanwhile the majority of Africa outside of Egypt and Tunisia continues to go straight to hell, as the world cynically manipulates the 'leaders' to exploit its resources, and ignores millions of civilians being killed as an indirect consequence of our (Western) foreign policy decisions.
Somehow, even in a forum like/. (where this over-focus on technology is not only appropriate but part of the appeal), it seems like talk of wiring up Africa is another pathologically Western case of putting the cart before the horse.
Microsoft has been found guilty of breaking the law in federal court. These schools are a slam-dunk nolo contendere for breaking copyright law.
Even steven, eh? Take from the public, give back to the public? Sounds great to me...
The visibility trend is not what pleases me, although it would increase volume in an IPO. What pleases me is that large corporate customers are paying to use their engine, and it is continually being reworked to be faster. Once they are profitable, and I would only invest in a token few shares if they IPO before that, I feel that good visibility would help to solidify their value in the eyes of individual investors (are there any of those left?) and fund managers.
I don't believe that eyeballs translate into money. I worked at NBCi, for god's sake -- I left when I realized that they'd never stop trying to monetize eyeballs (XOOM, which monetized things by actual revenue, is where some of Google's net ops crew came from, while I'm on the topic of failed-portal refugees). The company I now work for cares about profits, profits, and profits -- we only bother keeping hit counts in order to bill for bytes transmitted. So please do understand that I'm with you on this.
I never bought Yahoo stock. I bought Foundry stock, and Merck stock, and bonds, because the value of these instruments is derived from profitable institutions. I suggest that anyone who doesn't understand this stick with either IBM stock or stuffing their cash under a mattress;-).
As for momentum, it bought me a truck during the Great Internet Tulip Craze, so I'm not unhappy about it. I just don't believe in it for the long haul:-). If Google becomes profitable before they IPO, I will *invest* in them. If not, I'll buy a couple shares out of sympathy...
As of the moment, one of my friends who works there has heard nothing to indicate that this rumor is anything but bullshit, so I'm not losing any sleep yet.
GOOGLE DOES NOT MAKE MOST OF THEIR MONEY FROM ADS.
No company that relies on banner ads for revenue is ever going to be successful again, not even when they provide the value that Google's do (they're cheap, and work pretty well, but that's not a real business model, kids). I'll stand by that prediction -- not too brave of me.
GOOGLE MAKES MONEY LICENSING USE OF THEIR ENGINE.
Yahoo! pays to use it (although they didn't buy access to the entire page index, so a direct Google search will often give better results). So do about 50 other major companies. When I say 'their engine' I mean the many Googleclusters in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and (I believe) Herndon, not just the software.
Some of my friends and ex-coworkers work there -- "Nobody at Google ever quits" they say, and aside from contractors, this appears to be true. It is a wonderful work environment and they have filled their cubicles with Microsoft Research caliber PhD's and ex-professors. They are working on image retrieval technologies (not truly useful yet) and have pretty much cornered the search-engine-ASP market. (In fact, since I last talked to anyone at Google about this, they've added ANOTHER 70 PARTNERS!)
The technology rules -- I have converted every single employee at my current company (far from an IPO, but profitable nonetheless) to using the Google Toolbar because it saves so much time. (and they in turn have converted most of their acquaintances...) If things continue this way, not only will they be an attractive investment, but vast numbers of potential investors may habitually use Google the way they use Microsoft's site. If things go REALLY well, even Microsoft may end up using Google for their search services. That's damn good awareness. And that is why I say...
I STILL HOPE THEY DO NOT IPO YET.
Not just because I doubt my erstwhile coworkers will cut me in for friends-and-family;-) but because the market is atrocious and I, like (I pray) most/. readers, would want to see them rewarded for superior technology and hard work, rather than having a fair-to-middling IPO due to the.com spectres. If revenues continue to increase (and I believe they will -- Google's search engine is lightyears ahead of new entrants like Teoma due to its already being deployed and well tested), a Google IPO in a year or two would probably be a huge hit, as it may catch the economy coming OUT OF a dip.
Marc, Shawn, Chris, and everyone else at Google, you're doing a great job, and I will buy into the company's IPO either way. But I hope Doerr and Brin and Page, or whoever would be making the decision, decide to hold off a little bit!
You know, a couple of my friends took X one night and now they're dead... after being hit by a drunk driver. A tragedy that could have been averted, although probably not by a War on Drugs.
And then there's my grandparents, who started smoking cigarettes after the ads on TV in the 50's and 60's told them that "Doctors say... it's okay!". Since the drugs they used were legal, they don't count, right? That's just bad luck?
Of course, it also doesn't count when someone stacks up their car after having 'one for the road' because liquor companies are Doing The Right Thing and would never stoop to the ethically dubious lows of target-marketing to underage or high-risk ethnic market segments. The drugs you buy in the pretty glass bottles are okay. The nice men on TV tell you so.
We send the wrong message, alright. We tell people that a couple of missionaries on a humanitarian flight are a small price to pay for American self-righteousness, and we tell the rest of the world that we can't even see past the end of our own nose when it comes to reconciling foreign policy with domestic 'issues'.
Now, if we legalized and taxed the hell out of marijuana (in spite of the thousands and thousands of people that undoubtedly die of the munchies each year!), it could fund a hell of a lot of rehab clinics for monstrous problems like heroin addiction and alcoholism. There'd be a lot more money in the budget to fund stings on crackhouses and meth labs, reducing those problems (while methamphetamine, or dextro-amphetamine -- close enough for most addicts -- is legally available, meth heads are some of the most violently psychotic people I've ever come into contact with; legalization is not, by itself, an 'answer' to their behaviors). And hell, maybe some of it could get routed into the public schools (HA! Buy bigger guns for the War on Drugs!). But that would send the wrong message -- it might seem like America had become some bleeding-heart socialist hellhole like Holland or Canada. God knows, we wouldn't want their problems! (lower crime, better medical coverage, etc. etc.)
And it's an all or nothing prospect, you know -- we can't just have a few legal drugs (nicotine, alcohol, prescription painkillers and tranquilizers) and make others illegal, can we? Marijuana, for example, was only criminalized after Prohibition's spectacular failure (hmmm, no lessons about human nature in *that* debacle), and then only due to bigots like Henry Anslinger decrying its tendency to cause upstanding white women to consort with Negroes. (Really.)
I've seen plenty of people destroyed by drugs, most notably heroin and cocaine. My godfather was a physician with a coke habit -- he's dead now. I've taken plenty of drugs in my day, but I got bored when I realized that I was no longer experiencing anything particularly novel. I don't regret either starting or stopping my experimentations. And no, I don't like to smoke marijuana. But I'd love to see those who do help pay for remedies to some huge, pressing social problems, the same way that gas guzzlers do in Europe. Nothing personal, guys...
And I do feel like puritanical fervor misses the point of maintaining a healthy society, something that the War on Drugs has failed utterly to contribute to. If you feel that stepping back from a 'whatever it takes' mentality to evaluate the human cost of this war is Wrong, then perhaps you should ask yourself how you'd feel if *your* wife and child had been caught in the crossfire of this little War. Dogma is not particularly useful in shaping effective social policies.
With proper document management and a little foresight, this wouldn't be an issue. Keep triplicate copies of everything, keep licenses, contracts, and SLA agreements on file, yadda yadda.
Could Microsoft audit IBM? Sure! Would it bankrupt them? I doubt it highly, knowing how the shop is run there.
Microsoft is now resorting to harassing customers with lawyers to extract profit growths. This is good. It means they're putting themselves increasingly into a very unpopular position with large corporations and governments, which may prompt some of the "victims" to lobby (throw money at) lawmakers.
It's bad for customers, but that's par for the course. Microsoft has never been good for the consumer, I don't expect them to change now.
Your upstream provider can offer to only propagate routes reflected within their netblocks, or default routes only, for BGP4.
If you don't have an upstream provider you won't need to worry about any of these things:-).
Otherwise nobody with a wimpy Cisco (eg. cheaper than a 7000 series) would be able to multihome.
The comment about OSPF is fair, though. What a fucking nightmare... I hate to admit it but the behavior of OSPF nudged me into running EIGRP. (the shame!)
The EMC was a red herring, after a fashion. It's more for the purpose of "see this pile of money? that pays for the DISKS to run a real OLTP DB.".
I mean, this is Slashdot, not a technical forum.
I'd rather spec a Sun StorEdge/T3 array (for Oracle) or IBM's competitor to it (for DB2 UDB, presumably running on AIX) for performance, since EMCs are legendary for being butt slow once you blow through the cache. There was an article on adaptive caching RAID arrays in Oracle Internals awhile ago; someone built a hardware solution...
The Cheetahs now come in an X15 (15000 RPM) model, if you're rolling your own storage (ittybitty Oracle setups, PostgreSQL, or MySQL).
They're pretty nice IMHO, I have a few of them in RAID 1+0 here. Snappy. It's also nice to rack them in a 4U so you have room to put two Adaptec UW-160 cards in there and keep each side of your mirrors on a separate channel. 72GB mirrored at 15000 RPM... yeah, it beats up the EMC "solution" for that scale of a project. Obviously I'd start reaching for Sun Storedge JBODs after that.
But yeah, you're right, that was a spurious point.
Slashdot Mirror
Extreme fundamentalist groups have historically either been cults or the proxy soldiers of Machiavellian guerilla leaders. Their relationship to the tenets of whatever religion they claim to represent is tenuous at best, in nearly every instance.
Regardless, the primary mechanism for carrying out the most horrific crimes by sane, ostensibly well-adjusted people has historically been a shift in belief to portray what they're planning as "right" and "just". And if there's another refuge for wrongheadedness quite as expansive as religion (can't prove it right or wrong -- when's the last time God bought you a drink?), I haven't ever seen it. The Nazis used the next-best excuse, the "good of humanity". Regardless, if you can't see what I'm getting at here, you're in denial.
Whether I'm a bigot and/or an asshole remains the subject of some debate amongst my peers, but I wanted to clarify this point.
Frontline special: Plague Wars
This is the most balanced, incisive, and original presentation I've seen on the topic. It was written several years ago and was not rushing to meet some deadline or focused on the current agent du jour. It's fantastic.
Anyone who likes Laurie Garrett's work (or Ken Alibek's) will find this site worth digging into, deeply.
Have "fun".
while you're at it.
The use of biological agents in war is as old as war itself.
You're kidding yourself if you think that unemployed scientists from the Soviet biopreparat program would be totally unwilling to cart out some specimens and go work for another nation, provided the pay was good enough.
Inspections of the Soviet and Iraqi research facilities in the 1990's indicated that both had been actively working on biological agents. Yeltsin went ahead and publicly stated this, then dismantled the Russian programs. Hussein, of course, has not called any press conferences on the matter.
So, you are stating that both US military inspectors and the former president of Russia are liars. You need to provide some solid evidence of your position in order to be taken seriously!
I guess we didn't bomb Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan in the last 15 years. Nor did $300M of Saudi inheritance and an organization devoted to the destruction of the USA (and by proxy, our Western allies) spring up. Right?
The huge difference between an entity like the Soviet Union and a network like Al Qaeda is that, while the USSR was highly prepared and enamored of the will to power, the people holding the reins were not particularly interested in dying as a means of killing others. So while the cynical machinations of the Soviet power elite produced the finest weaponization programs for biowarfare yet seen, they were only intended for use as mop-up agents after a nuclear attack.
The Islamic fundies (not particularly worse than Christian fundies or ultranationalist Israelis, just more prominent) that have taken center stage lately are perfectly willing to die for their cause, as long as they can kill a few unarmed women and children while they're at it. What better for the slaughter of innocents than an epidemic? It worked for Genghis Khan (cf. catapulting plague-ridden corpses into sieged cities). These are not conventional enemies and they are not limiting themselves to conventional warfare. Moreover, a network of semi-autonomous individuals without a distinct nationality, i.e., nothing to lose, is a much more elusive target than a static nation-state like Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan. So the consequences of being "caught" are also different.
That, in conjunction with the underfunding and collapse of the public health systems around the world, is why I submit that a response to biowarfare is more crucial now than 15 years ago.
And the rebuilding of a worldwide public health infrastructure would be a damn nice side effect of this new urgency, IMHO.
I used to be an avid Tick and PTS fan. Collected them and Milk And Cheese, that about covers the comics I actually found amusing. The Tick was great because it wasn't so horribly cynical and angry as Dorkin's (Milk and Cheese) work, but was almost as funny. Then at some point the Tick stopped being funny. Man Eating Cow, Karma Tornado, all the spin-offs besides Paul The Samurai were terrible from the beginning. I never could figure out why this was.
Did you break with NEC at some point, leaving the Tick and Paul the Samurai series to be written by somebody else? The first dozen or so Ticks were hysterical, as was the first Paul the Samurai, and then everything dissipated. (the original Tick cartoon show was pretty funny, but nowhere near as good as the comic book)
I don't collect comics anymore (gave them all to my little brother) but I did enjoy the Tick and M&C. M&C lost a lot of its punch after a while, maybe everyone runs out of material, but it seemed like much more of an abrupt transition with the Tick, and I was wondering what happened. Also I hope you're back for good, some of my college friends had never heard of the Tick and really got hooked on it after I dug out some old issues of the comic. The comics were great stuff.
"Unnecessary Rockets: On/Off"
It's a cron-job type of thing and you'd have to write some elisp to integrate it with the lxr output (or hook into the fragment database), but it could be done:
;-). (actually I'm using Galeon and kind of like it better than IE, so scratch my bitching about Mozilla)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lxr
It looks like they're nearing a 1.0 release and have got the database integration and CVS integration cleaned up a lot lately. You'd still have some work to do if you wanted a fully-automated in-editor version of what you're asking for, but it would be fun stuff to implement, I think most of the drudgery is taken care of by now. Wow LXR has come a long way!!!
When I was a full-time Java/C/C++ developer I often used DDD + XEmacs + the combination of LXR and CVSweb to keep my wits about me and could therefore point other developers to whatever I'd done recently, how it worked, and what it involved. Now I'm more of an admin/loose cannon...
Haven't used LXR in a while and it seems like all my code has degenerated into componentized Perl, C, and Bash lately, but I still use CVSweb, JavaDoc-style docs (POD, JavaDoc, PHPdoc, Doxygen, whatever works), and a syntax-hilighting editor (Vim or XEmacs) whenever I write anything that'll be deployed for more than a week.
I know that the Gnome and Mozilla projects use LXR integrated with CVSWeb, but don't judge it harshly just because of that
1) Use port forwarding over ssh instead of DISPLAY=insecure_as_hell. Please, firewall X (6001-6006)!
;-)
:-).
2) Component programs like Gnumeric are cute, but with Gnome it's kind of all-or-nothing for the novice user. This is an issue since X performance is not up to par with Windows in many respects. Believe me, I've set users up with both Gnome and other WM's (fvwm, Windowmaker, etc.) and they all prefer Gnome. Even though it sucks
3) Ok, maybe the Mutt comment bears the Insightful label
Bottom line is that most X apps run well on a local workstation, and if you're not tunneling X from, say, an SGI Onyx in New York to a demonstration on a workstation in DC, you may not really want the overhead of being able to do so. Don't get me wrong, X is magically delicious for a handful of users, but most admins (myself included) can control things very well with a terminal or VNC, and most users are never going to use the most powerful features of X, rendering it needless bloat for them. DirectFB solutions would make Linux far more attractive for these sorts of users are their managers.
I'm using Galeon to write this. I don't recall ever using Mozilla for anything important, but Galeon rocks -- even my nontechnical girlfriend likes it. It's fast, simple, and aside from the Galeon team's apparent decision to make Backspace not go back one page in 0.94/0.12.whatever, it's very similar to IE. Which, of course, is pretty much the benchmark these days.
Bottom line, I don't hate my Linux web browser anymore, and Gecko/Galeon is the reason why. If AOL can use Gecko to, say, spit out shitloads of cheap Linux X terminals for clients, so much the better.
And if they're only using it to strongarm MS, that's okay too.
The guy
1) left bad feedback on the sellers,
2) filled out fraud reports, and
3) finally moved on.
What exactly is he supposed to do? Track down the sellers, shave their cats, and blow up their houses? Realistically, you take a risk when you use eBay, and it's probably best attenuated by using PayPal/Billpoint and merchant agreements to insure yourself.
Umm, in the past year, there have been at least 3 how-to articles in SysAdmin using OpenBSD. You need to get your eyes checked.
Read OBSDJ or the cvs-commits if OpenBSD is all you care about. Personally, I've found several of the articles (eg. on Snort and Cisco ACLs) quite useful, and the high-availability jury-rigging tips are invaluable.
The Perl Journal had gone downhill quite a bit (IMHO) as of last issue. I hope it will return to its former glory, but I'm not holding my breath.
AIX 5L is designed to run Linux apps with a recompile, or AIX apps without. Find me a Linux box that I can stuff 32 dual-core processors into.
Unless you're insane I don't believe you're going to tell me that there are more Solaris apps than Linux apps. AIX 5L runs the latter kind.
Besides, IBM techies have usually struck me as better qualified than Sun guys, although both are leagues ahead of almost any other company's.
Postgres home page
My experience with most datacenters is that they hire idiots and/or contractors in order to avoid paying reasonable salaries, and therefore the face presented to the customer is one of "duh...". While barging into the NOC and making long distance calls on someone else's phones (!) is obviously way out of line, there are procedures and processes at Exodus and Above.net which just plain don't work.
;-).
FGC (now part of Exodus) required customers to sign a contract that stated no customer UPS units were allowed. Then FGC's "failover" UPS system did not fail over and customers in several of their datacenters had entire sites go down when there was a power outage. It is not unreasonable to be unhappy with the shitty service offered by most datacenters. In fact, it's something of a running joke.
FWIW, the company I work at now has built our own goddamn datacenter and its uptime is far, far better than the nearest Exodus (Herndon). We've been pulling machines from Exodus for a while now, not because Exodus is particularly bad, but because if they go under or have to keep firing their best people, we won't have to notice
Nonetheless, there's something to be said for civility, and apparently internet.com hasn't figured that out yet. (Even when dealing with FGC I always tried to be professional, as did everyone else I worked with... they ARE people.)
Somehow I managed to omit that rather critical detail. The world did not make Sankoh the leader of the rebels; rather, it rewarded his savage violence as expressed through the RUF (chopping children's legs and arms off, sewing womens' vaginas shut with fishing line, and padlocking villagers' mouths shut for the simple crime of being outside the RUF) by endorsing a peace accord which made him Vice President of the entire country.
It's as if the UN had endorsed Hitler for Prime Minister of Israel.
No wonder most of Africa continues to starve in poverty. With 'friends' like the US, who needs enemies? Note to self: there are organizations even more cynical than Microsoft and Monsanto, and my tax dollars are paying for them. Woohoo!
In any event, no amount of fiber optic cable is going to improve the lives of people in countries like Sierra Leone until decent leaders are nudged into power and the economies can be built up to the point that ordinary citizens are not preoccupied with starvation, AIDS, and fleeing from murderous warlords.
Bonus: foreign aid workers will also be less likely targets for torture, murder, and mutilation if there is some incentive for leaders to act like moderately civilized human beings (as opposed to criminally insane sadists). This means you, Network Boy...
And I would have to say that is more critical than internet connectivity.
.JPGs and fiber optics will do the trick, by all means, that's a worthy goal. Still, the only useful wealth in the long term comes from within an economy, never from without.
/. (where this over-focus on technology is not only appropriate but part of the appeal), it seems like talk of wiring up Africa is another pathologically Western case of putting the cart before the horse.
Hard to use a keyboard when RUF rebels have chopped your hands off (Sierra Leone), when your entire city has been murdered (Rwanda), or you're dizzy from exhaustion because the food and supplies to your region have been obliterated by land mines for the third time in as many months and you're starving to death (Angola), or you're busy dying of AIDS (one out of every four people in subsaharan Africa). An ISP is not going to help the common man in these countries nearly as much as an international body with a spine (eg. one that would not agree to make Foday Sankoh, the leader of the vicious, terrorist RUF rebels in Sierra Leone) or something akin to dignity, especially on the part of the US and France. God knows it couldn't hurt to have more of the world's masses aware of the hell that exists in most of West and Central Africa, though -- if
As usual, foreign 'aid' is best suited for generating contempt and dependency. Vietnam, for example, is doing quite well these days, in spite of America's best efforts. Meanwhile the majority of Africa outside of Egypt and Tunisia continues to go straight to hell, as the world cynically manipulates the 'leaders' to exploit its resources, and ignores millions of civilians being killed as an indirect consequence of our (Western) foreign policy decisions.
Somehow, even in a forum like
Microsoft has been found guilty of breaking the law in federal court. These schools are a slam-dunk nolo contendere for breaking copyright law.
Even steven, eh? Take from the public, give back to the public? Sounds great to me...
The visibility trend is not what pleases me, although it would increase volume in an IPO. What pleases me is that large corporate customers are paying to use their engine, and it is continually being reworked to be faster. Once they are profitable, and I would only invest in a token few shares if they IPO before that, I feel that good visibility would help to solidify their value in the eyes of individual investors (are there any of those left?) and fund managers.
;-).
:-). If Google becomes profitable before they IPO, I will *invest* in them. If not, I'll buy a couple shares out of sympathy...
I don't believe that eyeballs translate into money. I worked at NBCi, for god's sake -- I left when I realized that they'd never stop trying to monetize eyeballs (XOOM, which monetized things by actual revenue, is where some of Google's net ops crew came from, while I'm on the topic of failed-portal refugees). The company I now work for cares about profits, profits, and profits -- we only bother keeping hit counts in order to bill for bytes transmitted. So please do understand that I'm with you on this.
I never bought Yahoo stock. I bought Foundry stock, and Merck stock, and bonds, because the value of these instruments is derived from profitable institutions. I suggest that anyone who doesn't understand this stick with either IBM stock or stuffing their cash under a mattress
As for momentum, it bought me a truck during the Great Internet Tulip Craze, so I'm not unhappy about it. I just don't believe in it for the long haul
As of the moment, one of my friends who works there has heard nothing to indicate that this rumor is anything but bullshit, so I'm not losing any sleep yet.
No company that relies on banner ads for revenue is ever going to be successful again, not even when they provide the value that Google's do (they're cheap, and work pretty well, but that's not a real business model, kids). I'll stand by that prediction -- not too brave of me.
GOOGLE MAKES MONEY LICENSING USE OF THEIR ENGINE.
Yahoo! pays to use it (although they didn't buy access to the entire page index, so a direct Google search will often give better results). So do about 50 other major companies. When I say 'their engine' I mean the many Googleclusters in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and (I believe) Herndon, not just the software.
Some of my friends and ex-coworkers work there -- "Nobody at Google ever quits" they say, and aside from contractors, this appears to be true. It is a wonderful work environment and they have filled their cubicles with Microsoft Research caliber PhD's and ex-professors. They are working on image retrieval technologies (not truly useful yet) and have pretty much cornered the search-engine-ASP market. (In fact, since I last talked to anyone at Google about this, they've added ANOTHER 70 PARTNERS!)
The technology rules -- I have converted every single employee at my current company (far from an IPO, but profitable nonetheless) to using the Google Toolbar because it saves so much time. (and they in turn have converted most of their acquaintances...) If things continue this way, not only will they be an attractive investment, but vast numbers of potential investors may habitually use Google the way they use Microsoft's site. If things go REALLY well, even Microsoft may end up using Google for their search services. That's damn good awareness. And that is why I say...
I STILL HOPE THEY DO NOT IPO YET.
Not just because I doubt my erstwhile coworkers will cut me in for friends-and-family ;-) but because the market is atrocious and I, like (I pray) most /. readers, would want to see them rewarded for superior technology and hard work, rather than having a fair-to-middling IPO due to the .com spectres. If revenues continue to increase (and I believe they will -- Google's search engine is lightyears ahead of new entrants like Teoma due to its already being deployed and well tested), a Google IPO in a year or two would probably be a huge hit, as it may catch the economy coming OUT OF a dip.
Marc, Shawn, Chris, and everyone else at Google, you're doing a great job, and I will buy into the company's IPO either way. But I hope Doerr and Brin and Page, or whoever would be making the decision, decide to hold off a little bit!
(define better-tool 'emacs)
(use (better-tool))
Computers are great for counting parentheses. That sort of 'have the machine take care of it' thinking is the point of high-level languages...
You know, a couple of my friends took X one night and now they're dead... after being hit by a drunk driver. A tragedy that could have been averted, although probably not by a War on Drugs.
And then there's my grandparents, who started smoking cigarettes after the ads on TV in the 50's and 60's told them that "Doctors say... it's okay!". Since the drugs they used were legal, they don't count, right? That's just bad luck?
Of course, it also doesn't count when someone stacks up their car after having 'one for the road' because liquor companies are Doing The Right Thing and would never stoop to the ethically dubious lows of target-marketing to underage or high-risk ethnic market segments. The drugs you buy in the pretty glass bottles are okay. The nice men on TV tell you so.
We send the wrong message, alright. We tell people that a couple of missionaries on a humanitarian flight are a small price to pay for American self-righteousness, and we tell the rest of the world that we can't even see past the end of our own nose when it comes to reconciling foreign policy with domestic 'issues'.
Now, if we legalized and taxed the hell out of marijuana (in spite of the thousands and thousands of people that undoubtedly die of the munchies each year!), it could fund a hell of a lot of rehab clinics for monstrous problems like heroin addiction and alcoholism. There'd be a lot more money in the budget to fund stings on crackhouses and meth labs, reducing those problems (while methamphetamine, or dextro-amphetamine -- close enough for most addicts -- is legally available, meth heads are some of the most violently psychotic people I've ever come into contact with; legalization is not, by itself, an 'answer' to their behaviors). And hell, maybe some of it could get routed into the public schools (HA! Buy bigger guns for the War on Drugs!). But that would send the wrong message -- it might seem like America had become some bleeding-heart socialist hellhole like Holland or Canada. God knows, we wouldn't want their problems! (lower crime, better medical coverage, etc. etc.)
And it's an all or nothing prospect, you know -- we can't just have a few legal drugs (nicotine, alcohol, prescription painkillers and tranquilizers) and make others illegal, can we? Marijuana, for example, was only criminalized after Prohibition's spectacular failure (hmmm, no lessons about human nature in *that* debacle), and then only due to bigots like Henry Anslinger decrying its tendency to cause upstanding white women to consort with Negroes. (Really.)
I've seen plenty of people destroyed by drugs, most notably heroin and cocaine. My godfather was a physician with a coke habit -- he's dead now. I've taken plenty of drugs in my day, but I got bored when I realized that I was no longer experiencing anything particularly novel. I don't regret either starting or stopping my experimentations. And no, I don't like to smoke marijuana. But I'd love to see those who do help pay for remedies to some huge, pressing social problems, the same way that gas guzzlers do in Europe. Nothing personal, guys...
And I do feel like puritanical fervor misses the point of maintaining a healthy society, something that the War on Drugs has failed utterly to contribute to. If you feel that stepping back from a 'whatever it takes' mentality to evaluate the human cost of this war is Wrong, then perhaps you should ask yourself how you'd feel if *your* wife and child had been caught in the crossfire of this little War. Dogma is not particularly useful in shaping effective social policies.
With proper document management and a little foresight, this wouldn't be an issue. Keep triplicate copies of everything, keep licenses, contracts, and SLA agreements on file, yadda yadda.
Could Microsoft audit IBM? Sure! Would it bankrupt them? I doubt it highly, knowing how the shop is run there.
Microsoft is now resorting to harassing customers with lawyers to extract profit growths. This is good. It means they're putting themselves increasingly into a very unpopular position with large corporations and governments, which may prompt some of the "victims" to lobby (throw money at) lawmakers.
It's bad for customers, but that's par for the course. Microsoft has never been good for the consumer, I don't expect them to change now.
Your upstream provider can offer to only propagate routes reflected within their netblocks, or default routes only, for BGP4. :-).
If you don't have an upstream provider you won't need to worry about any of these things
Otherwise nobody with a wimpy Cisco (eg. cheaper than a 7000 series) would be able to multihome.
The comment about OSPF is fair, though. What a fucking nightmare... I hate to admit it but the behavior of OSPF nudged me into running EIGRP. (the shame!)
I couldn't stand to see all the little trolls cry... besides, how else will they tunnel MPLS and have their gigE LANs be as baroque as ATM?
h tm
. tx t.html
http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/protocol/gre.
or the RFC itself,
http://www.kblabs.com/lab/lib/rfcs/1700/rfc1701
:-P
The EMC was a red herring, after a fashion. It's more for the purpose of "see this pile of money? that pays for the DISKS to run a real OLTP DB.".
I mean, this is Slashdot, not a technical forum.
I'd rather spec a Sun StorEdge/T3 array (for Oracle) or IBM's competitor to it (for DB2 UDB, presumably running on AIX) for performance, since EMCs are legendary for being butt slow once you blow through the cache. There was an article on adaptive caching RAID arrays in Oracle Internals awhile ago; someone built a hardware solution...
The Cheetahs now come in an X15 (15000 RPM) model, if you're rolling your own storage (ittybitty Oracle setups, PostgreSQL, or MySQL).
They're pretty nice IMHO, I have a few of them in RAID 1+0 here. Snappy. It's also nice to rack them in a 4U so you have room to put two Adaptec UW-160 cards in there and keep each side of your mirrors on a separate channel. 72GB mirrored at 15000 RPM... yeah, it beats up the EMC "solution" for that scale of a project. Obviously I'd start reaching for Sun Storedge JBODs after that.
But yeah, you're right, that was a spurious point.