All the ones I looked at used some form of encryption (I saw a lot of One Time Pad ones) for their control channels. I don't think someone's going to drop $100M on getting a satellite to orbit without putting decent security on it.
Seat belts have been compulsory here since the 1980's -- as long as I've been driving. You occasionally run across some jackass who insists that there are a couple of corner cases where the seatbelts are more dangerous, and therefore all the cases where they'll keep you from flying through the windshield and dying should be ignored. I haven't seen any research even to back up the claim that those corner cases exist, but those guys are mostly just jackasses. A lot of them die in car crashes.
I don't fly commercially that much anymore, but usually people keep their seat belts on when they're sitting down, from what I've seen. It's not like they're any less comfortable than anything else that's going on in coach. I've never seen really extreme turbulence, either, not even on small aircraft that you'd expect to be sketchier than commercial ones. We usually avoid flying on the shit days, though. I'd love to hitch a ride on that plane that deliberately flies into hurricanes. I bet that's a blast.
Oh yeah, I used to have a room mate who was terrified of flying, despite the fact that the drive to the airport was much more dangerous statistically than flying anywhere was. It's just not something that happens on a daily basis, and that freaks people out.
Like all the other managerial processes, it's just another silver bullet sold to your company (Along with training and tools to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars,) that will magically fix all your software development problems if you just take the time to learn it and do it correctly.
Ever notice how all that stuff focuses on management techniques and none of them focus your engineering talent or processes? You know, the stuff where the actual work is getting done? If your engineering teams are really broken, it doesn't matter how well you manage them. So let's say you're sitting in a dysfunctional turd of a company. I mean a really bad one, the type of company where the only people still working there are the people who absolutely can't find a job somewhere else. Now let's make that company agile. Will that actually solve any of their problems? No, it'll just pay to send some agile coach's kids to private school.
Can't be hacked and can easily be forced if law enforcement or the Russian mafia decides they want to see your information. Of course, with a password the Russian mafia will just beat you with a wrench until you log in, anyway, so YMMV.
Another setuid vulnerability in this day and age? You'd think it was difficult to find all the setuid programs on a system and audit the shit out of each and every one of them.
Wouldn't that be true only if they actually modified any of the original source? If they've made no modifications to any of the packages, then all the source for the thing is still freely available. Just not from them.
I thought it'd be neat to write a virus that lived on network printers and would replace every instance of the word "Strategic" with the word "Satanic" when printing. Sadly, there didn't seem to be any way to open a network socket from the PostScript(tm) layer of the printer, so it would have been unable to spread properly. The "Satanic Plans for Q2" transparencies would definitely have spiced up the board meetings.
I know, right? I hurt myself laughing at the title. And all those Apple users. I was also laughing at them. Maybe I can use this to sell my company on giving me a proper Linux laptop with a proper fucking keyboard when all their Display Link monitors stop working.
Didn't CDE on the Sun workstations have desktop icons? I got to play with the sun lab for a bit at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute back in, oh, '86 or '87, but I don't rightly remember. AIX also had a similar desktop environment, IIRC. Funny all those UNIX vendors fragmenting the shit out of the market and keeping the same crappy window manager. Oh, and SCO wanted another, what, $1500 for the GUI environment? And another $1200 for the C compiler. I almost felt bad for them when Linux came out, some punk ass kid from Finland letting all the air out of their business model...
SCO Unix used CDE as its desktop. It was the same one you'd get if you got a Sun workstation. It was motif based and had drag and drop and was like the shittiest UNIX desktop you could get. Which is pretty much all I remember about it.
Wasn't Eric Raymond and that lot talking about open source a lot in the mid-to-late-90's? I started getting involved in Linux just shortly before IBM killed OS/2, which was around '95 or '96 IIRC. By that time RMS had been going on about free software for years, though I don't know if he ever used the term "open source" to describe it.
Oh, slashdot was a lively place back then. I posted as an AC for a long time but was finally sold and convinced to sign up for an account since logged in accounts could block stories from Jon Katz. I'm kind of disappointed he's not still listed in my blocked writer list.
Or even "Pull over into the breakdown lane, stop and signal for medical attention." Should the autopilot be able to tell that the driver is having a heart attack? Or that it's been driving a corpse for the last 150 miles?
If you ever get to talk to someone from Ericsson, ask them, "You work for Ericsson, what do you know about Huawei?" and get ready for the rant. Scuttlebutt is that Huawei basically got hold of and copied the APZ hardware Ericsson uses in their phone exchanges. They're a masterpiece of engineering, not the sort of thing one's likely to just throw together. The racks have multiple processor cards that synchronize their memory between them and a testing card that is constantly looking for processing errors. If a fatal error occurs, the back-up card can take over processing for the main one with zero traffic lost. They also run an emulator for an esoteric chip that they originally used to make the machines so that applications their clients wrote for the hardware a couple decades ago will continue to work. The programming language reads like assembly language and is pretty difficult to follow. The Huawei hardware is supposed to be a drop-in replacement that'll run your old applications and everything. And, they're likely to go on to allege, they've seen signs that the hardware's been backdoored so that Huawei guys can get in and spy on stuff going on in the exchange.
This is all in the form of rumors, of course, I never actually heard anything official from inside the company, but it seems like every Ericsson employee is ready to whip this story out at a moment's notice. Given that Huawei's success works against Ericsson, I'd take the rant with a grain of salt, but it really seems like Ericsson views Huawei as its evil nemesis.
A tandem jump on a Mile Hi Skydiving plane will get you to 18,000 feet MSL (13K AGL.) Leastwise on a clear day. The door side usually faces the mountains when folks are getting out, but you can probably ask the pilot to do a 180 and go back the other way before you get out. Then you're looking out toward Kansas, which really IS flat. You still can't see the curvature of the earth particularly well at that altitude -- I think you really need to hit commercial airliner altitudes before you start to notice it.
Ok, well there's not, but I'd be happy to start a web site that whores your personal data that you share with it for free in a slightly less unlikable way than Facebook does. That's what you want, right? Because really the only reason Facebook exists is to convince you to share your personal data with it for free so it can whore that data to anyone with a large enough briefcase full of cash. So if you'd just share some personal data about what exactly you find unlikable about Facebook whoring out your personal data, we can get this party started!
I mean, let's assume you take the position that guy down there's not you. Well how is he not you? He thinks he's you. He has a continuous sense of being you. A DNA scan will match your DNA. A brain scan will be identical to the one of the guy who got into the transporter at the far end. These things would have to be true for transporters to be considered an acceptable form of transportation, I think. So is it not you just because you happened to not exist somewhere for the duration you were being transported? That somehow that guy down there didn't get your "Soul"? When for all provable scientific criteria he did? How much not-you is too much not-you? Does an alcohol binge on Friday night kill enough brain cells that you're no longer you? Are you no longer you because a ten-year-old you would not recognize the person you became 20 or 30 years later? We can stay in Plato's cave all night, but at the end of the day, that guy IS you... enough. So stop being a whiny bitch and get in the transporter, McCoy!
Also a little known fact is that most civilian GPS units will not work above a specific altitude or speed. IIRC the ceiling is either 45K or 60K feet and 600 MPH. Those are the numbers that stick in my head, anyway. It doesn't affect most people, as the ceiling is above where civilian aircraft fly, but it can be a bother for people doing high-end model rocketry or weather balloon experiments.
I thought I might be hitting it when trying to track some skydives with my phone, but the altitudes I'm jumping from are well below the ceiling. It seems like the GPS receivers in most phones are pretty much just crap. Or maybe just not optimized for falling at speeds up to around 200 MPH from altitudes up to 20K feet MSL. And yeah, average terminal velocity is approx 120 MPH belly-to-earth, but I've hit 200 MPH in a head down dive. I've heard tell of the competition fall-rate guys hitting 300 MPH with skin-tight jumpsuits and aerodynamic rigs.
Back in the day you'd fire up a tool like traceroute (or mtr) and see which hops are causing the problem. For me, it was always a sprint border router in Atlanta dropping all my packets on the floor. Seems like a lot of Linux distributions don't bundle traceroute by default anymore. In these days of generally-installing-everything-properly ubuntu (et al) distributions, you don't really need to be a sysadmin with a lot of networking know-how to run a networked Linux machine. Just get the wifi-enabled cable-modem from your cable provider and kick off your Ubuntu install. It's just like running windows -- wine will run most of your steam games and most MMOs flawlessly.
Slashdot Mirror
If I don't get real folders, they can fuck right off.
Oooh but you have to pull a 1" diameter locator beacon out of your nose. That kind of sucks.
All the ones I looked at used some form of encryption (I saw a lot of One Time Pad ones) for their control channels. I don't think someone's going to drop $100M on getting a satellite to orbit without putting decent security on it.
Or a Predator hunting ground.
I don't fly commercially that much anymore, but usually people keep their seat belts on when they're sitting down, from what I've seen. It's not like they're any less comfortable than anything else that's going on in coach. I've never seen really extreme turbulence, either, not even on small aircraft that you'd expect to be sketchier than commercial ones. We usually avoid flying on the shit days, though. I'd love to hitch a ride on that plane that deliberately flies into hurricanes. I bet that's a blast.
Oh yeah, I used to have a room mate who was terrified of flying, despite the fact that the drive to the airport was much more dangerous statistically than flying anywhere was. It's just not something that happens on a daily basis, and that freaks people out.
Ever notice how all that stuff focuses on management techniques and none of them focus your engineering talent or processes? You know, the stuff where the actual work is getting done? If your engineering teams are really broken, it doesn't matter how well you manage them. So let's say you're sitting in a dysfunctional turd of a company. I mean a really bad one, the type of company where the only people still working there are the people who absolutely can't find a job somewhere else. Now let's make that company agile. Will that actually solve any of their problems? No, it'll just pay to send some agile coach's kids to private school.
Just in time to force a complete rewrite of Kingdom Hearts 3, delaying the game by another 8 years.
Can't be hacked and can easily be forced if law enforcement or the Russian mafia decides they want to see your information. Of course, with a password the Russian mafia will just beat you with a wrench until you log in, anyway, so YMMV.
Another setuid vulnerability in this day and age? You'd think it was difficult to find all the setuid programs on a system and audit the shit out of each and every one of them.
Wouldn't that be true only if they actually modified any of the original source? If they've made no modifications to any of the packages, then all the source for the thing is still freely available. Just not from them.
Why not just broadcast it from some other country? Like Russia. You can broadcast anything you want to out of Russia, can't you?
I thought it'd be neat to write a virus that lived on network printers and would replace every instance of the word "Strategic" with the word "Satanic" when printing. Sadly, there didn't seem to be any way to open a network socket from the PostScript(tm) layer of the printer, so it would have been unable to spread properly. The "Satanic Plans for Q2" transparencies would definitely have spiced up the board meetings.
I know, right? I hurt myself laughing at the title. And all those Apple users. I was also laughing at them. Maybe I can use this to sell my company on giving me a proper Linux laptop with a proper fucking keyboard when all their Display Link monitors stop working.
Didn't CDE on the Sun workstations have desktop icons? I got to play with the sun lab for a bit at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute back in, oh, '86 or '87, but I don't rightly remember. AIX also had a similar desktop environment, IIRC. Funny all those UNIX vendors fragmenting the shit out of the market and keeping the same crappy window manager. Oh, and SCO wanted another, what, $1500 for the GUI environment? And another $1200 for the C compiler. I almost felt bad for them when Linux came out, some punk ass kid from Finland letting all the air out of their business model...
Wasn't Eric Raymond and that lot talking about open source a lot in the mid-to-late-90's? I started getting involved in Linux just shortly before IBM killed OS/2, which was around '95 or '96 IIRC. By that time RMS had been going on about free software for years, though I don't know if he ever used the term "open source" to describe it.
Oh, slashdot was a lively place back then. I posted as an AC for a long time but was finally sold and convinced to sign up for an account since logged in accounts could block stories from Jon Katz. I'm kind of disappointed he's not still listed in my blocked writer list.
Well I'm pretty sure the desired number was blocked, so I'd call that a win!
Or even "Pull over into the breakdown lane, stop and signal for medical attention." Should the autopilot be able to tell that the driver is having a heart attack? Or that it's been driving a corpse for the last 150 miles?
This is all in the form of rumors, of course, I never actually heard anything official from inside the company, but it seems like every Ericsson employee is ready to whip this story out at a moment's notice. Given that Huawei's success works against Ericsson, I'd take the rant with a grain of salt, but it really seems like Ericsson views Huawei as its evil nemesis.
So companies using legal tricks to not pay taxes hurts America? So how about those tax returns, buddy?
A tandem jump on a Mile Hi Skydiving plane will get you to 18,000 feet MSL (13K AGL.) Leastwise on a clear day. The door side usually faces the mountains when folks are getting out, but you can probably ask the pilot to do a 180 and go back the other way before you get out. Then you're looking out toward Kansas, which really IS flat. You still can't see the curvature of the earth particularly well at that altitude -- I think you really need to hit commercial airliner altitudes before you start to notice it.
Ok, well there's not, but I'd be happy to start a web site that whores your personal data that you share with it for free in a slightly less unlikable way than Facebook does. That's what you want, right? Because really the only reason Facebook exists is to convince you to share your personal data with it for free so it can whore that data to anyone with a large enough briefcase full of cash. So if you'd just share some personal data about what exactly you find unlikable about Facebook whoring out your personal data, we can get this party started!
I mean, let's assume you take the position that guy down there's not you. Well how is he not you? He thinks he's you. He has a continuous sense of being you. A DNA scan will match your DNA. A brain scan will be identical to the one of the guy who got into the transporter at the far end. These things would have to be true for transporters to be considered an acceptable form of transportation, I think. So is it not you just because you happened to not exist somewhere for the duration you were being transported? That somehow that guy down there didn't get your "Soul"? When for all provable scientific criteria he did? How much not-you is too much not-you? Does an alcohol binge on Friday night kill enough brain cells that you're no longer you? Are you no longer you because a ten-year-old you would not recognize the person you became 20 or 30 years later? We can stay in Plato's cave all night, but at the end of the day, that guy IS you... enough. So stop being a whiny bitch and get in the transporter, McCoy!
Also a little known fact is that most civilian GPS units will not work above a specific altitude or speed. IIRC the ceiling is either 45K or 60K feet and 600 MPH. Those are the numbers that stick in my head, anyway. It doesn't affect most people, as the ceiling is above where civilian aircraft fly, but it can be a bother for people doing high-end model rocketry or weather balloon experiments. I thought I might be hitting it when trying to track some skydives with my phone, but the altitudes I'm jumping from are well below the ceiling. It seems like the GPS receivers in most phones are pretty much just crap. Or maybe just not optimized for falling at speeds up to around 200 MPH from altitudes up to 20K feet MSL. And yeah, average terminal velocity is approx 120 MPH belly-to-earth, but I've hit 200 MPH in a head down dive. I've heard tell of the competition fall-rate guys hitting 300 MPH with skin-tight jumpsuits and aerodynamic rigs.
Back in the day you'd fire up a tool like traceroute (or mtr) and see which hops are causing the problem. For me, it was always a sprint border router in Atlanta dropping all my packets on the floor. Seems like a lot of Linux distributions don't bundle traceroute by default anymore. In these days of generally-installing-everything-properly ubuntu (et al) distributions, you don't really need to be a sysadmin with a lot of networking know-how to run a networked Linux machine. Just get the wifi-enabled cable-modem from your cable provider and kick off your Ubuntu install. It's just like running windows -- wine will run most of your steam games and most MMOs flawlessly.