Most tech-literate people I know find Slashdot summaries to be Highly Sensationalized, Often Bearing Little Relationship To Content Submitted! SCO suxxors!
So yeah, context is nice. But I'd settle for non-misleading.
Hmm. You're probably right. I happened to be reading about this several days ago, and found a paper by Steven Ward and Simon Day, where they used the rolling/convecting scenario to model the effects of a collapse. I got the implication from somewhere that a single splash would have a significantly lesser effect. I can't find the page in Mozilla's History though, so maybe I made it up. An asteroid would be a completely different calculation, but I see your point.
Anyway, the PDF file has great graphics of the modelled dispersion.
And, btw.. regarding my previous post...the waters on the west side of La Palma are 1000m deep. That would be a heck of a breakwater. And it would probably need to be at least as thick as it was high (to the ocean floor). That's a lotta concrete.:-)
The tsunami is created by the rolling motion caused by the material sliding down the slope of the Cumbre Vieja and the rest of the island.
One big splash would dissipate and not create a tsunami, it's the fact that the oscillation is reinforced by the additional material, creating a several-period wave that can travel.
I think the previous poster was right -- it would be possible to fragment or interfere with the waves in such a way to reduce their amplitude significantly. It would require an enormous amount of energy, but it's possible.
Maybe a ginormous 150m high (above water), 200m thick, and 5km long reinforced concrete breakwater, installed at great expense just beyond the limit of the Canary Islands' territorial waters. Damp the energy before it gets too far along in establishing a self-reinforcing wave train.
Of course, it would reflect a lot of the energy back at the Canaries, which would be swamped (but disperse it pretty effectively, so Africa would survive..) I guess that's why the Canary gov't wouldn't let it be built inside territorial waters.
Personally, I think I'll just move to Seattle, so I can get buried by the next eruption of Mt. St. Helens (or Yellowstone) instead.
It doesn't even matter whether meta tag spamming works, or whether the laws are enforceable. The idea that a government would try to regulate it is insane.
Since when are Internet users under an obligation to be relevant or consistent in anything they write? Sure, we can't infringe copyrights and we can't be libellous, but those are general laws that happen to apply to the Internet as well.
And when were search engines granted protections for their technical operational model, anyway? What's next? All pages must be valid HTML4.01 STRICT so that crawler parsers can run faster? Stupid stupid stupid.
As disappointed as I sometimes get about the USA being out of control in the world, "enlightened" governments like Germany or France or Canada seem to go out of their way to prove that if they had the global resources, they'd be just as bad or worse as the lone superpower.
Vocational training and vendor certifications are great. But they aren't computer science.
There are trade schools who offer "degrees" in "Electronics Engineering Technology" and "Computer Technology" where, as far as I can tell, you learn to fix VCRs and install Exchange Server 2000.
Obviously this is beyond that level, but it's still vocational training.
OTOH, industry always needs a greater number of schleps than creative thinkers, and the American educational system has been morphing to suit industry's needs for a hundred years. The average CS grad is no great shakes. This school just formalizes and rationalizes the production of average CS grads. They won't be be any less competent than the others.
It's an interesting response to outsourcing: lower the standards of education so we can home-grow more workers.
Do you really think Solaris on a Sun box prices out ahead of Linux on generic Intel hardware?
I realize it's not a fair comparison (at all!), but it's exactly the question being asked by systems people every day.
Maybe you're just talking about the Solaris license cost (free with a HW purchase) plus the media cost ($95/disk set a few years ago, probably less now). In which case, OK. No argument.
But it's rare to come across a business *need* that requires Solaris over Linux any more. (And it's only slightly less rare to come across a business need that requires Oracle...)
Inertia and employee familiarity sell more Sun boxes than business need. When the above are lacking, Linux gets the "sale" every time. I really think this is the right choice, too. I could replicate a million dollar Sun environment that I built in 1999 for $50k today (plus $70k or so of Cisco tax). Individual systems wouldn't be as reliable, but the environment as a whole would be as good or better.
I loved the Netras. They were exactly the right product.
What is the value of a video card on a webserver? Or a floppy drive? Or even a CD-ROM, though I would usually end up ordering them, for the additional $135.
Would you really have run the Sun-supplied httpd under any circumstances?? At the time, they were always shipping versions that were seriously outdated. They shipped sendmail4 for YEARS after sendmail8 was out! (This I never understood.)
I bought hundreds of Netras (literally, for a dozen different clients). They were a great way to build a cheap presentation layer for a web farm.
The standard pair of network interfaces was nice too (and rare among HW vendors, at the time). It saved $800 for a quad card.
Yes, they were IDE and there was no MBus. That didn't bother me at all. I used them where there were already good design reasons for system redundancy, either for failover or scaling.
So obviously, the Netras fit my needs perfectly and not yours. For those who weren't around at the time, Linux was *not* a viable option for a large production web farm at the time. It definitely *is* now, and IMHO that's why Sun is so devalued.
Solaris is still superior to Linux in many ways, but Linux is just as good or better for the vast majority of the market. If they were priced equally (TCO- admins, hardware, and software combined), Solaris would still be holding on. They aren't. It isn't.
I still own a bunch of Sun stock that I'm unwilling to sell at this deep of a loss. Come on Scott, make me proud of my stubbornness. Steve did!:-)
Yes, but when you base your business models on existing laws and make assurances to partners based on same, you have reasonable cause to pursue those who break the laws upon which your business models, assurances, and licenses are based.
It doesn't even matter whether Apple believes that all music is information, and all information should be free. They own licensing contracts, NOT copyrights to the music. If the music industry shuts iTMS down for Apple's negligence in enforcing their law-given rights (I'm sure it's in the contract somewhere!), then we all lose. Yes, the music industry loses in the long run, but in the forseeable future, consumers lose.
No reasonable business would neglect to use a legal avenue to shut down a threat to their business models.
OK, it was a dumb comment by someone who doesn't know what he's talking about (and yeah, he's a columnist, but that is no insurance against ignorance).
But the article was actually pretty good.
Summary:
1. The open source world is pretty confusing and seems complicated to the not-previously-exposed.
2. More and more people are growing up in this culture and that's trouble for Microsoft.
3. Wouldn't it be great if all that legacy software (that gets sold as part of the assets when a company goes under, and then disappears from view forever) was released as open source. It's not doing anyone any good where it is.
The last point is a great one. The problem is that all that code is usually encumbered by licensing agreements with companies that are also defunct, and the successors are sometimes hard to find and/or don't know how to renegotiate a contract when they don't even recognize the products and licenses being discussed. That, and of course, that there's no monetary incentive to do so, certainly not one that outweighs the risk of getting sued a la SCO by the fifth-generation successor to the ownership of the assets of XYZ corp (d.1990, RIP)..
...contrast the "glacial" development of open source projects other than Linux to the "rapid and relevant" development of commercial projects such as Internet Explorer, right?
Maybe the author defines "Linux" as "all the stuff that comes on the 9-disc super Red Hat distribution".
that's exactly what I was hoping someone would post. Thanks!
Now, looking through those pages, it looks like an auto-exploit pastes that bit onto the end of any pages it can find in the webserver's docroot...
The pages that Google reports as matches are safe because they aren't HTML pages. Google won't match text in javascript code, apparently. (maybe there's an option?)
So we still don't have a list of afflicted sites, but this helps.
Unfortunately, it's very true. If you read your firewall log, you'll see the proof.
Remember that several worms give preference to IPs with the first three (then two) octets identical to the infector host. So on a big ISP net, scans will be higher than on a corporate net.. Twenty minutes is a long time.
Everything happens in context, of course. I really don't think VAXen was intended to be a humorous word, because DEC took itself pretty seriously in their 35 feet of documentation. (The very existence of that many official manuals seems funny now, but it was fairly typical for the time...Even Sun sold about 12 feet in the late 80's.)
My favorite DEC VAX manual: "Obsolete Features Manual". It was about 5 inches thick.
Anyway, I don't speak German.. But isn't "blinkenlichten" a real word?
A company called DEC used to exist, and for a long time they made a class of machines which they named "VAX". Since they invented the word, and VAXes sounds weird, they decided the plural would be "VAXen".
"Boxen" is just a play on DEC's weirdness, started by people who knew the history, and perpetuated by people who don't.
Someday, after the revolution, this will be remembered as something we should have taken more seriously...
> Spokesman Frank Federau for Lower Saxony > police said the man was arrested on Friday. >... > "He made a confession and the experts at > Microsoft have now confirmed that he was the > cause of this worm," said Federau.
"Our strategy was to do a good job on the 80% of common queries and ignore the other stuff."
This encapsulates every objection I have to all of Microsoft's products. This is their strategy with every market they approach. It makes a lot of business sense when operating from a monopoly position -- new products don't have to be "good", merely "good enough" -- but it guarantees that the product is inflexible, and its limitations are hard and technically arbitrary.
I can't give him credit for that. Microsoft is in the unique position of being able to single-handedly drive mass technological progress in the industry. They don't, and it's not because they fear their competitors, it's because they are irresponsible.
Microsoft is still riding the returns from smart marketing moves in the 1980s. Think about that next time you hear an industry wag opine about how "fast-moving" the technology industry is!
Slashdot Mirror
depending on your ultimate goals (journey v. destination, etc), an impact printer might serve your needs.
That's funny.
Most tech-literate people I know find Slashdot summaries to be Highly Sensationalized, Often Bearing Little Relationship To Content Submitted! SCO suxxors!
So yeah, context is nice. But I'd settle for non-misleading.
Hmm. You're probably right. I happened to be reading about this several days ago, and found a paper by Steven Ward and Simon Day, where they used the rolling/convecting scenario to model the effects of a collapse. I got the implication from somewhere that a single splash would have a significantly lesser effect. I can't find the page in Mozilla's History though, so maybe I made it up. An asteroid would be a completely different calculation, but I see your point.
Anyway, the PDF file has great graphics of the modelled dispersion.
http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~ward/papers/La_Palma_grl.p df
And, btw.. regarding my previous post...the waters on the west side of La Palma are 1000m deep. That would be a heck of a breakwater. And it would probably need to be at least as thick as it was high (to the ocean floor). That's a lotta concrete. :-)
Not exactly true.
The tsunami is created by the rolling motion caused by the material sliding down the slope of the Cumbre Vieja and the rest of the island.
One big splash would dissipate and not create a tsunami, it's the fact that the oscillation is reinforced by the additional material, creating a several-period wave that can travel.
I think the previous poster was right -- it would be possible to fragment or interfere with the waves in such a way to reduce their amplitude significantly. It would require an enormous amount of energy, but it's possible.
Maybe a ginormous 150m high (above water), 200m thick, and 5km long reinforced concrete breakwater, installed at great expense just beyond the limit of the Canary Islands' territorial waters. Damp the energy before it gets too far along in establishing a self-reinforcing wave train.
Of course, it would reflect a lot of the energy back at the Canaries, which would be swamped (but disperse it pretty effectively, so Africa would survive..) I guess that's why the Canary gov't wouldn't let it be built inside territorial waters.
Personally, I think I'll just move to Seattle, so I can get buried by the next eruption of Mt. St. Helens (or Yellowstone) instead.
It doesn't even matter whether meta tag spamming works, or whether the laws are enforceable. The idea that a government would try to regulate it is insane.
Since when are Internet users under an obligation to be relevant or consistent in anything they write? Sure, we can't infringe copyrights and we can't be libellous, but those are general laws that happen to apply to the Internet as well.
And when were search engines granted protections for their technical operational model, anyway? What's next? All pages must be valid HTML4.01 STRICT so that crawler parsers can run faster? Stupid stupid stupid.
As disappointed as I sometimes get about the USA being out of control in the world, "enlightened" governments like Germany or France or Canada seem to go out of their way to prove that if they had the global resources, they'd be just as bad or worse as the lone superpower.
Vocational training and vendor certifications are great. But they aren't computer science.
There are trade schools who offer "degrees" in "Electronics Engineering Technology" and "Computer Technology" where, as far as I can tell, you learn to fix VCRs and install Exchange Server 2000.
Obviously this is beyond that level, but it's still vocational training.
OTOH, industry always needs a greater number of schleps than creative thinkers, and the American educational system has been morphing to suit industry's needs for a hundred years. The average CS grad is no great shakes. This school just formalizes and rationalizes the production of average CS grads. They won't be be any less competent than the others.
It's an interesting response to outsourcing: lower the standards of education so we can home-grow more workers.
Do you really think Solaris on a Sun box prices out ahead of Linux on generic Intel hardware?
I realize it's not a fair comparison (at all!), but it's exactly the question being asked by systems people every day.
Maybe you're just talking about the Solaris license cost (free with a HW purchase) plus the media cost ($95/disk set a few years ago, probably less now). In which case, OK. No argument.
But it's rare to come across a business *need* that requires Solaris over Linux any more. (And it's only slightly less rare to come across a business need that requires Oracle...)
Inertia and employee familiarity sell more Sun boxes than business need. When the above are lacking, Linux gets the "sale" every time. I really think this is the right choice, too. I could replicate a million dollar Sun environment that I built in 1999 for $50k today (plus $70k or so of Cisco tax). Individual systems wouldn't be as reliable, but the environment as a whole would be as good or better.
eh?
:-)
I loved the Netras. They were exactly the right product.
What is the value of a video card on a webserver? Or a floppy drive? Or even a CD-ROM, though I would usually end up ordering them, for the additional $135.
Would you really have run the Sun-supplied httpd under any circumstances?? At the time, they were always shipping versions that were seriously outdated. They shipped sendmail4 for YEARS after sendmail8 was out! (This I never understood.)
I bought hundreds of Netras (literally, for a dozen different clients). They were a great way to build a cheap presentation layer for a web farm.
The standard pair of network interfaces was nice too (and rare among HW vendors, at the time). It saved $800 for a quad card.
Yes, they were IDE and there was no MBus. That didn't bother me at all. I used them where there were already good design reasons for system redundancy, either for failover or scaling.
So obviously, the Netras fit my needs perfectly and not yours. For those who weren't around at the time, Linux was *not* a viable option for a large production web farm at the time. It definitely *is* now, and IMHO that's why Sun is so devalued.
Solaris is still superior to Linux in many ways, but Linux is just as good or better for the vast majority of the market. If they were priced equally (TCO- admins, hardware, and software combined), Solaris would still be holding on. They aren't. It isn't.
I still own a bunch of Sun stock that I'm unwilling to sell at this deep of a loss. Come on Scott, make me proud of my stubbornness. Steve did!
Err.
Yes, but when you base your business models on existing laws and make assurances to partners based on same, you have reasonable cause to pursue those who break the laws upon which your business models, assurances, and licenses are based.
It doesn't even matter whether Apple believes that all music is information, and all information should be free. They own licensing contracts, NOT copyrights to the music. If the music industry shuts iTMS down for Apple's negligence in enforcing their law-given rights (I'm sure it's in the contract somewhere!), then we all lose. Yes, the music industry loses in the long run, but in the forseeable future, consumers lose.
No reasonable business would neglect to use a legal avenue to shut down a threat to their business models.
OK, it was a dumb comment by someone who doesn't know what he's talking about (and yeah, he's a columnist, but that is no insurance against ignorance).
But the article was actually pretty good.
Summary:
1. The open source world is pretty confusing and seems complicated to the not-previously-exposed.
2. More and more people are growing up in this culture and that's trouble for Microsoft.
3. Wouldn't it be great if all that legacy software (that gets sold as part of the assets when a company goes under, and then disappears from view forever) was released as open source. It's not doing anyone any good where it is.
The last point is a great one. The problem is that all that code is usually encumbered by licensing agreements with companies that are also defunct, and the successors are sometimes hard to find and/or don't know how to renegotiate a contract when they don't even recognize the products and licenses being discussed. That, and of course, that there's no monetary incentive to do so, certainly not one that outweighs the risk of getting sued a la SCO by the fifth-generation successor to the ownership of the assets of XYZ corp (d.1990, RIP)..
...contrast the "glacial" development of open source projects other than Linux to the "rapid and relevant" development of commercial projects such as Internet Explorer, right?
Maybe the author defines "Linux" as "all the stuff that comes on the 9-disc super Red Hat distribution".
In which case, I probably agree.
that's exactly what I was hoping someone would post. Thanks!
Now, looking through those pages, it looks like an auto-exploit pastes that bit onto the end of any pages it can find in the webserver's docroot...
The pages that Google reports as matches are safe because they aren't HTML pages. Google won't match text in javascript code, apparently. (maybe there's an option?)
So we still don't have a list of afflicted sites, but this helps.
> For the love of Cthulu, people, "architect" is a noun, not a verb.
Ya.
And for the love of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, "Cthulhu" is not spelled "Cthulu".
Duh.
It would be a great set up if it weren't true.
Unfortunately, it's very true. If you read your firewall log, you'll see the proof.
Remember that several worms give preference to IPs with the first three (then two) octets identical to the infector host. So on a big ISP net, scans will be higher than on a corporate net.. Twenty minutes is a long time.
Well,
Everything happens in context, of course. I really don't think VAXen was intended to be a humorous word, because DEC took itself pretty seriously in their 35 feet of documentation. (The very existence of that many official manuals seems funny now, but it was fairly typical for the time...Even Sun sold about 12 feet in the late 80's.)
My favorite DEC VAX manual: "Obsolete Features Manual". It was about 5 inches thick.
Anyway, I don't speak German.. But isn't "blinkenlichten" a real word?
"Boxen" is a dumb in-joke.
A company called DEC used to exist, and for a long time they made a class of machines which they named "VAX". Since they invented the word, and VAXes sounds weird, they decided the plural would be "VAXen".
"Boxen" is just a play on DEC's weirdness, started by people who knew the history, and perpetuated by people who don't.
But it's still dumb.
Someday, after the revolution, this will be remembered as something we should have taken more seriously...
The orignal...but has Microsoft actually, finally, produced an operating system that is capable of such breakthrough technology?
If so, good for them. The rare occasions when I have to get work done on a Microsoft operating system will be slightly less painful.
I know the PTO people have good hearts. They just need a few more domain experts.
"Our strategy was to do a good job on the 80% of common queries and ignore the other stuff."
This encapsulates every objection I have to all of Microsoft's products. This is their strategy with every market they approach. It makes a lot of business sense when operating from a monopoly position -- new products don't have to be "good", merely "good enough" -- but it guarantees that the product is inflexible, and its limitations are hard and technically arbitrary.
I can't give him credit for that. Microsoft is in the unique position of being able to single-handedly drive mass technological progress in the industry. They don't, and it's not because they fear their competitors, it's because they are irresponsible.
Microsoft is still riding the returns from smart marketing moves in the 1980s. Think about that next time you hear an industry wag opine about how "fast-moving" the technology industry is!