"download music/movies/TV shows" doesn't matter to some people. I, for instance, believe in respecting the rights of content creators. I'm phrasing it that way to avoid the usual arg about whether downloading that sort of thing, in a manner that's contrary to the wishes of the creator, constitutes theft. As a rule, I don't believe in infringing their rights, save where they try to infringe mine--for instance, I'll rip CDs to disk, or make backups of electronic downloads. So long as I don't distribute, that's Fair Use, so far as I'm concerned.
"no ability to download software" is completely wrong. There were several mechanisms, such as FTP.
"no online banking or bill-paying" many of which are completely broken, which leads to much fraud, identity theft, etc. The masses just want stuff, now. Corporations build it, often very poorly, while shifting as much of the financial load (recovering from identity theft, etc.) onto the masses as possible.
"no Wikipedia or Google" I have problems with Wikipedia, in that I've found them wrong too many times, and I've neither the time nor the desire for the Games of Wikifiddlers. Nor do I think Google is some unalloyed Good Thing. Raising either of these points on Slashdot leads to flamage, but the points are still valid.
It's curious that you refer to Google's revenue as "obscene," yet still seem to think that they're a completely Good Thing, as in "Take away the scale up and you lose Google." Without the scale, we wouldn't *need* Google, at least in a search context. Plus, even Google admits that as much as 20% of their index is garbage generated by spamdexers and robots.
I'm *not* saying Wikipedia or Google are evil, useless things. I use both, all the time. But always hearing that they're the greatest things since sliced bread is *so* stale.
This is all moot: the internet is going to do pretty much nothing but grow. Economics and Metcalfe's Law are going to drive it. To me, that's pretty much a no-brainer. But it's become much more of a sewer of spam, malware, automated attacks, astroturfing, consensus reality, privacy invasions, etc. I can see how people who were early users might be a bit nostalgic.
In it's early days, the Internet was an amazing thing. Now, it's *still* an amazing thing. I get a bit nostalgic, too, at times. But it still presents so much scope for interesting work. While I think Sturgeon, like Murphy, was an optimist, there are some total jewels out there, in terms of Web sites, development tools, security tools, pretty much name your own category, in fact. I pretty much regard Wikipedia and Google as jewels in the rough, BTW.
Almost *nothing* in life is a proven, unalloyed good. Not Google, not Wikipedia, not the introduction of the masses to the Internet. On a pessimistic day, I'd strike the 'almost'.
Not sure what you meant by, "the middle of the network." A decent network design will likely have all of this happening on the DMZ. One positive thing about doing things this way (in addition to optimizing WAN traffic) would be that endpointing before the host allows you to place a network intrusion sensor on the wire.
If you have to comply with policies that require NIDS & retention of their logs, you don't have any other good option that won't load the host. That load will be disk I/O and it's associated CPU cost, or quite a bit more CPU and network I/O, if you're logging (possibly encrypting again) to a remote log host.
Depending upon exactly how your DMZ is configured (and what regs/policies are involved, how carefully you control access, etc.), you might not even need to re-encrypt between the appliance and the host, which could shrink host CPU SSL overhead to nothing.
As usual, it all depends upon the specific environment.
I can't ago along with that. Cell phones, crackberries, the Internet, etc., tend to have people putting in more work time in what used to down time. I don't them bookmarked, but I've read a couple of news articles about the amount of vacation time actually taken is seeing something of a decline.
So productivity is up, which is what allows pay raises--companies can pay more without having to raise their prices. But pay *isn't* going up (unless you are a CEO currently making 450 times the average worker's compensation) in relation to the cost of medical care (and corporations are shrinking their support for that), etc.
The squeeze on the middle class is real.
What you're advocating is simply exposing elementary children to higher pressures, in the hope that it will somehow prepare them instead of damaging them. I don't have the background to know if any damage would actually be done, but I'd advocate fixing the problems with a system that's rapidly getting out of control, and letting be children, rather then risk it.
One advantage of having an advanced society: a higher quality of life across all age brackets. To my mind, if we fail in that, we're rolling our society back. Where would that end? I'm sure there are many coporations that would happily roll things back to the working conditions of the early Industrial Revolution. Six day work week the standard, small children in dangerous textile mills, etc.
Again, it's past time to fix problems, not just attempt to prepare our elementary school children for The Sweatshop of the Future. Doing less is either admitting that our system is already irretrievably fscked up (in which case you probably need to be thinking in terms of a revolution) or that you simply don't care enough to try to fix things (which doesn't say anything good about how you discharge your responsibilities as a parent).
Somebody please mod parent up. To my mind, the people creating the Linux FHS were under too much pressure from vendors (who just needed *something*) toward the end. And of course some Linux vendors still don't follow the resulting doc...
HP created a doc which defines the layout called the 10FS for HP-UX 10.0, which I believe was done to allow them to advertise the system as Unix95 compatible. It may still be on 11i systems (it was on the early ones, as a.ps file, or it's available at http://docs.hp.com/en/5963-8942/index.html). It's interesting reading, if you're only familiar with Linux and would like some insight into how a commercial Unix designed to accommodate large installations was done.
But that doc defines/etc as "Machine-specific configuration and administration databases. No executables invoked by users". In an ideal world, I don't think anything with the executable bit set should live in/etc. My inner Security Guy wants to be able to mount/etc read-only, at least in hardened environments.
To keep this on-topic, I'd like to mention that in at least some environments, hearing/etc/ referred to as 'et cetera' was handy, in that it allowed you to immediately spot the noob. I've never heard old hands pronounce it any way but 'etsee'. But it's function was very much et cetera, not 'extended tool chest' or some other nonsense. It's about how people sort things out. You divide things into major categories, and you're usually left with a small number of things that just seem to defy categorization, unless you want to expand the count of major categories to the point where they're simply no longer major. They go into an 'et cetera' bucket. Duh.
Some meatware systems ship with an empty/commonsense. I'm against it, but what can you do? It's been a standard since forever.
No harm, no foul. I've learned a lot from following your links, and it was all about things I should have paid more attention to for--years. If there's something more I could ask, I'm not aware of what that might be.
I'll keep poking at it. Who knows? Now and again people who are deeply knowledgeable re: things I have no clue about post here. Part of my love/hate relationship with Slashdot.
BTW, the *first* science with no predictive power that I got interested in was archeology. Was digging out a trench for a drainage line in Santa Fe, New Mexico (Yeah, she was cute, too. I'm hopeless, that way.) and ran across *many* pottery fragments. Clean them up, then wet them, and Anasazi patterns leap into view. It was probably a 'had to be there' sort of thing, but I *was* there, and it made an impression.
It was highly cool, and I've never forgotten it. Buy a couple of books (and some decent geo maps) that bring out the context, and the experience just gets deeper. I *groove* on this stuff, though it's a long way from the infosec stuff I do for a living these days.
Learning is it's own reward. Life is about having fun, and I mean to have a good time with it. I can't get away from infosec (you've no idea how I groove on security stuff, or the client time involved), but I try to work on free mapping and database software every week. The goal is help field scientists plot specific locations, in a Geographic Information Systems context.
It's way fun, and there's probably a university in your area that could use some help.
Many hours expended. Much learning done. I have now bootstrapped myself to a state of ignorance--which is an improvement. I *suspect* that the dread Argument of the Qualifier arose because you have PolySci exposure and I don't. Though I seem to be getting some. There's a huge backstory, involving military guy gets out and becomes technologist. I won't bore you with it, save to say that the one or two papers I read at the time (hey, she was really cute, and biology, at least, was working fine) seemed really weak on numbers--statistics with gaping holes, etc.
I basically wrote off a few things that called themselves sciences, but didn't seem to effectively speak in the language of science--mathematics. It seems that may have changed, at least somewhat, in the case of PolySci, in that there are now more numbers involved than I saw then. Though I have to tell you that the statistics still seem somewhat weak.
I'm not nearly as adverse to subjects with no (or weak) numbers as I used to be. For instance, I used to hate history (realize now that the teachers were uninspired) but then I got older and realized how stupid it was to have almost *become* history before knowing anything *of* history. A Realpolitik statistic, as it were. That's a reasonable baseline if you wanted to quantify stupid, BTW.
Assuming you've had some PolySci, and can advise, I've one more question before I burn more late-night hours trying to get a grasp of the overall landscape of the subject. I have to ask, as just identifying and reading the essentials could take months, unless there are a small number of cannonical textbooks you can point me to, as I don't have a lot of spare time. Does it have any predictive power?
If so, where should I point my reading? Is Wikipedia (found too many errors to generally trust it) currently regarded as anything resembling accurate in the field? I'm not going to claim PolySci not a science if it doesn't have any predictive power--anthropology seems to have little predictive power, for example, but I'm not certainly going to claim it's not a science.
"undermining a local broadcaster who won't get the ratings they require to sell advertising"
That's a point I hadn't considered at all. Perhaps because the area where I live doesn't have a lot of local broadcasters, if I were to define that by how many television stations can deliver a watchable broadcast signal. Just checked, and I still only get two stations, plus one that is very marginal. The thing is, they don't deliver much content that with any meaning, other than the one that's PBS. The others already deliver local news via Web, and other than that, all they have is a couple of 'morning' shows that are pretty lame. These channels are serving several towns and cities with populations from 20-100K. So I doubt that they can afford very high production values, in any event. Plus, not *one* of them is locally owned.
If I expand the definition to include the closest major metro area, which is about an hour away, and population around 1M, the situation is somewhat better. In my case (sample size of 1) those small-town stations (none are in _my_ small town) will probably never be relevant to me, other than the news they deliver via Web. And local small newspaper's Web sites do as good a job there.
So are these small-city broadcasters already irrelevant to me? Probably. Regional? More, but not hugely, relevant. That's kind of depressing--I'm not a fan of big media. But it seems that it's rise was inevitable, if even a statistical outlier such as myself was part of it. OTOH, the 'narrowcast' (ability to reach small segments) capabilities of the Web supply most of needs for things that are time-sensitive.
So how much should I care? To what extent is this an iresitable trend; a done deal? Much food for thought, and thanks for the post. It's pretty clear that one thing I should do is that when an advert on a local channel takes me into a local merchant, I should tell the merchant. I've always tried to do that, as it's a good practice in supporting local businesses--it's hard to get feedback on their advertising spend. But I should get a lot better at it; I should form the habit of doing it each and every time.
But that doesn't really support local broadcasters, does it? I've spoken to the guys peddling adverts--they give demographics you don't know if you can trust, how well that translates to your widget, etc. The local merchant is usually buying in blindly, to a process that marketing folk from the broadcaster are going to attempt to 'tune' for him. An ongoing process that sells more adverts. Shades of the advert guy from the old WKRP series...
What's your idea of a resolution? How does that local (remember that in my case none are locally owned--well the PBS station may be) broadcaster not only stay in business, but deliver programming I want to see? What steps do I take in doing my bit to ensure that?
IAMNAC, but temperatures and salinity are probably seen more as a result than a driver of climate change. For instance, good salinity data should give us another window into ice sheet melt rates. This isn't a causality claim.
Init100 covered most of what I would have said, but I do have one additional point. Others respin and redistribute Fedora. This was mentioned in the mailing list. I have commend the Fedora Project for not breaking with what they've said their principles were since Day 1, and hosing those folks.
If people don't want to use Distro X due to it's fundamental nature, fine. I'm that way about a couple myself. I just use a distro that works for me. There are plenty of other distros out there, and lot of selection advice to be had on the Web. You might have to do some research, and try a couple (I know my requirements are very specific, and the differences involve things average users don't care about at all) but they'll find something.
A lot of people seem to want a single unified distro--usually desktop users. Sure, I can see some advantages to it. But I can see some disadvantages, as well. It's absolutely not going to happen, in any case. Nor is Windows going away anytime soon. It's not about the "At this rate" you mentioned in connection with Vista. Vista can't lose. The only "rate" that might vary is the actual uptake rate, decided mainly in the preload world. But it's not going to go away because of Linux.
Neither OS can kill the other, at the moment. I'm cool with that. The largest affect Vista will have on me over the next few years will be cheaper RAM, and good things are happening on other fronts--more governments switching to open document formats, etc.
I would see us as entering the knee of the curve on a Linux uptake graph. But it's going to look like a curve, not a hockey stick. I could wish for a hockey stick, but I just don't see that happening. I've my own ideas on why that is, but that won't really be sorted out until after the fact. It will probably prove to be a lot more complex than anyone is currently thinking, if history is any guide.
From TFA: "The energy-efficient, battery-powered glider carries sensors to measure oceanic conditions including salinity and temperature -- information that is key to understanding climate change."
Which sounds reasonable to me. No causality claims were made. These are scientists, with anomalous data which they're quite naturally curious about. That's what they do. Why are you so quick to assume that wild claims are being made? If it's magma, or a new conveyor belt, fine. Knowing about it is a Good Thing, as is nearly anything that may improve models, and allow more appropriate actions to be taken by one and all--people, companies, and nations.
OK, now we can peacefully and democratically coexist:). And now I've a good link to add to my collection as well. I'd never heard of Prof. Rummel. I can see that his Web site is going to be time consuming, and I'm almost out of weekend. I guess I'll be starting Monday a bit tired.
Indeed it does, but I was on about sendmail.com, not.org. The commercial company founded by Allman for sendmail support. You'd think that the commercial company founded for support would have a prominent and functioning link to their security page, right? As a sort of, well, *support* thing? Nope.
"Oh, please," yourself. Revisionism needs to be done better than this bungle to have any hope of success.
I've been hearing this addage, fairly frequently, for 30+ years. But in it's *actual* classic form, which is pretty much as you originally posted it, not with the 'with each others' qualifier you've just added. In which form I have *never* heard it, until now. So if you actually thought "everyone had heard about it by now" in it's qualified form, you are very much mistaken.
I strongly suspect that anyone who can use a search engine will find many more references to this adage without your revisionist qualifier than with it.
"I can't formulate a better argument, but it's just a gut feeling that the profit gained from digital distribution (it's GOT to be high; it's not like you need more physical material to distribute more copies, except maybe server capacity and bandwidth) would be much higher than the lost revenue from the broadcast."
Gut feelings can lead you astray. There's a huge myth that bandwidth is cheap. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor is server capacity cheap--not at a level where you can provide high-quality video downloads to massive numbers of people. The hardware requirements are enormous. Probably larger than you'd believe, unless you have some experience in this area.
DVD blanks are comparatively cheap. That's the basis of the NetFlix business model, and it seems to be working for them. That's probably not a solution if you enjoy some network weekly to the point where you need to talk about it around the watercooler, hang out on their Web discussion fora, or whatever. To some people, such as myself, I don't care if most network weeklies are delayed 'till they get to the SciFi, or other low-budget (Seen many of their movies? One-star mutant bug flicks are so 50s.) POS channel. I've no water-cooler imperative for most weeklies. The quality is usually so poor I'll wait until roughly forever, and even then, I'll only watch via something like Tivo. I won't sit through 30% commercials (though I'll go back and watch eye-catching ones I glimpse while skipping forward, so advertising models aren't totally dead) to watch marginal crap, when I could just go read a book.
For some things, like The Daily Show, timeliness does matter, or context is lost, and you should take it up with your provider if you have a problem. Enough complaints can get some action, so do a bit of organizing. But actual time-relevance is rare, if you think about.
I see NetFlix as pretty much meeting my needs for the few movies worth watching, without buying DVDs and providing a higher level of support for the RIAA. I refuse to go to the local theater--I value my sanity. So basically, DVD rentals (I admit to the rare purchase), and no problem with most any delays on weeklies.
Another cool thing about not having the 'must-watch-weekly-ASAP' mindset is that I occasionally leave three episodes on the drive, and watch them all at once. Skipping through commercials, that's the equivalent, time-wise, of a movie, if the episode are one hour, and they're about 30% commercials (the norm here in the US). Right around two hours. The downside is that the continuous stream can also drive home how bad some shows really are--to the point you just never watch them again.
If you relax, and don't treat things as time-sensitive unless the material really is, you burn less time in front of the tube, and have a better (in a less crappy sense, anyway) experience when you do watch. For less money. Media companies do a very good job of convincing people that something Must Be Watched Now. They're so good that most have been completely conditioned, without even realizing it.
Some have even been so conditioned that if they shrink the tube hours, they don't know WTF to do with the time. I've seen that, when a couple of buddies got laid off, money got tight, and they cancelled cable. It was both sad and very, very, scary.
As for the quality of your post: let me guess--you also complain about slow, bloated software, right? The old, "Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away," adage? Users have several orders of magnitude more compute and storage power than 'back in whatever day' yet personal computers seem little more responsive, etc.
Don't feel lonely. There's a large population of lugnuts like you, who, if they think of CS at all, largely carp about how some CS departments haven't become current technology de jour tradeschools. Some, unfortunately, have, but that's a whole different discussion, which has been seen on Slashdot time and again.
Algorithm research is important, as is having at least something of a grasp of algorithms. In *your* next programming exercise, since you seem to regard sort efficiency as 'esoteric', feel free to reinvent the bubble sort. Also, tout it as the Next Great Thing, and submit patches against all your favorite apps. That will get you your twenty seconds of fame, I assure you.
Sometimes I love Slashdot--but then I read a post from some random AC idiot like you: the proverbial lowest common denominator. Maybe you should restrain your efforts toward what you seem to regard as cool snarky posts, watch a thread (about which you plainly know nothing) develop, and maybe freaking *learn* something.
OTOH, maybe I'm just bitter right now, because I've just been doing a search through Google news on climate change, and I'm pretty much convinced that the last thing the human race needs right now is people like you.
...which I don't really think now occur in sendmail at a higher rate than some other infrastructure bloatware. People are sometimes very slow to upgrade from very old versions, when problems were more common. For whatever reason (I lean toward complexity of administration), I see this a lot more often with mail systems than other infrastructure plumbing.
But here's a bit of irony: the ACMQueue article would seem to indicate that Allman believes in transparency. OK, the sendmail security page lives at: http://www.sendmail.com/security/
But you have to know that, find it via Google, or just guess. When the page loads, you'll find a pagetop navigation bug at the Resources secion. But pull open the Resources section, and you find no link to it. Nor will you see it from the site map.
My overall take is that if you already know the ins and outs of sendmail admin (and other bits that it may be talking to, such as LDAP) you're running software which carries no greater than mainstream risk.
That said--this is complex software, and complexity is the enemy of security. If you're planning a new installation (particularly a small installation), and don't need all of sendmail's features, you should consider possible alternatives offerred by your Unix/Linux vendor.
I used to believe that too. It was actually quite the cherished notion. One of the worst things about our invasion of Iraq--and reading the many ugly truths that have come out regarding the run-up to the war--is that if I still want to believe in that notion, I'm now required to *not* believe in the US being a democracy.
The two statements: "democracies don't make war" and "US is a democracy" have been proven, in my eyes, to be mutually exclusive.
Only place I disagree is "Word processor == memos, letter home to Grandma."
Neither of these typically needs word processor overhead, unless you need graphics (logo or whatever) in your memo. I have templates for both, for use in my text editor, which is pretty much always running, anyway. The memo template never gets used any more, though. It's been completely subsumed by email.
Plain old text is also going to remain readable for much longer than any word processor file format. If any of those letters might need to be read fifty years from now, even (maybe especially) from sentimentality, a lot of people might be wishing they were ASCII.
About the only thing I use a word processor for any more is printing envelopes--and that's a legacy thing I just haven't bothered to fix. A few OOo envelopes for stuff that has to go by snail mail, monthly.
There are a couple of sample chapters available. http://manning.com/maher/ch03.pdf is all about using perl as a better grep'ing engine--better in *many* ways. It's 39 pages of goodness, and what convinced me, rather than the review here. YMMV, but I've been burned by portability issues in various flavors of shells, greps, and other tools.
At the moment: man -k grep |grep ' (1' | wc -l 16 but I've also worked with systems where that would have returned 3--and they were all incompatible with their 'equivalents' on this machine.
Then there are the vast differences in shells, ad nauseum. If you only work with one Unixy OS, it's probably not a big issue for you, though it might still make things easier, depending upon exactly what you do. But many people who've made the intellectual investment to acquire decent bash, awk, and sed skills are also working across disparate environments. Perl can cut down on the combinatorial explosion of syntax differences across the various tools.
I still use grep (and some others) all the time, as in the example above. I'm not arguing that Perl should be treated as a complete replacement for grep and other tools. But it sure can simplify your life, particularly as it's widely installed. For instance, I do a lot of work with minimal or close to minimal (hardened) Linux systems. On some SuSE systems I'm currently dealing with, you don't get Python in that configuration, but you do get Perl.
It's not a perfect solution, by any means. At least one commercial Unix system I have to deal with doesn't provide Perl by default, and policy prevents me from installing it. Some modules on the CPAN are, IMO, crappy enough that I don't *care* whether they're portable. I have other complaints. But there've been many situations where Perl saved either time, or my ass.
BTW, on the site mentioned above, there's an ebook version for $22.50, a source code download, etc. It's worth a look, if for no other reason that the sample chapters are informative and enjoyable.
"I think everyone in any company should spend two weeks working in the company's IT group as part of orientation and I think seeing and hearing the issues first hand from that side of the fence will generate a different set of articles from this one."
Maybe following IT folk through the job--but *working*? Few companies could survive it...:)
Some of what you've said is contradicted by: http://frank.harvard.edu/~paulh/unpublished/fermi. htm which is based upon the recollections of Herb York, who was present when Fermi posed the quesion over a regular lunch at Fuller Lodge, Los Alamos, New Mexico, according to the source above.
Can you supply sources?
frank.harvard.edu is an interesting site, BTW. I like the image sequence of Frank (Drake) meeting frank (server) at: http://frank.harvard.edu/frank/
Slashdot Mirror
"download music/movies/TV shows" doesn't matter to some people. I, for instance, believe in respecting the rights of content creators. I'm phrasing it that way to avoid the usual arg about whether downloading that sort of thing, in a manner that's contrary to the wishes of the creator, constitutes theft. As a rule, I don't believe in infringing their rights, save where they try to infringe mine--for instance, I'll rip CDs to disk, or make backups of electronic downloads. So long as I don't distribute, that's Fair Use, so far as I'm concerned.
"no ability to download software" is completely wrong. There were several mechanisms, such as FTP.
"no online banking or bill-paying" many of which are completely broken, which leads to much fraud, identity theft, etc. The masses just want stuff, now. Corporations build it, often very poorly, while shifting as much of the financial load (recovering from identity theft, etc.) onto the masses as possible.
"no Wikipedia or Google" I have problems with Wikipedia, in that I've found them wrong too many times, and I've neither the time nor the desire for the Games of Wikifiddlers. Nor do I think Google is some unalloyed Good Thing. Raising either of these points on Slashdot leads to flamage, but the points are still valid.
It's curious that you refer to Google's revenue as "obscene," yet still seem to think that they're a completely Good Thing, as in "Take away the scale up and you lose Google." Without the scale, we wouldn't *need* Google, at least in a search context. Plus, even Google admits that as much as 20% of their index is garbage generated by spamdexers and robots.
I'm *not* saying Wikipedia or Google are evil, useless things. I use both, all the time. But always hearing that they're the greatest things since sliced bread is *so* stale.
This is all moot: the internet is going to do pretty much nothing but grow. Economics and Metcalfe's Law are going to drive it. To me, that's pretty much a no-brainer. But it's become much more of a sewer of spam, malware, automated attacks, astroturfing, consensus reality, privacy invasions, etc. I can see how people who were early users might be a bit nostalgic.
In it's early days, the Internet was an amazing thing. Now, it's *still* an amazing thing. I get a bit nostalgic, too, at times. But it still presents so much scope for interesting work. While I think Sturgeon, like Murphy, was an optimist, there are some total jewels out there, in terms of Web sites, development tools, security tools, pretty much name your own category, in fact. I pretty much regard Wikipedia and Google as jewels in the rough, BTW.
Almost *nothing* in life is a proven, unalloyed good. Not Google, not Wikipedia, not the introduction of the masses to the Internet. On a pessimistic day, I'd strike the 'almost'.
Not sure what you meant by, "the middle of the network." A decent network design will likely have all of this happening on the DMZ. One positive thing about doing things this way (in addition to optimizing WAN traffic) would be that endpointing before the host allows you to place a network intrusion sensor on the wire.
If you have to comply with policies that require NIDS & retention of their logs, you don't have any other good option that won't load the host. That load will be disk I/O and it's associated CPU cost, or quite a bit more CPU and network I/O, if you're logging (possibly encrypting again) to a remote log host.
Depending upon exactly how your DMZ is configured (and what regs/policies are involved, how carefully you control access, etc.), you might not even need to re-encrypt between the appliance and the host, which could shrink host CPU SSL overhead to nothing.
As usual, it all depends upon the specific environment.
I can't ago along with that. Cell phones, crackberries, the Internet, etc., tend to have people putting in more work time in what used to down time. I don't them bookmarked, but I've read a couple of news articles about the amount of vacation time actually taken is seeing something of a decline.
So productivity is up, which is what allows pay raises--companies can pay more without having to raise their prices. But pay *isn't* going up (unless you are a CEO currently making 450 times the average worker's compensation) in relation to the cost of medical care (and corporations are shrinking their support for that), etc.
The squeeze on the middle class is real.
What you're advocating is simply exposing elementary children to higher pressures, in the hope that it will somehow prepare them instead of damaging them. I don't have the background to know if any damage would actually be done, but I'd advocate fixing the problems with a system that's rapidly getting out of control, and letting be children, rather then risk it.
One advantage of having an advanced society: a higher quality of life across all age brackets. To my mind, if we fail in that, we're rolling our society back. Where would that end? I'm sure there are many coporations that would happily roll things back to the working conditions of the early Industrial Revolution. Six day work week the standard, small children in dangerous textile mills, etc.
Again, it's past time to fix problems, not just attempt to prepare our elementary school children for The Sweatshop of the Future. Doing less is either admitting that our system is already irretrievably fscked up (in which case you probably need to be thinking in terms of a revolution) or that you simply don't care enough to try to fix things (which doesn't say anything good about how you discharge your responsibilities as a parent).
Somebody please mod parent up. To my mind, the people creating the Linux FHS were under too much pressure from vendors (who just needed *something*) toward the end. And of course some Linux vendors still don't follow the resulting doc...
.ps file, or it's available at http://docs.hp.com/en/5963-8942/index.html). It's interesting reading, if you're only familiar with Linux and would like some insight into how a commercial Unix designed to accommodate large installations was done.
/etc as "Machine-specific configuration and administration databases. No executables invoked by users". In an ideal world, I don't think anything with the executable bit set should live in /etc. My inner Security Guy wants to be able to mount /etc read-only, at least in hardened environments.
/etc/ referred to as 'et cetera' was handy, in that it allowed you to immediately spot the noob. I've never heard old hands pronounce it any way but 'etsee'. But it's function was very much et cetera, not 'extended tool chest' or some other nonsense. It's about how people sort things out. You divide things into major categories, and you're usually left with a small number of things that just seem to defy categorization, unless you want to expand the count of major categories to the point where they're simply no longer major. They go into an 'et cetera' bucket. Duh.
/commonsense. I'm against it, but what can you do? It's been a standard since forever.
HP created a doc which defines the layout called the 10FS for HP-UX 10.0, which I believe was done to allow them to advertise the system as Unix95 compatible. It may still be on 11i systems (it was on the early ones, as a
But that doc defines
To keep this on-topic, I'd like to mention that in at least some environments, hearing
Some meatware systems ship with an empty
No harm, no foul. I've learned a lot from following your links, and it was all about things I should have paid more attention to for--years. If there's something more I could ask, I'm not aware of what that might be.
I'll keep poking at it. Who knows? Now and again people who are deeply knowledgeable re: things I have no clue about post here. Part of my love/hate relationship with Slashdot.
BTW, the *first* science with no predictive power that I got interested in was archeology. Was digging out a trench for a drainage line in Santa Fe, New Mexico (Yeah, she was cute, too. I'm hopeless, that way.) and ran across *many* pottery fragments. Clean them up, then wet them, and Anasazi patterns leap into view. It was probably a 'had to be there' sort of thing, but I *was* there, and it made an impression.
It was highly cool, and I've never forgotten it. Buy a couple of books (and some decent geo maps) that bring out the context, and the experience just gets deeper. I *groove* on this stuff, though it's a long way from the infosec stuff I do for a living these days.
Learning is it's own reward. Life is about having fun, and I mean to have a good time with it. I can't get away from infosec (you've no idea how I groove on security stuff, or the client time involved), but I try to work on free mapping and database software every week. The goal is help field scientists plot specific locations, in a Geographic Information Systems context.
It's way fun, and there's probably a university in your area that could use some help.
Many hours expended. Much learning done. I have now bootstrapped myself to a state of ignorance--which is an improvement. I *suspect* that the dread Argument of the Qualifier arose because you have PolySci exposure and I don't. Though I seem to be getting some. There's a huge backstory, involving military guy gets out and becomes technologist. I won't bore you with it, save to say that the one or two papers I read at the time (hey, she was really cute, and biology, at least, was working fine) seemed really weak on numbers--statistics with gaping holes, etc.
I basically wrote off a few things that called themselves sciences, but didn't seem to effectively speak in the language of science--mathematics. It seems that may have changed, at least somewhat, in the case of PolySci, in that there are now more numbers involved than I saw then. Though I have to tell you that the statistics still seem somewhat weak.
I'm not nearly as adverse to subjects with no (or weak) numbers as I used to be. For instance, I used to hate history (realize now that the teachers were uninspired) but then I got older and realized how stupid it was to have almost *become* history before knowing anything *of* history. A Realpolitik statistic, as it were. That's a reasonable baseline if you wanted to quantify stupid, BTW.
Assuming you've had some PolySci, and can advise, I've one more question before I burn more late-night hours trying to get a grasp of the overall landscape of the subject. I have to ask, as just identifying and reading the essentials could take months, unless there are a small number of cannonical textbooks you can point me to, as I don't have a lot of spare time. Does it have any predictive power?
If so, where should I point my reading? Is Wikipedia (found too many errors to generally trust it) currently regarded as anything resembling accurate in the field? I'm not going to claim PolySci not a science if it doesn't have any predictive power--anthropology seems to have little predictive power, for example, but I'm not certainly going to claim it's not a science.
"undermining a local broadcaster who won't get the ratings they require to sell advertising"
That's a point I hadn't considered at all. Perhaps because the area where I live doesn't have a lot of local broadcasters, if I were to define that by how many television stations can deliver a watchable broadcast signal. Just checked, and I still only get two stations, plus one that is very marginal. The thing is, they don't deliver much content that with any meaning, other than the one that's PBS. The others already deliver local news via Web, and other than that, all they have is a couple of 'morning' shows that are pretty lame. These channels are serving several towns and cities with populations from 20-100K. So I doubt that they can afford very high production values, in any event. Plus, not *one* of them is locally owned.
If I expand the definition to include the closest major metro area, which is about an hour away, and population around 1M, the situation is somewhat better. In my case (sample size of 1) those small-town stations (none are in _my_ small town) will probably never be relevant to me, other than the news they deliver via Web. And local small newspaper's Web sites do as good a job there.
So are these small-city broadcasters already irrelevant to me? Probably. Regional? More, but not hugely, relevant. That's kind of depressing--I'm not a fan of big media. But it seems that it's rise was inevitable, if even a statistical outlier such as myself was part of it. OTOH, the 'narrowcast' (ability to reach small segments) capabilities of the Web supply most of needs for things that are time-sensitive.
So how much should I care? To what extent is this an iresitable trend; a done deal? Much food for thought, and thanks for the post. It's pretty clear that one thing I should do is that when an advert on a local channel takes me into a local merchant, I should tell the merchant. I've always tried to do that, as it's a good practice in supporting local businesses--it's hard to get feedback on their advertising spend. But I should get a lot better at it; I should form the habit of doing it each and every time.
But that doesn't really support local broadcasters, does it? I've spoken to the guys peddling adverts--they give demographics you don't know if you can trust, how well that translates to your widget, etc. The local merchant is usually buying in blindly, to a process that marketing folk from the broadcaster are going to attempt to 'tune' for him. An ongoing process that sells more adverts. Shades of the advert guy from the old WKRP series...
What's your idea of a resolution? How does that local (remember that in my case none are locally owned--well the PBS station may be) broadcaster not only stay in business, but deliver programming I want to see? What steps do I take in doing my bit to ensure that?
IAMNAC, but temperatures and salinity are probably seen more as a result than a driver of climate change. For instance, good salinity data should give us another window into ice sheet melt rates. This isn't a causality claim.
Init100 covered most of what I would have said, but I do have one additional point. Others respin and redistribute Fedora. This was mentioned in the mailing list. I have commend the Fedora Project for not breaking with what they've said their principles were since Day 1, and hosing those folks.
If people don't want to use Distro X due to it's fundamental nature, fine. I'm that way about a couple myself. I just use a distro that works for me. There are plenty of other distros out there, and lot of selection advice to be had on the Web. You might have to do some research, and try a couple (I know my requirements are very specific, and the differences involve things average users don't care about at all) but they'll find something.
A lot of people seem to want a single unified distro--usually desktop users. Sure, I can see some advantages to it. But I can see some disadvantages, as well. It's absolutely not going to happen, in any case. Nor is Windows going away anytime soon. It's not about the "At this rate" you mentioned in connection with Vista. Vista can't lose. The only "rate" that might vary is the actual uptake rate, decided mainly in the preload world. But it's not going to go away because of Linux.
Neither OS can kill the other, at the moment. I'm cool with that. The largest affect Vista will have on me over the next few years will be cheaper RAM, and good things are happening on other fronts--more governments switching to open document formats, etc.
I would see us as entering the knee of the curve on a Linux uptake graph. But it's going to look like a curve, not a hockey stick. I could wish for a hockey stick, but I just don't see that happening. I've my own ideas on why that is, but that won't really be sorted out until after the fact. It will probably prove to be a lot more complex than anyone is currently thinking, if history is any guide.
Yeah, that would be sad, if it had happened. But it didn't. Please read TFA. No causality claims were made.
From TFA:
"The energy-efficient, battery-powered glider carries sensors to measure oceanic conditions including salinity and temperature -- information that is key to understanding climate change."
Which sounds reasonable to me. No causality claims were made. These are scientists, with anomalous data which they're quite naturally curious about. That's what they do. Why are you so quick to assume that wild claims are being made? If it's magma, or a new conveyor belt, fine. Knowing about it is a Good Thing, as is nearly anything that may improve models, and allow more appropriate actions to be taken by one and all--people, companies, and nations.
OK, now we can peacefully and democratically coexist :). And now I've a good link to add to my collection as well. I'd never heard of Prof. Rummel. I can see that his Web site is going to be time consuming, and I'm almost out of weekend. I guess I'll be starting Monday a bit tired.
Indeed it does, but I was on about sendmail.com, not .org. The commercial company founded by Allman for sendmail support. You'd think that the commercial company founded for support would have a prominent and functioning link to their security page, right? As a sort of, well, *support* thing? Nope.
"Oh, please," yourself. Revisionism needs to be done better than this bungle to have any hope of success.
3 /01-0912/features.html
I've been hearing this addage, fairly frequently, for 30+ years. But in it's *actual* classic form, which is pretty much as you originally posted it, not with the 'with each others' qualifier you've just added. In which form I have *never* heard it, until now. So if you actually thought "everyone had heard about it by now" in it's qualified form, you are very much mistaken.
For instance, you might read Bernard Lewis at:
http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/archive_new/PAW02-0
It's somewhat apropos of my post, informative material by a guy widely judged to be rather thoughtful, and contains the addage in question.
I strongly suspect that anyone who can use a search engine will find many more references to this adage without your revisionist qualifier than with it.
"I can't formulate a better argument, but it's just a gut feeling that the profit gained from digital distribution (it's GOT to be high; it's not like you need more physical material to distribute more copies, except maybe server capacity and bandwidth) would be much higher than the lost revenue from the broadcast."
Gut feelings can lead you astray. There's a huge myth that bandwidth is cheap. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor is server capacity cheap--not at a level where you can provide high-quality video downloads to massive numbers of people. The hardware requirements are enormous. Probably larger than you'd believe, unless you have some experience in this area.
DVD blanks are comparatively cheap. That's the basis of the NetFlix business model, and it seems to be working for them. That's probably not a solution if you enjoy some network weekly to the point where you need to talk about it around the watercooler, hang out on their Web discussion fora, or whatever. To some people, such as myself, I don't care if most network weeklies are delayed 'till they get to the SciFi, or other low-budget (Seen many of their movies? One-star mutant bug flicks are so 50s.) POS channel. I've no water-cooler imperative for most weeklies. The quality is usually so poor I'll wait until roughly forever, and even then, I'll only watch via something like Tivo. I won't sit through 30% commercials (though I'll go back and watch eye-catching ones I glimpse while skipping forward, so advertising models aren't totally dead) to watch marginal crap, when I could just go read a book.
For some things, like The Daily Show, timeliness does matter, or context is lost, and you should take it up with your provider if you have a problem. Enough complaints can get some action, so do a bit of organizing. But actual time-relevance is rare, if you think about.
I see NetFlix as pretty much meeting my needs for the few movies worth watching, without buying DVDs and providing a higher level of support for the RIAA. I refuse to go to the local theater--I value my sanity. So basically, DVD rentals (I admit to the rare purchase), and no problem with most any delays on weeklies.
Another cool thing about not having the 'must-watch-weekly-ASAP' mindset is that I occasionally leave three episodes on the drive, and watch them all at once. Skipping through commercials, that's the equivalent, time-wise, of a movie, if the episode are one hour, and they're about 30% commercials (the norm here in the US). Right around two hours. The downside is that the continuous stream can also drive home how bad some shows really are--to the point you just never watch them again.
If you relax, and don't treat things as time-sensitive unless the material really is, you burn less time in front of the tube, and have a better (in a less crappy sense, anyway) experience when you do watch. For less money. Media companies do a very good job of convincing people that something Must Be Watched Now. They're so good that most have been completely conditioned, without even realizing it.
Some have even been so conditioned that if they shrink the tube hours, they don't know WTF to do with the time. I've seen that, when a couple of buddies got laid off, money got tight, and they cancelled cable. It was both sad and very, very, scary.
Explanation: pretty much bogus.
As for the quality of your post: let me guess--you also complain about slow, bloated software, right? The old, "Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away," adage? Users have several orders of magnitude more compute and storage power than 'back in whatever day' yet personal computers seem little more responsive, etc.
Don't feel lonely. There's a large population of lugnuts like you, who, if they think of CS at all, largely carp about how some CS departments haven't become current technology de jour tradeschools. Some, unfortunately, have, but that's a whole different discussion, which has been seen on Slashdot time and again.
Algorithm research is important, as is having at least something of a grasp of algorithms. In *your* next programming exercise, since you seem to regard sort efficiency as 'esoteric', feel free to reinvent the bubble sort. Also, tout it as the Next Great Thing, and submit patches against all your favorite apps. That will get you your twenty seconds of fame, I assure you.
Sometimes I love Slashdot--but then I read a post from some random AC idiot like you: the proverbial lowest common denominator. Maybe you should restrain your efforts toward what you seem to regard as cool snarky posts, watch a thread (about which you plainly know nothing) develop, and maybe freaking *learn* something.
OTOH, maybe I'm just bitter right now, because I've just been doing a search through Google news on climate change, and I'm pretty much convinced that the last thing the human race needs right now is people like you.
...which I don't really think now occur in sendmail at a higher rate than some other infrastructure bloatware. People are sometimes very slow to upgrade from very old versions, when problems were more common. For whatever reason (I lean toward complexity of administration), I see this a lot more often with mail systems than other infrastructure plumbing.
But here's a bit of irony: the ACMQueue article would seem to indicate that Allman believes in transparency. OK, the sendmail security page lives at:
http://www.sendmail.com/security/
But you have to know that, find it via Google, or just guess. When the page loads, you'll find a pagetop navigation bug at the Resources secion. But pull open the Resources section, and you find no link to it. Nor will you see it from the site map.
My overall take is that if you already know the ins and outs of sendmail admin (and other bits that it may be talking to, such as LDAP) you're running software which carries no greater than mainstream risk.
That said--this is complex software, and complexity is the enemy of security. If you're planning a new installation (particularly a small installation), and don't need all of sendmail's features, you should consider possible alternatives offerred by your Unix/Linux vendor.
I hate to be a spelling Nazi, but s/Nuclujar/Nukyoulur.
"...democracies don't make war (not even USA)."
I used to believe that too. It was actually quite the cherished notion. One of the worst things about our invasion of Iraq--and reading the many ugly truths that have come out regarding the run-up to the war--is that if I still want to believe in that notion, I'm now required to *not* believe in the US being a democracy.
The two statements:
"democracies don't make war"
and
"US is a democracy"
have been proven, in my eyes, to be mutually exclusive.
Only place I disagree is "Word processor == memos, letter home to Grandma."
Neither of these typically needs word processor overhead, unless you need graphics (logo or whatever) in your memo. I have templates for both, for use in my text editor, which is pretty much always running, anyway. The memo template never gets used any more, though. It's been completely subsumed by email.
Plain old text is also going to remain readable for much longer than any word processor file format. If any of those letters might need to be read fifty years from now, even (maybe especially) from sentimentality, a lot of people might be wishing they were ASCII.
About the only thing I use a word processor for any more is printing envelopes--and that's a legacy thing I just haven't bothered to fix. A few OOo envelopes for stuff that has to go by snail mail, monthly.
There are a couple of sample chapters available.
http://manning.com/maher/ch03.pdf
is all about using perl as a better grep'ing engine--better in *many* ways. It's 39 pages of goodness, and what convinced me, rather than the review here. YMMV, but I've been burned by portability issues in various flavors of shells, greps, and other tools.
At the moment:
man -k grep |grep ' (1' | wc -l
16
but I've also worked with systems where that would have returned 3--and they were all incompatible with their 'equivalents' on this machine.
Then there are the vast differences in shells, ad nauseum. If you only work with one Unixy OS, it's probably not a big issue for you, though it might still make things easier, depending upon exactly what you do. But many people who've made the intellectual investment to acquire decent bash, awk, and sed skills are also working across disparate environments. Perl can cut down on the combinatorial explosion of syntax differences across the various tools.
I still use grep (and some others) all the time, as in the example above. I'm not arguing that Perl should be treated as a complete replacement for grep and other tools. But it sure can simplify your life, particularly as it's widely installed. For instance, I do a lot of work with minimal or close to minimal (hardened) Linux systems. On some SuSE systems I'm currently dealing with, you don't get Python in that configuration, but you do get Perl.
It's not a perfect solution, by any means. At least one commercial Unix system I have to deal with doesn't provide Perl by default, and policy prevents me from installing it. Some modules on the CPAN are, IMO, crappy enough that I don't *care* whether they're portable. I have other complaints. But there've been many situations where Perl saved either time, or my ass.
BTW, on the site mentioned above, there's an ebook version for $22.50, a source code download, etc. It's worth a look, if for no other reason that the sample chapters are informative and enjoyable.
"I think everyone in any company should spend two weeks working in the company's IT group as part of orientation and I think seeing and hearing the issues first hand from that side of the fence will generate a different set of articles from this one."
:)
Maybe following IT folk through the job--but *working*? Few companies could survive it...
Well, sure. But you have to admit, it's a million laughs.
Addendum--found some details about the original circumstances of the question. Wikipedia is incorrect (no huge shock) in referring to it as possibly apocryphal. Details are above, in http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=223140 &threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=180720 48#18085404
Some of what you've said is contradicted by:. htm
http://frank.harvard.edu/~paulh/unpublished/fermi
which is based upon the recollections of Herb York, who was present when Fermi posed the quesion over a regular lunch at Fuller Lodge, Los Alamos, New Mexico, according to the source above.
Can you supply sources?
frank.harvard.edu is an interesting site, BTW. I like the image sequence of Frank (Drake) meeting frank (server) at:
http://frank.harvard.edu/frank/