"So the security world used to be pretty hostile to MS, before, you know, XPSP2, MSRC got taken seriously, etc."
Used to be? We still are. XPSP2 didn't hold up long. Last July we had HD Moore's "Month of Browser Bugs," which finished up like this: MSIE: 25 Apple Safari: 2 Mozilla: 2 Opera: 1 Konqueror: 1 then in August we get the 'patch the patch' debacle, against an easy remote admin compromise that was deemed serious enough that the Department of Homeland Security gave it coverage. I wonder what we get in September?
One thing commonly done with bots is scan for other machines to infect. If the next machine is doing something important, and becomes unresponsive, etc., then that's just too bad. Botherds don't really care who is injured by their actions, so long as they make money. In this case:
"In searching for more computers to infect, the bot software used by the group caused trouble amongst some systems at Northwest Hospital: doors to the operating room failed to open, pagers did not work, and computers in the intensive care unit were disrupted, the statement said. The hospital used backup systems to continue to treat and care for patients."
I'm not saying this sort of thing is never blown out of proportion. It can be, especially when DoJ needs a headline. But billions of dollars are being lost, lives severely impacted by identity theft, etc. I'd say that the courts are often too lenient.
Other problems with the review. I couldn't care less about his opinion on whether scrolling text is too user-unfriendly and should be hidden. But he had problems with installing additional software, and that bit ended with, "Not sure what happened there, but at least I was able to get my additional software installed."
Did he look at the logs, look and find no information, or ???
YAN desktop image doesn't tell anyone anything, considering that you can make a KDE desktop look like pretty much anything, and a lot of users do. I know mine looks almost nothing like a current default KDE. Who chooses a distro based on what the default desktop looks like? I'd rather have seen more information on the install problem than that waste of real estate.
I got the feeling that he's pretty much a pure GUI user, and just doesn't know or care an awful lot about what goes on behind the scenes. But even from that perspective, he might have taken the opportunity to tell viewers if KDE'ss log viewer was installed, since he certainly needed to look at a couple of logs. It's not on his list of installed software, but then he doesn't even show a category for system utilities, and he does mention that he used KDE's package manager. Or he could mention whether he could play MP3s or WMVs out of the box, or something.
At the end of the day, he never did explain the identity crisis bit of his title, which was "Ark LinuxA Distro with an Identity Crisis".
I did get a chuckle out of the irony of finding this fluff on a site that bills itself as ExtremeTech: Build it, tweak it, know it. Better than nothing, I guess, but not great.
I find it (3.5.4) excellent. It's my default browser, and I have few compatability issues, though YMWV. And of course Firefox is on the system if I do have a problem. I like the cookie control, including being warned about cross-domain cookies. I like being able to move the tabs, or save them into a bookmark folder. It launches much faster than Firefox, though that's less important to me than it might be to others, as it's nearly always running. Being able to enter 'man:whatever' in the location window is something I find extremely handy, due to the nature of the work I do.
You won't have Greasemonkey in Konqueror. That might be a problem for you. I was never a heavy user of it, and a security vulnerability led me to drop the small amount of stuff that I was doing with it. In the same vein, Konqueror has had few exploits published against it. Though that could be purely a popularity thing, I feel it's a somewhat safer browser.
It's kind of tough to present a list of features it might have, which other browsers might lack, because it's very rare for me to need another browser.
If I have one complaint, it's that editing bookmarks slows down if you have a large collection. I have hundreds, and that XML file is getting large. If it became a problem, I could maintain multiple files, of course. But the problem isn't that severe. Just slow enough to annoy you if you're putting in massive changes.
I'd agree. The only objections I've see to terrestrial planets, gas giants, and Pluto as a Kuyper Belt Object was from a children's letter-writing campaign. We are way to fixated on our children when we change a workable scientific nomenclature so some random six year old, who won't remember a think about it at twenty, like as not, gets a smile.
We're going to be reworking this system anyway in a few years, as more extrasolar planets are discovered. You already see references to 'hot Jupiters' and such in the popular and semitechnical press. We should have just demoted Pluto, lived with a few subspecies of asteroids, and waited 'till we had more knowledge of other systems.
What we now have is just stupid. We're going to end up with a couple of hundred planets, of such diversity that the term will convey no information.
The IAU is going to be hideously embarrassed about the whole sorry episode, at some point. They may as well get started now.
Yuck. So you can't do a non-blocking operation from the shell on a Mac. Again, I don't use the blocking device unless I'm generating keys or something, as attacks against/dev/urandom are only theoretical.
I'm not sure I like Apple's approach. It smacks of a system that thinks it's smarter than it's programmer, and does what it wants, rather than what's asked of it. In this case, it doesn't allow for cases where I know what level of randomness is good enough,/dev/random is way more than I need, and I don't want blocking. If I were hand-rolling a temporary file system (not an OS-level filesystem, but just a big batch of temporary files) or something, that could be more blocking than I'd want to put up with.
I've done that once, BTW. Again, a problem with HP-UX. mktemp(1) did not operate the way the man page said it would, an argument ensued with HP support, and while that was being sorted, I needed a working script that was robust against symlink attacks. So the situation definitely can arise.
"Anyone whose primary concern in this debate is not the survival and flourishing of the human species shouldn't have a say, in my opinion."
And exactly how would you implement this grand policy, oh Savior of the Species? Something is warning me about yet another person who doesn't seem to *get* democracy--and would be happy to pass a few laws preventing a ballot measure being introduced, etc., by anyone who doesn't think the way they do.
You people are dangerous. Let me be the first to assure that you have nothing like the level of of intelligence or moral authority to make a judgment on who should, or should not, "have a say."
BTW, eye-rolling is annoying as hell to pretty much everyone, and is most commonly seen in adolescent females of the drama queen variety. 'mmm-kay' was stale years ago, much like coughsomethingstupid.
Let's make it 'dangerous, and with obnoxious mannerisms.'
Scarcity drives value. We have exactly one planet, but a seemingly endless supply of idiots. Given any serious resource crunch, the solution seems obvious. But that one, while probably more useful, can't be implemented either. Sigh. Another potential source of biodiesel that can't be realized...
If he hates Bush, there's a plethora of valid reasons. Most of the rest of statement represents some pretty simplistic thinking, as well.
Everything most certainly is *not* cheaper, as replies above mine indicate. For the things that are cheaper, efficiency has indeed played a part. But a large part of that increased efficiency is had from lower wages--globalization, etc. That's jobs exported, more uncompensated hours, etc. Nothing is an unalloyed good.
I don't even know what you're talking about when you speak of "innovations in efficiency." Which is OK. Neither do you. Do you think that we've just invented Some New Thing that's the equivalent, of, say, mass production, in the past decade? We've done some incremental things, sure. But it's been more about globalization.
I think you're confusing productivity, as in work units of some type per unit of time (unit wage prices), with the overall economic efficiency of a manufacturing system.
In the case of efficiency, direct expenses for wages and benefits often trumps all else. Hence moving to locations with far lower wages, longer hours, six day workweeks, few or no benefits, etc. Often this will sharply lower capital expenditures as well.
Alpha Widgets now has a system that can make some classes of widgets at very low cost. Beta Widgets, then puts in a plant across the street, competition ensues. All and sundry become yet *more* efficient. Your costs as a consumer of this class of widgets goes down, assuming you can afford the widget even at the new lower price, as the middle class is dissappearing. Our jobless recovery continues, though now at a slower pace.
As these jobs have left the country, whatever money you spend on your widget goes overseas and adds to our record or near-record trade deficit.
Year Productivity Wages 2004 +3.4% +1.1% 2005 +2.9% +2.6%
Raising productivity drives an increasing standard of living. It's what allows your employer to pay you more without having to raise their prices. But wages aren't keeping up. Companies are often making record prices, executive compensation packages are through the roof (something like 400 times average wage now, and yet we still have the current stock option scandals, with no end to that mess in sight), yet on average this isn't really being reflected in the checks most workers take home.
This year, real wage increases are *down*. They haven't even kept up with real inflation. Not so-called core inflation, which doesn't roll food and energy in. The CPI is being understated by about half a percent, etc. The books are cooked, in other words. And even at that, inflation still doesn't look good--only less bad. On top of all that, it's by no means certain whether our slowing economy is headed for a soft or hard landing. The Bernanke Fed has a tough road ahead, and some things simply can't be controlled with the only knob the Fed has--the discount rate.
So what's the deal? How are you benefitting from Bush being in office? I'm having trouble imagining that you're a corporate executive, and am leaning toward the completely ignorant theory. I'd been wondering how that idiot achieved, then retained, the office. Thanks for clearing that up.
On the other hand, by the time we know how to build the reactor, and a workable direct conversion system, the odds are very good that we'll also have better autonomous operations software, better tele-operations technology, etc. We may even have a space elevator (which probably says more about the speed of fusion power development than anything else).
I just don't see how we ever arrive at really cheap power without at least D-He3, and possibly He3-He3. The US, at least, is going to need that cheap power. Given that our current energy policy to shovel money into the coffers of countries that hate us (and do it forever), perhaps we *could* afford it. Look what we're already paying:
Oil price shocks and price manipulation by the OPEC cartel from 1979 to 1991 cost the U.S. economy about $4 trillion, almost as much as we spent on national defense over the same time period and more than the interest payments on the national debt (www.fueleconomy.gov).
U.S. spending on imported crude oil soared to $143.7 billion in the first 10 months of 2005, $37.2 billion more than during the same period in 2004, as the price rose 32 percent, according to the Commerce Department. The U.S. imports more than half of the 21 million barrels of oil it consumes daily. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&si d=awqXjt10PSAE&refer=us
49% of my federal taxes are military-related. I'd like to see us avoid interactions with those countries which hate us so much. I mean *really* avoid. Don't buy their oil. Don't allow their citizens into the US, save for diplomatic travel involving the UN. If they want to buy from the US, fine. But no large corporate presences there. They hate us enough that for the people in the street to not miss us, and some of the locals governments wouldn't be able to make so much hay with, "Death to America." If they want to tyranize each other, hold shitty little religious wars, conduct the odd barbarism (beheading, mutilation, or whatever), then fine. Their problem, and an entirely internal matter that we need not concern ourselves about. I'd be willing to bet that we'd be able to get by with a much smaller military, and we'd see a lot fewer of our sons and daughters killed.
There are some other numbers out there, related to the true cost of the war in Iraq, which are truly horrifying.
Gee, maybe it's just me, but it looks as if we can afford nearly *anything*, rather than simply carry on as we have before.
Of course the whole lunar He3 is a chain of ifs. If we can build the fusion plant. If the He3 is even present in viable concentrations. If we can get even automated physical plant to it. I'm not insane enough to not realize that three big ifs probably equals one serious pipedream. But this is Slashdot, speculation is fun, and the US certainly has a huge problem it needs to solve.
I guess that depends upon whether you're essentially optimistic or pessimistic.
Assuming the human race face some sort of doomsday scenario (a rather large assumption), my guess is that we'll eventually see one or more disruptive technologies which will provide cheap energy in some form. Whether that comes from advanced solar (maybe something a lot better than the 20% efficiency we can get from cells now, maybe thin films instead of cells), carbon nanotubes which allow a space elevator (hence maybe power satellites), fusion power, molecular assembly, etc., I've no idea. But something will come along.
I don't believe in peak oil scenarios as the end of civilization. It will bring tremendous changes, certainly. But some of those will be for the better. Like not stepping on balls of some sort of vile hydro-goo when walking on some beaches, or sucking down great mucking lungfulls of hydrocabons with every breath of Los Angeles air. I'd like to see us get away from internal combustion engines just for the freaking *silence*. Those were a stupid, make-do idea anyway. Bumping cylinders of metal foolishly back and forth, wasting most of the energy produced directly as heat. I mean, come on! That's just soooo weak. We've been clattering around in those things for a hundred years now, and I'm thinking it's past time for something better.
Petrochemicals are rare enough for western civilization to be extracting them from places filled with people that wish us nothing but harm, and whom we'd otherwise have nothing to do with. That alone justifies moving on, and has since the day the US became a net importer of oil. Today, the required technologies are closer. I don't even mind the price of gasoline, as US energy policy consists of shipping truckloads of money overseas, forever. Nothing was ever going to change until a threshold of daily pain was reached, and people demanded it.
Some changes will undoubtedly be for the worse, for at least some people. Sorry about that, and I hope it's not too bad, for too many. But it's not as if we can stop change from happening. All we can do is try to stay informed and make good choices. Oh, and perhaps somehow keep the politicians from screwing things up too badly. I'm afraid I don't have that last bit worked out just yet, though.
I'm not worried about asphalt or fertilizer. Everything is an energy shortage. Given enough affordable energy, we'll *make* the materials we need. We use our current materials because of current economics. When the economic landscape changes, so will our materials. It's not written in stone that the next generation of materials will be worse. The trend over the past few thousand years has been rather the reverse, after all.
Any future economy is guaranteed to be different. But the sky is not guaranteed to fall. Were you around for The Club of Rome/Limits to Growth days? According to those projections, the population should have starved itself back to about twelve by now. Six of those twelve should be peddling generators turned by stationary bicycles in order to induce a dim flicker from the 4 Watt light bulb at the rear of the mud hut.
*Screw* a petrochemical economy. *Bring* the flying cars!
I wish your post had been up before I posted mine. Do you get enough He3 from the D-T reaction to fuel an He3 plant?
I like the idea of a no neutron He3-He3 reaction, producing your energy as charged particles. I'm thinking the plants would last longer without the neutron flux, and be easier to decomission when that time finally did arrive. Plus if you're doing everything with neutrons, you're back to spending lots of money in plant costs due to heating water to spin turbine/generator sets, vice some sort of direct conversion scheme that could be cheaper in capital and maintenance costs.
Excellent point. I'd thought of H3, figuring perhaps it might be concentrated in any ices that could be found, it's astonishingly expensive, and ices would be easiest of all possible feedstocks to process.
I'm not buying into the idea of mining heavy metals anytime soon, as it seems you'd need some extensive infrastructure, like maybe a mass driver http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver. Given our tendency toward monkey dominance games, I'm not sure I even want a mass driver on the moon. Sooner or later, some nutjob would be using it to drop rocks on our heads.
Significant quantities of He3, and the whole deuterium/He3 fusion thing becomes much more possible. No neutrons! Now *that* could be huge, huge, huge.
On large scales, things will average out. In resource extraction, though, you care about *local differences*. You're saying you can dig a gold mine anywhere and get the same results. I think I'll side with the people who want to dig where the concentrations are. Duh.
The more we know about the moon, the greater the possibility of finding a useful concentration of something. I'd bet that H3 concentrations would have a better shot at economic viability than any metal, but I've no idea if SMART-1 observations would be useful for that.
I also believe knowledge has it's own intrinsic value. Whether some corporation makes a nickel off of it or not, it's still worthwhile. I'd just like to know how the moon was formed. Seems like a reasonable question, to me.
You already have some support for this under KDE, via Kmag. But it's just a magnifier. Highlighting text, for instance, is still done in the application you're magnifying. Using it takes a bit of getting used to, and it has problems with update speed. Overall, I'd call it too clunky to use in the case of my-eyes-are-fried-after-fourteen-hours-in-a-text-e ditor, where you can just enlarge the font a bit. In the case of a true accessibility issue, I don't know if I'd still say that, though. It might be horrible, or a lifesaver, for all I know. This is one of those cases where you'd need a very exact sort of test user.
Don't know what the situation is with Gnome, but I'd expect that they've something at least as good.
"If the company you work for is hung up on this, you might need to explain to you pointy haired boss that you can do business without MS Office. I leave the details to the reader."
The devil certainly is in those details you're leaving to the reader, my friend. There are *plenty* of environments where hundreds of manhours would be required to even assemble a good business case. And there are plenty of managers who simply will not listen, even if you do have a good business case is. Particularly if they have to do much adaption themselves.
There is no 'we', in that context. While I think most paid development is happening in server space, there are clearly a lot of itches being scratched in the desktop arena. You probably aren't going to get some random developer, working evenings on KDE or Gnome, to go off to server space because, "that's where we should be focusing our efforts."
I'm fine with that. Those desktop developers have given me a desktop which already does 90% of what I need it to do. While much of what I do *ends up* in server space, where there ain't no steenking X, it's *produced* in a desktop environment. I'd be a hurting unit without that great desktop. Much lower productivity, much higher costs.
I've produced stuff for server space in several ways: all Linux, all MS, and mixed. When I had both boxes side by side, usage of the MS machine slowly devolved into Outlook only. I probably could have avoided that, as well, but why bother? I had the MS machine sitting right there, and didn't have to admin the thing, so why not burn the CPU, network, and disk resources for calendaring on the MS box?
For me, at least, developing for server space was far more productively done from a Lin desktop. In case I haven't said it lately, thanks KDE, Gnome, and OO developers. Keep up the great work.
I don't know that I've every had anything resembling such a considered answer (very succinct) to a sig. It has something of a Jesuit ring to it. For better or worse, that was meant as a compliment.
I'm afraid I'm more in the 'espouse atheism' than 'eschew religion' camp. In different historical periods, I'm sure my answer would have been different. In fact, about ten years ago my answer would have been different: I didn't believe a thing about supernatural beings, but was willing to admit that that belief was a net good. Something of a restraining influence, at any rate.
Now? No. The willingness to believe in the supernatural has gone far beyond "What's your sign." Or New Age mystical mumbo-jumbo, both of which at least were at least hysterically funny. In my judgment, this might now lead to breeding a brand new biological warfare vector. The poor-man's thermonuclear weapon. Other threats, on a close order of magnitude, however horror might be measured, exist as well.
I'm an official Old Guy. I have no living relatives. I have no stake in the future, hence no ax to grind. I'm not singing some sad tale, as that's just the way things worked out, and life has been good. But I will make some claim to an opinion that, while certainly not unique, is probably somewhat hard to obtain.
My take is that religion has never reflected reality, and is now doing far more harm than good. I base that opinion in what I read of conflicts in the Middle East (and in Southern Asia), the removal of personal freedoms and governmental restraints that I see happening in my own country (the US), the ongoing espousal of continual population boom by several Christian schools of thought, etc.
Again, I'm out of here, all too shortly. I've no ax to grind. But for those with children, or any perceived or real stake in the future--I can't believe organized religion will represent anything but a future death sentence for untold millions. In an increasingly complex world, belief in supernatural powers probably isn't a Good Thing. Unless, say, you don't mind the idea of Reagan controlling a huge nuclear arsenal, and believing in astrology. Or Ahmadinejad probably stalling for time in an attempt to gain nuclear weapons, and being an Islamic fundamentalist. Or Bush being...let's not even go there.
If this sort of thing bothers you, no problem. I'm out of here soon enough anyway, and have no serious reason to care, one way or the other.
Definitions espouse: adopt or support eschew: abstain from
"Linuxu random is not random enough. (Well it probably is for this purpose:-)" I'm thinking it is. But then maybe somebody has some scriptable rollout interface that neither of us know about? There's always an unanticipated case, ain't thar? I hate it when that happens...
"Under Linux,/dev/random will block if there aren't enough bits in the entropy pool./dev/urandom will output as many bytes as requested regardless of the entropy pool. In theory/dev/urandom is vulnerable to attack."
Yep. I should have included my uname -a. Which, for the record, is: Linux [REDACTED] 2.6.17-1.2142_FC4 #1 Tue Jul 11 22:41:14 EDT 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux and advised all and sundry to look at the appropriate man pages. For Linux, that would be man(4) urandom, where some of the above came from. I probably should have referenced it, despite being a bit bummed that one statement in there is suspect, despite the good deeds of Ted T'so (cat/proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail).
I wish I had an OpenBSD box at the moment, just to compare stuff. Things do vary. For instance, in HP-UX, you get neither device, unless you install the add-in Strong Random Number Generator. Does that suck, or what?
"I had forgotten how reading/dev/random works. Smaller block sizes with bigger counts are better. Try: $ dd if=/dev/random bs=64 count=50" Just did that, and it took forever to return. Had to go off and check mail, refresh a couple of Web pages, etc., in order to gather enough entropy to get a return from: dd if=/dev/random bs=64 count=50 | tr -dc [:alnum:]
Still, it points up the need for me to go back and read the dd docs.
I'm sticking with what I said above as a workable solution for someone who needs to stick a decent string into WPA with AES. Provided I can tack on a Linux proviso, anyway. It does return immediately, and I don't see the need for blocking in this application. As per the man page and common practice, we're not doing crypto key generation, or something equally sensitive. Where, to my mind, you should be using a machine with no NIC, filled with concrete, wrapped in chains, welded into a barrel, buried at the bottom of the Marianas Trench or fired into the Oort Cloud, etc. But that's just me, and everyone has different requirements.
There's probably some happy compromise in dd parameters. If you don't mind my asking, what's your system? If you can't tell me, that's cool. I'm about to pop you into my friends list anyway. To me, security-clueful==friends, on/. I see too way much raving here, with no references, code, etc., to back anything up.
On the up side, I've also learned a ton of stuff, on wildly divergent topics. So I can't complain too much.
Slashdot Mirror
"So the security world used to be pretty hostile to MS, before, you know, XPSP2, MSRC got taken seriously, etc."
Used to be? We still are. XPSP2 didn't hold up long. Last July we had HD Moore's "Month of Browser Bugs," which finished up like this:
MSIE: 25
Apple Safari: 2
Mozilla: 2
Opera: 1
Konqueror: 1
then in August we get the 'patch the patch' debacle, against an easy remote admin compromise that was deemed serious enough that the Department of Homeland Security gave it coverage. I wonder what we get in September?
And yes, I *am* part of the security world.
OK, I relected on that for a moment. And now....
Crikey!
One thing commonly done with bots is scan for other machines to infect. If the next machine is doing something important, and becomes unresponsive, etc., then that's just too bad. Botherds don't really care who is injured by their actions, so long as they make money. In this case:
"In searching for more computers to infect, the bot software used by the group caused trouble amongst some systems at Northwest Hospital: doors to the operating room failed to open, pagers did not work, and computers in the intensive care unit were disrupted, the statement said. The hospital used backup systems to continue to treat and care for patients."
http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/204
I'm not saying this sort of thing is never blown out of proportion. It can be, especially when DoJ needs a headline. But billions of dollars are being lost, lives severely impacted by identity theft, etc. I'd say that the courts are often too lenient.
Other problems with the review. I couldn't care less about his opinion on whether scrolling text is too user-unfriendly and should be hidden. But he had problems with installing additional software, and that bit ended with, "Not sure what happened there, but at least I was able to get my additional software installed."
Did he look at the logs, look and find no information, or ???
YAN desktop image doesn't tell anyone anything, considering that you can make a KDE desktop look like pretty much anything, and a lot of users do. I know mine looks almost nothing like a current default KDE. Who chooses a distro based on what the default desktop looks like? I'd rather have seen more information on the install problem than that waste of real estate.
I got the feeling that he's pretty much a pure GUI user, and just doesn't know or care an awful lot about what goes on behind the scenes. But even from that perspective, he might have taken the opportunity to tell viewers if KDE'ss log viewer was installed, since he certainly needed to look at a couple of logs. It's not on his list of installed software, but then he doesn't even show a category for system utilities, and he does mention that he used KDE's package manager. Or he could mention whether he could play MP3s or WMVs out of the box, or something.
At the end of the day, he never did explain the identity crisis bit of his title, which was "Ark LinuxA Distro with an Identity Crisis".
I did get a chuckle out of the irony of finding this fluff on a site that bills itself as ExtremeTech: Build it, tweak it, know it. Better than nothing, I guess, but not great.
I find it (3.5.4) excellent. It's my default browser, and I have few compatability issues, though YMWV. And of course Firefox is on the system if I do have a problem. I like the cookie control, including being warned about cross-domain cookies. I like being able to move the tabs, or save them into a bookmark folder. It launches much faster than Firefox, though that's less important to me than it might be to others, as it's nearly always running. Being able to enter 'man:whatever' in the location window is something I find extremely handy, due to the nature of the work I do.
You won't have Greasemonkey in Konqueror. That might be a problem for you. I was never a heavy user of it, and a security vulnerability led me to drop the small amount of stuff that I was doing with it. In the same vein, Konqueror has had few exploits published against it. Though that could be purely a popularity thing, I feel it's a somewhat safer browser.
It's kind of tough to present a list of features it might have, which other browsers might lack, because it's very rare for me to need another browser.
If I have one complaint, it's that editing bookmarks slows down if you have a large collection. I have hundreds, and that XML file is getting large. If it became a problem, I could maintain multiple files, of course. But the problem isn't that severe. Just slow enough to annoy you if you're putting in massive changes.
I'd agree. The only objections I've see to terrestrial planets, gas giants, and Pluto as a Kuyper Belt Object was from a children's letter-writing campaign. We are way to fixated on our children when we change a workable scientific nomenclature so some random six year old, who won't remember a think about it at twenty, like as not, gets a smile.
We're going to be reworking this system anyway in a few years, as more extrasolar planets are discovered. You already see references to 'hot Jupiters' and such in the popular and semitechnical press. We should have just demoted Pluto, lived with a few subspecies of asteroids, and waited 'till we had more knowledge of other systems.
What we now have is just stupid. We're going to end up with a couple of hundred planets, of such diversity that the term will convey no information.
The IAU is going to be hideously embarrassed about the whole sorry episode, at some point. They may as well get started now.
Yuck. So you can't do a non-blocking operation from the shell on a Mac. Again, I don't use the blocking device unless I'm generating keys or something, as attacks against /dev/urandom are only theoretical.
/dev/random is way more than I need, and I don't want blocking. If I were hand-rolling a temporary file system (not an OS-level filesystem, but just a big batch of temporary files) or something, that could be more blocking than I'd want to put up with.
I'm not sure I like Apple's approach. It smacks of a system that thinks it's smarter than it's programmer, and does what it wants, rather than what's asked of it. In this case, it doesn't allow for cases where I know what level of randomness is good enough,
I've done that once, BTW. Again, a problem with HP-UX. mktemp(1) did not operate the way the man page said it would, an argument ensued with HP support, and while that was being sorted, I needed a working script that was robust against symlink attacks. So the situation definitely can arise.
"Anyone whose primary concern in this debate is not the survival and flourishing of the human species shouldn't have a say, in my opinion."
And exactly how would you implement this grand policy, oh Savior of the Species? Something is warning me about yet another person who doesn't seem to *get* democracy--and would be happy to pass a few laws preventing a ballot measure being introduced, etc., by anyone who doesn't think the way they do.
You people are dangerous. Let me be the first to assure that you have nothing like the level of of intelligence or moral authority to make a judgment on who should, or should not, "have a say."
BTW, eye-rolling is annoying as hell to pretty much everyone, and is most commonly seen in adolescent females of the drama queen variety. 'mmm-kay' was stale years ago, much like coughsomethingstupid.
Let's make it 'dangerous, and with obnoxious mannerisms.'
Scarcity drives value. We have exactly one planet, but a seemingly endless supply of idiots. Given any serious resource crunch, the solution seems obvious. But that one, while probably more useful, can't be implemented either. Sigh. Another potential source of biodiesel that can't be realized...
Thank you. Excellent explanation.
Good one. I meant the parent, of course. Not my own mod request!
If he hates Bush, there's a plethora of valid reasons. Most of the rest of statement represents some pretty simplistic thinking, as well.
Everything most certainly is *not* cheaper, as replies above mine indicate. For the things that are cheaper, efficiency has indeed played a part. But a large part of that increased efficiency is had from lower wages--globalization, etc. That's jobs exported, more uncompensated hours, etc. Nothing is an unalloyed good.
I don't even know what you're talking about when you speak of "innovations in efficiency." Which is OK. Neither do you. Do you think that we've just invented Some New Thing that's the equivalent, of, say, mass production, in the past decade? We've done some incremental things, sure. But it's been more about globalization.
I think you're confusing productivity, as in work units of some type per unit of time (unit wage prices), with the overall economic efficiency of a manufacturing system.
In the case of efficiency, direct expenses for wages and benefits often trumps all else. Hence moving to locations with far lower wages, longer hours, six day workweeks, few or no benefits, etc. Often this will sharply lower capital expenditures as well.
Alpha Widgets now has a system that can make some classes of widgets at very low cost. Beta Widgets, then puts in a plant across the street, competition ensues. All and sundry become yet *more* efficient. Your costs as a consumer of this class of widgets goes down, assuming you can afford the widget even at the new lower price, as the middle class is dissappearing. Our jobless recovery continues, though now at a slower pace.
As these jobs have left the country, whatever money you spend on your widget goes overseas and adds to our record or near-record trade deficit.
Year Productivity Wages
2004 +3.4% +1.1%
2005 +2.9% +2.6%
Raising productivity drives an increasing standard of living. It's what allows your employer to pay you more without having to raise their prices. But wages aren't keeping up. Companies are often making record prices, executive compensation packages are through the roof (something like 400 times average wage now, and yet we still have the current stock option scandals, with no end to that mess in sight), yet on average this isn't really being reflected in the checks most workers take home.
This year, real wage increases are *down*. They haven't even kept up with real inflation. Not so-called core inflation, which doesn't roll food and energy in. The CPI is being understated by about half a percent, etc. The books are cooked, in other words. And even at that, inflation still doesn't look good--only less bad. On top of all that, it's by no means certain whether our slowing economy is headed for a soft or hard landing. The Bernanke Fed has a tough road ahead, and some things simply can't be controlled with the only knob the Fed has--the discount rate.
So what's the deal? How are you benefitting from Bush being in office? I'm having trouble imagining that you're a corporate executive, and am leaning toward the completely ignorant theory. I'd been wondering how that idiot achieved, then retained, the office. Thanks for clearing that up.
"...with a 10 day or so residence time."
I don't understand. Why would the residence time matter, if the supply is being constantly refreshed?
"Hey, how about something that runs on gravity, since there's an unending supply of that, eh?"
Done. Henceforth, I shall travel travel only by Falling Brick.
It does sound a bit ridiculous, doesn't it? :)
i d=awqXjt10PSAE&refer=us
On the other hand, by the time we know how to build the reactor, and a workable direct conversion system, the odds are very good that we'll also have better autonomous operations software, better tele-operations technology, etc. We may even have a space elevator (which probably says more about the speed of fusion power development than anything else).
I just don't see how we ever arrive at really cheap power without at least D-He3, and possibly He3-He3. The US, at least, is going to need that cheap power. Given that our current energy policy to shovel money into the coffers of countries that hate us (and do it forever), perhaps we *could* afford it. Look what we're already paying:
Oil price shocks and price manipulation by the OPEC cartel from 1979 to 1991 cost the U.S. economy about $4 trillion, almost as much as we spent on national defense over the same time period and more than the interest payments on the national debt (www.fueleconomy.gov).
U.S. spending on imported crude oil soared to $143.7 billion in the first 10 months of 2005, $37.2 billion more than during the same period in 2004, as the price rose 32 percent, according to the Commerce Department. The U.S. imports more than half of the 21 million barrels of oil it consumes daily. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&s
49% of my federal taxes are military-related. I'd like to see us avoid interactions with those countries which hate us so much. I mean *really* avoid. Don't buy their oil. Don't allow their citizens into the US, save for diplomatic travel involving the UN. If they want to buy from the US, fine. But no large corporate presences there. They hate us enough that for the people in the street to not miss us, and some of the locals governments wouldn't be able to make so much hay with, "Death to America." If they want to tyranize each other, hold shitty little religious wars, conduct the odd barbarism (beheading, mutilation, or whatever), then fine. Their problem, and an entirely internal matter that we need not concern ourselves about. I'd be willing to bet that we'd be able to get by with a much smaller military, and we'd see a lot fewer of our sons and daughters killed.
There are some other numbers out there, related to the true cost of the war in Iraq, which are truly horrifying.
Gee, maybe it's just me, but it looks as if we can afford nearly *anything*, rather than simply carry on as we have before.
Of course the whole lunar He3 is a chain of ifs. If we can build the fusion plant. If the He3 is even present in viable concentrations. If we can get even automated physical plant to it. I'm not insane enough to not realize that three big ifs probably equals one serious pipedream. But this is Slashdot, speculation is fun, and the US certainly has a huge problem it needs to solve.
I guess that depends upon whether you're essentially optimistic or pessimistic.
Assuming the human race face some sort of doomsday scenario (a rather large assumption), my guess is that we'll eventually see one or more disruptive technologies which will provide cheap energy in some form. Whether that comes from advanced solar (maybe something a lot better than the 20% efficiency we can get from cells now, maybe thin films instead of cells), carbon nanotubes which allow a space elevator (hence maybe power satellites), fusion power, molecular assembly, etc., I've no idea. But something will come along.
I don't believe in peak oil scenarios as the end of civilization. It will bring tremendous changes, certainly. But some of those will be for the better. Like not stepping on balls of some sort of vile hydro-goo when walking on some beaches, or sucking down great mucking lungfulls of hydrocabons with every breath of Los Angeles air. I'd like to see us get away from internal combustion engines just for the freaking *silence*. Those were a stupid, make-do idea anyway. Bumping cylinders of metal foolishly back and forth, wasting most of the energy produced directly as heat. I mean, come on! That's just soooo weak. We've been clattering around in those things for a hundred years now, and I'm thinking it's past time for something better.
Petrochemicals are rare enough for western civilization to be extracting them from places filled with people that wish us nothing but harm, and whom we'd otherwise have nothing to do with. That alone justifies moving on, and has since the day the US became a net importer of oil. Today, the required technologies are closer. I don't even mind the price of gasoline, as US energy policy consists of shipping truckloads of money overseas, forever. Nothing was ever going to change until a threshold of daily pain was reached, and people demanded it.
Some changes will undoubtedly be for the worse, for at least some people. Sorry about that, and I hope it's not too bad, for too many. But it's not as if we can stop change from happening. All we can do is try to stay informed and make good choices. Oh, and perhaps somehow keep the politicians from screwing things up too badly. I'm afraid I don't have that last bit worked out just yet, though.
I'm not worried about asphalt or fertilizer. Everything is an energy shortage. Given enough affordable energy, we'll *make* the materials we need. We use our current materials because of current economics. When the economic landscape changes, so will our materials. It's not written in stone that the next generation of materials will be worse. The trend over the past few thousand years has been rather the reverse, after all.
Any future economy is guaranteed to be different. But the sky is not guaranteed to fall. Were you around for The Club of Rome/Limits to Growth days? According to those projections, the population should have starved itself back to about twelve by now. Six of those twelve should be peddling generators turned by stationary bicycles in order to induce a dim flicker from the 4 Watt light bulb at the rear of the mud hut.
*Screw* a petrochemical economy. *Bring* the flying cars!
I wish your post had been up before I posted mine. Do you get enough He3 from the D-T reaction to fuel an He3 plant?
I like the idea of a no neutron He3-He3 reaction, producing your energy as charged particles. I'm thinking the plants would last longer without the neutron flux, and be easier to decomission when that time finally did arrive. Plus if you're doing everything with neutrons, you're back to spending lots of money in plant costs due to heating water to spin turbine/generator sets, vice some sort of direct conversion scheme that could be cheaper in capital and maintenance costs.
Excellent point. I'd thought of H3, figuring perhaps it might be concentrated in any ices that could be found, it's astonishingly expensive, and ices would be easiest of all possible feedstocks to process.
I'm not buying into the idea of mining heavy metals anytime soon, as it seems you'd need some extensive infrastructure, like maybe a mass driver http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver. Given our tendency toward monkey dominance games, I'm not sure I even want a mass driver on the moon. Sooner or later, some nutjob would be using it to drop rocks on our heads.
Significant quantities of He3, and the whole deuterium/He3 fusion thing becomes much more possible. No neutrons! Now *that* could be huge, huge, huge.
This is Score:2, Insightful? Wow.
On large scales, things will average out. In resource extraction, though, you care about *local differences*. You're saying you can dig a gold mine anywhere and get the same results. I think I'll side with the people who want to dig where the concentrations are. Duh.
The more we know about the moon, the greater the possibility of finding a useful concentration of something. I'd bet that H3 concentrations would have a better shot at economic viability than any metal, but I've no idea if SMART-1 observations would be useful for that.
I also believe knowledge has it's own intrinsic value. Whether some corporation makes a nickel off of it or not, it's still worthwhile. I'd just like to know how the moon was formed. Seems like a reasonable question, to me.
You already have some support for this under KDE, via Kmag. But it's just a magnifier. Highlighting text, for instance, is still done in the application you're magnifying. Using it takes a bit of getting used to, and it has problems with update speed. Overall, I'd call it too clunky to use in the case of my-eyes-are-fried-after-fourteen-hours-in-a-text-e ditor, where you can just enlarge the font a bit. In the case of a true accessibility issue, I don't know if I'd still say that, though. It might be horrible, or a lifesaver, for all I know. This is one of those cases where you'd need a very exact sort of test user.
Don't know what the situation is with Gnome, but I'd expect that they've something at least as good.
Um, it was speculation from OSDL that started this, not some MS announcement. I rather doubt OSDL is interested in slowing OO development.
"If the company you work for is hung up on this, you might need to explain to you pointy haired boss that you can do business without MS Office. I leave the details to the reader."
The devil certainly is in those details you're leaving to the reader, my friend. There are *plenty* of environments where hundreds of manhours would be required to even assemble a good business case. And there are plenty of managers who simply will not listen, even if you do have a good business case is. Particularly if they have to do much adaption themselves.
Somebody please mod this interesting.
There is no 'we', in that context. While I think most paid development is happening in server space, there are clearly a lot of itches being scratched in the desktop arena. You probably aren't going to get some random developer, working evenings on KDE or Gnome, to go off to server space because, "that's where we should be focusing our efforts."
I'm fine with that. Those desktop developers have given me a desktop which already does 90% of what I need it to do. While much of what I do *ends up* in server space, where there ain't no steenking X, it's *produced* in a desktop environment. I'd be a hurting unit without that great desktop. Much lower productivity, much higher costs.
I've produced stuff for server space in several ways: all Linux, all MS, and mixed. When I had both boxes side by side, usage of the MS machine slowly devolved into Outlook only. I probably could have avoided that, as well, but why bother? I had the MS machine sitting right there, and didn't have to admin the thing, so why not burn the CPU, network, and disk resources for calendaring on the MS box?
For me, at least, developing for server space was far more productively done from a Lin desktop. In case I haven't said it lately, thanks KDE, Gnome, and OO developers. Keep up the great work.
I don't know that I've every had anything resembling such a considered answer (very succinct) to a sig. It has something of a Jesuit ring to it. For better or worse, that was meant as a compliment.
I'm afraid I'm more in the 'espouse atheism' than 'eschew religion' camp. In different historical periods, I'm sure my answer would have been different. In fact, about ten years ago my answer would have been different: I didn't believe a thing about supernatural beings, but was willing to admit that that belief was a net good. Something of a restraining influence, at any rate.
Now? No. The willingness to believe in the supernatural has gone far beyond "What's your sign." Or New Age mystical mumbo-jumbo, both of which at least were at least hysterically funny. In my judgment, this might now lead to breeding a brand new biological warfare vector. The poor-man's thermonuclear weapon. Other threats, on a close order of magnitude, however horror might be measured, exist as well.
I'm an official Old Guy. I have no living relatives. I have no stake in the future, hence no ax to grind. I'm not singing some sad tale, as that's just the way things worked out, and life has been good. But I will make some claim to an opinion that, while certainly not unique, is probably somewhat hard to obtain.
My take is that religion has never reflected reality, and is now doing far more harm than good. I base that opinion in what I read of conflicts in the Middle East (and in Southern Asia), the removal of personal freedoms and governmental restraints that I see happening in my own country (the US), the ongoing espousal of continual population boom by several Christian schools of thought, etc.
Again, I'm out of here, all too shortly. I've no ax to grind. But for those with children, or any perceived or real stake in the future--I can't believe organized religion will represent anything but a future death sentence for untold millions. In an increasingly complex world, belief in supernatural powers probably isn't a Good Thing. Unless, say, you don't mind the idea of Reagan controlling a huge nuclear arsenal, and believing in astrology. Or Ahmadinejad probably stalling for time in an attempt to gain nuclear weapons, and being an Islamic fundamentalist. Or Bush being...let's not even go there.
If this sort of thing bothers you, no problem. I'm out of here soon enough anyway, and have no serious reason to care, one way or the other.
Definitions
espouse: adopt or support
eschew: abstain from
"Linuxu random is not random enough. (Well it probably is for this purpose :-)"
/dev/random will block if there aren't enough bits in the entropy pool. /dev/urandom will output as many bytes as requested regardless of the entropy pool. In theory /dev/urandom is vulnerable to attack."
/proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail).
/dev/random works. Smaller block sizes with bigger counts are better. Try:
/. I see too way much raving here, with no references, code, etc., to back anything up.
I'm thinking it is. But then maybe somebody has some scriptable rollout interface that neither of us know about? There's always an unanticipated case, ain't thar? I hate it when that happens...
"Under Linux,
Yep. I should have included my uname -a. Which, for the record, is:
Linux [REDACTED] 2.6.17-1.2142_FC4 #1 Tue Jul 11 22:41:14 EDT 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
and advised all and sundry to look at the appropriate man pages. For Linux, that would be man(4) urandom, where some of the above came from. I probably should have referenced it, despite being a bit bummed that one statement in there is suspect, despite the good deeds of Ted T'so (cat
I wish I had an OpenBSD box at the moment, just to compare stuff. Things do vary. For instance, in HP-UX, you get neither device, unless you install the add-in Strong Random Number Generator. Does that suck, or what?
"I had forgotten how reading
$ dd if=/dev/random bs=64 count=50"
Just did that, and it took forever to return. Had to go off and check mail, refresh a couple of Web pages, etc., in order to gather enough entropy to get a return from:
dd if=/dev/random bs=64 count=50 | tr -dc [:alnum:]
Still, it points up the need for me to go back and read the dd docs.
I'm sticking with what I said above as a workable solution for someone who needs to stick a decent string into WPA with AES. Provided I can tack on a Linux proviso, anyway. It does return immediately, and I don't see the need for blocking in this application. As per the man page and common practice, we're not doing crypto key generation, or something equally sensitive. Where, to my mind, you should be using a machine with no NIC, filled with concrete, wrapped in chains, welded into a barrel, buried at the bottom of the Marianas Trench or fired into the Oort Cloud, etc. But that's just me, and everyone has different requirements.
There's probably some happy compromise in dd parameters. If you don't mind my asking, what's your system? If you can't tell me, that's cool. I'm about to pop you into my friends list anyway. To me, security-clueful==friends, on
On the up side, I've also learned a ton of stuff, on wildly divergent topics. So I can't complain too much.