I never used to back up. I had files scattered about, and anything truly important was either on a hard copy, or on a flash drive or my server or email. Any time I moved to a new computer, the old drive was imaged and copied over to the new one.
In fact, I had a legitimately hard time justifying backups until about 2 years ago until I got both a Mac and a 1TB external drive. Before then, I didn't have enough space to "waste", and I couldn't justify buying more when it was so expensive. And backup software was expensive, or junky. OSX's Time Machine function is just stupid-easy - it's literally as simple as selecting a disk. But the main thing is, it's the first time in my life that it's cheap and easy to just back up everything - for less than $100 you can get a drive that will hold every version of everything on your disk. I have incremental backups back through January 2010. I've never had to use it, but I've helped others - pop the CD in and hook up the drive, and a few hours later you're set. I understand that there's similar tools for Windows and OSX as well, so it's not a fanboi thing. I've also heard great things about Dropbox.
I'm thanking my lucky stars that I didn't need to lose my data to learn my lesson. I know too many people who lost *everything* and were completely screwed. Funny thing is, people don't realize how important backups are until they need them - and by then, it's too late.
They didn't, or at least there's absolutely no evidence that they did. On the contrary, actually, the software they were using (Kismet) saves unencrypted packets by default. You have to go and turn it off. So it sounds to me like they forgot to do that, which is something that I've done myself so I can relate.
Add to that the fact that *nobody knew about this* until Google said "yeah, we did this by accident and we're deleting it". If they were trying to be sneaky and collect people's information, why would they come and reveal something that had been a secret? That's not how I hush something up, that's how I try to stave off potential misunderstandings. But apparently it didn't work.
I guess the lesson here is that when corporations screw something up, they should never come clean and instead just hush it up. At least that way they stand a chance of not being ripped apart for it. Frankly, I thought we wanted to discourage that behavior as a society, but maybe that's just me.
I think Google makes a good search engine and good products, and I am happy to "pay" my eyeballs and habits for that. But I am *very* wary of the amount of power they have, so I watch their actions very closely. I have seen no evidence for more than 5 years that they are anything other than upstanding - and like I said the bar has been set higher for them. In fact, when stuff like the WiFi thing above, and the Buzz thing in the OP is the worst anybody can come up with, I'm pretty confident that they're not a "bad guy".
Jesus are people still talking about "wireless sniffing" like it's a terrible thing? That's like calling it my fault that I'm forced to smell it when you rip ass.
In fact, that's a more apt analogy than I intended. The recipient has no control, in each case, of whether it gets to them. Can they be faulted for collecting? Sure, it would make them a little creepy if they delibrately inhaled, but there's absolutely no evidence than they intended to. In any case, it's not their fault for having it be there in the first place.
I'm so sick of this WiFi shit. IT'S FUCKING RADIO WAVES! THEY ARE **BROADCASTED**. BROAD... CAST.... If you don't want it to get out there, then DON'T SPEND MONEY AND ELECTRICITY TO PUT IT OUT THERE! Or at least encrypt it!
Particularly when it's written in Python. I mean... jesus. If you've managed to have a problem with your *web application* written in Python, because the scheduler is different? Get out of coding.
I was writing a C/curses application with pthreads on OSX that compiled with no modifications on Linux. Ran fine, too, after I changed a stupid assumption about select() that worked on *BSD but not Linux. And that was my fault for not following POSIX.
This guy is an idiot with a rage-on. How did this make Slashdot? Oh right...
IADefinitelyNAL, but aren't trade secret protections useless if somebody reverse-engineers your product? That's why they're somewhat the opposite of patents - if you patent something, you disclose how you do it but you legally prevent others from doing it until the patent expires. If it's a trade secret, nobody can look it up - but if somebody figured out the process independently there's no protection. Unless they're going to argue that GeoHot stole the secret without finding it independently...
Sounds like a test to me. Nobody said it would be easy or cheap to do these tests (hence the LHC).
The problem is when you have things like string theory that don't really make testable predictions. Not that predictions are mad but are hard to test. Curvature of space is hard to test too, until you get the chance to look at a gravitational lens around a star.
Uh, this was about 6 years ago. But the computers might as well have been Apple ][s. To their credit, they weren't wasting money - the computer labs and library got the new computers on about a 3-year cycle (30 new computers a year or so), and the rest got 'trickled down' through the district on a need-based system - labs in the high school and the HS library got them first, those newish machines went to the teachers in the high school, and their only-slightly older machines went to the middle school and elementary schools. We still had a large (but rapidly decreasing) number of machines running Windows 98 - and they actually worked pretty much OK, because they weren't being used for anything more complex than a powerpoint and Google a few times a year.
Well, it was a high school and a middle school, separated by a block or two. They actually had a pretty decent 10 megabit (or so) microwave link set up between the schools, because they could only afford a T1 at the one and centralizing the network made sense (I guess?)
In any case, the middle school had 5 computers or so per classroom (to facilitate group projects), the library had about two dozen, and all the offices and other rooms had a few each. Probably about the same in the high school, except each teacher had only the one because students would use the library or their own computers.
Now they have *two* T1s (3Mbps symmetric) but it's fine fir their purposes, I suppose. And they figured out DHCP and even a few VLANs! I'm astonished they're able to keep it all running (well, basically).
Ah, I remember that as a tech back at my high school. Only problem is, we had more than 254 computers, so we would be continuously knocking computers off the network. But it was OK, because it was almost never the same people. Then Netware would break, and things got interesting.
Eventually we figured out that we could assign the lab computers to a subnet. Implementing this took some fighting becase "it worked well enough".
Hilarious. You know, because OSX shits all over the command line, unlike Windows.
Oh wait, never mind. Damn near all of the OS is configurable from it. And it's a real shell (bash) and utilities, not cmd.exe. Hell, they even have an X11 server on the install disk.
Call me a fanboi if you'd like, but I don't think it's unreasonable to have a powerful Unix machine that most of my favorite Linux software runs without modification on - and then not have to fuck with it to keep it working.
A nuclear dump? Well I wouldn't want piles of crap sitting around in a vacant lot, but if it was miles below ground I wouldn't have a problem with it. And if I was next to a nuke plant instead of a coal plant, I'd get less radiation...
So yeah I'd be happy to live near one. But I'm also reasonably intelligent, and understand pretty well what sort of dangers there are and how they're addressed by safety features and the design of the facility.
Perhaps, but as you've noted there have been rather significant improvements in reactor technology. But damned if we can *build* them, or fund their research.
If you build bridges, and you've developed a really nice new bridge design (based on stone arches instead of people holding ropes at each end) - but the public blocks all bridges because the "actively safe bridge design of the bridge engineers" had the wrong design philosophy - well how are you ever going to change the perception, or get funding to improve?
You're right - the new reactors are much better and safer than the old ones. Wouldn't it be nice if we could *use* them? And the complaint is about the (relative) unsafety of the previous design, not the new design!
Well they need some relatively expensive hardware or software, but once amortized across their whole customer base over the multiple years it's functional, it is essentially free. Because it was a non-zero cost to provide it initially, it isn't actually free... but it might as well be.
My school does the theory and math, but with plenty of "real", for-credit classes available. At the moment I'm taking a compilers class (which is all theory, but we have to figure out how to implement it) and a computer-graphics class, where the class time is used to discuss a scene graph, intersection algorithms, and so on, but the final project is a 3D polygon mesh editor written with Qt. This is along with an in-depth algorithms class (dynamic programming, greedy algorithms, etc). Last semester, along with my automata theory class, I wrote a machine-code interpreter for an in-house instruction set, and assembly programs to run on it. Next semester we'll be implementing this ISA on a FPGA. These are required classes for my major.
This is probably because I'm at an engineering school in a university, so the theory is considered a (crucial) means to an end. Like all education, it's really up to the student to take advantage of it properly, but I can't see how somebody could make it even the halfway that I have without being a skilled programmer.
A CS degree damn well should be about math and theory, because it should be a given that you can implement the theory competently by the end of your freshman year. In fact, spring semester of my freshman year was all about the theory of data structures and algorithms, but the homework was implementing each one. I can tell you from experience that a motivated individual can become a competent programmer, but it's much harder to understand the theory without proper instruction (and homework).
A good CS degree presumes that its students are skilled and motivated enough to figure out how to implement increasingly-abstract algorithms in any language, even ones they don't know yet. Then it makes them do it. If you hire somebody from a good CS program, they should be able to code up a storm right away (with maybe some training on your specific environment) while understanding what they're doing and ways to improve it.
I didn't dismiss virtual hosts, quite the contrary. My point was that you can serve websites without it (as the two comments mentioning/etc/hosts point out).
Perhaps you've missed the point, or perhaps I wasn't clear enough about the thrust of my post. I wasn't saying "we don't need the DNS", or that for all but the most technical of reasons it *is* part of the Internet. But breaking or otherwise fussing with the DNS is not a technical issue, and can't be fixed with a technical solution. It's, as I think we agree, a human matter of agreeing that these policies or features or whatever of these roots are more worthwhile than those roots.
You can't fix DNS broken in that way with a patch, or fancy routing tricks. TFA doesn't exactly make that claim, but it's an important distinction nonetheless. For example, the problem of spam: is it a technical one, a legal one, or a social one? There's a case to be made for any or all of them, but you can't "fix" it without figuring out from which angle to address it. So it goes for the altroots - you can't "fix" it by fiddling with some configurations, you fix it by removing the impetus for its creation or keep it a fringe effort by marginalizing its importance.
It's a question of nuance, like so many other important issues. Without understanding the real intricacies of a system, how can anybody hope to improve it? The distinction between the DNS and the Internet matters, whether you think it's relevant or not.
The analogy would be the ability to run an arbitrary number of "Internets" over the same copper and fiber, just as you can run multiple DNS over an IP network. But that would require cooperation from everybody involved, whereas I can tell my laptop to be a root and convince people to point to it without any third-party involvement.
Well, the Host: HTTP header came long after the DNS. You can define per-machine, sure, and it'll probably work - but that's not the point. The point is that it's automatic. If I already know that these several names map to one IP, everybody might as well just use a subdirectory. It was for sake of argument, I didn't mix them up.
I must admit that I haven't RTFA. But the summary quotation seems to imply that DNS is somehow part of the Internet.
Just to clarify, it's not. The internet sure would be hard to use without the DNS, absolutely. But it's not unthinkable - we'd just be stuck with IP addresses for everything, and there could be no virtual hosting (multiple domains per IP, disambiguated by the Host: field).
But the DNS is really more of a universal agreement. Everybody agrees on who the roots are, and that's that. But there's no technical reason that the roots have to be who they are - hence the altroots described.
But he didn't "fracture" the Internet. That's a stupid statement. The Internet doesn't concern itself with domain names, just routing IPs - the DNS is built on top of that and maps back down to IPs. Were he successful, he would've fractured the DNS. Pain in the ass? Sure. Coke.com could go to Pepsi's site, but http://216.64.210.28/ would still get me to the Coca-Cola website.
The difference matters, because fracturing the Internet is technical (routing), while fracturing the DNS is more of an administrative-bureaucratic-sociopolitical type of thing. Peering disputes can of course be about non-technical things like money, but it breaks at a technical level.
You know, I was considering posting a snarky comment to that effect when it occurred to me that they probably couldn't. I barely appreciate the subtleties of the problem (that is, why it's hard).
This is the kind of proof I could maybe understand in my Algorithms class, given a week and a very good explanation. But I'm not exactly a 'layman' in that context...
Though I will agree - the polynomial ham sandwich theorem sounds badass.
"The real world" would have a big problem ignoring Linux. Of the top million sites on the web, 65% run Linux (or at least Apache, and who runs Apache on Windows?). The majority smartphone OS is Android, and everybody from IBM to Google to Amazon to Grandma trying to watch DVR'd shows on her TiVo or use the Internet through her wireless router would have big issues.
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I never used to back up. I had files scattered about, and anything truly important was either on a hard copy, or on a flash drive or my server or email. Any time I moved to a new computer, the old drive was imaged and copied over to the new one.
In fact, I had a legitimately hard time justifying backups until about 2 years ago until I got both a Mac and a 1TB external drive. Before then, I didn't have enough space to "waste", and I couldn't justify buying more when it was so expensive. And backup software was expensive, or junky. OSX's Time Machine function is just stupid-easy - it's literally as simple as selecting a disk. But the main thing is, it's the first time in my life that it's cheap and easy to just back up everything - for less than $100 you can get a drive that will hold every version of everything on your disk. I have incremental backups back through January 2010. I've never had to use it, but I've helped others - pop the CD in and hook up the drive, and a few hours later you're set. I understand that there's similar tools for Windows and OSX as well, so it's not a fanboi thing. I've also heard great things about Dropbox.
I'm thanking my lucky stars that I didn't need to lose my data to learn my lesson. I know too many people who lost *everything* and were completely screwed. Funny thing is, people don't realize how important backups are until they need them - and by then, it's too late.
That would be cesium, which is basically worthless. And they don't use that anymore.
Troll? Come on, it was more like a flamebait (though I'd argue it was just flame...:p ). Troll means something, people.
They didn't, or at least there's absolutely no evidence that they did. On the contrary, actually, the software they were using (Kismet) saves unencrypted packets by default. You have to go and turn it off. So it sounds to me like they forgot to do that, which is something that I've done myself so I can relate.
Add to that the fact that *nobody knew about this* until Google said "yeah, we did this by accident and we're deleting it". If they were trying to be sneaky and collect people's information, why would they come and reveal something that had been a secret? That's not how I hush something up, that's how I try to stave off potential misunderstandings. But apparently it didn't work.
I guess the lesson here is that when corporations screw something up, they should never come clean and instead just hush it up. At least that way they stand a chance of not being ripped apart for it. Frankly, I thought we wanted to discourage that behavior as a society, but maybe that's just me.
I think Google makes a good search engine and good products, and I am happy to "pay" my eyeballs and habits for that. But I am *very* wary of the amount of power they have, so I watch their actions very closely. I have seen no evidence for more than 5 years that they are anything other than upstanding - and like I said the bar has been set higher for them. In fact, when stuff like the WiFi thing above, and the Buzz thing in the OP is the worst anybody can come up with, I'm pretty confident that they're not a "bad guy".
Jesus are people still talking about "wireless sniffing" like it's a terrible thing? That's like calling it my fault that I'm forced to smell it when you rip ass.
In fact, that's a more apt analogy than I intended. The recipient has no control, in each case, of whether it gets to them. Can they be faulted for collecting? Sure, it would make them a little creepy if they delibrately inhaled, but there's absolutely no evidence than they intended to. In any case, it's not their fault for having it be there in the first place.
I'm so sick of this WiFi shit. IT'S FUCKING RADIO WAVES! THEY ARE **BROADCASTED**. BROAD ... CAST.... If you don't want it to get out there, then DON'T SPEND MONEY AND ELECTRICITY TO PUT IT OUT THERE! Or at least encrypt it!
Particularly when it's written in Python. I mean... jesus. If you've managed to have a problem with your *web application* written in Python, because the scheduler is different? Get out of coding.
I was writing a C/curses application with pthreads on OSX that compiled with no modifications on Linux. Ran fine, too, after I changed a stupid assumption about select() that worked on *BSD but not Linux. And that was my fault for not following POSIX.
This guy is an idiot with a rage-on. How did this make Slashdot? Oh right...
IADefinitelyNAL, but aren't trade secret protections useless if somebody reverse-engineers your product? That's why they're somewhat the opposite of patents - if you patent something, you disclose how you do it but you legally prevent others from doing it until the patent expires. If it's a trade secret, nobody can look it up - but if somebody figured out the process independently there's no protection. Unless they're going to argue that GeoHot stole the secret without finding it independently...
Sounds like a test to me. Nobody said it would be easy or cheap to do these tests (hence the LHC).
The problem is when you have things like string theory that don't really make testable predictions. Not that predictions are mad but are hard to test. Curvature of space is hard to test too, until you get the chance to look at a gravitational lens around a star.
Uh, this was about 6 years ago. But the computers might as well have been Apple ][s. To their credit, they weren't wasting money - the computer labs and library got the new computers on about a 3-year cycle (30 new computers a year or so), and the rest got 'trickled down' through the district on a need-based system - labs in the high school and the HS library got them first, those newish machines went to the teachers in the high school, and their only-slightly older machines went to the middle school and elementary schools. We still had a large (but rapidly decreasing) number of machines running Windows 98 - and they actually worked pretty much OK, because they weren't being used for anything more complex than a powerpoint and Google a few times a year.
Well, it was a high school and a middle school, separated by a block or two. They actually had a pretty decent 10 megabit (or so) microwave link set up between the schools, because they could only afford a T1 at the one and centralizing the network made sense (I guess?)
In any case, the middle school had 5 computers or so per classroom (to facilitate group projects), the library had about two dozen, and all the offices and other rooms had a few each. Probably about the same in the high school, except each teacher had only the one because students would use the library or their own computers.
Now they have *two* T1s (3Mbps symmetric) but it's fine fir their purposes, I suppose. And they figured out DHCP and even a few VLANs! I'm astonished they're able to keep it all running (well, basically).
Can't say I'm a network engineer, so subnet may be the wrong term. We were all behind a NAT, so we just made a new /24
Ah, I remember that as a tech back at my high school. Only problem is, we had more than 254 computers, so we would be continuously knocking computers off the network. But it was OK, because it was almost never the same people. Then Netware would break, and things got interesting.
Eventually we figured out that we could assign the lab computers to a subnet. Implementing this took some fighting becase "it worked well enough".
Glad to be done with that...
Yes, but when he says bad news, it's *really* bad.
Hilarious. You know, because OSX shits all over the command line, unlike Windows.
Oh wait, never mind. Damn near all of the OS is configurable from it. And it's a real shell (bash) and utilities, not cmd.exe. Hell, they even have an X11 server on the install disk.
Call me a fanboi if you'd like, but I don't think it's unreasonable to have a powerful Unix machine that most of my favorite Linux software runs without modification on - and then not have to fuck with it to keep it working.
Unless you're suggesting that Google is selling their accidentally-collected WiFI data, you're conflating two *completely* different issues.
A nuclear dump? Well I wouldn't want piles of crap sitting around in a vacant lot, but if it was miles below ground I wouldn't have a problem with it. And if I was next to a nuke plant instead of a coal plant, I'd get less radiation...
So yeah I'd be happy to live near one. But I'm also reasonably intelligent, and understand pretty well what sort of dangers there are and how they're addressed by safety features and the design of the facility.
Perhaps, but as you've noted there have been rather significant improvements in reactor technology. But damned if we can *build* them, or fund their research.
If you build bridges, and you've developed a really nice new bridge design (based on stone arches instead of people holding ropes at each end) - but the public blocks all bridges because the "actively safe bridge design of the bridge engineers" had the wrong design philosophy - well how are you ever going to change the perception, or get funding to improve?
You're right - the new reactors are much better and safer than the old ones. Wouldn't it be nice if we could *use* them? And the complaint is about the (relative) unsafety of the previous design, not the new design!
Well they need some relatively expensive hardware or software, but once amortized across their whole customer base over the multiple years it's functional, it is essentially free. Because it was a non-zero cost to provide it initially, it isn't actually free... but it might as well be.
My school does the theory and math, but with plenty of "real", for-credit classes available. At the moment I'm taking a compilers class (which is all theory, but we have to figure out how to implement it) and a computer-graphics class, where the class time is used to discuss a scene graph, intersection algorithms, and so on, but the final project is a 3D polygon mesh editor written with Qt. This is along with an in-depth algorithms class (dynamic programming, greedy algorithms, etc). Last semester, along with my automata theory class, I wrote a machine-code interpreter for an in-house instruction set, and assembly programs to run on it. Next semester we'll be implementing this ISA on a FPGA. These are required classes for my major.
This is probably because I'm at an engineering school in a university, so the theory is considered a (crucial) means to an end. Like all education, it's really up to the student to take advantage of it properly, but I can't see how somebody could make it even the halfway that I have without being a skilled programmer.
A CS degree damn well should be about math and theory, because it should be a given that you can implement the theory competently by the end of your freshman year. In fact, spring semester of my freshman year was all about the theory of data structures and algorithms, but the homework was implementing each one. I can tell you from experience that a motivated individual can become a competent programmer, but it's much harder to understand the theory without proper instruction (and homework).
A good CS degree presumes that its students are skilled and motivated enough to figure out how to implement increasingly-abstract algorithms in any language, even ones they don't know yet. Then it makes them do it. If you hire somebody from a good CS program, they should be able to code up a storm right away (with maybe some training on your specific environment) while understanding what they're doing and ways to improve it.
I didn't dismiss virtual hosts, quite the contrary. My point was that you can serve websites without it (as the two comments mentioning /etc/hosts point out).
Perhaps you've missed the point, or perhaps I wasn't clear enough about the thrust of my post. I wasn't saying "we don't need the DNS", or that for all but the most technical of reasons it *is* part of the Internet. But breaking or otherwise fussing with the DNS is not a technical issue, and can't be fixed with a technical solution. It's, as I think we agree, a human matter of agreeing that these policies or features or whatever of these roots are more worthwhile than those roots.
You can't fix DNS broken in that way with a patch, or fancy routing tricks. TFA doesn't exactly make that claim, but it's an important distinction nonetheless. For example, the problem of spam: is it a technical one, a legal one, or a social one? There's a case to be made for any or all of them, but you can't "fix" it without figuring out from which angle to address it. So it goes for the altroots - you can't "fix" it by fiddling with some configurations, you fix it by removing the impetus for its creation or keep it a fringe effort by marginalizing its importance.
It's a question of nuance, like so many other important issues. Without understanding the real intricacies of a system, how can anybody hope to improve it? The distinction between the DNS and the Internet matters, whether you think it's relevant or not.
The analogy would be the ability to run an arbitrary number of "Internets" over the same copper and fiber, just as you can run multiple DNS over an IP network. But that would require cooperation from everybody involved, whereas I can tell my laptop to be a root and convince people to point to it without any third-party involvement.
So they're not comparable.
Well, the Host: HTTP header came long after the DNS. You can define per-machine, sure, and it'll probably work - but that's not the point. The point is that it's automatic. If I already know that these several names map to one IP, everybody might as well just use a subdirectory. It was for sake of argument, I didn't mix them up.
I must admit that I haven't RTFA. But the summary quotation seems to imply that DNS is somehow part of the Internet.
Just to clarify, it's not. The internet sure would be hard to use without the DNS, absolutely. But it's not unthinkable - we'd just be stuck with IP addresses for everything, and there could be no virtual hosting (multiple domains per IP, disambiguated by the Host: field).
But the DNS is really more of a universal agreement. Everybody agrees on who the roots are, and that's that. But there's no technical reason that the roots have to be who they are - hence the altroots described.
But he didn't "fracture" the Internet. That's a stupid statement. The Internet doesn't concern itself with domain names, just routing IPs - the DNS is built on top of that and maps back down to IPs. Were he successful, he would've fractured the DNS. Pain in the ass? Sure. Coke.com could go to Pepsi's site, but http://216.64.210.28/ would still get me to the Coca-Cola website.
The difference matters, because fracturing the Internet is technical (routing), while fracturing the DNS is more of an administrative-bureaucratic-sociopolitical type of thing. Peering disputes can of course be about non-technical things like money, but it breaks at a technical level.
You know, I was considering posting a snarky comment to that effect when it occurred to me that they probably couldn't. I barely appreciate the subtleties of the problem (that is, why it's hard).
This is the kind of proof I could maybe understand in my Algorithms class, given a week and a very good explanation. But I'm not exactly a 'layman' in that context...
Though I will agree - the polynomial ham sandwich theorem sounds badass.
"The real world" would have a big problem ignoring Linux. Of the top million sites on the web, 65% run Linux (or at least Apache, and who runs Apache on Windows?). The majority smartphone OS is Android, and everybody from IBM to Google to Amazon to Grandma trying to watch DVR'd shows on her TiVo or use the Internet through her wireless router would have big issues.