If you had bothered to click the link in my original post, you would have found out that hams didn't really play any significant emergency role in last year's hurricanes.
OK, I've read the article. It's not clear to me exactly what the hams actually did, other than pass routine traffic. What role, exactly, did the ham radio operators play in saving lives?
No, it's really not. Sometimes it appears that ham radio is providing important services, when in fact ham radio operators are simply present with no real emergency interaction and simply relegated to the role of passing routine health/welfare traffic.
What role, exactly, did ham radio play in 9/11? I don't recall any major role played by ham radio that saved lives. I don't recall ham radio stepping in to resolve the inability of various NY agencies to communicate...
Just showing up at the party doesn't quite cut it.
With the continuing death throes of ham radio, who exactly are you going to communicate with other than other hams on a pre-determined schedule (yes, I RTFA, and this is exactly what was done)? Who will be listening when an emergency comes around? In case one hasn't noticed, there is really nothing going on new and innovative in digital modes these days. And if you do find the occasional renegade website that talks about high-speed digital communications on the ham bands, good luck in actually finding another ham locally who is interested.
Where were the ham radio operators during the London blasts, when the telephone/cell networks were reportedly overloaded and in some cases unusable? In fact, when was the last time ham radio was used in an emergency situation because other modes of communications were down? (If you doubt the death of ham radio, you might want to peruse this.)
These are just some observations from a long-time ham...one of the reasons I became inactive was because I could not find other hams interested in pushing the digital envelope. That was 10 years ago...and now, I'm afraid it's too late to catch up.
This article was a good read from a nostalgic standpoint, but I don't see anything very innovative, at least innovative enough to spark my interests (again).
Got a nastygram from the same North Shore collection agency after letting a trial subscription lapse. Even though I knew it was a ruse, I tried to track this "collection agency" down, and was never able to get through to them by phone.
I wrote to the publishers of "Reason" and let them know how distasteful the practice was...never heard back from them, but never heard back from North Shore either.
BTW, "Reason" is a libertarian rag, so I thought it was somewhat ironic they would threaten to report me to some watchdog credit agencies.
The days of high -end hardware are over
on
SGI Faces Bankruptcy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Back in the mid 90's, I wrote software for a commercial satellite imaging system (now part of Space Imagining). SGIs were the workstation of choice: Very high-end, graphics without compare, in-depth support for parallel processing, and relatively fast. Cheap they were not (not to mention a fairly buggy C++ compiler in IRIX that took up many hours of our time...usually very esoteric bugs that even stumped the SGI folks).
Back then, the rumor was always floating around that SGI was considering moving from Irix to Linux. (Did I hear correctly that they finally did, years later?) Amongst ourselves, we would talk about there was no way Linux would be able to replace Irix (remember, this was '96!), and that it would be a mistake for SGI to go this route.
How wrong we were...SGI, like Cray and some of the others mentioned, refused to give up their hold on proprietary high-end hardware, and have fallen hard. Now that the hardware market has become commoditized, with throw-away PCs, there's really no need for companies like SGI, Sun, etc. Sun, to their credit, has tried to bail from their sinking ship by making overtures to the OSS crowd and by delving into software, but they may have been too late to start manning the lifeboats. But it's my belief that Sun's days are numbered as well.
So a hearty farewell to SGI. I just hope they go down swiftly and silently.
Maybe now's the time to give serious consideration to long-standing alternative root servers like OpenNIC. And the only way alternative roots will catch on is if individuals fed up with the greedy ways of domain registrars demand that their ISPs allow them port 53 access (or better yet, also include the alternative root zones with the ISP nameserver's own root zones).
I'm curious as to the legal basis which Google is using to "copyright" these images (they are all marred with Google watermarks). Last time I checked, Google wasn't in the satellite building business. Wouldn't the copyright for images be held by the originator of the images?
The world is full of hypotheticals...can someone actually point us to a working example of this alleged exploit? If not, I'll just file it away as "cool information with little practical impact on my daily life."
I scoured past articles for this.. but could not find it. There was reference to the steps a guy had to go thru to get FAA approval for launching a balloon- contacting the airport controller, etc, and no one had any clue how to do it.
IIRC, from my days as an air traffic controller, the US Gov't has laid claim to all airspace between 18,000 feet and FL600 (about 60,000 feet) as "positive control airspace" (PCA). I believe parent is correct. These individuals face some hefty civil fines if they didn't get permission/clearance from the FAA first. If any of them have pilot tickets, they stand to lose those as well.
All I can say is life is short, too short to fight the FAA (which is why I'm no longer a controller).
..is that it's a terrible model to support when it comes to randomly-challenged humans. The move needs to be away from passwords (especially randomly-generated) and towards passphrases -- still randomly generated, but using pronouncable/easily remembered combinations of words in the user's native language. (Diceware has some good background on the why passphrases are more secure than passwords.)
Before spouting off why you think (erroneously) that "easily-remembered" passphrases can't possibly be more secure than randomly-generated passwords, please read the FAQs at the Diceware site first.
The CNN article implies that this competition was "invented" by Kaman...Botball is a much more challenging competition, has been around for a number of years, enjoys NASA sponsorship, and makes use of multi-controller robots (including the incredibly versatile, open-source Handy Board controller). Plus, Botball is open to high-school students as well as middle school.
You would expect the number of people using email less because of spam to decrease to zero quickly when 25% of the population say they avoid email!
I would expect the number of people understanding this statement less because of mangled syntax to decrease to zero quickly when 75% of the Slashdot population say they favor stricter editing standards.
I read that line a couple of times, and it does not state that companies will be forced to pay. What it does seem to imply is that companies will be put in the uncomfortable position of having to decide whether or not to dump their GPL-licensed software (contrary to Olson's premise that companies will either expose their soft underbellies and pony up, or distribute their source code).
To me, this is nothing more than extortion on the part of the FSF.
looking at a proposal where companies would be required to pay money if they use GPLed software,
Wow, talk about sensationalism. Or maybe I can't read. But I did RTFA, and no where did I see mention of anybody having to pay anything for using GPLed software.
Instead, what I did find was an article which seems to imply that the FSF is trying to further alienate themselves from the real world by effectively prohibiting GPLed software from being used by for-profit organizations, irregardless of whether or not modified software is distributed. Thank God for alternative OSI-certified licenses that promote the continued development of open source software without the political trappings of the GPL.
4. Red Hat: Gone. I hear Fedora Core is good. Nice that they gave us the free version, but it doesn't have near the support or attention that Red Hat does.
Scratch Fedora unless you're running the greatest and latest hardware. Otherwise, you'll spend a lot of time agonizing over what should be a straightforward installation.
5. Slackware: Going strong. Great distro. Package management? Nope...
pkgtool does an acceptable job with Slack. I'm not too sure where you were headed with this one...
My wife couldn't see them at all until I shoed her through a jewelers loupe... Of course once you know where they are, they seem to stand out.
Interesting you bring this up...a number of years ago I worked in a shop that was almost all Sony Trinitrons. After a number of months of great joy and happiness, a co-worker pointed out that that the Trinitron CRTs have two thin lines that run horizontally across the screen, dividing it roughly into thirds. I didn't believe him and told him so. He pointed one out...I stared and stared, then lo and behold, there it was: A hair thin strand that stretched the length of the screen. Twice.
After that, my life was miserable. Those two lines stuck out as if someone rulered them on with a Sharpie. I finally had to scrounge up an old 15" CRT from the junkpile, and hid the Sony under my desk, where it stayed until I left.
So yeah, I can see where a few dead pixels would mess with your mind.
In the world of educational CMSes, Moodle is pretty much king of the roost. Not only has Martin Dougiamas helped build and direct a quality system that has a presence in over 100 countries (nearly 3000 registered sites), but he is successfully parlaying his expertise in service and support, providing the opportunity for others to become support "partners."
I have never been one to believe that's it's criminal to make a living off F/OSS. I think you can have it both ways, and Martin does a great job at proving this to be the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Hurricanes last year
If you had bothered to click the link in my original post, you would have found out that hams didn't really play any significant emergency role in last year's hurricanes.
OK, I've read the article. It's not clear to me exactly what the hams actually did, other than pass routine traffic. What role, exactly, did the ham radio operators play in saving lives?
No, it's really not. Sometimes it appears that ham radio is providing important services, when in fact ham radio operators are simply present with no real emergency interaction and simply relegated to the role of passing routine health/welfare traffic.
What role, exactly, did ham radio play in 9/11? I don't recall any major role played by ham radio that saved lives. I don't recall ham radio stepping in to resolve the inability of various NY agencies to communicate...
Just showing up at the party doesn't quite cut it.
With the continuing death throes of ham radio, who exactly are you going to communicate with other than other hams on a pre-determined schedule (yes, I RTFA, and this is exactly what was done)? Who will be listening when an emergency comes around? In case one hasn't noticed, there is really nothing going on new and innovative in digital modes these days. And if you do find the occasional renegade website that talks about high-speed digital communications on the ham bands, good luck in actually finding another ham locally who is interested.
Where were the ham radio operators during the London blasts, when the telephone/cell networks were reportedly overloaded and in some cases unusable? In fact, when was the last time ham radio was used in an emergency situation because other modes of communications were down? (If you doubt the death of ham radio, you might want to peruse this.)
These are just some observations from a long-time ham...one of the reasons I became inactive was because I could not find other hams interested in pushing the digital envelope. That was 10 years ago...and now, I'm afraid it's too late to catch up.
This article was a good read from a nostalgic standpoint, but I don't see anything very innovative, at least innovative enough to spark my interests (again).
Got a nastygram from the same North Shore collection agency after letting a trial subscription lapse. Even though I knew it was a ruse, I tried to track this "collection agency" down, and was never able to get through to them by phone.
I wrote to the publishers of "Reason" and let them know how distasteful the practice was...never heard back from them, but never heard back from North Shore either.
BTW, "Reason" is a libertarian rag, so I thought it was somewhat ironic they would threaten to report me to some watchdog credit agencies.
Back in the mid 90's, I wrote software for a commercial satellite imaging system (now part of Space Imagining). SGIs were the workstation of choice: Very high-end, graphics without compare, in-depth support for parallel processing, and relatively fast. Cheap they were not (not to mention a fairly buggy C++ compiler in IRIX that took up many hours of our time...usually very esoteric bugs that even stumped the SGI folks).
Back then, the rumor was always floating around that SGI was considering moving from Irix to Linux. (Did I hear correctly that they finally did, years later?) Amongst ourselves, we would talk about there was no way Linux would be able to replace Irix (remember, this was '96!), and that it would be a mistake for SGI to go this route.
How wrong we were...SGI, like Cray and some of the others mentioned, refused to give up their hold on proprietary high-end hardware, and have fallen hard. Now that the hardware market has become commoditized, with throw-away PCs, there's really no need for companies like SGI, Sun, etc. Sun, to their credit, has tried to bail from their sinking ship by making overtures to the OSS crowd and by delving into software, but they may have been too late to start manning the lifeboats. But it's my belief that Sun's days are numbered as well.
So a hearty farewell to SGI. I just hope they go down swiftly and silently.
Maybe now's the time to give serious consideration to long-standing alternative root servers like OpenNIC. And the only way alternative roots will catch on is if individuals fed up with the greedy ways of domain registrars demand that their ISPs allow them port 53 access (or better yet, also include the alternative root zones with the ISP nameserver's own root zones).
I'm curious as to the legal basis which Google is using to "copyright" these images (they are all marred with Google watermarks). Last time I checked, Google wasn't in the satellite building business. Wouldn't the copyright for images be held by the originator of the images?
There's no need for GPS when you have an internally-accessible geoposition system available.
The world is full of hypotheticals...can someone actually point us to a working example of this alleged exploit? If not, I'll just file it away as "cool information with little practical impact on my daily life."
Diceware generates secure passphrases that are very useful for this purpose.
IIRC, from my days as an air traffic controller, the US Gov't has laid claim to all airspace between 18,000 feet and FL600 (about 60,000 feet) as "positive control airspace" (PCA). I believe parent is correct. These individuals face some hefty civil fines if they didn't get permission/clearance from the FAA first. If any of them have pilot tickets, they stand to lose those as well.
All I can say is life is short, too short to fight the FAA (which is why I'm no longer a controller).
Ask anyone who has been in a plane when they open a cargo door before completely equalizing the pressure in the cabin......
Usually there aren't too many survivors after such an event, so I doubt anyone here has actually had the opportunity to ask such a question.
It's like asking someone what a successful suicide feels like.
..is that it's a terrible model to support when it comes to randomly-challenged humans. The move needs to be away from passwords (especially randomly-generated) and towards passphrases -- still randomly generated, but using pronouncable/easily remembered combinations of words in the user's native language. (Diceware has some good background on the why passphrases are more secure than passwords.)
Before spouting off why you think (erroneously) that "easily-remembered" passphrases can't possibly be more secure than randomly-generated passwords, please read the FAQs at the Diceware site first.
The CNN article implies that this competition was "invented" by Kaman...Botball is a much more challenging competition, has been around for a number of years, enjoys NASA sponsorship, and makes use of multi-controller robots (including the incredibly versatile, open-source Handy Board controller). Plus, Botball is open to high-school students as well as middle school.
Everything you ever wanted to know about open source licenses and more!
Remember, anything you read here about open source licensing is only an opinion. Educate yourself!
You would expect the number of people using email less because of spam to decrease to zero quickly when 25% of the population say they avoid email!
I would expect the number of people understanding this statement less because of mangled syntax to decrease to zero quickly when 75% of the Slashdot population say they favor stricter editing standards.
Silly be not.
I read that line a couple of times, and it does not state that companies will be forced to pay. What it does seem to imply is that companies will be put in the uncomfortable position of having to decide whether or not to dump their GPL-licensed software (contrary to Olson's premise that companies will either expose their soft underbellies and pony up, or distribute their source code).
To me, this is nothing more than extortion on the part of the FSF.
looking at a proposal where companies would be required to pay money if they use GPLed software,
Wow, talk about sensationalism. Or maybe I can't read. But I did RTFA, and no where did I see mention of anybody having to pay anything for using GPLed software.
Instead, what I did find was an article which seems to imply that the FSF is trying to further alienate themselves from the real world by effectively prohibiting GPLed software from being used by for-profit organizations, irregardless of whether or not modified software is distributed. Thank God for alternative OSI-certified licenses that promote the continued development of open source software without the political trappings of the GPL.
4. Red Hat: Gone. I hear Fedora Core is good. Nice that they gave us the free version, but it doesn't have near the support or attention that Red Hat does.
Scratch Fedora unless you're running the greatest and latest hardware. Otherwise, you'll spend a lot of time agonizing over what should be a straightforward installation.
5. Slackware: Going strong. Great distro. Package management? Nope...
pkgtool does an acceptable job with Slack. I'm not too sure where you were headed with this one...
My wife couldn't see them at all until I shoed her through a jewelers loupe... Of course once you know where they are, they seem to stand out.
Interesting you bring this up...a number of years ago I worked in a shop that was almost all Sony Trinitrons. After a number of months of great joy and happiness, a co-worker pointed out that that the Trinitron CRTs have two thin lines that run horizontally across the screen, dividing it roughly into thirds. I didn't believe him and told him so. He pointed one out...I stared and stared, then lo and behold, there it was: A hair thin strand that stretched the length of the screen. Twice.
After that, my life was miserable. Those two lines stuck out as if someone rulered them on with a Sharpie. I finally had to scrounge up an old 15" CRT from the junkpile, and hid the Sony under my desk, where it stayed until I left.
So yeah, I can see where a few dead pixels would mess with your mind.
I believe the correct term is "treacherous computing." (Not my idea -- Stallman's, I think.)
In the world of educational CMSes, Moodle is pretty much king of the roost. Not only has Martin Dougiamas helped build and direct a quality system that has a presence in over 100 countries (nearly 3000 registered sites), but he is successfully parlaying his expertise in service and support, providing the opportunity for others to become support "partners."
I have never been one to believe that's it's criminal to make a living off F/OSS. I think you can have it both ways, and Martin does a great job at proving this to be the case.
Must be a slow day...check out what they're watching on the left-hand monitor!
http://webcam1.cotas.com.bo/view/view.shtml
Here's a link for you. Keep in mind these are only recommendations, not legal requirements.
Here's a LinuxJournal link that also might be of interest.