Any amount of evil is intolerable here in the Utopia of Slashdot:)
Disney is not really concerned with good and evil, however. Those concepts are ancillary to increasing shareholder value. If you look at them through those eyes, everything is easy to understand.
Disney dislikes how the doctrine of fair use for copyrightable material makes it too easy for unscrupulous people to circumvent their revenue stream.
They aren't adopting Linux because they believe in its moral superiority - they're doing it because it makes financial sense to do so.
what they did to refine the diagnose and isolate the cause
exactly what they did to fix it (I can see where SysV and BSD camps each need for the other to be explicit about things they each take for granted.)
Finally, because a system like this depends on the cooperation of the sysadmins involved to be complete and detailed about this documentation, you need to heap frequent praise and monetary rewards on those that do a good job documenting their work.
Make sure they understand that if a secondary sysadmin is able to keep their system going while they're on vacation that it is not a sign of job insecurity, but a sign of a first class sysadmin that makes sure his company keeps running even if he's on vacation.
I'm not familiar with how the FCC auctions off the EM spectrum.
It sure makes sense to me if they opened it up for free usage as long as the TX power was low enough, a lot like 800-900 MHz and 2 GHz usages for cordless phones, garage door openers, etc..
I like the idea of last mile wireless that is not hamstrung by fixed costs of providers that bought up the spectrum license.
Then, I'd be willing to pay for a contact point to a local communications provider that relays my wireless traffic on and off land line optical fiber.
Just like cars, refrigerators and houses, the quality of what you purchase is not perfect. And you should not expect software quality to be perfect any more than you expect your car to be perfect. The more money you pay, the more quality you get. It's an asymptotic approach where increasing quality costs a lot more money.
Just because of a long-standing close relationship with mathematics, people buy into the idea that software should be as ironclad as a theorem.
It just ain't so.
Real software becomes complicated, much in the same way that PDE's governing real physical phenomena become complicated. Small pieces of software can be verified for correctness pretty easily, but complicated interacting pieces of software rapidly will exceed your resources to check for behavior under all circumstances.
There are so many ways for it to behave and misbehave that closure is a process of endurance, enumerating and testing as many options as possible under as many likely and important conditions that you can think of.
At some point, you decide that you've reached an acceptable level of quality (does our regression tests and stays up and running for 99.99% of the time for the sample of typical users) and release the product.
[Bill Gates is another matter altogether. I think he's responsible for some distortion of the software marketplace and, thereby, responsible for software not needing to be up to higher standards. That said, however, even without his influence, software will never be up to perfect standards.]
If you've kept track of the news for the last couple of years (the elections) or decades you know that Zimbabwe is really screwing itself.
Robert Mugabe is holding onto power using teen gangs to beat up opponents, blaming rural white farmers for his country's ills, bloating up the civil service with jobs for cronies, etc.
Believe me, freedom of the press is just one misery in big heap as far as Zimbabwe is concerned.
It was good and just that they threw off the shackles of colonial imperialism. But now they're finding out that home-grown rulers can be just as bad as their former governments, probably worse than Ian Smith ever was.
It's too bad that there hasn't been more of an international outcry at the abuses in Zimbabwe. I guess things will just have to degrade to the point where enough of the citizens start to get a clue that they have the power to change things, but only if they're willing to risk some more of their blood. Change will have to come from within and will cost dearly.
Abandon the computer field for a bit. Look into occupations that seem to be suffering from a shortage of qualified workers.
Actually, what I think works better is to expand on your non-computer areas of expertise and become someone that is qualified at bringing IT solutions to the $AREA.
Say you know computers and used cars. Then, you'll have a leg up on people that only know one of those two areas. Granted, you'll have greater competition if you're looking to become a simple used car salesman or a plain IT hack with no other skills. But, if you can demonstrate to prospective employers that you know IT in a particular industry, I think you'll find it to be more rewarding and lucrative.
Fairbanks even holds a few records for the biggest seasonal variances in temperature.
I wouldn't doubt it.
I used to live there some time back. The depths of winter would see super lows around -60F sometimes in town where the ice fog and carbon monoxide from running vehicles would pile up. (You'd be afraid to turn off your car, too, at those temperatures unless you were near an outlet you could plug your engine block heater and battery warmer into.) Fortunately, on the Fbx campus there are lots of parking spaces with such plugs.
Also, up on the hill where the UAF campus is located, the temperatures in the dead of winter are usually warmer than downtown Fbx, or places southeast of the city (Badger Road).
I could tolerate the cold with minor inconvenience. You can even wear tennis shoes outside quite nicely for up to about 15 minutes at at time - about the time to go between buildings in the worse case. The more insidious drawback to Fbx in the winter is the paucity of daylight.
Summertime high temperatures are usually in the 80s in early July; August is the rainy season. I once saw it go into the low 90's, but that's as unusual as going below -60F in the winter.
Oh, and definitely watch out for the mosquitoes. In the height of the season, the arctic is infested with as many of the little bloodsuckers as the everglades.
Not to be all down on Fairbanks - there's a lot of wonderful scenery (Alaska range to the south, including Denali(/McKinley). Great rivers, fishing, hunting, backpacking, etc. Frequently you can see the aurora borealis in the winter.
There are plenty of advantages and drawbacks to something like this.
I like the quick power on and no need for long bootup wait and the potential for diskless operation. Ideal for consumer electronic applications like PVRs.
As others have mentioned, the complexity of the BIOS now means it's harder to secure against network exploits. How about reducing the network functionality down to a minimum? BUt, at the same time, it would be nice to have standard network functionality to replace all these different internal communication busses.
Imagine if the HD were communicating via IP to other internal components. It would be interesting if my PC were nothing but a mini LAn of components that could be just more networked devices. And if I could make a NAS down the hall look really local and not through SMB or NFS.
The networking built into the X windowing system would be small potatotes compared to having everything be a networked device: video card, mouse, keyboard, harddisk, CD, etc. This new BIOS seems like an important step if something like that is ever to happen.
From the early days of programming, I recall that everyone that is just starting out programming will automatically strew various bugs and imperfections around their programs.
Hence, the big thing you learned outside of the classroom was how to debug and to interpret error diagnostics.
Funny, but years later I'm still doing the same thing.
I applaud the notion that a company responsible for price fixing be made to pay for its noncompetitive tactics.
That said, however, I see where this could open up all kinds of cans of worms.
What if it could be shown that the supplier for one part of my Ford Mustang exerted similar tactics and caused the price of some component to be exagerated compared to what a competitive marketplace would support?
Could I get a refund of several dollars from the manufacturer of the power seats?
What about going back two levels of suppliers?
Iowa might be right -- and it might even work -- but on a state by state basis I could see where the feds would get all kinds of complaints from businesses seeking to avoid this kind of potential hassle.
OTOH, if the feds did their job, looking out for development of anti-competitive marketplaces, then we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. Maybe there's been a de facto rollback of the Sherman anti-trust act that I don't know about.
I've found that ccmalloc helped me to find a lot of problems in C code. The output is more verbose than Purify, but it showed me where some real problems lay with my code.
Check out this site by Ben Zorn on free and other tools for this.
This of course ignores the fact that the code for Foo2 that you gave to the person outside your organisation is now GPL'd, and they can release it for free to the whole world.
Which ignores the fact that you got foo with source absolutely free and were able to use for any purpose of your own apart from certain forms of redistribution.
I like to think of the GPL as the share and share alike license.
I can't be the only one saddened to see the name of Alexis de Toqueville besmirched by being associated with a think tank for hire.
His insights into America of the early 19th century were profound.
Meanwhile, the points of this paper, besides being wide of the mark in assessing the truth, are not even particularly original - other fear mongers have trotted out the same vague bogeymen prior to the publication of this report. And those objections to open source have no more basis in fact now than they did when they were originally brought out.
Hmmmm. It's a little problematic that you only have one flavor of Unix now.
My experience is that managing different flavors of Unix is a lot like porting to different flavors of Unix.
That is, learning to go from the first to the second platform is often the most difficult step. Then going from the second to the third is slightly easier, etc.
Level of difficulty = 1 - exp(-n)
Thus, for your situtation, the difficulty of migration is going to be directly related to how similar the 2nd platform is to the first.
In the old days it was easy to distinguish the BSD flavors from the SysV flavors as a significant learning hump that had to be overcome.
Do these iPAQs or Zauri come or be augmented with audio, for example?
A portable web server that streams out live music or video from remote locations (concerts, theatres, seminars, political speeches) would be quite useful.
Practically, though, you wouldn't want everyone connecting directly to the BW limited wireless device. Better to relay to a cache server with big pipes to handle the multicasting.
Presuming that "counter-revolutionary" thoughts always enter from the outside and could be theoretically controlled by a firewall neglects the basic fact that China is filled with enough people on the inside that can think for themselves.
When a rational idea or a truth is communicated, it will resonate all through the inside.
OTOH, China, like the U.S. and Russia, has a great deal of national pride. While the party in power has used that as tool for its own ends, there's nothing preventing a popular movement from incorporating "patriotism" in a way that might be unhealthy for everyone in the long term. Remember some of the causes of WWW 1!
Traveling time was 85 hours over a span of 16 days, an average of about 38 mph, but DaimlerChrysler says the car reached speeds of more than 90 mph.
In other news, late yesterday, state police officials from Nevada arrived in Washington, D.C., for the extradition of the driver of the Daimler-Chrysler fuel cell powered car.
Crime Scene Investigators from Las Vegas confirmed that a vehicle with tires matching those of the unique fuel-cell car was responsible for running over a Wayne Newton billboard near the entrance of the Mustang Ranch.
"We think the testimony the engineers gave to CNN will clinch this case and help to save America from terrorist speeders."
[Sorry for being OT, I just couldn't resist asking a related question...]
I have a home burglar alarm system I purchased several years ago that basically just gets inputs on twisted pairs from simple sensors all over the house and has a phone line out, some power sensor, and the ability to activate an outside alarm.
But a lot of the system seems to be software, AFAICT.
Is there any open source implementation of a burglar alarm system?
I couldn't get a 5 superscript to render or I would have done a "10<sup>5</sup> to get the best rendition of something on the order of a hundred thousand.
Besides, most pure math types would consider my specification of the "1" to be needless and figure that the "e5" would come out to about 13.59... and wonder if there was a partial volume in the library of irrational size.
most 'minimally skilled IT operators' write passwords to important systems on bits of paper
Yes, I do that, too.
But I can see it now: the social engineering crackers show up to look for a word written down on a piece of paper - in an archive (aka library) with probably O(1e5) volumes!
If I wanted to hide a piece of paper, that's exactly where I'd hide it.
As a youngster, I once hid some paper money in an obscure text in the library and was able to retrieve it a month later.
Slashdot Mirror
Strictly, yes.
Any amount of evil is intolerable here in the Utopia of Slashdot:)
Disney is not really concerned with good and evil, however. Those concepts are ancillary to increasing shareholder value. If you look at them through those eyes, everything is easy to understand.
Disney dislikes how the doctrine of fair use for copyrightable material makes it too easy for unscrupulous people to circumvent their revenue stream.
They aren't adopting Linux because they believe in its moral superiority - they're doing it because it makes financial sense to do so.
Pure and simple.
Answers: Sentences 3, 6, 9, 12 and 15 are correct.
Why didncha just cut to the chase and tell us that proper English grammar is as simple as
instead of all this complicated string usage rules with "myself"?In particular, have your admins write down
Finally, because a system like this depends on the cooperation of the sysadmins involved to be complete and detailed about this documentation, you need to heap frequent praise and monetary rewards on those that do a good job documenting their work.
Make sure they understand that if a secondary sysadmin is able to keep their system going while they're on vacation that it is not a sign of job insecurity, but a sign of a first class sysadmin that makes sure his company keeps running even if he's on vacation.
I'm not familiar with how the FCC auctions off the EM spectrum.
It sure makes sense to me if they opened it up for free usage as long as the TX power was low enough, a lot like 800-900 MHz and 2 GHz usages for cordless phones, garage door openers, etc..
I like the idea of last mile wireless that is not hamstrung by fixed costs of providers that bought up the spectrum license.
Then, I'd be willing to pay for a contact point to a local communications provider that relays my wireless traffic on and off land line optical fiber.
Just like cars, refrigerators and houses, the quality of what you purchase is not perfect. And you should not expect software quality to be perfect any more than you expect your car to be perfect. The more money you pay, the more quality you get. It's an asymptotic approach where increasing quality costs a lot more money.
Just because of a long-standing close relationship with mathematics, people buy into the idea that software should be as ironclad as a theorem.
It just ain't so.
Real software becomes complicated, much in the same way that PDE's governing real physical phenomena become complicated. Small pieces of software can be verified for correctness pretty easily, but complicated interacting pieces of software rapidly will exceed your resources to check for behavior under all circumstances.
There are so many ways for it to behave and misbehave that closure is a process of endurance, enumerating and testing as many options as possible under as many likely and important conditions that you can think of.
At some point, you decide that you've reached an acceptable level of quality (does our regression tests and stays up and running for 99.99% of the time for the sample of typical users) and release the product.
[Bill Gates is another matter altogether. I think he's responsible for some distortion of the software marketplace and, thereby, responsible for software not needing to be up to higher standards. That said, however, even without his influence, software will never be up to perfect standards.]
He was likely trying to steer you a phone with a better profit margin and of course a better commission for him.
Heh.
"Would you like an extended warranty with that?"
If you've kept track of the news for the last couple of years (the elections) or decades you know that Zimbabwe is really screwing itself.
Robert Mugabe is holding onto power using teen gangs to beat up opponents, blaming rural white farmers for his country's ills, bloating up the civil service with jobs for cronies, etc.
Believe me, freedom of the press is just one misery in big heap as far as Zimbabwe is concerned.
It was good and just that they threw off the shackles of colonial imperialism. But now they're finding out that home-grown rulers can be just as bad as their former governments, probably worse than Ian Smith ever was.
It's too bad that there hasn't been more of an international outcry at the abuses in Zimbabwe. I guess things will just have to degrade to the point where enough of the citizens start to get a clue that they have the power to change things, but only if they're willing to risk some more of their blood. Change will have to come from within and will cost dearly.
Abandon the computer field for a bit. Look into occupations that seem to be suffering from a shortage of qualified workers.
Actually, what I think works better is to expand on your non-computer areas of expertise and become someone that is qualified at bringing IT solutions to the $AREA.
Say you know computers and used cars. Then, you'll have a leg up on people that only know one of those two areas. Granted, you'll have greater competition if you're looking to become a simple used car salesman or a plain IT hack with no other skills. But, if you can demonstrate to prospective employers that you know IT in a particular industry, I think you'll find it to be more rewarding and lucrative.
Fairbanks even holds a few records for the biggest seasonal variances in temperature.
I wouldn't doubt it.
I used to live there some time back. The depths of winter would see super lows around -60F sometimes in town where the ice fog and carbon monoxide from running vehicles would pile up. (You'd be afraid to turn off your car, too, at those temperatures unless you were near an outlet you could plug your engine block heater and battery warmer into.) Fortunately, on the Fbx campus there are lots of parking spaces with such plugs.
Also, up on the hill where the UAF campus is located, the temperatures in the dead of winter are usually warmer than downtown Fbx, or places southeast of the city (Badger Road).
I could tolerate the cold with minor inconvenience. You can even wear tennis shoes outside quite nicely for up to about 15 minutes at at time - about the time to go between buildings in the worse case. The more insidious drawback to Fbx in the winter is the paucity of daylight.
Summertime high temperatures are usually in the 80s in early July; August is the rainy season. I once saw it go into the low 90's, but that's as unusual as going below -60F in the winter.
Oh, and definitely watch out for the mosquitoes. In the height of the season, the arctic is infested with as many of the little bloodsuckers as the everglades.
Not to be all down on Fairbanks - there's a lot of wonderful scenery (Alaska range to the south, including Denali(/McKinley). Great rivers, fishing, hunting, backpacking, etc. Frequently you can see the aurora borealis in the winter.
I'd like to see an improved replacement for PCI, too.
But what about this recent report of Infiniband's demise?
There are plenty of advantages and drawbacks to something like this.
I like the quick power on and no need for long bootup wait and the potential for diskless operation. Ideal for consumer electronic applications like PVRs.
As others have mentioned, the complexity of the BIOS now means it's harder to secure against network exploits. How about reducing the network functionality down to a minimum? BUt, at the same time, it would be nice to have standard network functionality to replace all these different internal communication busses.
Imagine if the HD were communicating via IP to other internal components. It would be interesting if my PC were nothing but a mini LAn of components that could be just more networked devices. And if I could make a NAS down the hall look really local and not through SMB or NFS.
The networking built into the X windowing system would be small potatotes compared to having everything be a networked device: video card, mouse, keyboard, harddisk, CD, etc. This new BIOS seems like an important step if something like that is ever to happen.
From the early days of programming, I recall that everyone that is just starting out programming will automatically strew various bugs and imperfections around their programs.
Hence, the big thing you learned outside of the classroom was how to debug and to interpret error diagnostics.
Funny, but years later I'm still doing the same thing.
I applaud the notion that a company responsible for price fixing be made to pay for its noncompetitive tactics.
That said, however, I see where this could open up all kinds of cans of worms.
What if it could be shown that the supplier for one part of my Ford Mustang exerted similar tactics and caused the price of some component to be exagerated compared to what a competitive marketplace would support?
Could I get a refund of several dollars from the manufacturer of the power seats?
What about going back two levels of suppliers?
Iowa might be right -- and it might even work -- but on a state by state basis I could see where the feds would get all kinds of complaints from businesses seeking to avoid this kind of potential hassle.
OTOH, if the feds did their job, looking out for development of anti-competitive marketplaces, then we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. Maybe there's been a de facto rollback of the Sherman anti-trust act that I don't know about.
I've found that ccmalloc helped me to find a lot of problems in C code. The output is more verbose than Purify, but it showed me where some real problems lay with my code.
Check out this site by Ben Zorn on free and other tools for this.
This of course ignores the fact that the code for Foo2 that you gave to the person outside your organisation is now GPL'd, and they can release it for free to the whole world.
Which ignores the fact that you got foo with source absolutely free and were able to use for any purpose of your own apart from certain forms of redistribution.
I like to think of the GPL as the share and share alike license.
I can't be the only one saddened to see the name of Alexis de Toqueville besmirched by being associated with a think tank for hire.
His insights into America of the early 19th century were profound.
Meanwhile, the points of this paper, besides being wide of the mark in assessing the truth, are not even particularly original - other fear mongers have trotted out the same vague bogeymen prior to the publication of this report. And those objections to open source have no more basis in fact now than they did when they were originally brought out.
Hmmmm. It's a little problematic that you only have one flavor of Unix now.
My experience is that managing different flavors of Unix is a lot like porting to different flavors of Unix.
That is, learning to go from the first to the second platform is often the most difficult step. Then going from the second to the third is slightly easier, etc.
Level of difficulty = 1 - exp(-n)
Thus, for your situtation, the difficulty of migration is going to be directly related to how similar the 2nd platform is to the first.
In the old days it was easy to distinguish the BSD flavors from the SysV flavors as a significant learning hump that had to be overcome.
This sounds interesting.
Do these iPAQs or Zauri come or be augmented with audio, for example?
A portable web server that streams out live music or video from remote locations (concerts, theatres, seminars, political speeches) would be quite useful.
Practically, though, you wouldn't want everyone connecting directly to the BW limited wireless device. Better to relay to a cache server with big pipes to handle the multicasting.
I'm actually here right now (I'm a US citizen on a 6 month visa) and there is no fear of war out here.
Interesting to hear independent data.
There have been reports that fear of war is affecting the Indian IT industry.
Exactly.
Presuming that "counter-revolutionary" thoughts always enter from the outside and could be theoretically controlled by a firewall neglects the basic fact that China is filled with enough people on the inside that can think for themselves.
When a rational idea or a truth is communicated, it will resonate all through the inside.
OTOH, China, like the U.S. and Russia, has a great deal of national pride. While the party in power has used that as tool for its own ends, there's nothing preventing a popular movement from incorporating "patriotism" in a way that might be unhealthy for everyone in the long term. Remember some of the causes of WWW 1!
You'll need a draw, something like free beer and a chance to win an uber-karma account with +3 for posts.
Also, do you have any idea of what goes on down Score: -1 and Score: 0 ? I only slum down there when I moderate.
Let me tell you, some of those posters give me the creeps.
I don't think I'd want to risk meeting them in person.
You'll definitely need some bouncers at the door.
Traveling time was 85 hours over a span of 16 days, an average of about 38 mph, but DaimlerChrysler says the car reached speeds of more than 90 mph.
In other news, late yesterday, state police officials from Nevada arrived in Washington, D.C., for the extradition of the driver of the Daimler-Chrysler fuel cell powered car.
Crime Scene Investigators from Las Vegas confirmed that a vehicle with tires matching those of the unique fuel-cell car was responsible for running over a Wayne Newton billboard near the entrance of the Mustang Ranch.
"We think the testimony the engineers gave to CNN will clinch this case and help to save America from terrorist speeders."
[Sorry for being OT, I just couldn't resist asking a related question...]
I have a home burglar alarm system I purchased several years ago that basically just gets inputs on twisted pairs from simple sensors all over the house and has a phone line out, some power sensor, and the ability to activate an outside alarm.
But a lot of the system seems to be software, AFAICT.
Is there any open source implementation of a burglar alarm system?
O(1e5)=O(1)
Depends.
In most computer languages
is tantamount to saying that a=100000 (base 10).I couldn't get a 5 superscript to render or I would have done a "10<sup>5</sup> to get the best rendition of something on the order of a hundred thousand.
Besides, most pure math types would consider my specification of the "1" to be needless and figure that the "e5" would come out to about 13.59... and wonder if there was a partial volume in the library of irrational size.
most 'minimally skilled IT operators' write passwords to important systems on bits of paper
Yes, I do that, too.
But I can see it now: the social engineering crackers show up to look for a word written down on a piece of paper - in an archive (aka library) with probably O(1e5) volumes!
If I wanted to hide a piece of paper, that's exactly where I'd hide it.
As a youngster, I once hid some paper money in an obscure text in the library and was able to retrieve it a month later.