Any computer, telephone, or communication system that attempts to discriminate between authorized users (paying customers) and unauthorized users (freeloaders).
Any computer, telephone, or communication system that, in the opinion of the current administration, should so discriminate.
Critical, adj.:
(in relation to cybersecurity, q.v.)
likely to contain (however briefly) information useful to the goals of the current administration.
likely to negatively affect the wealth/power/popularity/social-standing of the current administration.
likely to positively affect the wealth/power/popularity/social-standing of those critical to the current administration.
Simple solution: eliminate all federal bailouts. Let each potentially vulnerable entity assess and independently insure against risk.
What? Your "critical" service is on the net and gets attacked? Hope the money you saved on security was enough to pay the insurance premiums. Hope your insurance covers all the lawsuits. If not, the failure of your poorly-run business will provide lots of opportunity for the start-ups who are scrambling to take your place.
Capitalism doesn't prevent failure, but it doesn't encourage it, either. And it provably provides a quicker and cheaper recovery than government bailouts.
...My agenda: - Constitutional amendment: single-issue bills only. (reduce pork and make reps accountable for everything they vote on instead of being able to hide behind a "must pass" bill)
Agreed. I'd add two more conditions:
In order to vote on a bill, each congresscritter must be endure, while conscious, an oral reading of the entire bill, with no restroom breaks.
No bills will be voted upon until at minimum 2/3 quorum of congresscritters have qualified to vote under the preceeding clause.
... - Constitutional amendment: 10 year sunset clause on ALL federal laws. (create an upper bound on the number of laws that the federal gov't can maintain)
Sunset clauses don't work, because it's easier to vote to renew the status quo than to seriously consider changing it.
... - Move elections to an instant-run-off system so voters don't feel they have to try to game the system
... - Move election day to July 4th. More people vote because they're off work. Can celebrate *getting* freedom and *keeping* it.
Most companies informally allow time off from work to vote. In many areas, this practice is enforced by law.
Also, I would argue that the original (constitutional) method, which specified that only landowners could vote, resulted in a higher-quality electorate. Too many voters let their opinion be determined by the passing winds of mass media. Because they don't have enough invested in the outcome, they fail to seriously consider the issues.
... That should get us some REAL change!
On the contrary, "real change" comes from the inside, not from the outside.
If I put Ubuntu on it, can I still make phone calls with the built-in GSM/HSDPA?
Waiting for detailed specs. If the hardware is supported under Linux, I don't mind blowing away the pre-installed Windows. It's not like they put the O/S in ROM.
Used squid + dansguardian + clamav for a church network of about twenty workstations. The server/router/firewall/proxy had 512MB of RAM and about a gigabyte of hard drive dedicated to the cache. Subscribed to urlblacklist.com and hand-tweaked from there. Any denied pages triggered an email to the administrator (me) and after the initial break-in period, I saw no more than an email a month. The emails helped me figure out what needed to be adjusted, and they were more consistent and reliable than reports from the staff.
Nothing beats dansguardian for security and completeness, but setting it up is a bit more work than most people are willing to undertake for just one or two computers.
When faced with a slow Windows computer, I typically fix *everything*. As in "House, MD" episodes, symptoms may be indicative of a single problem, multiple problems, or the interaction between multiple problems. Treatment is often quicker (and easier) than diagnosis.
Things I do automatically:
* Scan/remove all malware, virus, trojans, etc. * Remove all unnecessary ActiveX and browser helpers. * Remove/deactivate/shut down all unnecessary auto-start programs and services. * Run Disk Cleanup with all options selected * Run Defrag * Create a new user (hence empty profile)
All CMS's suck. Drupal sucks less.
on
Using Drupal
·
· Score: 1
(with apologies to Michael Elkins)
I've had occasion to download and test out dozens of Content Management Systems over the past ten years or so. Drupal is the first one where I looked at the code and didn't immediately think "Oh, crap. I should really rewrite half of this."
Drupal has a steep learning curve. After working with it for two years, I feel like I'm just beginning to grasp some of the underlying concepts.
Drupal isn't the fastest CMS out there; it isn't the easiest to use; it isn't the biggest or the prettiest or the most customizable even.
For any particular metric you care to define, there's probably somebody out there who does it better than Drupal.
But every time I take another look at the competition, I keep coming back to Drupal.
I recently installed a competing product, at a customer's request. From his standpoint, it was clearly superior to Drupal. It started quicker, ran quicker, and did most of what he wanted "out of the box." But every add-on came with instructions like "Open the file in such-and-such folder and find the place around line 277 that looks like... and change it to..." After half a dozen modifications like that one, the system can't be upgraded without ripping everything out and starting over.
There are parts to Drupal that can only be customized by hand-tweaking some program files. But the tweaks live in your theme directory, safely removed from the original (and still upgradeable) code.
Yeah, Drupal feels slow sometimes, but it's plenty fast enough to run some pretty high-profile websites.
Yeah, there's been times when it took me all day to figure out how to do something in Drupal, but the result was small, elegant, maintainable, and well-documented.
Yeah, there are dozens of CMS's out there, and they all suck. Drupal sucks less.
It's been my experience that the people who have problems switching between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice are precisely the ones who should be using LaTeX.
People who use (either) Office for its intended purpose (form letters, business correspondence, short reports) should find them very nearly interchangeable.
Too many people use their Word Processor as a Swiss-Army-Knife of Desktop Publishing. After time, they learn to take its idiosyncrasies so completely for granted that switching to *ANYTHING* else (even a later version of the same product) is painful.
... designers of Star Trek really thought long and hard about what future technology would be like...
Yeah, you can see the evidence by reading the raw scripts they produced, which are littered with references to... (tech). The scriptwriters would literally write the word "tech" in parentheses to indicate the places where their science writers (who had NO INFLUENCE on the actual PLOT) should insert some technical-sounding jargon.
Reminds me of a short-story where all jokes were found to come from an extraterrestrial (alien) source that was using them to conduct psychological experiments on humans.
It is *possible* to cache YouTube videos and the like, but you'd need some technical skill to pull it off. Basically, you'd write a Squid pre-filter that replaces embedded YouTube videos with an embedded call to a local cgi-script. On the first invocation, the cgi-script would download and cache the video while streaming it to the client. Subsequent calls would skip the download process.
Of course, this only saves bandwidth when you re-watch the same video over-and-over.
Even in the pre-YouTube days of the internet, Squid didn't help with bandwidth all that much. I once set up a Squid cache in transparent-proxy mode at an ISP with around 400 dial-up customers. I gave it 4 GB of cache space, which doesn't sound like much now, but our biggest drives were 500mb full-height SCSI bricks. I tuned every configurable option and pulled every trick in the book to maximize the caching. The experiment lasted around a month, during which time Squid saved us around 30% on our inbound bandwidth, according to log analysis. We finally had to shut it down because customers started to notice that they weren't seeing real-time data (like stock quotes) and some of them threatened to sue.
Bottom line: If you want low-bandwidth internet, use one of the these:
So after reading the article and associated links, I gather that:
1. The U.S. Army commissioned Foster-Miller to modify their TALON remote-controlled vehicle to carry and operate various types of weapons. The modified vehicle is named SWORDS, and erroneously described as a "robot", although it is neither human-like in appearance nor autonomous in operation.
2. Some time later, the Army canceled the production order, citing an "unexpected movement" of a single test unit.
After a brief search:
There's a reason we separate military and the police: one fights the enemy of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people. Commander William Adama of Battlestar Galactica, Season One, Episode 9.
Slashdot Mirror
- Any computer, telephone, or communication system that attempts to discriminate between authorized users (paying customers) and unauthorized users (freeloaders).
- Any computer, telephone, or communication system that, in the opinion of the current administration, should so discriminate.
Critical, adj.: (in relation to cybersecurity, q.v.)Simple solution: eliminate all federal bailouts. Let each potentially vulnerable entity assess and independently insure against risk.
What? Your "critical" service is on the net and gets attacked? Hope the money you saved on security was enough to pay the insurance premiums. Hope your insurance covers all the lawsuits. If not, the failure of your poorly-run business will provide lots of opportunity for the start-ups who are scrambling to take your place.
Capitalism doesn't prevent failure, but it doesn't encourage it, either. And it provably provides a quicker and cheaper recovery than government bailouts.
...My agenda:
- Constitutional amendment: single-issue bills only. (reduce pork and make reps accountable for everything they vote on instead of being able to hide behind a "must pass" bill)
Agreed. I'd add two more conditions:
...
- Constitutional amendment: 10 year sunset clause on ALL federal laws. (create an upper bound on the number of laws that the federal gov't can maintain)
Sunset clauses don't work, because it's easier to vote to renew the status quo than to seriously consider changing it.
...
- Move elections to an instant-run-off system so voters don't feel they have to try to game the system
IRV fails as many fairness tests as the method currently used in the United States and elsewhere. IRV is vulnerable to gaming, namely compromise and push-over strategies. Ranked Pairs or Schulze would be preferable.
...
- Move election day to July 4th. More people vote because they're off work. Can celebrate *getting* freedom and *keeping* it.
Most companies informally allow time off from work to vote. In many areas, this practice is enforced by law.
Also, I would argue that the original (constitutional) method, which specified that only landowners could vote, resulted in a higher-quality electorate. Too many voters let their opinion be determined by the passing winds of mass media. Because they don't have enough invested in the outcome, they fail to seriously consider the issues.
...
That should get us some REAL change!
On the contrary, "real change" comes from the inside, not from the outside.
Of course, my example doesn't prove anything, but neither does an argument over statistics.
For instance, I could install Linux on my Treo 700p, but I wouldn't be able to make phone calls with it.
If I put Ubuntu on it, can I still make phone calls with the built-in GSM/HSDPA?
Waiting for detailed specs. If the hardware is supported under Linux, I don't mind blowing away the pre-installed Windows. It's not like they put the O/S in ROM.
Last time I had to implement an indexing and searching solution, swish++ was by far the performance winner.
If you had paid as much for your living arrangements then you would bloody well expect some perks, too.
Well of course they do. That's what money is for, you silly bugger!
You think they acquire all that money just so they can jump up and down on it like Scrooge McDuck? Get a clue.
Used squid + dansguardian + clamav for a church network of about twenty workstations. The server/router/firewall/proxy had 512MB of RAM and about a gigabyte of hard drive dedicated to the cache. Subscribed to urlblacklist.com and hand-tweaked from there. Any denied pages triggered an email to the administrator (me) and after the initial break-in period, I saw no more than an email a month. The emails helped me figure out what needed to be adjusted, and they were more consistent and reliable than reports from the staff.
Nothing beats dansguardian for security and completeness, but setting it up is a bit more work than most people are willing to undertake for just one or two computers.
Why are fancy charts and graphs needed to prove that the Linux kernel is not "sliming down"?
sliming being coated with a soft, moist, adhesive mucilaginous substance down in the direction of gravityI mean, it's obvious, isn't it? Just look at the thing. No slime at all that I can see.
When faced with a slow Windows computer, I typically fix *everything*. As in "House, MD" episodes, symptoms may be indicative of a single problem, multiple problems, or the interaction between multiple problems. Treatment is often quicker (and easier) than diagnosis.
Things I do automatically:
* Scan/remove all malware, virus, trojans, etc.
* Remove all unnecessary ActiveX and browser helpers.
* Remove/deactivate/shut down all unnecessary auto-start programs and services.
* Run Disk Cleanup with all options selected
* Run Defrag
* Create a new user (hence empty profile)
(with apologies to Michael Elkins)
I've had occasion to download and test out dozens of Content Management Systems over the past ten years or so. Drupal is the first one where I looked at the code and didn't immediately think "Oh, crap. I should really rewrite half of this."
Drupal has a steep learning curve. After working with it for two years, I feel like I'm just beginning to grasp some of the underlying concepts.
Drupal isn't the fastest CMS out there; it isn't the easiest to use; it isn't the biggest or the prettiest or the most customizable even.
For any particular metric you care to define, there's probably somebody out there who does it better than Drupal.
But every time I take another look at the competition, I keep coming back to Drupal.
I recently installed a competing product, at a customer's request. From his standpoint, it was clearly superior to Drupal. It started quicker, ran quicker, and did most of what he wanted "out of the box." But every add-on came with instructions like "Open the file in such-and-such folder and find the place around line 277 that looks like ... and change it to ..." After half a dozen modifications like that one, the system can't be upgraded without ripping everything out and starting over.
There are parts to Drupal that can only be customized by hand-tweaking some program files. But the tweaks live in your theme directory, safely removed from the original (and still upgradeable) code.
Yeah, Drupal feels slow sometimes, but it's plenty fast enough to run some pretty high-profile websites.
Yeah, there's been times when it took me all day to figure out how to do something in Drupal, but the result was small, elegant, maintainable, and well-documented.
Yeah, there are dozens of CMS's out there, and they all suck. Drupal sucks less.
It's all about the Pentiums, baby.
It's been my experience that the people who have problems switching between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice are precisely the ones who should be using LaTeX.
People who use (either) Office for its intended purpose (form letters, business correspondence, short reports) should find them very nearly interchangeable.
Too many people use their Word Processor as a Swiss-Army-Knife of Desktop Publishing. After time, they learn to take its idiosyncrasies so completely for granted that switching to *ANYTHING* else (even a later version of the same product) is painful.
I just wanted to point out that there are two kinds of Star Wars fans:
Yeah, you can see the evidence by reading the raw scripts they produced, which are littered with references to ... (tech). The scriptwriters would literally write the word "tech" in parentheses to indicate the places where their science writers (who had NO INFLUENCE on the actual PLOT) should insert some technical-sounding jargon.
They can have my Logitech Trackman Marble FX when they pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.
Got it in one! The link I posted was, on the day I posted it, a copy of that story. Sorry it's down.
Summary is here, of course.
Reminds me of a short-story where all jokes were found to come from an extraterrestrial (alien) source that was using them to conduct psychological experiments on humans.
It is *possible* to cache YouTube videos and the like, but you'd need some technical skill to pull it off. Basically, you'd write a Squid pre-filter that replaces embedded YouTube videos with an embedded call to a local cgi-script. On the first invocation, the cgi-script would download and cache the video while streaming it to the client. Subsequent calls would skip the download process.
Of course, this only saves bandwidth when you re-watch the same video over-and-over.
Even in the pre-YouTube days of the internet, Squid didn't help with bandwidth all that much. I once set up a Squid cache in transparent-proxy mode at an ISP with around 400 dial-up customers. I gave it 4 GB of cache space, which doesn't sound like much now, but our biggest drives were 500mb full-height SCSI bricks. I tuned every configurable option and pulled every trick in the book to maximize the caching. The experiment lasted around a month, during which time Squid saved us around 30% on our inbound bandwidth, according to log analysis. We finally had to shut it down because customers started to notice that they weren't seeing real-time data (like stock quotes) and some of them threatened to sue.
Bottom line: If you want low-bandwidth internet, use one of the these:
Lynx
Links
ELinks
w3m
Granted that two of ten dictionaries define a robot as:
but most people wouldn't recognize that definition. Is my central-air system a robot just because it operates by a remote control thermostat?
Certainly, speaking of a "robot uprising" implies the definition of a robot which includes artificial intelligence or at least autonomous operation.
So after reading the article and associated links, I gather that:
1. The U.S. Army commissioned Foster-Miller to modify their TALON remote-controlled vehicle to carry and operate various types of weapons. The modified vehicle is named SWORDS, and erroneously described as a "robot", although it is neither human-like in appearance nor autonomous in operation.
2. Some time later, the Army canceled the production order, citing an "unexpected movement" of a single test unit.
3. Simultaneously, the Army purchased, from the same company, a bigger, badder version of the same product.
Folks, this isn't a failed robotic uprising. It isn't even the over-reaction of a safety-conscious Army Executive. This is an excuse to kill a little project in order to start a bigger one.
I used to be bob@html.com, and got around five new mailing-list signups per day. That's where I learned how to properly use bogofilter.