I think there is a problem in applying this attitude, which is found in personal emotions about one's property, to corporate-owned equipment which is professionally maintained. If I saw someone pissing on my car, I would be angry. In fact, even seeing a stranger sitting on the hood of my car sends the blood rushing into my face. This is a mammalian reaction to protect personal territory.
As an employee of a large corporation, if I saw someone pissing on the wall of one of our buildings, I would feel no such outrage. Maybe mild irritation. Likewise, if I owned stock in IBM I would not have territorial feelings about IBM's assets. So the attempt to link corporate assets emotionally to personal assets remains unconvincing. In fact, it highlights the shaky ground on which the idea of the corporate citizen is built.
One problem with this case is that it hinges on the simple-sounding idea of the property owner deciding what gets done with "his" property. Which might make sense when you take your shirts to the dry-cleaner - you want them cleaned and pressed, not cut up and made into a quilt. Although I doubt the dry-cleaner would be convicted of a felony even if he did that.
But when you work for a big corporation, the will of the "owner" is expressed in a diffuse way. Nobody you deal with really has authority to speak for the corporation (only an officer of the corporation can do that.) Therefore, you are reduced to interpreting conflicting demands, one of which could be a corporate policy manual. My approach has been to deliver what my boss wants, and disregard the other expressions of corporate will. I count on my boss to protect me against anyone I offend. But what if my boss gets hit by a truck? Am I liable to be prosecuted for violating some obscure "corporate policy" I never read?
I would guess that the growth of Linux in the enterprise mostly occurred secretly in direct violation of corporate policy. Should the sysadmins who helped that growth be thrown in jail?
I am not denying that the case against Randal may have some merit. But you are making the issues far too simple.
There was a study [asktog.com] done to answer this very question.
Oh dear. So this is the oft-cited "study". First, the "study" is far too lacking in documentation of methodology, control procedures, raw data and possible biases to be glorified with the name. But that's hardly worth mentioning, given the objections arising from what little information "Tog" provided.
This "study" is not a comparison of GUI vs. CLI - it is a comparison of two ways to move a cursor around in a GUI - mouse vs. arrow keys. Even within that limitation, it is of dubious value.
The task is to replace the '|' character with 'e'. Most hackers wouldn't even use a text editor for this: just perl -pi.bak -e's/\|/e/g'. Within vi, you would type:%s/|/e/g. Microsoft Word, the platform used in the study has similar (slower) functionality. So we start by accepting an artifical constraint on how to accomplish the task. The constraint is intended to tip the playing field in favor of the mouse.
In any event, I actually agree with "Tog" that arrow keys aren't that useful. hjkl are in the home row and work better. However a good text editor should not force you to navigate by spatial position - it should assist you in navigation by content.
The GUI is faster, even when the test was slanted to favour keyboard usage!
I disagree. Although "Tog" claims this slant, the test is in fact geared to a "sharecropping" task, akin to picking apples or pulling weeds. In other words, a task that rewards the ability to move the cursor to a precise position rather than the ability to symbolically express the task. I don't do those kinds of task on a computer - I tell the computer to do them for me.
I suspect I am not the only person finding the comparison to the civil rights protests disgusting. There is a big difference between getting arrested for drinking at a colored water fountain and getting arresting for ripping off the latest U2 or Dire Straits tracks.
The ramifications of the emerging "intellectual property" regime extend far beyond pop entertainment. Even within the realm of entertainment, I cannot accept the idea that our common culture is "owned" by whoever capitalized its creation. The popular songs of U2 and Dire Straits are, in fact, in the public domain. They are widely known cultural referents, and many musicians could play them from memory. Unfortunately, the law has not kept up with reality, and denies that these songs are in the public domain.
But how do you even know there were civil rights protests? You know because that information was free to retransmit and archive. The Olympic Committee bans any unauthorized coverage of the games - they consider the games their "intellectual property". Even the athletes are forbidden to keep diaries. What if a city hosting the next WTO summit sells the "media rights" to a corporation? Then it would be illegal to pass on news or images from the protests.
If you watch the development of IP, it's clear that there is a powerful drive to destroy information. Shut down the fan sites, delete the tributes and remixes, take the old books out of print, take the old records off the shelf. Your example of Scientology vs Spaink highlights this destructive, censoring aspect of "intellectual property". And corporations are allergic to history - they'd like consumers and stockholders to live in the eternal now. Ever dig up an old computer magazine and see how quaint the "high-tech" ads appear? Kind of takes the edge off of techno-lust. Now if you were the publisher of that magazine, wouldn't you like to exercise your "intellectual property rights" and magically make the old magazines disappear? Your advertisers would like that.
And besides, by destroying the old material "content providers" create a vacuum into which to sell the new material. Already we are seeing laws (building codes) that are copyrighted by private corporations and illegal to reproduce. How long until your day-to-day activities are governed by secret laws?
If you want to listen to music then pay for the damn stuff.
Why? That's like saying "If you want to breathe air then pay for the damn stuff." Sure, it could support a massive air industry. Sure, the nonexistent air industry is losing billions of dollars a year, but why should I care? Conversely, why are you posting to slashdot for free? Surely you "deserve to be payed" for making insightful comments? Doesn't it bother you that I'm "ripping off" the "comment industry"?
This particular riff on the GPL has been repeated thousands of times on slashdot. And while we discuss whether the GPL is truly consistent with our principles, somewhere lobbyists are meeting with a legislator and pitching a new law that will horrify us. If for every time someone posted a deep comment about the GPL, he had instead tossed ten dollars into a bucket, the bucket would contain enough money to buy at least one legislator.
This is the wrong question. The right question is why computers in school.
I agree, and I think the real answer is that there is little or no legitimate role for computers in class. I do think there should be ample computer labs for kids who wouldn't otherwise have access to computers to play around with. The bottom line is that schools are already doing a lousy job teaching the minimum knowledge that underpins civilization. People come out of high school pathetically ignorant, aliterate and unable to form a valid sentence. I don't see the point in taking up more of the school day with trendy computer stuff which kids can learn on their own time (I did.)
None of the good programmers I know had significant interaction with computers in school (excluding college). We learned on our own. It's far more important to know reading, writing and arithmetic.
I think an educated, alert teenager of 1901, if transported by time machine to our era, could easily learn how to use Microsoft Office. But his counterpart of today, if transported back to 1901, would have no hope of keeping up with the more intensive curriculum.
That's why the width of standard vehicle wheel sets is what it is. It's based on the Roman chariot....They's why modern day cars, trucks, and even trains use that width.
The urban legend to which you are referring is discussed here, and attempts to explain railroad width, not cars and trucks. Extending the UL to cars and trucks makes little sense because they have widely varying wheel spacings.
Depends what you mean by "us". Folks whose sole skill is rebooting and reinstalling Windows will be redundant. However this is the trend of industrialization - less machine-like jobs, because machines can do them, and more human-like jobs in engineering and supporting the machines. It seems like desktop business computing is not advancing very fast in the benefits it offers the customer. Maybe some of the energy currently being used to reboot, reinstall, uncorrupt and audit licenses could be channeled into building and customizing apps that actually increase productivity or capture currently elusive business opportunity.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a completely backwards way of thinking? IOW, don't use an OS because it works?!
It's an unfortunate fact of organization life. If your systems function perfectly and you always catch failures before they impact users, you become invisible and your budget is in danger. But if you have the occasional high-profile failure, you raise your department's visibility and importance, look like heroes, and can show upper management where the 'pain' is, and why you need more money/people.
Why would anyone go to school for IT? To learn about the OS's and technologies of today, that will be obsolete in five years? I don't get it. Study EE or CS or a hard science like Chem/Physics. That will give you a disciplined and flexible mind. OS's and platforms are better learned on your own initiative, not least because they will continue to change throughout your life, and you must consequently continue to learn.
I guess I find it unsurprising that people going to school for IT would worship Microsoft.
Re:Two counterpoints take two
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
That sounds reasonable. However, by that logic there should never have been any exploits for a Microsoft product, right? Maybe you are assuming that the trojan would be glaringly obvious. I would assume the opposite - that it would be the kind of vulnerability we've already seen many times in IIS and Outlook. Something that could be called an honest mistake.
I still don't really believe the story, but I think you are dismissing it too lightly.
I think he misinterpreted your question. I think you were asking about the possibility of the TC becoming an ineffective paper tiger that occasionally has meetings and issues documents, but never actually curbs Microsoft. Just as our state Public Utility Commissions generally did nothing to stop the ILECs from destroying the DSL industry via sabotage and non-cooperation. That is a very real concern I'd like to see addressed. I think Satchel may have interpreted your question as "What if some TC members never show up for work, never return phone calls, and never return emails?" Obviously, the latter is not likely, for the reasons he pointed out.
I personally believe that all critical infrastructure should be the property of the people. The roads, the electric wires, the plumbing, Mae east and west, all of it.
I tend to agree. But the key issue isn't whether something is 'critical', it's whether it's a natural monopoly. The street in front of your dwelling, for example, is. If it were owned by a private company that could charge you anything they want for driving on it, you'd be screwed. Capitalism works well when people have choices. When no choice is possible, socialism helps prevent abuse.
As for internet infrastructure, I believe governments should build out the manholes and ductbanks, and allow private competing providers to rent ducts and pull their copper/fiber/whatever. The portion of infrastructure owned by the government should be minimized, because government is slow-moving, inefficient, and motivated by the wrong factors (pork barrel). The government should own just enough to insure a level playing field.
Re:BIOSes should not be operating system-specific.
on
LinuxBIOS Gains Steam
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· Score: 2
It is no better to be locked into running Linux on a machine than to be locked into running Windows. The BIOS should be a generic facility that can load any desired operating system.
This BIOS is unlikely to be bundled with new motherboards; therefore it is unlikely to restrict anyone's choices. It is currently aimed at embedded devices and clusters. Anyone who sets up a large cluster of identical computers to crunch numbers probably doesn't mind being "locked in" to the family of OS for which the cluster is intended. And if they decide to repurpose the machines as general-purpose PC's (which is unlikely if they have no disk, floppy, cdrom or video, as the author intends) they can just re-flash the BIOS.
Given that writing this firmware is a pretty difficult project, I have no wish for the author to go out of his way to also support Windows.
It is not practical for general use PC system design, since kernel upgrades mean plugging in a new ROM or reprogramming the old one in a special ROM burner. It is for dedicated appliances only.
I don't think you read the article. Because the ROM is typically 256K, and the author could not squeeze a kernel down to that size, his code does not use a Linux kernel. Therefore, upgrading the kernel would have no impact on the code in the ROM. Second, there is no need to remove the ROM or use a "special burner". The article specifically mentions that the ROM is re-flashed in place, and onlyl removed if the flash fails.
And it is not just for appliances. The author states that his focus is on compute clusters. I see this as a logical technology for server farms and even managed workstations. I have worked on automating boot and install for servers, and the antiquated BIOS is always a stumbling block. It would be great to have firmware that works with you instead of against you. For example, as mentioned in the article, moving the console to serial and eliminating video hardware.
Sometimes it's that easy, and I've done that. Other times the wall includes a "firebreak". This is a piece of 2x4 nailed transversely between the studs, and it can really put a crimp in this plan. The solution is to drill through the firebreak with a diversabit - a long flexible drill bit. Because it's hard to guide the diversabit to the center of the firebreak, you risk breaking out through the drywall.
I think the other poster meant wiring duct, such as this Panduit product which is actually a raceway. Your comments, of course, apply to ventilation ducts.
Good points. But don't cut electrical conduit with a pipe cutter - use a hacksaw with the appropriate blade. For EMT that would be 24 teeth per inch. If you use a pipe cutter and fully remove the internal ridge, it takes way longer than using a hacksaw. The only real benefit to a pipe cutter is that the cut is perfectly square. EMT fittings already incorporate tolerance for slightly off-square cuts.
One other point - if the conduit is installed by a contractor, it's good to require that he pull a mandrel through while you watch. This proves that no obstructions are decreasing the area of the conduit. Obviously, the mandrel must be of the same size as the conduit.
Then how the heck do all the office buildings get built?
The get built by a different set of folks. I've worked on residential, commercial and industrial construction, and they are totally different worlds. You could take an experienced residential electrician to an industrial job site and he probably couldn't identify most of the parts being installed. There are probably small towns where this isn't true because the same guy does everything.
... see if the plumber will run some dry pipes for you...
Couple of problems with this. First, plumbing pipe is generally installed with hard 90's, not the sweep 90's of electrical conduit. Second, plumbers don't usually install pull boxes, nor would they know where those boxes are required by electrical code. Third, plumbers generally don't know electrical code at all. Which leads to: fourth: plumbing pipe is not UL listed as electrical conduit, even if it's physically almost the same thing.
However this idea can work if you need fairly short, straight runs (no major planning required) and your inspector has already proved tolerant of such things.
Re:Running Ethernet With Phone Lines
on
Wiring A New House?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I'm sorry phone lines are not low voltage and they do cause interference with CAT5 cable.
Anyone can define "low voltage" however he wants. Check out this link for some of the ways NEC seems to define low voltage. Most electricians would say that less than 600 volts is low voltage, and this is also how the state of California defines it..
Phone lines run at a much higher frequency (around 2.6khz)...
Phone lines carry the speech spectrum, roughly 300 hz to 3000 hz. They also carry DC (0 hz) and ringing current (20 hz). They can also carry square-edged pulses made by hanging up a phone with a mechanical switch, for example, or dialing with a mechanical rotary phone. Such pulses contain energy far up the RF spectrum. Of course, a phone line carrying DSL will have lots of high-frequency energy above 3000 hz.
... but they only run at around 60v (I believe).
Phone lines use a nominal 48 volt battery. When you pick up the phone, most of that voltage is lost in the loop and you get 6 to 8 volts across the line. Ringing current is AC, ranging from 80 to 110 volts.
What all this means is that phone lines have a shorter range but can cause more interference, and power lines have greater range but won't completely wreck the signal.
Phone lines can run for many miles without significant loss of signal or power. 120 volt power lines cannot. If you live in a house in the US, your phone line probably goes several miles to the CO, but your power line goes straight to a nearby transformer that feeds it from a higher distribution voltage. As for interference, power lines don't just carry 60 hz - they carry substantial amounts of energy at higher frequencies, caused by motors, light ballasts, switching power supplies and other equipment. I think a power line is more likely to contribute noise to a data circuit than a phone line is.
There is no particular reason to install pull string when the conduit is installed, other than proving the continuity of the conduit. Professional electricians blow the string through with a compressor, or use a fish tape if it's a short run. No competent electrician installs pull string 10 feet at a time as he installs conduit, because any code-compliant conduit installation is fairly easy to string. The main issues in code compliance being: All pull boxes, condolets and junction boxes are accessible, and no more than 360 degrees of bend between access points.
I guess you think the architects should have been held accountable for the twin towers not withstanding a plane hitting them.
That's a bad analogy. It's more like four kids pressed a button on the outside of the WTC at street level, causing the towers to explode due to an engineering flaw. In other words, there is no way for a mail message to directly cause harm to your computer. It must be interpreted by a program which you trust (a traitor, in other words) which is willing to harm your computer at the command of an outside party.
I hate M$'s practices as much as the next guy, but you can't hold them responsible when someone else knowingly takes advantage of a problem that they did address in hotfixes and patches!
I absolutely can and do hold them responsible. Their decision to facilitate running programs that arrive in the mail without any kind of sandbox or access restrictions was an obviously dangerous one whose implications were immediately visible to people who understand computers. Microsoft spins their product as the omniscient gatekeeper to the internet and handholder to the clueless. They encourage the computer-illiterate to put their trust in Microsoft rather than learning how computers actually work. They created both the software and the culture that propogate malicious code. All of which means that they are greatly to blame for deliberately bringing into existence email viruses.
A lot of the comments have been based on not understanding this. People post "it works in $browser on $OS." More fundamentally, this is a persistent problem with Slashdot. Neither the story submitter nor the editor takes the two minutes to dig up and answer the most obvious question or confusion that will arise from the provided links. Therefore instead of an informed discussion we get lots of people blundering around in the dark, powered by misconceptions.
A good starting point for this kind of stuff is the bpbatch home page.. And yes, NFS is generally used to mount the shared storage. I haven't found it to be that awful. It does have its quirks.
I hope someone mods this up. I think OS/2 evangelists did such a good job proclaiming the use of their favorite OS in ATM's that people have been blind to the gradual switch to Windows.
With the ATM networks changing the banks are taking the opportunity to rebuild their supporting networks. At least the internal departments are using the reason to grab more money and play for new toys.
I think this is a phenomenon we badly need to understand and leverage. A transition from a legacy OS to Windows seems to raise the prestige and budget of the department doing it. Why is that, and is there any way to make Linux similarly attractive?
Re:Why can't anyone see the implications of this?
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
Just to respond to you, out of all the people talking about warehouses - you should realize that there is already an existing market, with existing suppliers, for industrial vehicles. Cushman is a popular maker of such vehicles. Check out this outline of material handling equipment, including industrial trucks. A stock picker offers vertical elevation as well as horizontal mobility - most warehouses have tall racks. If that's not an issue, don't you think something like this Taylor-Dunn Stockchaser is a more sensible machine to use in a warehouse?
It amazes me that some folks think that a huge industry like material handling would just be languishing in the dark ages because nobody thought of the right kind of vehicle, and some guy from the medical equipment industry suddenly invented it. Please don't take it personally.
just look at biological species to see that a process of evolution rarely results in the optimal design, and is unable to take U-turns or back out of dead ends...
I'm not sure if you're describing the shortcomings of a horse or of evolution. Assuming the latter, I don't think evolution needs to make U-turns because rather than turning it forks. In other words, if species X becomes extinct you can view that as a failure of evolution, but it's not. Because somewhere in the past, species X diverged from species Y.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there is a problem in applying this attitude, which is found in personal emotions about one's property, to corporate-owned equipment which is professionally maintained. If I saw someone pissing on my car, I would be angry. In fact, even seeing a stranger sitting on the hood of my car sends the blood rushing into my face. This is a mammalian reaction to protect personal territory.
As an employee of a large corporation, if I saw someone pissing on the wall of one of our buildings, I would feel no such outrage. Maybe mild irritation. Likewise, if I owned stock in IBM I would not have territorial feelings about IBM's assets. So the attempt to link corporate assets emotionally to personal assets remains unconvincing. In fact, it highlights the shaky ground on which the idea of the corporate citizen is built.
One problem with this case is that it hinges on the simple-sounding idea of the property owner deciding what gets done with "his" property. Which might make sense when you take your shirts to the dry-cleaner - you want them cleaned and pressed, not cut up and made into a quilt. Although I doubt the dry-cleaner would be convicted of a felony even if he did that.
But when you work for a big corporation, the will of the "owner" is expressed in a diffuse way. Nobody you deal with really has authority to speak for the corporation (only an officer of the corporation can do that.) Therefore, you are reduced to interpreting conflicting demands, one of which could be a corporate policy manual. My approach has been to deliver what my boss wants, and disregard the other expressions of corporate will. I count on my boss to protect me against anyone I offend. But what if my boss gets hit by a truck? Am I liable to be prosecuted for violating some obscure "corporate policy" I never read?
I would guess that the growth of Linux in the enterprise mostly occurred secretly in direct violation of corporate policy. Should the sysadmins who helped that growth be thrown in jail?
I am not denying that the case against Randal may have some merit. But you are making the issues far too simple.
This "study" is not a comparison of GUI vs. CLI - it is a comparison of two ways to move a cursor around in a GUI - mouse vs. arrow keys. Even within that limitation, it is of dubious value.
The task is to replace the '|' character with 'e'. Most hackers wouldn't even use a text editor for this: just perl -pi.bak -e's/\|/e/g'. Within vi, you would type
In any event, I actually agree with "Tog" that arrow keys aren't that useful. hjkl are in the home row and work better. However a good text editor should not force you to navigate by spatial position - it should assist you in navigation by content.
I disagree. Although "Tog" claims this slant, the test is in fact geared to a "sharecropping" task, akin to picking apples or pulling weeds. In other words, a task that rewards the ability to move the cursor to a precise position rather than the ability to symbolically express the task. I don't do those kinds of task on a computer - I tell the computer to do them for me.
The ramifications of the emerging "intellectual property" regime extend far beyond pop entertainment. Even within the realm of entertainment, I cannot accept the idea that our common culture is "owned" by whoever capitalized its creation. The popular songs of U2 and Dire Straits are, in fact, in the public domain. They are widely known cultural referents, and many musicians could play them from memory. Unfortunately, the law has not kept up with reality, and denies that these songs are in the public domain.
But how do you even know there were civil rights protests? You know because that information was free to retransmit and archive. The Olympic Committee bans any unauthorized coverage of the games - they consider the games their "intellectual property". Even the athletes are forbidden to keep diaries. What if a city hosting the next WTO summit sells the "media rights" to a corporation? Then it would be illegal to pass on news or images from the protests.
If you watch the development of IP, it's clear that there is a powerful drive to destroy information. Shut down the fan sites, delete the tributes and remixes, take the old books out of print, take the old records off the shelf. Your example of Scientology vs Spaink highlights this destructive, censoring aspect of "intellectual property". And corporations are allergic to history - they'd like consumers and stockholders to live in the eternal now. Ever dig up an old computer magazine and see how quaint the "high-tech" ads appear? Kind of takes the edge off of techno-lust. Now if you were the publisher of that magazine, wouldn't you like to exercise your "intellectual property rights" and magically make the old magazines disappear? Your advertisers would like that.
And besides, by destroying the old material "content providers" create a vacuum into which to sell the new material. Already we are seeing laws (building codes) that are copyrighted by private corporations and illegal to reproduce. How long until your day-to-day activities are governed by secret laws?
Why? That's like saying "If you want to breathe air then pay for the damn stuff." Sure, it could support a massive air industry. Sure, the nonexistent air industry is losing billions of dollars a year, but why should I care? Conversely, why are you posting to slashdot for free? Surely you "deserve to be payed" for making insightful comments? Doesn't it bother you that I'm "ripping off" the "comment industry"?
I agree with the second half of your post.
This particular riff on the GPL has been repeated thousands of times on slashdot. And while we discuss whether the GPL is truly consistent with our principles, somewhere lobbyists are meeting with a legislator and pitching a new law that will horrify us. If for every time someone posted a deep comment about the GPL, he had instead tossed ten dollars into a bucket, the bucket would contain enough money to buy at least one legislator.
I agree, and I think the real answer is that there is little or no legitimate role for computers in class. I do think there should be ample computer labs for kids who wouldn't otherwise have access to computers to play around with. The bottom line is that schools are already doing a lousy job teaching the minimum knowledge that underpins civilization. People come out of high school pathetically ignorant, aliterate and unable to form a valid sentence. I don't see the point in taking up more of the school day with trendy computer stuff which kids can learn on their own time (I did.)
None of the good programmers I know had significant interaction with computers in school (excluding college). We learned on our own. It's far more important to know reading, writing and arithmetic.
I think an educated, alert teenager of 1901, if transported by time machine to our era, could easily learn how to use Microsoft Office. But his counterpart of today, if transported back to 1901, would have no hope of keeping up with the more intensive curriculum.
The urban legend to which you are referring is discussed here, and attempts to explain railroad width, not cars and trucks. Extending the UL to cars and trucks makes little sense because they have widely varying wheel spacings.
Depends what you mean by "us". Folks whose sole skill is rebooting and reinstalling Windows will be redundant. However this is the trend of industrialization - less machine-like jobs, because machines can do them, and more human-like jobs in engineering and supporting the machines. It seems like desktop business computing is not advancing very fast in the benefits it offers the customer. Maybe some of the energy currently being used to reboot, reinstall, uncorrupt and audit licenses could be channeled into building and customizing apps that actually increase productivity or capture currently elusive business opportunity.
It's an unfortunate fact of organization life. If your systems function perfectly and you always catch failures before they impact users, you become invisible and your budget is in danger. But if you have the occasional high-profile failure, you raise your department's visibility and importance, look like heroes, and can show upper management where the 'pain' is, and why you need more money/people.
Why would anyone go to school for IT? To learn about the OS's and technologies of today, that will be obsolete in five years? I don't get it. Study EE or CS or a hard science like Chem/Physics. That will give you a disciplined and flexible mind. OS's and platforms are better learned on your own initiative, not least because they will continue to change throughout your life, and you must consequently continue to learn.
I guess I find it unsurprising that people going to school for IT would worship Microsoft.
That sounds reasonable. However, by that logic there should never have been any exploits for a Microsoft product, right? Maybe you are assuming that the trojan would be glaringly obvious. I would assume the opposite - that it would be the kind of vulnerability we've already seen many times in IIS and Outlook. Something that could be called an honest mistake.
I still don't really believe the story, but I think you are dismissing it too lightly.
I think he misinterpreted your question. I think you were asking about the possibility of the TC becoming an ineffective paper tiger that occasionally has meetings and issues documents, but never actually curbs Microsoft. Just as our state Public Utility Commissions generally did nothing to stop the ILECs from destroying the DSL industry via sabotage and non-cooperation. That is a very real concern I'd like to see addressed.
I think Satchel may have interpreted your question as "What if some TC members never show up for work, never return phone calls, and never return emails?" Obviously, the latter is not likely, for the reasons he pointed out.
I tend to agree. But the key issue isn't whether something is 'critical', it's whether it's a natural monopoly. The street in front of your dwelling, for example, is. If it were owned by a private company that could charge you anything they want for driving on it, you'd be screwed. Capitalism works well when people have choices. When no choice is possible, socialism helps prevent abuse.
As for internet infrastructure, I believe governments should build out the manholes and ductbanks, and allow private competing providers to rent ducts and pull their copper/fiber/whatever. The portion of infrastructure owned by the government should be minimized, because government is slow-moving, inefficient, and motivated by the wrong factors (pork barrel). The government should own just enough to insure a level playing field.
This BIOS is unlikely to be bundled with new motherboards; therefore it is unlikely to restrict anyone's choices. It is currently aimed at embedded devices and clusters. Anyone who sets up a large cluster of identical computers to crunch numbers probably doesn't mind being "locked in" to the family of OS for which the cluster is intended. And if they decide to repurpose the machines as general-purpose PC's (which is unlikely if they have no disk, floppy, cdrom or video, as the author intends) they can just re-flash the BIOS.
Given that writing this firmware is a pretty difficult project, I have no wish for the author to go out of his way to also support Windows.
I don't think you read the article. Because the ROM is typically 256K, and the author could not squeeze a kernel down to that size, his code does not use a Linux kernel. Therefore, upgrading the kernel would have no impact on the code in the ROM. Second, there is no need to remove the ROM or use a "special burner". The article specifically mentions that the ROM is re-flashed in place, and onlyl removed if the flash fails.
And it is not just for appliances. The author states that his focus is on compute clusters. I see this as a logical technology for server farms and even managed workstations. I have worked on automating boot and install for servers, and the antiquated BIOS is always a stumbling block. It would be great to have firmware that works with you instead of against you. For example, as mentioned in the article, moving the console to serial and eliminating video hardware.
Sometimes it's that easy, and I've done that. Other times the wall includes a "firebreak". This is a piece of 2x4 nailed transversely between the studs, and it can really put a crimp in this plan. The solution is to drill through the firebreak with a diversabit - a long flexible drill bit. Because it's hard to guide the diversabit to the center of the firebreak, you risk breaking out through the drywall.
I think the other poster meant wiring duct, such as this Panduit product which is actually a raceway. Your comments, of course, apply to ventilation ducts.
Good points. But don't cut electrical conduit with a pipe cutter - use a hacksaw with the appropriate blade. For EMT that would be 24 teeth per inch. If you use a pipe cutter and fully remove the internal ridge, it takes way longer than using a hacksaw. The only real benefit to a pipe cutter is that the cut is perfectly square. EMT fittings already incorporate tolerance for slightly off-square cuts.
One other point - if the conduit is installed by a contractor, it's good to require that he pull a mandrel through while you watch. This proves that no obstructions are decreasing the area of the conduit. Obviously, the mandrel must be of the same size as the conduit.
The get built by a different set of folks. I've worked on residential, commercial and industrial construction, and they are totally different worlds. You could take an experienced residential electrician to an industrial job site and he probably couldn't identify most of the parts being installed. There are probably small towns where this isn't true because the same guy does everything.
Couple of problems with this. First, plumbing pipe is generally installed with hard 90's, not the sweep 90's of electrical conduit. Second, plumbers don't usually install pull boxes, nor would they know where those boxes are required by electrical code. Third, plumbers generally don't know electrical code at all. Which leads to: fourth: plumbing pipe is not UL listed as electrical conduit, even if it's physically almost the same thing.
However this idea can work if you need fairly short, straight runs (no major planning required) and your inspector has already proved tolerant of such things.
Anyone can define "low voltage" however he wants. Check out this link for some of the ways NEC seems to define low voltage. Most electricians would say that less than 600 volts is low voltage, and this is also how the state of California defines it..
Phone lines carry the speech spectrum, roughly 300 hz to 3000 hz. They also carry DC (0 hz) and ringing current (20 hz). They can also carry square-edged pulses made by hanging up a phone with a mechanical switch, for example, or dialing with a mechanical rotary phone. Such pulses contain energy far up the RF spectrum. Of course, a phone line carrying DSL will have lots of high-frequency energy above 3000 hz.
Phone lines use a nominal 48 volt battery. When you pick up the phone, most of that voltage is lost in the loop and you get 6 to 8 volts across the line. Ringing current is AC, ranging from 80 to 110 volts.
Phone lines can run for many miles without significant loss of signal or power. 120 volt power lines cannot. If you live in a house in the US, your phone line probably goes several miles to the CO, but your power line goes straight to a nearby transformer that feeds it from a higher distribution voltage. As for interference, power lines don't just carry 60 hz - they carry substantial amounts of energy at higher frequencies, caused by motors, light ballasts, switching power supplies and other equipment. I think a power line is more likely to contribute noise to a data circuit than a phone line is.
There is no particular reason to install pull string when the conduit is installed, other than proving the continuity of the conduit. Professional electricians blow the string through with a compressor, or use a fish tape if it's a short run. No competent electrician installs pull string 10 feet at a time as he installs conduit, because any code-compliant conduit installation is fairly easy to string. The main issues in code compliance being: All pull boxes, condolets and junction boxes are accessible, and no more than 360 degrees of bend between access points.
That's a bad analogy. It's more like four kids pressed a button on the outside of the WTC at street level, causing the towers to explode due to an engineering flaw. In other words, there is no way for a mail message to directly cause harm to your computer. It must be interpreted by a program which you trust (a traitor, in other words) which is willing to harm your computer at the command of an outside party.
I absolutely can and do hold them responsible. Their decision to facilitate running programs that arrive in the mail without any kind of sandbox or access restrictions was an obviously dangerous one whose implications were immediately visible to people who understand computers. Microsoft spins their product as the omniscient gatekeeper to the internet and handholder to the clueless. They encourage the computer-illiterate to put their trust in Microsoft rather than learning how computers actually work. They created both the software and the culture that propogate malicious code. All of which means that they are greatly to blame for deliberately bringing into existence email viruses.
A lot of the comments have been based on not understanding this. People post "it works in $browser on $OS."
More fundamentally, this is a persistent problem with Slashdot. Neither the story submitter nor the editor takes the two minutes to dig up and answer the most obvious question or confusion that will arise from the provided links. Therefore instead of an informed discussion we get lots of people blundering around in the dark, powered by misconceptions.
A good starting point for this kind of stuff is the bpbatch home page.. And yes, NFS is generally used to mount the shared storage. I haven't found it to be that awful. It does have its quirks.
I think this is a phenomenon we badly need to understand and leverage. A transition from a legacy OS to Windows seems to raise the prestige and budget of the department doing it. Why is that, and is there any way to make Linux similarly attractive?
Just to respond to you, out of all the people talking about warehouses - you should realize that there is already an existing market, with existing suppliers, for industrial vehicles. Cushman is a popular maker of such vehicles. Check out this outline of material handling equipment, including industrial trucks. A stock picker offers vertical elevation as well as horizontal mobility - most warehouses have tall racks. If that's not an issue, don't you think something like this Taylor-Dunn Stockchaser is a more sensible machine to use in a warehouse?
It amazes me that some folks think that a huge industry like material handling would just be languishing in the dark ages because nobody thought of the right kind of vehicle, and some guy from the medical equipment industry suddenly invented it. Please don't take it personally.
I'm not sure if you're describing the shortcomings of a horse or of evolution. Assuming the latter, I don't think evolution needs to make U-turns because rather than turning it forks. In other words, if species X becomes extinct you can view that as a failure of evolution, but it's not. Because somewhere in the past, species X diverged from species Y.