Sorry for forgetting that he directed the Branch of Celestial Mechanics at the Naval Observatory. Not the director of the Naval Observatory.
But he did help those gus finding Charon. And BTW I didn't say he found Charon. I said he HELPED on the find. If you work at the Naval Observatory you mau know well that he did a lot of homework about minor planets, Neptune satellites and things around Pluto
??????????????? I have my VERY OLD home box on a new fresh bloat distro and I ain't upgrade for nearly 1,5 years. And I'm well doing on KDE3 + ALL THE BLOAT OUT THERE.
Video editing? I'm speaking about broadcasting and I've been on it for 2 years. And I don't get what you wanna say. Because I have seen both sides - Windows and Linux.
What it does out of the box? So go for Windows... This place is NOT for lazy sysadmins. Believe me 'cause I'm also a security expert and I'm seek of seeing the HELL in the form of badly configured RH's. At least Windows has a good advantage here, security is so great on M$ that I only need to argument - It's Windows so what do you want from it? And sysadmins can continue to blame BG for their problems.
Bloatness on Linux is a question of administration and not a distro problem. Distros are for features and for the laziness of building everything nearly from scratch. On Celeron 500 + 64Mb maybe RH 8 will slow down as you may have installed everything you could... On PIII 866 + 128Mb? Well I've just 2 months ago switched to 256 and I don't get where you could have had problems. For a simple office task the machine was ok. However it was hard to work on a destkop and having 3-4 servers working on background for good. Yes, for good, as one of them was no one else than the video broadcaster from mpeg4ip which loads the machine very well.
On what relates to Windows. Do you wanna tell me that you can find a Windows good enough to hang on the configurations you pointed? Even NT had trouble working on the Celeron you pointed out. With only a browser it managed to eat up all memory and permanently require some 20Mb swap.
Or are you talking about the "new" Windows? This new XP crap needs no less than 256 megs to live relatively well on a PIII 900MHz. On that same machine I'm able to use a full-featured Mandrake 9 and have always some 100Mb free for something else, Quake III for example...
Keep the FUD for yourself while you can't switch from Windows Help to man rtfm
No, they are probably afraid of naming it Nemesis - the Death Star. There are some theories about the Sun having an older sister in the form of a brown dwarf. Some consider alternatively the existence of a planet somewhat bigger than Jupiter. They use these theories to explain the episodical extinctions on Earth, supposedly caused by swarms of Kuiper belt comets falling inside the Solar system. This hypothetical "star/planet" is supposed to be much far away than Quaoar. Some theories give its orbit the fantastic period of 3 million years, and some consider it the reason why we can't find it...
Well, probably some academical SF. They, sometimes, are also good writers...
It may make sense. Some good years ago, Dr. Van Flandern published several weird ideas about our solar system. He mentioned that some weirdnesses seen on certain asteroids pointed to the fact that they could have satellites. He was demonished for this theory but Galileo probe did find such an asteroid in its way to Jupiter. Sincerly, Pluto is too big for an asteroid and too small for a true planet. But still no one real could classify the real edge between planets and small bodies... So I wouldn't be admired to see this new object also bouncing between both terms.
For UFO manhunters/bashers: note that VF was once the director of the U.S. Naval Astronomy, and one of the guys who help find Charon. Since Richard Hoagland started to search for hyperpyramids in the closet, he suffered some bad publicity, but still, his researches are quite important because they are in the edge of Science and some have had positive results recently.
Sincerly I don't get from what sky or Moon you fell from./. is deeply linked to technical aspects concerning open source code. This is not a generation NeXt place and we do not discuss colas or how to get girls for geeks. And ads are not here for decoration (with the exception of those M$ surrealistic offers).
The problem of perl journal is exactly stuff that matters. Because it's about OSS and it's about one of the major journals about Perl.
And it's news for nerds not jerks.
Please mod this down. This guy is just another M$ flamebaiter. And you may mod me down also for being such a big flamer...
Till now we have seen this on games. However I know lots of situations where I would prefer a 3D interface rather than this archaic 2D windowish (X, Windows, OS/2, Mac OS - no matter) world.
One of the main situations would be on working with large multidimensional data. Think this is too far from you. Take/var/log and you may see a lot of interest moments where it would be easier to deal with this mastodon in a 3D space.
We already have 3Dwm. But it looks like a little forgotten puppy in the middle of nowhere. Probably because no one created a standard in the same way X was created. How to fit legacy apps or even the command line in the new world? How people will create new apps for 3D if there is no largely accepted standard? Frankly these are issues I think one should think about. Maybe all this is still a bit futuristic, but the time has come for 3D to get more serious. In the place where we work we are already developing a 3D tool for some highly popular program because no one can hold the information that comes in flat relational tables. When one comes up to 2Gb of information a day, information just seem to blow up in front of your eyes.
Besides, I dream to see a 3D penguin behind the flat surface of Windows...
This looks like one of those old stories about "overcoming his death by sending a message to the future".
Presently the only good potential customer I could see would be the one that dreams on making a copy of himself when medicine gets to advanced to achieve what can't do today. This thing goes on the same wave as the frozen cadavers, frozen human cells and the frozen human DNA. However we know that all this risk to degrade in time. So the idea of writing up one's DNA would be an intersting solution to these drawbacks. Is it?
No. Because CD are also not eternal. And besides there is a huge difference between genes and what comes up after. We humans are the less genetic species on Earth, and every detail on character, behaviour and knowledge is mainly a product of our everyday experience. We are formed under the circumstances we grow up, the conditions of our family, society and the world in the whole. Besides every single piece of experience can be very fundamental to our character.
Let's remeber an old tale that many people used on several SF tales - Adolf Hitler's clones. Would Adolf Hitler revive from his genes? Absolutely not. His copies wouldn't ever seen his strict mother and his father with that very character of an austriac small burocrat. He wouldn't have suffered that poisoning in Ypres battlefield and wouldn't have seen the turmoil of the Russian October Revolution beating on the doors of Germany. He would not be the same racist bastard because his antecessor managed to wipe out a good piece of Jewish population in Germany and this populistic view that "jews are to be blamed for everything" is hardly to be overused today. Who would really be the new Adolf Hitler is hard to predict. However I would believe that his fate would not be shinny. Because he would not have parents, his artificiality would probably hunt him for the rest of his life and society, with its stupidities, faiths and superstitions would always mark him as the "Butcher of the World".
Well, probably soon we will have "an holographic image of your brain on DVD" together with instructions to reproduce it... But even then I would hardly believe that anyone may get ready for eternity. What would happen if I suddenly travel 1000 ahead from now? Well, let's take someone 1000 before us, and think the SHOCK he would get:
Boxes showing people or talking. Mettalic tubes that spit fire and make huge thunders. Big metallic things that move without horses, some EVEN FLY like birds. People talking to each other on distance. Fire that burns without wood. Some strange boxes, made of metal and something like glass, where people write some strange symbols that look like letters and pass huge amounts of time on them. Some of these boxes even play songs or seem to talk. Others show demons, dragons and even trolls.
Sorry to those who buz talk about "beggars cannot be choosers". The philosophy of Open Source and Free Software is not about begging and getting for gratis. It is an exchange, someone offers a service and ethically I have a duty to offer some feedback. It worked very well while we were a few tens of thousands. Today the masses came in and we have lots of seemingly "beggars" around. But this is not the hear of the movement and we shall keep our efforts to show people how things really develope. The problem of having supposedly "beggars" is similar to the problem of Anonymous Cowards in/.. If we take them away, we jeopardise our ideals. "Beggars" and ACs are a side effect of a world that is not perfect and which we should fight for being a little more correct. Not marginalising the masses but bringing to them the real meaning of the Open Source, Free Software and Free Speech is the real duty we shall not ever ever forget.
Now about this blatant monopolistic and ridiculous license. I may understand a commercial interest when someone declares a agreement void because I work on something that may hinder my partner. Development, production are things that are interim to a work where I and my partners should trust each other ofr a common cause. Using or developing some product while I do the same thing "on the side" for a concurrent product, is somehow a dubious behaviour from my side.
However sell/resell? Who's the jerk that wrote this license? Who's the stupid lawyer that forgets centuries of commercial ethics and practices? Who is he to hinder my right of choice and the right of choice of my clients? Any exclusivety on distributing, selling or lending anything is a conception that immediately forces a special agreement of rights and duties between two partners, sharing a common profit. Not something that "I should do or else". This is monopolism and it is ethicaly criminal to state such things in this way. No matter I get this thing for free or under a fee, claiming that I have not a right to choose what is best for me is the worst of dictatorships ever. They hinder the very principal of market with this.
Imagine this situation. I have a market. I try to find the best product so that this market lives on. Under this agreement either I cannot test their product if I sell something similar, I am forced to stop selling it to test their stuff or I have to pay them a fee to test their product. This, I would just call blackmail. If everyone starts doing it, it would be much worse than Windows EULAs.
The Institute of Internet Security recently created in Moscow, considering the importance of the new methods used on arresting the two Chelyabinsk hackers, invites the FBI investigators to participate on the conference "International Investigations on Cyberspace". Submission of thesis and demonstration of the new practices will be highly accepted. There should be mentioned that, Russian investigators are eager to learn and apply the new methods due to the new conditions they face on cyberspace and will be very happy to see their american colleagues...
First Happy Birthday to all of you, those I like and those I don't like. Anyway, it's you have made it together and hope to see this team for some more years. Only hope that some of you over there would be more careful on the quality of the posts...
And now the remark. 5 years passed and the big huge feature of/. is not comemorating it? Has CowBoyNeal go on holiday? Where's the Pool?
Unfortunately they don't solve up. And before commenting just make some research by yourself. And dig up inside tracings before making some hype for nothing
A few years ago a large block of ice fell not far away from where I'm living. It made some headlines and it was even shown on TV. Several analysis were made to study the origin of this thing. Well the main startling thing was that this big boulder had an unusual high level of titanium, so most speculated that this came from some rocket booster. Meanwhile many noted that this could be barely the fact as our region is not in the direct lift-off trajectory of any base. There was never a final conclusion, so this piece of ice is a small mistery of the skies.
As far as I have seen on TV the boulder looks is a ice with a blue tone, with a volume nearly to 3 cubic meters. However, some earlier news claimed that the original boulder was no less than 500 cubic meters.
Hurd is an OS with a much more "correct" architecture ideology than Linux and BSD. In its core it is much more universal and modular. Unfortunately, there is a huge gap between the paper and reality. The way it has been developed showed many HURDles among the GNU community. The more lavish, intellectual and less pragmatic approach to development made HURD a pariah. That's why Linux came up and ran over it. Being a traditional monlithic kernel that nearly carried all the ills of a 20 year kernel ideology, the penguin won just by being more closed to Earth.
However I hope that one day HURD will be able to hit the stands. It has been a pitty to see such a good idea living such a sad life. Frankly, we have been quite poor in kernels for the last years...
No matter the hype, the pros and cons, the rather primitive, raw and clumsy IP protocol proved its way. And the most fantastic is that its broadcast nature, what some people considered a drawback, proved to be one of its main advantages. We have seen it covering the whole world, proving its ideology on wars (well IP was a DoD protocol for a war situation wasn't it?) and even reaching Mars. However this same primitive, raw and clumsy nature keeps on... And we see lots of troubles on security, performance and reliability. It seems that even Mars is something harder for IP to reach.
Well, is IP protocol The Wheel? And is will this wheel be always a near-round polygon with several holes on it? Isn't any avenue of future for a better protocol? Will we see "ping Mars - timeout, timeout, timeout, timeout - 48 minutes - Mars pinged 80% lost packets" as a common reality?
When I was writing my comment on this post I thought about this tool and alikes. And considered that this is not a solution. Forensic data recovery is an important part of security analysis, however, this is not exactly what we need to protect data. This branch of forensics deals mostly with intentionally deleted data, temporary data and historical data. It could be used for data recovery also, but, it is and should not be its main intent. All the tasks, that forensic data recovery deals with, are already complex enough for its developers. This is a field filesystem developers should consider. Due to the embroglios of the infrastructure each filesystem has, the ideology of data protection should be a question on the creation of every filesystem.
One should note that it should not be obligatory for every filesystem to carry a data protection/recovery mechanism. Sincerly I prefer XFS and ReiserFS 3 to lack such mechanism, rather than seeing the pains of having a slow performance for the price of a dubious "feature". It is understandable to see the developers of these systems to refuse the creation of a data protection system. Yet, it is a pitty that developers didn't seem to even have tried to implement it. Only ext2 guys seem to have tried to explore the correct region of data protection. The ideology inherent to the undelete mechanism on ext2 is much better than a simple "trashcan"-alike tool. At least, it goes inherent to the architecture and has a safety choice option for each file. Unfortunately, it is not perfect and it seems that developers forgot the good idea it was. This is still a wide unexplored forest.
In other point, I should note that TCT is not a perfect idea because of the fact that stays over the surface of most filesystems. The unrm util can hold only ext2 filesystem. However many people today use XFS or ReiserFS due to performance.
What we need is more than a trashcan
on
Undelete In Linux
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· Score: 2
Personally I don't have a big need for a trashcan. And most *NIX vets barely need it. Only the masses may have need for such stuff, specially when so many Windows users are coming up. However I would damnly congratulate the nerd who would put in default such a feature on the next distro. Every experienced hacker knows perfectly that trashcan solutions are frequently THE reason for loosing performance. For individual removals this may look no so critical but when things come up into whole folders and thousands of files, we get some trouble.
Anyway a save removal system should be potentially in place over every file system. Moreover, this safety mechanism should be inherent to the filesystem itself. With the chance to choose what I want to safeprotect or not. Under such approach we could meet a middleterm between performance and safety. Besides such approach would allow to cover a problem where most backup systems can't have a voice - safeguarding highly critical data in a more realtime basis. Yes, such safeguarding mechanisms will not be good for the real realtime situations. But they would be quite good for protecting and recovering by-hour or by-minutes cases. Sometimes this is much more important, rather than picking up last-day's archive and forcing the user to type his last hours of work at the end of worktime and having the boss yelling "I want it now!!!".
If such mechanisms would be implemented they could find a very important niche among sysadmins working with certain types of information - document files, legacy databases, big amounts of data and so on. However such mechanism should regard some safety concerns of confidentiality and control. I fear that in lamers hands it would be much preferable to see the old damn Recycle Bin in their hands.
The most recent M$ press release shows that XP sales in academical circles skyrocketed for the last weeks with a record 5 times increase. "This shows that XP is getting a higher than expected level of acceptance among the students, soon it will probably take a good segment of the market out of the concurrency". "JustInTime4PR" Corporation, specialized in market analysis added that this boost is particularly significative of the tendencies - "When did Linux had such success? This proves our predictions that the boost this OS had was merely temporary and just a backward effect of some customer dissatisfaction while waiting for the new and improved XP. Now XP took the lead and probably we are not going to hear of Linux for long... The fact that Linux developers were always lenny to add "Start" button on desktop made them loose the moment.Till now Linux ain't desktop ready and barely can achieve it..."
According to other sources, there are chances that this new sales record will be beaten when more and more Universities will attain a bigger level of acceptance for XP...
5 years ago this one was the biggest and broadest Internet event since the the Web-Bang. Millions of people from around the world were roaming NASA's site. They had to create several mirrors and upgrade bandwith to hold up the crowd.
But still the bozos can't get to the idea that there are lots of people wondering for the "final frontier". Frankly NASA and its political mandarins did several things as if trying to desmise this all-world will. Today, many lost interest not only for Mars but also for anything that sounds "Space". Things went so far that many major mass media nearly wiped out their Science/Technology headlines from the front pages of their sites.
Personally I would congratulate NASA on turning Mars into the most boring, aired and dry place of our Solar System. And not because of the fact that "Science is a hard and long way of discovery". On the contrary. You killed the mood for this:
Your sites on Mars look as if only retarded children have some interest on these things.
You laughed, laughed and laughed over everyone. Maybe you don't have anything to do on creating "Elvis leaving the stage and Bigfoot coming up on Mars". But you did exploit this cheap, raw and stupid humour against a mass of people you could be ideologically wrong but wanted to get a more serious criticism or clarification.
You have put everyone who didn't agree with you in one pan. And tried to cook them in various ways. However you were no less dogmatic and stubborn. Let's remind the trouble you had when Pathfinder's site did show that the fable "old, old, dry and lifeless Mars" blowed with the first images. How many times you went further and back with that story? Only with after some MGS frames you stopped this old and btw unscientific line. Yes, unscientific, because it was born from some Prof. "Dodo" Horowitz that couldn't even respect the death of his colleague in attempting to rise the heights of a "scientific authority".
Well there are many other things to remember but I'll just will leave one... Just one. For NASA guys, who may see this:
YOU PROMISED IN BIG HEADERS THAT YOU WOULD PUBLISH AN ESTIMATION FOR THE CONTENT OF CARBON IN THE ROCKS AFTER "CALIBRATING" THE RESULTS OF ROCK ANALYSIS!!!!
Well five damn years passed!!! WHERE ARE THE ESTIMATIONS????
Some have been claiming around here that slapper is a "demonstration" that Linux is no better than Windows, maybe worse... Sorry you people but this talk is just about onions and carrots. The fact is that a very similar attack, that happens nearly a year after CodeRed/Nimda carmageddon, shows a huge difference between both worlds.
If anyone takes the care to look at incidents.org site, one may see the facts for himself. Slapper didn't hit the stands. It is far from its Windows cousins, not only in terms of infected machines but also in attacks. And note specially the attacks. In less than 12 hours after Nimda's appearence I had more then 340000 Nimda "visits" on the network I surpervised. On what concerns Slapper, till now things are nearly on zero. Slapper is in no way a second Nimda.
You stop for a second in the middle of the street. Just to take a rest or something else. Suddenly someone pushes you and you see a cop dressed in ol'style pharaon uniform crying to you: "Why the hell you stop by? Trying to warchalking? Keep moving you little bastard. I know you all. Just make the impression you jus'stop to rest and in a second you are stealing some more bandwith of a decent corporate citizen... Behind bars is the place for the scum like you. Go on! Go on! Keep moving!! If I see you again in my sector I'll not be so humble!"
Well most of us may not remember or note that once upon a time not only in America but also all over the world, cops loved to hunt small gatherings of people and disperse them. In some countries a gathering of more than three people on the street would be considered a demonstration and they could be thrown to jail for that. Probably we still have some countries where such practices still exist... So the humour may not be so unrealistic...
... I'm just waiting to see news like "Slashdot sued for infringing patent on web-forums/moderation points/news submition/Poll a la CowBoyNeal.
Really I'm just waiting for that very day when someone overcomes is inner rat fear, comes into light and makes the most sound claim over millions and millions of geeks, hackers, nerds and lamers that roam the Internet - "You owe me money".
Frankly, this looks less probable to happen as immediately he will be crushed by a wave of public opinion, EFF and the whole world together. But seeing the schizos that have been appearing recently, and the claims they make against huge world mastodons, who have a whole lawyer army behind... The will to become "rich, rich, very rich" destroys every reasoning of these people. These guys have been in this world since the conception of patents have came into force. However we have a problem that before was not so critical:
You pick up a foggy idea, convert it into some unscientific and poorly technical piece of paper and voila! Considering the very poor quality of the workers in the US Patent Office then they think they have all the chances to show the nose to BG on next Fortune edition...
What the Patent Office has been doing for the last years is a brilliant example of incompetence, absurdity and a demonstration that their people is not qualified at all. They simply are violating one of the reasons for the existence of such institution: To kick out idiots that claim for non-existing inventions, "inventions" that factually have prior art and schizos. However they seem to nearly accept every single thing that comes to them concerning software. From anyone or anywhere. So I will no be surprised, in a near future, to see Hemos publishing - "We have been sued for patent infrigement".
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry for forgetting that he directed the Branch of Celestial Mechanics at the Naval Observatory. Not the director of the Naval Observatory.
But he did help those gus finding Charon. And BTW I didn't say he found Charon. I said he HELPED on the find. If you work at the Naval Observatory you mau know well that he did a lot of homework about minor planets, Neptune satellites and things around Pluto
???????????????
I have my VERY OLD home box on a new fresh bloat distro and I ain't upgrade for nearly 1,5 years. And I'm well doing on KDE3 + ALL THE BLOAT OUT THERE.
Keep the flame up to you.
Video editing? I'm speaking about broadcasting and I've been on it for 2 years. And I don't get what you wanna say. Because I have seen both sides - Windows and Linux.
What it does out of the box? So go for Windows... This place is NOT for lazy sysadmins. Believe me 'cause I'm also a security expert and I'm seek of seeing the HELL in the form of badly configured RH's. At least Windows has a good advantage here, security is so great on M$ that I only need to argument - It's Windows so what do you want from it? And sysadmins can continue to blame BG for their problems.
Tales... I have exactly such a devil... Either you use it for typing small texts or to hang a little on mine sweeper.
Sorry but I'm pretty sure for it as the crap. It couldn't work out a large >3Gb file on a 900MHz. Linux cried wild but ate the stuff.
Bloatness on Linux is a question of administration and not a distro problem. Distros are for features and for the laziness of building everything nearly from scratch. On Celeron 500 + 64Mb maybe RH 8 will slow down as you may have installed everything you could... On PIII 866 + 128Mb? Well I've just 2 months ago switched to 256 and I don't get where you could have had problems. For a simple office task the machine was ok. However it was hard to work on a destkop and having 3-4 servers working on background for good. Yes, for good, as one of them was no one else than the video broadcaster from mpeg4ip which loads the machine very well.
On what relates to Windows. Do you wanna tell me that you can find a Windows good enough to hang on the configurations you pointed? Even NT had trouble working on the Celeron you pointed out. With only a browser it managed to eat up all memory and permanently require some 20Mb swap.
Or are you talking about the "new" Windows? This new XP crap needs no less than 256 megs to live relatively well on a PIII 900MHz. On that same machine I'm able to use a full-featured Mandrake 9 and have always some 100Mb free for something else, Quake III for example...
Keep the FUD for yourself while you can't switch from Windows Help to man rtfm
No, they are probably afraid of naming it Nemesis - the Death Star. There are some theories about the Sun having an older sister in the form of a brown dwarf. Some consider alternatively the existence of a planet somewhat bigger than Jupiter. They use these theories to explain the episodical extinctions on Earth, supposedly caused by swarms of Kuiper belt comets falling inside the Solar system. This hypothetical "star/planet" is supposed to be much far away than Quaoar. Some theories give its orbit the fantastic period of 3 million years, and some consider it the reason why we can't find it...
Well, probably some academical SF. They, sometimes, are also good writers...
It may make sense. Some good years ago, Dr. Van Flandern published several weird ideas about our solar system. He mentioned that some weirdnesses seen on certain asteroids pointed to the fact that they could have satellites. He was demonished for this theory but Galileo probe did find such an asteroid in its way to Jupiter. Sincerly, Pluto is too big for an asteroid and too small for a true planet. But still no one real could classify the real edge between planets and small bodies... So I wouldn't be admired to see this new object also bouncing between both terms.
For UFO manhunters/bashers: note that VF was once the director of the U.S. Naval Astronomy, and one of the guys who help find Charon. Since Richard Hoagland started to search for hyperpyramids in the closet, he suffered some bad publicity, but still, his researches are quite important because they are in the edge of Science and some have had positive results recently.
Sincerly I don't get from what sky or Moon you fell from. /. is deeply linked to technical aspects concerning open source code. This is not a generation NeXt place and we do not discuss colas or how to get girls for geeks. And ads are not here for decoration (with the exception of those M$ surrealistic offers).
The problem of perl journal is exactly stuff that matters. Because it's about OSS and it's about one of the major journals about Perl.
And it's news for nerds not jerks.
Please mod this down. This guy is just another M$ flamebaiter. And you may mod me down also for being such a big flamer...
Now the metaphora comes to reality:
Hey, get of your chair and go check that mudpit over there, we are been having some blackouts for the last five minutes...
Till now we have seen this on games. However I know lots of situations where I would prefer a 3D interface rather than this archaic 2D windowish (X, Windows, OS/2, Mac OS - no matter) world.
/var/log and you may see a lot of interest moments where it would be easier to deal with this mastodon in a 3D space.
One of the main situations would be on working with large multidimensional data. Think this is too far from you. Take
We already have 3Dwm. But it looks like a little forgotten puppy in the middle of nowhere. Probably because no one created a standard in the same way X was created. How to fit legacy apps or even the command line in the new world? How people will create new apps for 3D if there is no largely accepted standard? Frankly these are issues I think one should think about. Maybe all this is still a bit futuristic, but the time has come for 3D to get more serious. In the place where we work we are already developing a 3D tool for some highly popular program because no one can hold the information that comes in flat relational tables. When one comes up to 2Gb of information a day, information just seem to blow up in front of your eyes.
Besides, I dream to see a 3D penguin behind the flat surface of Windows...
This looks like one of those old stories about "overcoming his death by sending a message to the future".
Presently the only good potential customer I could see would be the one that dreams on making a copy of himself when medicine gets to advanced to achieve what can't do today. This thing goes on the same wave as the frozen cadavers, frozen human cells and the frozen human DNA. However we know that all this risk to degrade in time. So the idea of writing up one's DNA would be an intersting solution to these drawbacks. Is it?
No. Because CD are also not eternal. And besides there is a huge difference between genes and what comes up after. We humans are the less genetic species on Earth, and every detail on character, behaviour and knowledge is mainly a product of our everyday experience. We are formed under the circumstances we grow up, the conditions of our family, society and the world in the whole. Besides every single piece of experience can be very fundamental to our character.
Let's remeber an old tale that many people used on several SF tales - Adolf Hitler's clones. Would Adolf Hitler revive from his genes? Absolutely not. His copies wouldn't ever seen his strict mother and his father with that very character of an austriac small burocrat. He wouldn't have suffered that poisoning in Ypres battlefield and wouldn't have seen the turmoil of the Russian October Revolution beating on the doors of Germany. He would not be the same racist bastard because his antecessor managed to wipe out a good piece of Jewish population in Germany and this populistic view that "jews are to be blamed for everything" is hardly to be overused today. Who would really be the new Adolf Hitler is hard to predict. However I would believe that his fate would not be shinny. Because he would not have parents, his artificiality would probably hunt him for the rest of his life and society, with its stupidities, faiths and superstitions would always mark him as the "Butcher of the World".
Well, probably soon we will have "an holographic image of your brain on DVD" together with instructions to reproduce it... But even then I would hardly believe that anyone may get ready for eternity. What would happen if I suddenly travel 1000 ahead from now? Well, let's take someone 1000 before us, and think the SHOCK he would get:
Boxes showing people or talking.
Mettalic tubes that spit fire and make huge thunders.
Big metallic things that move without horses, some EVEN FLY like birds.
People talking to each other on distance.
Fire that burns without wood.
Some strange boxes, made of metal and something like glass, where people write some strange symbols that look like letters and pass huge amounts of time on them. Some of these boxes even play songs or seem to talk. Others show demons, dragons and even trolls.
In other terms - The Hell...
Sorry to those who buz talk about "beggars cannot be choosers". The philosophy of Open Source and Free Software is not about begging and getting for gratis. It is an exchange, someone offers a service and ethically I have a duty to offer some feedback. It worked very well while we were a few tens of thousands. Today the masses came in and we have lots of seemingly "beggars" around. But this is not the hear of the movement and we shall keep our efforts to show people how things really develope. The problem of having supposedly "beggars" is similar to the problem of Anonymous Cowards in /.. If we take them away, we jeopardise our ideals. "Beggars" and ACs are a side effect of a world that is not perfect and which we should fight for being a little more correct. Not marginalising the masses but bringing to them the real meaning of the Open Source, Free Software and Free Speech is the real duty we shall not ever ever forget.
Now about this blatant monopolistic and ridiculous license. I may understand a commercial interest when someone declares a agreement void because I work on something that may hinder my partner. Development, production are things that are interim to a work where I and my partners should trust each other ofr a common cause. Using or developing some product while I do the same thing "on the side" for a concurrent product, is somehow a dubious behaviour from my side.
However sell/resell? Who's the jerk that wrote this license? Who's the stupid lawyer that forgets centuries of commercial ethics and practices? Who is he to hinder my right of choice and the right of choice of my clients? Any exclusivety on distributing, selling or lending anything is a conception that immediately forces a special agreement of rights and duties between two partners, sharing a common profit. Not something that "I should do or else". This is monopolism and it is ethicaly criminal to state such things in this way. No matter I get this thing for free or under a fee, claiming that I have not a right to choose what is best for me is the worst of dictatorships ever. They hinder the very principal of market with this.
Imagine this situation. I have a market. I try to find the best product so that this market lives on. Under this agreement either I cannot test their product if I sell something similar, I am forced to stop selling it to test their stuff or I have to pay them a fee to test their product. This, I would just call blackmail. If everyone starts doing it, it would be much worse than Windows EULAs.
The Institute of Internet Security recently created in Moscow, considering the importance of the new methods used on arresting the two Chelyabinsk hackers, invites the FBI investigators to participate on the conference "International Investigations on Cyberspace". Submission of thesis and demonstration of the new practices will be highly accepted. There should be mentioned that, Russian investigators are eager to learn and apply the new methods due to the new conditions they face on cyberspace and will be very happy to see their american colleagues...
First Happy Birthday to all of you, those I like and those I don't like. Anyway, it's you have made it together and hope to see this team for some more years. Only hope that some of you over there would be more careful on the quality of the posts...
/. is not comemorating it? Has CowBoyNeal go on holiday? Where's the Pool?
And now the remark. 5 years passed and the big huge feature of
Unfortunately they don't solve up. And before commenting just make some research by yourself. And dig up inside tracings before making some hype for nothing
A few years ago a large block of ice fell not far away from where I'm living. It made some headlines and it was even shown on TV. Several analysis were made to study the origin of this thing. Well the main startling thing was that this big boulder had an unusual high level of titanium, so most speculated that this came from some rocket booster. Meanwhile many noted that this could be barely the fact as our region is not in the direct lift-off trajectory of any base. There was never a final conclusion, so this piece of ice is a small mistery of the skies.
As far as I have seen on TV the boulder looks is a ice with a blue tone, with a volume nearly to 3 cubic meters. However, some earlier news claimed that the original boulder was no less than 500 cubic meters.
Hurd is an OS with a much more "correct" architecture ideology than Linux and BSD. In its core it is much more universal and modular. Unfortunately, there is a huge gap between the paper and reality. The way it has been developed showed many HURDles among the GNU community. The more lavish, intellectual and less pragmatic approach to development made HURD a pariah. That's why Linux came up and ran over it. Being a traditional monlithic kernel that nearly carried all the ills of a 20 year kernel ideology, the penguin won just by being more closed to Earth.
However I hope that one day HURD will be able to hit the stands. It has been a pitty to see such a good idea living such a sad life. Frankly, we have been quite poor in kernels for the last years...
No matter the hype, the pros and cons, the rather primitive, raw and clumsy IP protocol proved its way. And the most fantastic is that its broadcast nature, what some people considered a drawback, proved to be one of its main advantages. We have seen it covering the whole world, proving its ideology on wars (well IP was a DoD protocol for a war situation wasn't it?) and even reaching Mars. However this same primitive, raw and clumsy nature keeps on... And we see lots of troubles on security, performance and reliability. It seems that even Mars is something harder for IP to reach.
Well, is IP protocol The Wheel? And is will this wheel be always a near-round polygon with several holes on it? Isn't any avenue of future for a better protocol? Will we see "ping Mars - timeout, timeout, timeout, timeout - 48 minutes - Mars pinged 80% lost packets" as a common reality?
When I was writing my comment on this post I thought about this tool and alikes. And considered that this is not a solution. Forensic data recovery is an important part of security analysis, however, this is not exactly what we need to protect data. This branch of forensics deals mostly with intentionally deleted data, temporary data and historical data. It could be used for data recovery also, but, it is and should not be its main intent. All the tasks, that forensic data recovery deals with, are already complex enough for its developers. This is a field filesystem developers should consider. Due to the embroglios of the infrastructure each filesystem has, the ideology of data protection should be a question on the creation of every filesystem.
One should note that it should not be obligatory for every filesystem to carry a data protection/recovery mechanism. Sincerly I prefer XFS and ReiserFS 3 to lack such mechanism, rather than seeing the pains of having a slow performance for the price of a dubious "feature". It is understandable to see the developers of these systems to refuse the creation of a data protection system. Yet, it is a pitty that developers didn't seem to even have tried to implement it. Only ext2 guys seem to have tried to explore the correct region of data protection. The ideology inherent to the undelete mechanism on ext2 is much better than a simple "trashcan"-alike tool. At least, it goes inherent to the architecture and has a safety choice option for each file. Unfortunately, it is not perfect and it seems that developers forgot the good idea it was. This is still a wide unexplored forest.
In other point, I should note that TCT is not a perfect idea because of the fact that stays over the surface of most filesystems. The unrm util can hold only ext2 filesystem. However many people today use XFS or ReiserFS due to performance.
Personally I don't have a big need for a trashcan. And most *NIX vets barely need it. Only the masses may have need for such stuff, specially when so many Windows users are coming up. However I would damnly congratulate the nerd who would put in default such a feature on the next distro. Every experienced hacker knows perfectly that trashcan solutions are frequently THE reason for loosing performance. For individual removals this may look no so critical but when things come up into whole folders and thousands of files, we get some trouble.
Anyway a save removal system should be potentially in place over every file system. Moreover, this safety mechanism should be inherent to the filesystem itself. With the chance to choose what I want to safeprotect or not. Under such approach we could meet a middleterm between performance and safety. Besides such approach would allow to cover a problem where most backup systems can't have a voice - safeguarding highly critical data in a more realtime basis. Yes, such safeguarding mechanisms will not be good for the real realtime situations. But they would be quite good for protecting and recovering by-hour or by-minutes cases. Sometimes this is much more important, rather than picking up last-day's archive and forcing the user to type his last hours of work at the end of worktime and having the boss yelling "I want it now!!!".
If such mechanisms would be implemented they could find a very important niche among sysadmins working with certain types of information - document files, legacy databases, big amounts of data and so on. However such mechanism should regard some safety concerns of confidentiality and control. I fear that in lamers hands it would be much preferable to see the old damn Recycle Bin in their hands.
The most recent M$ press release shows that XP sales in academical circles skyrocketed for the last weeks with a record 5 times increase. "This shows that XP is getting a higher than expected level of acceptance among the students, soon it will probably take a good segment of the market out of the concurrency". "JustInTime4PR" Corporation, specialized in market analysis added that this boost is particularly significative of the tendencies - "When did Linux had such success? This proves our predictions that the boost this OS had was merely temporary and just a backward effect of some customer dissatisfaction while waiting for the new and improved XP. Now XP took the lead and probably we are not going to hear of Linux for long... The fact that Linux developers were always lenny to add "Start" button on desktop made them loose the moment.Till now Linux ain't desktop ready and barely can achieve it..."
According to other sources, there are chances that this new sales record will be beaten when more and more Universities will attain a bigger level of acceptance for XP...
5 years ago this one was the biggest and broadest Internet event since the the Web-Bang. Millions of people from around the world were roaming NASA's site. They had to create several mirrors and upgrade bandwith to hold up the crowd.
But still the bozos can't get to the idea that there are lots of people wondering for the "final frontier". Frankly NASA and its political mandarins did several things as if trying to desmise this all-world will. Today, many lost interest not only for Mars but also for anything that sounds "Space". Things went so far that many major mass media nearly wiped out their Science/Technology headlines from the front pages of their sites.
Personally I would congratulate NASA on turning Mars into the most boring, aired and dry place of our Solar System. And not because of the fact that "Science is a hard and long way of discovery". On the contrary. You killed the mood for this:
Your sites on Mars look as if only retarded children have some interest on these things.
You laughed, laughed and laughed over everyone. Maybe you don't have anything to do on creating "Elvis leaving the stage and Bigfoot coming up on Mars". But you did exploit this cheap, raw and stupid humour against a mass of people you could be ideologically wrong but wanted to get a more serious criticism or clarification.
You have put everyone who didn't agree with you in one pan. And tried to cook them in various ways. However you were no less dogmatic and stubborn. Let's remind the trouble you had when Pathfinder's site did show that the fable "old, old, dry and lifeless Mars" blowed with the first images. How many times you went further and back with that story? Only with after some MGS frames you stopped this old and btw unscientific line. Yes, unscientific, because it was born from some Prof. "Dodo" Horowitz that couldn't even respect the death of his colleague in attempting to rise the heights of a "scientific authority".
Well there are many other things to remember but I'll just will leave one... Just one. For NASA guys, who may see this:
YOU PROMISED IN BIG HEADERS THAT YOU WOULD PUBLISH AN ESTIMATION FOR THE CONTENT OF CARBON IN THE ROCKS AFTER "CALIBRATING" THE RESULTS OF ROCK ANALYSIS!!!!
Well five damn years passed!!! WHERE ARE THE ESTIMATIONS????
Some have been claiming around here that slapper is a "demonstration" that Linux is no better than Windows, maybe worse... Sorry you people but this talk is just about onions and carrots. The fact is that a very similar attack, that happens nearly a year after CodeRed/Nimda carmageddon, shows a huge difference between both worlds.
If anyone takes the care to look at incidents.org site, one may see the facts for himself. Slapper didn't hit the stands. It is far from its Windows cousins, not only in terms of infected machines but also in attacks. And note specially the attacks. In less than 12 hours after Nimda's appearence I had more then 340000 Nimda "visits" on the network I surpervised. On what concerns Slapper, till now things are nearly on zero. Slapper is in no way a second Nimda.
You stop for a second in the middle of the street. Just to take a rest or something else. Suddenly someone pushes you and you see a cop dressed in ol'style pharaon uniform crying to you: "Why the hell you stop by? Trying to warchalking? Keep moving you little bastard. I know you all. Just make the impression you jus'stop to rest and in a second you are stealing some more bandwith of a decent corporate citizen... Behind bars is the place for the scum like you. Go on! Go on! Keep moving!! If I see you again in my sector I'll not be so humble!"
Well most of us may not remember or note that once upon a time not only in America but also all over the world, cops loved to hunt small gatherings of people and disperse them. In some countries a gathering of more than three people on the street would be considered a demonstration and they could be thrown to jail for that. Probably we still have some countries where such practices still exist... So the humour may not be so unrealistic...
... I'm just waiting to see news like "Slashdot sued for infringing patent on web-forums/moderation points/news submition/Poll a la CowBoyNeal.
Really I'm just waiting for that very day when someone overcomes is inner rat fear, comes into light and makes the most sound claim over millions and millions of geeks, hackers, nerds and lamers that roam the Internet - "You owe me money".
Frankly, this looks less probable to happen as immediately he will be crushed by a wave of public opinion, EFF and the whole world together. But seeing the schizos that have been appearing recently, and the claims they make against huge world mastodons, who have a whole lawyer army behind... The will to become "rich, rich, very rich" destroys every reasoning of these people. These guys have been in this world since the conception of patents have came into force. However we have a problem that before was not so critical:
You pick up a foggy idea, convert it into some unscientific and poorly technical piece of paper and voila! Considering the very poor quality of the workers in the US Patent Office then they think they have all the chances to show the nose to BG on next Fortune edition...
What the Patent Office has been doing for the last years is a brilliant example of incompetence, absurdity and a demonstration that their people is not qualified at all. They simply are violating one of the reasons for the existence of such institution: To kick out idiots that claim for non-existing inventions, "inventions" that factually have prior art and schizos. However they seem to nearly accept every single thing that comes to them concerning software. From anyone or anywhere. So I will no be surprised, in a near future, to see Hemos publishing - "We have been sued for patent infrigement".