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....it sure is easy to get useless stuff posted here now-a-days. this will probably get modded down, but i am trying to make a point.

.brad

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...but it doesn't tell us how much these "subscriptions" will cost. anyone know?

.brad
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suse linux used to (may still) ship their 6 cd distro on a single dvd. i thought it was cool back then.

.brad
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the library of congress will not move any of their audio archive over to cd from vinyl, mostly as a result of something like this. they know that cds will degrade in quality over time, and they had speculated that a fungii such as this may exist. this and the fact that they seem to agree that there is a degradation of sound quality between the cd's and the original vinyl. it doesnt really surprise me that they have confirmed this finally.

.brad

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i used to work in the states, and my god, we would work 10 - 12 hour days, we were however paid to take large breaks, and a big lunch, which went like so:
7am - 9am work
9am - 930 break
930 - 1130 work
1130 - 1pm lunch
1pm - 3pm work
3pm - 330 break
330 - 430 work
430 - 5pm break
5pm - 6pm work
while this looks like an 11 hour work day, i was really on break for a good 3 hours, that didnt include all of the tea breaks, bathroom breaks, internet time breaks, personal call breaks, etc, etc, etc. I figure i was probably working for about 5 hours and screwing around for another 6. i would often stay late, and that meant another hour or so of work, but an extra three hours on the timesheet. since ive moved to canada, im on the clock for 8 hours, and i probably work for about 7.5 of them (i sign out for my 30 min lunch).

.brad

you see, this is the beauty of the bsd license. this is the only truly free license out there, as it allows the source code to be free. midsize to large companies tend to not want to touch gpl code due to the red tape surrounding its use. it usually has nothing to do with their desire to "give back" to the community, the bsd licensee is just a lot easier to deal with. as a person who likes the idea of great and powerful "free code" to evolve, that makes the bsd licensee great. who really cares if bigger users don't submit bugfixes/enhancements, someone will.

as for apple, im sure they will contribute to this so called community, it may take a fair bit longer to happen, and it may not be too obvious to the slashdot community, but as soon as everyone sees how similar osx and linux are from a development standpoint, our benefit will be the applications that are ported from osx over to linux/bsd.

.brad

look close enough and youll see the line saying that only the first 100 will be eligable. hate to see 150 goatse.cx themes get submitted today, and make it so that the quality themes arent even eligable.

.brad

at my work, my boss made the policy tabs, with exactly one tab before any comments that happen to be on the same line as code. this way everyone writes the same code, and they can setup their editors to use their preferred number of spaces.

html (php included) has no policy however, so everyone that has to do any of that gets to deal with idiot code. i tend to put all of my html/php onto one single line. i wish i could do the same for c.....

.brad

http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/forum_messa ge.html?forum=2&head=32&id=32
this article was about that big internet security audit, around week three there is a story of a security intrusion originating from a smb server that everyone forgot about, sitting in an isp in australia. may as well have been behind a fucking wall. wonder if anyone had done one of these.

.brad

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well, if it were an nt 3.51 server, it would have crashed about 3 years and 11 months ago. then it would have been lost forever.

.brad
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real doll
theres even real hamster

.brad

technically the wording says to all living beings. unfortunately they seem to regularly overlook non-humans with these rights, mostly because people are the only ones who are capable of complaining in a way other people notice.

.brad

assuming that they landed on us soil, and werent immiediately killed/captured by rednecks or the government, they would be extended all the rights set fourth in your constitution. the constitution doesnt apply to citizens, but to anyone on us soil. they wouldnt be allowed to work, or stay any longer than six months untill the proper paper work is filled out however.

imagine a grey driving a taxi, or working in a 7-11.....

.brad

That explains everything -- why, when that guy sold me that Anna Kournikova underwear and I extracted the sweat to clone my own AK, out came a middle-aged Portugese woman with a lisp. I thought maybe I'd gotten swindled, but now I can be sure it was just a freak mutation. Phew!

Back to the lab...
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>Name one major company using MySQL for a mission-critical database.

well, NASA, according to this article. that a major enough company?

.brad

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im sure the good folks at the X consortium (you know, X windows) would have a little laugh at that one.

.brad

i wonder if someone at microsoft leaked a touch of info, and someone else beat them to the patent a few months before the big release? seems like a good way to throw a wrench into the engine eh?

.brad

when people like this, people with moderate amount of power, yet dont understand what they should be using it for, get scared, strange things happen.

about two years ago, a friend of mine was contacted, they wanted to ask him a few questions about a "recent security violation". apparently the isp he read his email from was setup ni an incredibly odd way, they had a couple of mail servers, pop.theirname.com and popp.thiername.com. pop was the standard mail server that this guy should have been using, however, being moderately slow, he was using popp (its one extra keystroke). apparently popp was reserved for the local rcmp branch (canadas version of the fbi) email, as well as the local police departmnet's email. fine, but apparently everyone else's login/pass works on this server.

my analysis is that they read a log quickly, saw that he had repeatedly logged in successfully to this supposedly secure box, and the isp started thinking legal action. anyhow onto the story, after being called by a threatening sounding person, he got in touch with a friend of his, a lawyer. by the end of that day, pretty much every law enforcement official in the town had swarmed into his place (with a questionable warrant), and taken everything that resembled a peice of electronics. of course after analyzing the poor guys setup, the isp quickly realized what idiots they were, and quickly dropped everything. the local rcmp apparently kept everything for another 6 months out of paranoia. no body seemed to understand that what he was doing was based off of a simple error, the friend didnt even notice, as his email still came in a-o.k.

had the tech reading the log thought for about three minutes, the entire situation could have been avoided. had the law agencies thought, hey, maybe we should get someone to take a second and third look at those logs, the entire situation could have been avoided. had someone spoken to him long enough to realize he didnt know what telnet, tracert, ping, ftp, or even pop stood for (let alone how any of them worked), the entire situation could have been avoided. what im basically saying, is most situations like my friends, and the one in the story could have been avoided. all people need is a bit of logic when dealing with computer security issues.

.brad

...that it was like yesterday that i had mentioned something to the tune of, once the netbsd port catches up, we need a beowulf of these. maybe its time to try it ;)

as soon as the netbsd port is stable, im considering getting about 10 of these together to try it. hopefully theyll be a bit cheaper by then, not that they arent already ridiculously cheap since they announced the death of them.

.brad

there seems to definately be two different types of pci slots, the bottom one is indeed different than the ones above it. the very top slot is agp.

.brad>

im really doubting that head-hunters good enough to come up with a system of filtering based on how quickly people learn in this course would miss qualified applicants who hadnt taken the course. this seems more like a slick way of gathering up and coming talent, not the exclusive way of gathering talent.

as for the irs similarity, im really not seeing it, if this were redhat giving rhce certification to every seceratary/janitor/pizza delivery guy who has worked for them, id see it. this is more like redhat offering jobs to those who get the highest scores on the rhce exams.....

.brad

i mean if you take a course to get certified, your probably going to get a job. linuxgruven just wants to make sure that they get an extra advantage when they go scouting. to me the thought of scouting people by training them seems like a very good idea for any firm. how better to get a feel for how good a guy is than to sit and train him for a while.

as they say, they've hired people who werent trained by them before.

.brad

this project was called lavarand. i spoke to the guy who started this about 3 years ago, smart guy.

heres the url for more info:
http://lavarand.sgi.com

.brad

its been proven that coffee tends to speed up reaction time a bit for a fairly short period of time, only to lead to a crash (regular old caffeine high). tea on the other hand tends to raise mental stimulation considerably for longer periods of time, without any form of crash, mostly due to the significantly lower amounts of caffiene in tea.

.brad

oh yea, that boston thing, it was about a tax on tea, as a result, most countries still dont tax loose tea sales.

water has been known to reduce brain power (as have most cold beverages), coffee on the other hand does nothing for your brain power short of being mildly carcinogenic. tea on the other hand (especially green tea) has been proven many times to heighten brain activity, stimulate your mind, as well as mildly reproducing brain cells. pretty amazing being as how tea is basically warm water after having tea leaves added to it.

.brad

behold my .sig!

but, the itanium should excell mostly at running native 64-bit code, hopefully mostly in the floating point area. x86 emulation shouldnt have even been included, let alone talked seriously about. people who need an itanium will not want x86 code, they wont even want a filesystem that easily supports x86 code.

dont judge these things by their x86 emulation, benchmark them against a similarly clocked (or similarly priced) alpha, that is when we can discount this chip.

.brad

embracing a hardware hack like this, and communicating with curious hackers, could allow the entire community to breathe life into new and old willians pinball systems. this is a good thing because the world needs more pinball.

.brad

if your going to end up doing a lot of number crunching, you should really look into some form of multiple cpu alpha. the alphas absolutley fly when it comes to floating point calculations. by the sounds of it, you would almost definately benefit from having some form of alpha solution. you will be better served to use compaq's tru64 unix than linux, im pretty sure that any alpha with 16+ cpu's would definately laugh at linux.

.brad

well, what i more meant was some form of hardware hack to the ethernet card to allowo it to function as some form of dual port card. there is also the possibility of making some form of splitter to allow two cards to interface through, which of course the software (NetBSD in this case) has to be able to recognize and deal with properly. to me, this seems like the sort of thing a decent hardware hacker would have a fairly fun time doing. this obviously would cause crazy errors if the person were to try to play games throuhg it, but hey, were talking firewall *grin*.

.brad

between this and the netbsd port to dreamcast, we're a hell of a lot closer to having a beowulf cluster of these things...

im sure someone will find a way to use these things as firewalls, and when they do, i absolutely need one...

.brad

heres another story on the same thing:
http://www.crn.com/Sections/BreakingNews/dailyarch ives.asp?ArticleID=22871

.brad

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the last interveiw i read with linus said that he was going to think for a bit before releasing the next kernel version. he may be planning to jump straight to version 3.0 next. it seems a touch unlikely to me at least, but who gets the prizes if that happens??

this is a touch sarcastic...

.brad

the sick thing is that the 19 billion a year that is spent on the war on drugs is miniscule to what is made each year, by both sides, because of the drug trade. the technology that is needed to basically completely win the war on drugs would cost very, very little. the rest of the money (the other 17 billion) could be used to re-vitalize the us public education system (which is probably the worst funded [and as a result worst performing] public education system in the civilized world). higher education tends to lead to less moronic drug use (which also leads to less moronic drug use related problems). legalization would also eliminate the prolem, and free up a lot of money, which again, the schools would benefit from.

education is the key. smarter people tend to not turn into the drug crazed lunatics that are often pictured whenever legal narcotics are spoken of.

.brad

the war on drugs has got to be the largest sham ive personally ever heard of. the figures i have found all seem to say figures to the tune of 19 billion dollars a year, also every few months some congressman manages to add 10 million or so to the yearly pool. 19 billion is a lot of money.

now take a look at what they do with that money, they setup special police forces that go to public schools, concerts, and various other suspect spots. this is great for catching the end user of said substances, but that is hardly stopping the problem.

lets now look at the technology that exists. there are radar style devices out there that can detect very small amounts of cocaine, barbituates, or opiates. now if you think about the bigger drugs, almost all of them fit into these categories. these are also inexpensively mades. if these devices were used instead of being left on the shelf, the us border patrol would not only be able to detect the drugs, but they would also see them about a mile away. the technology that is used, is usually dogs who can supposedly smell larger amounts of drugs.

lets also look at where the border patrol is told to watch. the heavily patrolled area is basically right along the us/mexico border, when in fact, more drugs come through from canada. vancouver, and montreal are the two largest drug centres in north america. both of these are port cities, and both of them are ridiculously close to the us border. i, being a canadian have crossed the us canada border more times than i can count, including several times in the two previously mentioned cities. not once have i ever seen any form of narcotics detection. most drugs that come through mexico are usually flown in, or brought in by people with "special clearance". yes, people who have paid the right people dont even get to be sniffed by the previously mentioned dogs.

yes folks, it seems the us wants to lose the war on drugs, but why? well, there is a lot of money being made from it. i dont mean employing a few hundred people, i mean several thousand occupations seem to benefit from it. the justice system obviously, most of the people in jails in the us wouldnt be there if drugs werent an issue. the police need larger numbers of people, with even more training. the hospital system gets a lot of drug related cases. those on the other side of the law make phenomenal amounts of money. more importantly, this "war on drugs" gives the politicians something to talk about during the debates. they tend to like keeping the real issues quiet. all the parties at hand tend to also make a great deal of money directly from those involved in the drug trade. medical professionals who come into contact with these people are often paid better to keep that whole doctor client secrecy thing a bit tighter, lawyers are paid twice what they normally get, arresting officers are often paid to lose evidence, the list goes on and on.

recently there was a push in vancouver to make needle drugs semi-legal. this is mostly because vancouver is the heroin capital of the western world. aids rates are high, crime in the troubled spots is outstanding (for canada at least). they wanted to make "shooting galleries", to ensure that people had clean needles, as well as having trained staff make sure that if there was an overdose the person would live. they also wanted education to be the focus, and possession of personal amounts to be perfectly legal. everyone in the city (i mean everyone) was excited. all of a sudden most of the people who were voting on it were suddenly against the idea. about four months later, a large drug bust revealed that these people were actually paid by the largest street gang to keep the drug illegal! it seems the gang makes more off of an illegal substance than off of a legal one.

that cant be an isolated incident.

.brad

to me this seems like the perfect power source for some form of small submarine style spy tool. add a radar/sonar device, possibly a camera of sorts, a microphone maybe? these things are probably small enough to not get picked up by radar, and could be sent long distances without running out of power.

im sure you guys can think of a few uses for devices like this for use in large bodies of water as well as inside pipes and other common places you wouldnt expect survailence devices...

nifty, yet scary.....

.brad

he screwed up his goatsecx link...

.brad

especially when you compare them to mindstorms. with a few extra expansion packs and some creative hacking mindstorms can do anything. im working on one thatll sweep my floor (it scares the heck outta my cats too).

.brad

...but not exactly this. i was actually on the team that was doing the budget for the plan. they basically wanted broadband and free internet terminals with webcams. theyre plan was to have it set-up for web confrencing with other starbucks customers (mostly those long lost friends and family), and have a few cameras in each location that broadcast all of the stores to the internet.

obviously as you can imagine, this was going to cost a boatload of cash (5 terminals, each with webcam, 1 server to be a gateway /firewall /controller for the internet webcams, at every location). It was pure madness. The support bill was more than they had wanted to spend on the entire project.

With this plan however, a lot less hardware is needed. probably a much wiser way to go over all.

PS2 seriously outperforms these friggin things too. they cost about the same though.....

.brad

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speaking of quarantine, i recently pulled that game out of my closet, and in an attempt to play it, i realized that there is this nice little chart that data has to be entered from, basically a copy protection.

i seem to have lost mine.

when i went looking for the gametek site to try to get a copy of the thing (i did actually buy this game) i found out that gametek had gone out of business. no worries, i had also read that they had ben aquired by take2 interactive. i then sent an email to them explaining my situation. they replied in a very polite manner explaining that most of gameteks older games (quarantine included) were released into the public domain, and as a result were no longer supported. the nice guy sent me to another website that was supposed to have the game.

basically they only had the demo version, and no documentation online. i tried emailing him, explaining what take2 had told me. he called me a liar, i forwarded the email, he apologized. my trail ended there, and now i have a game that is supposed to be public domain, yet i cannot find any sort of support for.


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got any good urls for info on this?

.brad

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Im personally fairly sick of the huge amount of domain squatters out there who register 6000 (give of take a few) domains, only to not pay for any of them, but keep the hold on em untill they can successfully auction them off on ebay or sell em outright (making money for nothing). Trouble is I dont really think NSI should auction them off, they should just become open again. I know of a few domains id like to register (through someone other thatn NSI) that arent in use, and more importantly probably havent been paid for.

just my 2 cents

.brad
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