Slashdot Mirror

Just a general "hear, hear" in response to your comment about the Dvorak layout. A while ago there was a link on /. to a man who had developed a superior keyboard layout using a genetic algorithm and it turned out, after much optimization, exactly like Dvorak, save two keys that were switched with one another. I've been using Dvorak for years; took me about a week to learn, and while it's great for speed, it's far better for comfort IMHO. It's worthwhile for anyone who types more than 50 words a day. Note that it's optimized for English; however, I've found it to be much better than Dvorak in the few European foreign languages I've used so far (Spanish and French).

You don't say where HERE is. In the twin cities, MN I have cable with about 1.5mb/s down and 384kb/s up. The standard DSL here gets 640kb/s down and 272kb/s up. I don't really like AT&T but I despise the main local phone company (qwest) even more. I am tempted to get DSL through a good local ISP Visi so I can get a static IP address even if my speeds are slower.

Joining an organization like the EFF is great--really. I'm a member, and you should be too. But if you really want to be effective in changing the policies that effect you, there are cheaper and better things you can do. The refrain here on /. is that Big Evil Corporations do whatever they want. As a political scientists, I can tell you that's only half true. In general, big corporations and special interests only win on issues that are out of the public eye. In other words, issues members of congress don't get bothered about.

Forget all this stuff about emailing your representative--most (though not all!) members of congress ignore email, because they get so much of it. Snail mail is the traditional way to go here. However, academic studies have shown that faxes and phone calls to congressional members' Washington office are the most effective in influencing policy. A few short phone calls are a lot cheaper than a membership in the EFF. And what sort of a geek are you if you can't get your computer to send a fax?

So what the fuck are you waiting for? Find out who your Senators and Rep is, and pick up the phone.

Say, "My name is Joe Hacker, a I'm a constituent and regular Slashdot reader. I use the Linux operating system on my computer and I'm a member of the open source software community. I'm deeply concerned about digital rights issues. I want to know where Senator X / Rep. Y stands on these issues."

Force them to articulate an opinion, and ask them to send you a packet outlining the member's positions on digital rights issues, the Microsoft Anti-Trust action, online privacy, the DMCA, etc. I guarantee you that if only 10% of Slashdot readers had called up their elected representatives, 80% of the crappy legislation we have to deal with wouldn't have been passed in the first place.

I keep a bunch of "classic" bookmarks around. Some are undisputed gems, others are, well, to my taste. Bytes being cheap here's a batch.

• Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource
• AmbySoft Inc. White Papers: Scott Ambler's Online Writings
• windows.oreilly.com -- Deep Inside C#: An Interview with Microsoft Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg
• TQ
• The Rise of ``Worse is Better''
  
• A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux
  
• Theist Hall of Shame
• Internetworking Technology Overview
  
• Software Technology Review
  Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics
• P.S.: More Than Just Words
• Welcome to the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
• John McCarthy
  
• Slashdot | Net Translations of Dead-Tree IT Classics
  
• advICE
  
• 0xdeadbeef archives
  

He may not be an asshole, but he is an idiot. His rant about public transportation not making money is a lot of hogwash. Public roads don't make any money either. What does make money is selling people vehicles (and status symbols) that they can use on those public roads. In my town, Minneapolis, we had "light rail" for a long time, then it was taken out as the streetcars were replaced with buses manufactured by GM and apparently several managers of the transit system were getting kickbacks GM as well. Nothing like a little corruption to destroy valuable rail-based infrastructure. Bravo to Seattle for looking at mass transit solutions. I was just in Seattle and found their bus system to be fairly friendly-- wish I'd taken some time to check out the local train situation a little better.

Totally off-topic question to Seattle residents: what the heck is up with pedestrians in downtown Seattle standing on the corner waiting for the light? I felt a little weird jaywalking all the time, but I'll be danged if I'm going to stand around like a dolt when it's obvious there's no traffic.

What gives you the idea that only verified addresses are sold? Even non-existant addresses are sold. The link is an interesting story of a typo-email-address being sold (written by the postmaster of the ISP the e-mail address was from).

This was a lot funnier the first time!

*sigh*

Take a look for yourself!

I can't believe he's complaining about the few pixels he loses to the title bar.

Here's my favourite window manager, which goes onto any machine that I have to sit at for more than a few hours.

Formatted text and all images are now live on the mirror.

No movies, though. ;-)

I'm starting an image mirror here:
http://www.visi.com/~rwglynn/mirror/

Do not set LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Compile with -R or LD_RUN_PATH instead.

That essay about LD_LIBRARY_PATH is one of the most interesting things I've ever read. Reading it helped me understand not only the issues involved, but affected a lot of my thinking about programming in general. It's good for you! :) I never can remember where it is, but I see that it's the first hit you get when you search for LD_LIBRARY_PATH on google now.

visi.com -- a great ISP.

The BMW logo on the computer reminded me of this story about the BMW chair. Combine the two -- have a roaming leather seat out of a BMW and hook up the computer and touch screen flat panel monitor to it. Maybe make the system wireless..

No text (it's in Korean), but I have almost all of the pictures.

See here.

• Use blacklists, spews.org if you want to be really careful, or relays.visi.com or relays.osirusoft.com to stop open relays connecting for a start
• Check the sending domains exists when mail is sent.
• Drop the common abusive domains
• Increase the amount of blocked domains you can have. 250 is not enough when people use aaaa.com, aaab.com and so on
• Data mine the individual block lists. If more than 20% of hotmail users block a domain, then it should be looked at

All these things are pretty standard these days, but webmail providers (not just hotmail) don't actually seem to bother. Remember, the more times you check your inbox, the more ads they have viewed.

The link to the code on the provided web page is broken.

The proper address to the location of the tar.gz file is:

http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.tar.gz

--R

The code

PDF

Experiment

The code

PDF

Experiment

The code

PDF

Experiment

That web page has some messed up links going to it's own filesystem:

• C Code
• PDF

That web page has some messed up links going to it's own filesystem:

• C Code
• PDF

http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.tar.gz

http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.tar.gz
- bad link on the original page...

I have seen no empirical evidence whatsoever, published in an accredited, peer-reviewed scientific journal, which supports any detail of the 'creation of the world' as described in the bible.

On May 19, 1992 Humphreys submitted his article *"Compton scattering and the cosmic microwave background bumps" to the Scientific Correspondence section of the British journal Nature. The editorial staff knew Humphreys was a creationist and didn't want to publish it (even though the article did not contain any glaring creationist implications). The editorial staff didn't even want to send it through official peer review. Six months later Nature published an article by someone else on the same topic, having the same conclusions. Thus, most creationist researchers realize it is simply a waste of time to send journal editors openly creationist articles. To say that a "slight bias" exists on the part of journal editors would be an understatement.

Here's what goes on -- the pair of copper going to a house gets a digital signal modulated over it. Equipment at both ends is able to reconstruct two independent "streams" from the same line -- one at or below 8 KHz, the other one in a much higher frequency band. This line runs directly to the CO, so there's no bandwidth sharing there.

Going out of the CO, it runs through a large networks, eventually getting data to the ISP. This one signal is sent along with a lot of other data, so technically, bandwidth is being shared. I can't say about where you live, I can't say about your ISP, I can't say about your regional telecom network, but I know that where I live I always have a full pipe between me and my ISP. I can constantly saturate my DSL line with as much data as the computer on the other end can give me (chargen, anyone?)

That's not to say that the ISP has allocated a lot of bandwidth for you -- but mine does a pretty good job of that making sure that there's room for everyone.

Anyway, let's step back a little. Think about this, for a minute: DSL users share bandwidth too, just in a slightly different fashion. Everyone on the 'net shares bandwidth -- one ISP gets service from another ISP, the Tier 1 ISPs have exchanges, and everyone shares bandwidth at some point -- just further down the line. The advantage of DSL is that this bandwidth-sharing point is significantly further away from the end-user.

Click here to see some Warp 4 Example Screens

Ah, yes! The evil, black-helicoptered Scientific Orthodoxy! An army of jack-booted, blue-helmeted thugs, commanded by Persian-catted evil overlords in their concrete fortresses on the far side of the moon. They are coming for us. They are coming for us all.

Forget the hat, in times like theese only a Full tinfoil body suit will do!

Link to find out your Representative's contact info here.

Click on the state, decide who you want to contact and click on the bio for the mailing address.

SealBeater

The U.S. Senate is obliging and gives out the addresses in a convenient form: U.S. Senate. The U.S. House of Representatives is less so, but others have done the work: CongressMerge Contacting the Congress.

It wouldn't be difficult to comb The U.S. House of Representatives Locate Representatives' Web Sites Listed by Name for addresses.

What all of this rambling means is that you can filter out a great deal of spam with the right DNS blacklists. I only use DNSbl's that allow zone transfers because I don't want network latency to slow down mail delivery. It really is a worthwhile thing to do.

Finally the best thing that you can do for your users is educate them. Give them very clear examples of how doing simple things like giving your personal email to a credit card company, entering it in a guestbook, using it in USENET, using it on any public discussion board, and many more can increase their spam intake many fold. Explain that to them. Show them the proof. It's not hard to generate spam. Hell create a dummy account and make a few posts in the newsgroups. Never give the address to anyone else and don't use it yourself. Give it a week. Then show the results to your users as proof of USENET address harvesting.

Finally, don't be part of the problem (this is to the parent of the article). Be proactive in fighting spam. Sitting back and bitching about it doesn't help anyone. If you put up a server that's an open relay then you fucked up. It's your responsibility as an administrator to make sure you do your job right. Putting up and open relay isn't doing your job right (are you listening all of you damned Exchange admins?! 90% of the open relays I find and report are running Exchange!!!). When you get spam, report it (called LARTing). Drop a copy to uce@ftc.gov. Reporting stock spam to the SEC. Report bogus drug scams (loose 100lbs tonight while you sleep!) to the FDA. Report Nigerian Monet scams to the Secret Service. Report the spamertised sites to their providers and ask that they investigate (don't accuse in case it's a Joe Job). Parse through the headers and learn to identify relayed spam, BS headers, and other tricks of the trade. Submit open relays for listing in all the open relay blacklists. Report it to the owner of the IP as well. DO YOU PART! If you're not going to do you part to fight spam or ensure that you're servers are properly configured, THEN GET YOU SERVERS AND YOUR ASS OFF THE 'NET BECAUSE YOU DON"T BELONG IN THIS COMMUNITY!! Don't be part of the problem.

The page is not easy to find, but you can get a list of alternative DSL ISPs here.

I can recommend Visi and USFamily.net. I am sure other folks can recommend their favorites also.

One of IBM's problems is that most of their really cool hardware isn't targetted at consumers, so most hobbyist types have no idea what they actually produce...

If you're inspired to become a gadfly to those who think they can turn you into a consuming conforming ruminant:

First off, check out Dennis Powell's advice on responding to the DOJ's attempt to give the Internet to MS.

Never let your senator or congressperson do anything that concerns you and your liberties without hearing from you.

I've never seen Common Cause mentioned here, but they are a real lobbying group who deserve your support and dollars, have done so for decades.

"Have a place to submit spam incidents, such as a web form. Then process them to look for patterns."

Have you ever tried to run more than a handful of LARTS through a web form? It's a nightmare. I have 1200 pieces of Broadwing.net spam that I need to LART tonight. I don't know how I'd LART all of them via a web form.

Patterns aren't something that the average Joe would pick up on anyhow. Few people noticed that recently more and more spam uses a spoofed From: in the form of BSUser@yourowndomain.tld. If they do want to look for patterns, they could easily view thousands of spam reports in news.admin.net-abuse.sightings. Numerous people post their spam to it.

Provide separate zones for blocking sources of spam, and blocking web sites and ISPs where spammers might be hosting a web page. Not everyone wants to block the latter; I only want to block the source of spam."

Many DNS blacklist authors do just this. MAPS is a good example. You have the DUL which lists dial-up IPs only. The RSS which lists known && abused open relays. The RBL contains ISPs that are known to harbor spammers or at least be neutral to their abuse and ignore abuse complaints. The RBL+ is a combination of those 3. All 4 of those are their own zones. SPEWS lists /24's from which spam originates. Occasionally they'll even list a whole provider that harbors spammers or spamware sites, repeated lies to people that mail abuse@, or are known to bit bucket abuse complaints. relays.osirusoft.com hosts many lists. Individual queries can be made to for any of the lists it hosts or you can transfer them all at once in a big zone file. relays.visi.com is the home of the RSL. It only lists open relays that have been abused, like the RSS and relays.osirusoft.com's base DNSbl. blackholes.2mbit.com is the home of the SBL (Summit Block List), not to be confused with the SBL (Spamhaus Block List) which is hosted by osirusoft. The Summit Block List contains abused open relays and hosts that have been directly involved in spamming. The Spamhaus Block List contains "known spammers, spam gangs, or spam support services" and is "by the same team that maintains the ROKSO database", a list of those spammers.

"Some anti-spammers are on a crusade to maximize collateral damage. I am not. I won't block a whole ISP because of a spammer unless that ISP is making it difficult to isolate and focus on the spammer."

In a small way I agree. I used to feel like you do now. I was very leary about blocking an entire ISP just because of the possibility of lossing legit mail. I quickly came to realize that blocking just a small piece of that ISP that's know to spam wasn't solving the problem. They'd just move elsewhere within that ISP.

"If they corner the spammer operation to a specific static subnet, I'll gladly block that, and I'd want to use a DNS blacklist that is equally focused."

This doesn't accomplish anything in the long term and little in the short term. Sure you block some spam from a spammer for a couple of weeks but they'll quickly figure that out and move to another block. If the ISP facilitates their move then they are supporting spammers. It's an all or nothing deal. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Personally I block entire ISPs myself, in my personal access lists that are independant of group maintainted DNS blacklists, that are known to harbor spammers and ignore complaints. A perfect example of this is Broadwing.net. I have blacklisted every IP they have registered to them. That includes 3 /14's, a /24, and a /28. That's a lot of IPs. I have never seen anything but spam come directly from them. They harbor Alan Ralsky and many other well known spammers. They ignore spam complaints. They simply don't care. Whenever I LART their spam, I also LART their upstreams because I believe someone there will eventually notice. I know that no one at Broadwing will.

"Some of the anti-spammers are on the wrong crusade and not very many people will follow them."

This I have to strongly disagree with. I've been involved in protecting my resources from spam for some time now and have implemented many steps to prevent as much spam from entering my system as possible. I reject just under 1400 known spamming domains. I also reject all mail from a number of providers that harbor spammers as well. I utilize all the lists hosted by Osirusoft, relays.visi.com, blackholes.2mbit.com, and I'm in the process of resubscribing to the RSS and DUL. I even do some filtering on message content which has been incredibly successful. Last week I rejected almost 96,000 pieces of spam on one of my servers. That's pretty darn good. Of the 2400 users on this particular server, I've only had complaints from 3. 3 of them couldn't receive mail from a particular person on the 'Net that wsa being filtered by me. 1 was on an osirusoft list. 1 was attempting to send mail through their mailing list that's run by cybercon.com (a known spam supporter) and mail to subscribers on our end was bouncing. The other was a customer of a customer of Broadwing's. After explaining to them that we couldn't selectively allow mail to just them from the affected host and that we'd have to allow all mail to them unfiltered, they decided to suffer from more spam than miss out on their friend's email. One has changed his mind though. The rest seem to love it. The best advice I can say to you is to keep an open mind about these lists and what they do for us. Not every list is meant for all situations. I personally don't want to use the RBL. In the beginning I was leary about SPEWS. The rest I like. Join news.admin.net-abuse.email and keep up with some of the conversations of the anti-spammers that reside there. A plethora of information and insight can be had with them (I'm there too). good luck!

"Have a place to submit spam incidents, such as a web form. Then process them to look for patterns."

Have you ever tried to run more than a handful of LARTS through a web form? It's a nightmare. I have 1200 pieces of Broadwing.net spam that I need to LART tonight. I don't know how I'd LART all of them via a web form.

Patterns aren't something that the average Joe would pick up on anyhow. Few people noticed that recently more and more spam uses a spoofed From: in the form of BSUser@yourowndomain.tld. If they do want to look for patterns, they could easily view thousands of spam reports in news.admin.net-abuse.sightings. Numerous people post their spam to it.

Provide separate zones for blocking sources of spam, and blocking web sites and ISPs where spammers might be hosting a web page. Not everyone wants to block the latter; I only want to block the source of spam."

Many DNS blacklist authors do just this. MAPS is a good example. You have the DUL which lists dial-up IPs only. The RSS which lists known && abused open relays. The RBL contains ISPs that are known to harbor spammers or at least be neutral to their abuse and ignore abuse complaints. The RBL+ is a combination of those 3. All 4 of those are their own zones. SPEWS lists /24's from which spam originates. Occasionally they'll even list a whole provider that harbors spammers or spamware sites, repeated lies to people that mail abuse@, or are known to bit bucket abuse complaints. relays.osirusoft.com hosts many lists. Individual queries can be made to for any of the lists it hosts or you can transfer them all at once in a big zone file. relays.visi.com is the home of the RSL. It only lists open relays that have been abused, like the RSS and relays.osirusoft.com's base DNSbl. blackholes.2mbit.com is the home of the SBL (Summit Block List), not to be confused with the SBL (Spamhaus Block List) which is hosted by osirusoft. The Summit Block List contains abused open relays and hosts that have been directly involved in spamming. The Spamhaus Block List contains "known spammers, spam gangs, or spam support services" and is "by the same team that maintains the ROKSO database", a list of those spammers.

"Some anti-spammers are on a crusade to maximize collateral damage. I am not. I won't block a whole ISP because of a spammer unless that ISP is making it difficult to isolate and focus on the spammer."

In a small way I agree. I used to feel like you do now. I was very leary about blocking an entire ISP just because of the possibility of lossing legit mail. I quickly came to realize that blocking just a small piece of that ISP that's know to spam wasn't solving the problem. They'd just move elsewhere within that ISP.

"If they corner the spammer operation to a specific static subnet, I'll gladly block that, and I'd want to use a DNS blacklist that is equally focused."

This doesn't accomplish anything in the long term and little in the short term. Sure you block some spam from a spammer for a couple of weeks but they'll quickly figure that out and move to another block. If the ISP facilitates their move then they are supporting spammers. It's an all or nothing deal. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Personally I block entire ISPs myself, in my personal access lists that are independant of group maintainted DNS blacklists, that are known to harbor spammers and ignore complaints. A perfect example of this is Broadwing.net. I have blacklisted every IP they have registered to them. That includes 3 /14's, a /24, and a /28. That's a lot of IPs. I have never seen anything but spam come directly from them. They harbor Alan Ralsky and many other well known spammers. They ignore spam complaints. They simply don't care. Whenever I LART their spam, I also LART their upstreams because I believe someone there will eventually notice. I know that no one at Broadwing will.

"Some of the anti-spammers are on the wrong crusade and not very many people will follow them."

This I have to strongly disagree with. I've been involved in protecting my resources from spam for some time now and have implemented many steps to prevent as much spam from entering my system as possible. I reject just under 1400 known spamming domains. I also reject all mail from a number of providers that harbor spammers as well. I utilize all the lists hosted by Osirusoft, relays.visi.com, blackholes.2mbit.com, and I'm in the process of resubscribing to the RSS and DUL. I even do some filtering on message content which has been incredibly successful. Last week I rejected almost 96,000 pieces of spam on one of my servers. That's pretty darn good. Of the 2400 users on this particular server, I've only had complaints from 3. 3 of them couldn't receive mail from a particular person on the 'Net that wsa being filtered by me. 1 was on an osirusoft list. 1 was attempting to send mail through their mailing list that's run by cybercon.com (a known spam supporter) and mail to subscribers on our end was bouncing. The other was a customer of a customer of Broadwing's. After explaining to them that we couldn't selectively allow mail to just them from the affected host and that we'd have to allow all mail to them unfiltered, they decided to suffer from more spam than miss out on their friend's email. One has changed his mind though. The rest seem to love it. The best advice I can say to you is to keep an open mind about these lists and what they do for us. Not every list is meant for all situations. I personally don't want to use the RBL. In the beginning I was leary about SPEWS. The rest I like. Join news.admin.net-abuse.email and keep up with some of the conversations of the anti-spammers that reside there. A plethora of information and insight can be had with them (I'm there too). good luck!

1. The Rules of both the House and Senate prohibit Member of Congress emailing constituents directly. This is to prevent unauthorized campaigning via Capitol Hill through less traceable email (all correspondence must be via snail mail).
2. In my experience, members of Congress have a few generic form letter they send out. They receive literally hundreds to thousands of mailings a day and try to respond to everyone in their district. Imagine having to write custom responses...it can't feasibly be done.
3. If you don't agree with them...well, vote against them or get enough people pissed off so that it becomes an issue threatening their re-election. In my years of running the site, I have rarely seen a member of Congress vote against 'public opinion' in their home district.

You can find your reps mailing address at Contacting the Congress .

1. Come up with what to tell our representatives. Most of us are computer geeks and not politicians or speech writers, so sometimes it's difficult for us to present a more compelling argument than "Don't do this, 'cause it sucks".
2. Make it easyy to forward that information to our representatives by making acces to our representatives information easier.

I don't like organized religion

Here in Australia, we have unions, which may be somewhat different to American unions. Most unions here have gone from being a vital lever for employees to use against expliotative employers, to being exploitative self-serving bullies in their own right. Unions should serve freedom of choice, but they've actually reduced freedom of choice. This becomes clear when you see building sites covered with ``NO TICKET, NO START'' stickers. It's not as if the building companies have any choice left, and regardless of what the law says, the reality is that if you want to work on a large site, you must join a union and you must continue to obey the union.

It's almost the same in Science. In many disciplines, you must believe in ``natural history'' (ie a theory of origins which supports Atheism in particular) in order to hold a job. If you don't do this, even if you hold no particular religion, it becomes effectively impossible to publish in mainstream journals, regardless of the value [detailed] of your work.

This is a problem to do with people, and with the nature of mankind - about which religion has much to say, some of it true - not with the particular area of dispute.

Dear XYZ,

Like you, I am aggrieved at the tragic loss of life resulting from the horrendous events of September 11, 2001. Every American has been touched by this trauma which will linger forever in the memory of our nation.

Though I want to see the perpetrators of these acts brought to justice, I must beg you not to compromise American civil liberties in your pursuit of justice. The loss of American citizens' ability to move and communicate freely and their right to privacy would be a greater casualty than the thousands killed Tuesday morning, considering how many millions of Americans have already died defending those freedoms throughout our country's history. In the end, reduction of civil liberty will not prevent a repetition of such disasters -- only a worldwide attention to the root causes of terrorism (like poverty, warfare, injustice, child abuse, intolerance, and racism) can do that.

Benjamin Franklin said that those who give up necessary liberties for security deserve neither security nor freedom. I must echo his sentiment. Do not allow our sacred rights of freedom of speech, privacy, association or movement to be abridged in the coming days of difficult choices. America's enemies hate us in part because we are a free and open society, and they fear the potential that that represents. Do not give them the victory they cannot themselves win by destroying the core of our society, our beloved liberties.

God Bless America,

NAME AND ADDRESS

http://support.visi.com/dsl/242/

I'd suspect that you could also find it this update using google (look for "c675.2.4.2.bin" or something equivalent ...)

I've been using Vector Internet Services (visi.com) for several years, and I've had DSL through them for about 2 1/2 years or so. It's been very reliable, and best of all you can get a static IP for your DSL connection. The support staff here definitely knows what they're doing, too. Check them out: http://www.visi.com. And I'm not just saying this for the referral bonus.

http://support.visi.com/dsl/codered.html

Of course this doesn't have much to do with NASA's shuttle radar imagery! Except maybe that it can take a while to download one of those full resolution images for maximum viewing :-)

I'd point out that some of the imagery is too good - extremely sharp topographic relief simply cannot be captured in stereo from space (at least not in the shuttle passes) and thus no elevation data for those locations. I also recall that they were not able to image the entire surface of the Earth in stereo as they had hoped.

if incompatible libraries are found, the installation process should wrap its binaries in scripts which set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the necessary compatibility libraries (/usr/lib/compat) -- and they should be linked to _specifically by version_, so that different versions of compability libraries don't fight with each other.

Excellent plan. Just so everyone knows, though, LD_LIBRARY_PATH is rarely needed. In this case, it is only needed because the binaries are precompiled. If you ever have to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH, the software should be recompiled correctly!

Neat eye-opening information about LD_LIBRARY_PATH can be found at Why LD_LIBRARY_PATH is Bad

I don't think we're going to see anything analogous to the DLL problem because most shared libraries use explicit versions. But I would love to get rid of the madness of being told to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to run software I just compiled! All you have to do is set LD_RUN_PATH during compilation. (See that link!) One notes that Perl's MakeMaker system always sets LD_RUN_PATH appropriately when compiling an extension module.

Cable providers are such pains about running services on your computer at home. They absolutely want you to be a passive consumer of information, no matter what.

I have a /29 from my ISP, and run various low bandwidth services (including being a primary DNS server for several domains) from my computer at home. I could never do that reliably with a cable modem.

My actual available bandwidth is more reliable as well. Especially if I go through my ISPs squid proxy for most stuff. The squid proxy is connected to the net at 45 MBps and the higher peak rates can smooth out network bumps to make my transfer rate a smooth 65k/sec. I wish they were more vocal about their squid proxy because then there'd be a better chance that stuff I want would be in it, and I wouldn't have to fetch from the Internet at large at all.

Of course, having a good ISP is a must. I wouldn't ever use QWorst as my ISP. I've been extremely pleased with VISI.

Those of you in other Qwest cities, there's a good chance that there is somebody like that where you live. Look around a little, and post it here if you find one. :)

I must admit that the customer service I got from them wasn't quite stellar, however. I wound up going through the local ILEC, simply because they had actually gotten back to me within a day or two, a month after I had requested information from Northpoint. By the time Northpoint had gotten back to me, my circuit was up and I was cruising along with an awesome local ISP.

I'm generally not an anti-corporatist, but I do hope that they win their suit and put at least a little chink in the evil keiretsu that is Verizon, which appears to have put their offer on the table as a bargaining chip in their labor disputes last summer.

(end comment) */ }

I still use VTWM whenever I set up a machine. TWM, updated, and with Virtual Paging. Wow!

Here's a screenshot.

Easy to understand files, alyways compiles, and lightning quick. Makes my 1990 NCD XTerms usable again! :-)