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Slashback: Safety, Transmissions, Breakage

Slashback has updates tonight on nuclear-safe hosting facilities, the temporary return of Metricom's Ricochet service, and a possible problem with Apple's newest upgrade for anyone using Xfree86 under Mac OS X.

A soft spot on the Apple?MacXGuy writes: "I recently obtained by free 10.1 upgrade from the Apple Store in the Mall of America. After installing it on my Titanium PB-G4 XFree4.1 (http://www.mrcla.com/XonX/) no longer works. (I'm definitely not installing it on my Dual 800 G4 until a workaround is found.)"

Since most of the stuff I've heard about the 10.1 upgrade has been positive to the point of suspicion, I wonder if anyone else has experienced similar upgrade quibbles with it.

Another good reason for a complex infrastructure. PhantomHarlock writes "New York City officials requested and got what's left of Metricom to re-activate the wireless network in the area surrounding the World Trade Center. Rescue and cleanup crews are using the network to coordinate and access death certificates filed online. Only one rooftop transmitter had been destroyed, the other four are still intact."

Even when you're right, you're wrong -- as the fine print clearly shows. An anonymous reader points to column in InfoWorld about interpreting the overlapping, contradictory and sometimes funny EULAs that accompany Microsoft products. Microsoft certainly isn't alone in that regard either -- ever read a EULA you thought was totally fair, unambiguous, and satisfying? Mr. Anonymous writes: "This was amply illustrated last week after I mentioned here that the EULA (end-user license agreement) for FrontPage 2002 contains a term prohibiting use of the software in connection with a site that disparages Microsoft or its online services. I love it."

The only place to hunker is a well-connected bunker. severn2j writes: "It seems that AL Digital's nuclear bunker (posted on /. a few weeks ago), has paid off for them in light of the attacks on the U.S. So much so that they've got another one."

And for all your fair-use needs ... An Anonymous Coward writes "Maybe lyrics.ch is going down now, but most of its content and even more is available from LyricsDot which is not going to close."

Good to hear. Amateur song transcription really isn't such a bad thing, except when you consider most of the songs.

52 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. 10.1 breaks things by cmoney · · Score: 5, Informative

    No conspiracy theory here, 10.1 does in fact break things. There were hacked up drivers for the Lucent WaveLan wireless ethernet card that worked with 10.0.4 but broke under 10.1. Various other programs like BBEdit had smaller problems also. Alot of programs have been re-released within the past few days to address 10.1 issues that have cropped up. If you haven't seen them publicized, it's because you're not looking on Mac boards, but they're there.

    1. Re:10.1 breaks things by kerincosford · · Score: 2, Informative

      it does indeed break things.

      I installed it today, and it broke Apache, because I'd installed the Apple WebSharing update, which seems mighty odd.

      It also went ahead and installed an older build of PHP over my existing one.

      But, the problems werent that huge. A simple edit Apache edit and a rebuild of PHP and everything was up and running again.

      Other people may well have more problems with stuff like C and Perl though, until they start using Developer Tools 10.1 - a whole bunch of modules have been renamed, and GCC seemed to be all screwed up until Dev tools 10.1 was installed.

    2. Re:10.1 breaks things by kerincosford · · Score: 4, Informative

      Oh, anybody having troubles with 10.1 breaking things - this has a whole bunch of handy pointers.

    3. Re:10.1 breaks things by MouseR · · Score: 2

      10.1 does in fact break things. There were hacked up drivers for the Lucent WaveLan wireless ethernet card

      Gee, they mustn't have been very good hacks, were they?

      Our application runs just fine after the update. Blame failing applications on poor QA, or hacked-up, non-kosher workarounds for things that were not quite working with prior versions of OS X.

    4. Re:10.1 breaks things by timdaman · · Score: 3, Informative

      It broke X so I reinstalled it. Blow away your /usr/X11R6 and /etc/X11 and reinstall. Also get the really nice new XonX Xdarwin client so you can run X in rootless mode (i.e. show X and Aqua on the same display at the same time). Total time of recovery, about 15 min. Also if I may put my 2cents in, **10.1 ROCKS**!!!!! I was almost ready to give up my Mac habit of many years. I had Linux running on my G4 fulltime with occasionaly trips to MacOS 9/X to do stuff. Now I think I may be moveing in the other direction. I still am keeping linux on my router and server tho so I am not toally abandoning it. :)

      --
      Do worry about life, you will never get out alive.
    5. Re:10.1 breaks things by hysterion · · Score: 3, Interesting
      anybody having troubles with 10.1 breaking things - this [stepwise.com] has a whole bunch of handy pointers
      Found this part interesting:
      Apple has removed [wget] in 10.1 as yet another GPL'd tool that can be replaced with a non-GPL alternative.
      This seems to be the reason they also avoided bash. Is the plan to ultimately remove everything GNU? Grepping 10.0.x manpages reveals a few that seem potentially there:
      diff
      dpkg
      emacs
      enscript
      etags
      gawk
      gnutar
      grep
      groff
      gunzip
      gzip
      less
      patch
      sort
      (Just asking! Please correct rather than flame the inevitable errors/omissions.)
    6. Re:10.1 breaks things by yuriwho · · Score: 2

      A package installer for the wavelan driver can be found at http://homepage.mac.com/yuriwho

      of course if you have the new dev tools (free from ADC) you can compile the driver yourself from the wirelessdriver sources at http://sourceforge.net/projects/wirelessdriver (you'll also need the IOPCCardFamily headers from darwin to compile it)

      --
      no sig.
    7. Re:10.1 breaks things by njug · · Score: 2, Insightful

      GCC (and emacs) can't really be replaced by a non-GNU alternative. The note said wget was going to be removed because it *could* be replaced by a non-GNU alternative.

      So my hunch is that they want to expunge the GNU stuff they can avoid, and deal with what they can't.

  2. 10.1 Is So Great That... by ekrout · · Score: 2, Funny
    The article before this was Huge security hole in Internet Explorer for MacOS
    [Microsoft] Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday October 02, @05:30PM
    .

    On the bright side, at least I use Linux :-)

    --

    If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
    1. Re:10.1 Is So Great That... by megaduck · · Score: 2

      Cut Apple some slack. Both of these issues are with third party software, and have nothing to do with the fundamental "goodness" of the OS. The exact same issues exist in the Linux world.

      IIRC, Apache, Sendmail, and Bind have had a couple of security holes crop up in the past. Plus I guarantee that every time there's a major kernel upgrade it breaks a few programs. That's not a bad thing, it's just the price of progress. True, you don't see this kind of thing as often with Linux, but Linus isn't pushing out kernel upgrades at the frantic pace that he used to.

      I'm not worried about it. Holes will be plugged, bugs will be fixed, and software will be rewritten. OS X is just going through some of the growing pains that other systems (like Linux) went through earlier.

      --
      This .sig for rent.
  3. bunker by geekoid · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm going into the bunker selling business, just like the 50s.

    I can use terrorism fear, point to the governments overreaction for validation, I'll make a fortune! If they don't buy from me I'll report them annonymously as terrorist via the web!

    if only Mcarthy had the web

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    1. Re:bunker by Omerna · · Score: 2

      if only Mcarthy had the web

      He probably wouldn't have been as affective on the web. From what I understand (I wasn't alive back then) the Senate hearings took place on national television, and everyone tuned in to watch. If your name was mentioned you were immediately thought a hard-core, selling the US out, Communist.

      IMO, over the internet, and now with network TV, he wouldn't have such a forum to work in. He wouldn't be the ONLY news story, and networks wouldn't be able to talk for to long about him. (The Florida election thing only lasted for a few weeks/ months, and that was to elect the President.) He'd probably start big and soon be relegated to a background role, eventually falling out of the public's eye.

      (Assumed all our tech was just transposed to his era. Just guess work.)

      --


      No sig for you.
    2. Re:bunker by Glytch · · Score: 2

      We've got our McCarthy. His name is John Ashcroft.

  4. WTF? by ekrout · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anyone else still having trouble believing that sentence above is talking about New York City, USA in the year 2001? --> PhantomHarlock writes "New York City officials requested and got what's left of Metricom to re-activate the wireless network in the area surrounding the World Trade Center. Rescue and cleanup crews are using the network to coordinate and access death certificates filed online. Only one rooftop transmitter had been destroyed, the other four are still intact."

    --

    If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
  5. Not the hardware by matty · · Score: 2, Informative

    He's not talking about a problem with the hardware, he's saying that XFREE86 4.1 no longer works.

    I don't need to mention that XF86 4.1 is software, not hardware, do I?

  6. EULA Question by jiheison · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Has any M$ EULA ever been tested in court? Or is it just a legal stick that they use to menace people into compliance. Being that they never receive any physical proof that you "accepted" anything, it seems unlikely that they could use it against users.

    Sure, it covers them from being sued for faulty software. But is it really a threat to users who "missuse" their products?

    1. Re:EULA Question by GigsVT · · Score: 2

      Yeah but when they say "Don't break this seal unless you agree with the enclosed EULA", the one you can't read without breaking the seal.... I REALLY don't think that would stand up in court.

      --
      I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
  7. Redundancy in the net/points of failure by NotSurprised · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The article about nuclear bunker hosting got me thinking. We all know that back in the early days of the Net, when it was run by the US military/govt, it WAS designed to survive a nuclear attack, especially in terms of topology/redundancy.

    But since the commercialization of the Internet, has this objective been swept aside for the pursuit of mere growth? How vulrenable as single points of failure are places like MAE-East, MAE-West, etc where the major backbones peer together?

    Now, since the Net is mission-critical for a lot of businesses, might we need to ensure that it is survivable against such attacks, such as from terrorism?

    Could anyone really say the Internet is still robust to the failure of a few nodes? Any real study been done the graph-structure of the net?

    1. Re:Redundancy in the net/points of failure by SimplyCosmic · · Score: 3, Funny

      Meh. The modern Internet has trouble surviving an attack by a backhoe, let alone nuclear weapons.

  8. Uhh by alexburke · · Score: 4, Interesting

    LyricsDot which is not going to close

    If there's one thing the Slashdot crowd has figured out, it's to not count one's chickens before they've hatched.

    As soon as the Harry Fox Agency gets wind of this, I'm sure they'll go after this new variant with just as much zeal.

    However, since it appears as though the site truly IS hosted in Russia (rather than having a North American-based site with a .RU address), it just might stick around for a while after all!

    [ 8 ]

    RIPE whois query for www.lyricsdot.ru (195.34.224.76):

    inetnum: 195.34.224.0 - 195.34.224.255
    netname: AOR2-1-NET
    descr: Lipetsk regional network
    country: RU
    admin-c: AOR2-RIPE
    tech-c: AOR2-RIPE
    rev-srv: ns1.lipetsk.ru
    rev-srv: ns2.lipetsk.ru
    rev-srv: ns.vrn.ru
    status: ASSIGNED PA
    mnt-by: AOR2-MNT-RIPE
    changed: aor@takthq.lietsk.su 19980321
    source: RIPE

    route: 195.34.224.0/19
    descr: Lipetsk Regional Public Network
    origin: AS8570
    mnt-by: AOR2-MNT-RIPE
    changed: aor@takthq.lipetsk.su 19971207
    source: RIPE

    person: Alexander I Ostankov
    address: JSC "Lipetskelectrosvyaz"
    address: Lipetsk regional NIC
    address: 5, Plekhanova str.
    address: SU-398000 Lipetsk, Russia
    phone: +7 0742 470909
    phone: +7 0742 470916
    fax-no: +7 0742 744823
    e-mail: aor@lipetsk.ru
    nic-hdl: AOR2-RIPE
    mnt-by: AOR2-MNT-RIPE
    changed: aor@takthq.lipetsk.su 19981223
    source: RIPE

    1. Re:Uhh by aozilla · · Score: 3, Funny

      However, since it appears as though the site truly IS hosted in Russia (rather than having a North American-based site with a .RU address), it just might stick around for a while after all!

      Unless the maintainers decide to come visit the U.S. to participate in a Def Con convention.

      --
      ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
  9. What do you expect? by megaduck · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm not really suprised by 10.1 breaking X. In order to get the speed increases that I've been hearing about, they probably had to retouch darn near everything all the way down to the kernel level. That includes the BSD layer, so I wouldn't be surprised if anything written at that level has problems. Even Apple's own dev tools that came with 10.0 are broken.

    While losing X is irritating, I have a hard time getting angry at Apple. OS X was a real dog, and they absolutely needed to get performance up to snuff. Besides which, I'm sure that this glitch will be corrected shortly. Until then, you can get by with Aqua. It's not that bad. :)

    --
    This .sig for rent.
  10. *Ahem* by 11thangel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ok, its a change in the minor version of the OS. Think win98->winme, or anything->winxp. Or even linux2.2->2.4. Xfree 3.x->4.x. SOMETHING breaks. Whether it be 3d support, drivers for anything (or everything), or if its hardly recognizable as the same program, when the minor version number (or the major version number for that matter) goes UP, support for something must come DOWN. Either that or UP and DOWN or just two keys on my keyboard, I can't see straight enough to tell.

    --

    I am !amused.
    1. Re:*Ahem* by RedWizzard · · Score: 2
      Ok, its a change in the minor version of the OS. Think win98->winme, or anything->winxp. Or even linux2.2->2.4. Xfree 3.x->4.x.
      Linux 2.2 - > 2.4 and XFree86 3.3.6 > 4.0 were both major rewrites. Not at all like 10.0.x -> 10.1. More like OS9 -> OSX.
  11. Complex infrastructures aren't always that good by gburgyan · · Score: 5, Interesting
    That's one of the inefficiencies of a complex, competitive environment. If everyone wants to set up their own wireless network, for instance, there's going to be a lot of overlap in the low-level stuff. This is not anti-capitalistic, it's just that some bit of standardization is a good thing - take a look at the IBM PC ISA and TCP/IP. While certain amounts are good (a Windows worm hasn't yet also struck Linux for instance) but too much really is a waste.

    The same could have been done with the wireless freenets that was mentioned a few articles ago.

    Redudancy is good. Too much redundancy is bad.

  12. Uhhh... by bIOHZRd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Go ahead and score this as insightful O' modera-tors....

    The Bunker offers the ultimate in protection from a myriad of attacks including; crackers, terrorist attack, electro-magnetic pulse, HERF weapons, electronic eavesdropping and solar flares.

    That seems kind of confusing to me that it offers protection against electronic eavesdropping, as doesn't the building need to connect to the "outside world" somehow? As long as a single line filled with data is coming out of the building, it isn't protected fully. Now if they could secure the lines all the way to uhh, the end user's house...THEN it would be superior.

    1. Re:Uhhh... by evil_one · · Score: 2

      They are referring to the computers themselves - the calculations and processes inside the computer, not the data coming to/from

      --
      Desperation is a stinky cologne
  13. XFree 4.1 needs to be post 1.0a2 by descubes · · Score: 5, Informative
    I had a similar problem. After upgrading to 1.0a3, the latest build, it worked fine. The web page at http://www.mrcla.com/XonX indicates that 1.0a2 is the first build that starts on 10.1.

    I still have trouble if I lose a connection to a remote X machine, or if I kill XDarwin. In that case, I seem to have trouble starting a new X session, it complains that it cannot connect to a socket and that another XDarwin might be running.

    --
    -- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
  14. Re:About the Bunker by hackerhue · · Score: 4, Funny

    I think they really meant hackers i.e. people trying to chop up your computer with an axe.

    --

    To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.

  15. EULA Issues by os2fan · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer

    If MS is inserting into its licenses, conditions of approved content, then they may well be stepping on the jurisdiction of the judge.

    There is a certian right to protect the IP rights of a work, which is limited to the use of the work and derived copies. This means that MS can restrict the production and distribution of copies of their work.

    There is also the certian right of association of "good name". This means, that if I write on some subject, then I can have you disassociate your work against mine. This was done, for example with Karl Marx and the "survival of the fittest". In the present context, it means the use of MS logos on sites that disparage MS.

    But one can not prevent one from using a companies works, legally acquired, to fight against a company, as long as the product is not identified.

    The licence as provided is not aimed at the protection of abuse of the intellectual property it covers, but to cover other IP not implied in the license. That is, the licence implies that you should protect IP that you are not being given special access to. It might be interesting to test this role of restraint in court, especially since the annual license thing has been deemed rental in Germany, with the implied restriction of owner (ie MS) fixes.

    The other thing is that judges might not take kindly to other people dishing out punishment for crimes that they decide punishment for. For example, if I were to create a hate site, and such a site were legal, than MS could still punish me. If the judge decides it were illegal, than the judge punishes me, and this is all I should pay, not an additional punishment from MS.

    What the EULA also grants, by undefined terms "hate, porn", is that they can control content. And for this control of content, they might also be leaving themselves open to the legal content of sites [... by acting as an editor, you become responsible for content ...]

    --
    OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
    1. Re:EULA Issues by os2fan · · Score: 3, Informative
      Having read the EULA in question, it DOES place exactly the sort of restrictions as I have indicated. The way that the EULA that I have for it reads, it does not specifically state web components. Is HTML a web component? The term "web component" is undefined. And having seen what MS does with undefined terms, I would be afraid of this.

      That MS has overstepped the steps necessary to protect the unauthorised reproduction of its licenced IP, and the misuse of its trademarks, should be regarded as a threat to the freedom of speech.

      Next, they will be saying you can't use their compiler to compile a competing wordprocessor, or any product that competes, replaces or interferes with their extant or potential products. Well.

      --
      OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
  16. XF86 10.1 problem is easy... by ehintz · · Score: 5, Informative

    Make sure /usr/X11R6/bin and /usr/local/X11/bin are in your path.

    --
    ehintz
  17. "The Bunkers" Threats.. by crazney · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In the news story linked above, one of the "upcomming threats" that someone mentioned was this:

    'It is not just terrorists that companies should be worried about. The biggest threat is anti-capitalists. They aren't going to go away. They've seen the hysteria and how capitalists go weak at the knees.

    WTF is that about? I consider myself an anti-capitalist (living in a capitalist world, damnit) and so do some of my friends.. but why on earth would be want to break in and destroy computers or launch nukes on them? For gods sake we are geeks!

    --
    stuff
  18. Much of that redundancy went out the window... by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The article about nuclear bunker hosting got me thinking. We all know that back in the early days of the Net, when it was run by the US military/govt, it WAS designed to survive a nuclear attack, especially in terms of topology/redundancy.

    But since the commercialization of the Internet, has this objective been swept aside for the pursuit of mere growth? How vulrenable as single points of failure are places like MAE-East, MAE-West, etc where the major backbones peer together?


    Much of that redundancy went out the window due to two factors:

    The move from a generalized net (most sites talk to a random minimum of two others, the routers figure out the shortest route) to a backbone-plus-ISPs with lots of fixed routing and most sites as singly-connected leaves.

    If you lose (all) your connection(s) to your ISP, or your ISP loses any single-point-of-failure or all N of a set of n-points-of-failure between you and the backbone, you're cut off. Running an ethernet cable to a neighbor's LAN that's still connected via another ISP will not get you the packets that were trying to reach your IP address.

    Your ISP's connection with the rest of the backbone might have some nice self-healing characteristics. So the net-of-ISPs might still have that kind of survivability. But your packets are at the mercy of your ISP's survival and internals. (And if you're paying home rather than business rates I bet your ISP didn't spend many bux to make things redundant on their way to you.)

    With the explosion of hosts the full routing tables are now WAY too big to be held in every router on the net. So we can't go back to the old style even if we wanted to - or at least not without a LOT of engineering.

    --
    Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
  19. ...and solar flares. by xFoz · · Score: 3, Funny

    BOFH excuse generator proof? I gotta check into this!

  20. Re:About the Bunker by suraklin · · Score: 4, Funny

    How does a bunker protect you from crackers?

    Simple. If you are under ground you do not have to fear pasty white people trying to throw Ritz, Saltines, Townhouse or other flat crunchy breadlike foodstuffs at you.

  21. This is a job for Super Geek! by darkonc · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Uhm, isn't getting an 802.11b free-network up around ground zero the kind of thing that us slashdot types could do to help with the rescue effort? (note that 'freenet' is apparently trademarked).

    I note that the ricochet network is only guaranteed to the end of October. It shouldn't be that difficult to get a free network up and running to cover the site by then (even if it has to be powered by car batteries!).

    --
    Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
    1. Re:This is a job for Super Geek! by Myself · · Score: 2

      Yeah, but most geeks didn't think that such a network would be useful. See the last few days' message traffifc on the RicochetUsers group.

      For those who don't know, Ricochet modems can operate in three modes. The first is similar to 802.11b's "infrastructure" mode, where the modems all report to the Metricom network. The second mode is "hayes emulation", where one Ricochet modem can directly dial another, independent of Metricom's repeaters (as long as they're within range, which is quite long!). The third mode is "Starmode", similar to 802.11b's "ad-hoc" mode. The IP-over-Starmode drivers have been part of the Linux kernel since 1.x, the package is called STRIP and it's worth looking into.

      802.11b has pathetic range. Better antennae are directional, which isn't suitable in this situation. For this reason, I'm going to suggest keeping the Ricochet modems in service, just flipping them into Starmode so they can operate on a geek network, rather than Metricom's network.

  22. Yes--The Perforce EULA is Excellent by sudog · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's clear, unambiguous, and I'm happy to say very fair.

  23. An EULA that I thought was fair. by AdrianG · · Score: 5, Interesting
    In the mid 80's, I remeber using Turbo-C/Borland-C, and the licence agreement (called a "No Nonsense Licence Agreement") said something about using the software "like a book". You could make all the copies you wanted, loan it to friends, install it on as many different systems as you wanted, as long as you made sure that only one copy was in use at a time.

    Does any one else remember that?? I don't have a copy of it any more.

    Adrian

    1. Re:An EULA that I thought was fair. by dwlemon · · Score: 5, Interesting
      "This software is protected by copyright law and international copyright treaty. Therefore, you must treat this software just like a book, except that you may copy it onto a computer to be used and you may make archive copies of teh software for the sole purpose of backing up our software and protecting your investment from loss.

      By saying "just like a book," Borland means, for example, that this software may be used by any number of people, and may be freely moved from one computer or location to another, so long as there is no possibility of it being used by more than one person at a time. Just as a book can't be read by two different people in two different places at the same time, neither can the software be available for use by two different people in two different places at the same time without Borland's permission (unless, of course, Borland's copyright has been violated)."

      emphasis in original text, typos added by me

  24. Re:MacXGuy is lying by wrhix · · Score: 3, Informative

    Hang in there, it can work.

    I'm running XDarwin 1.0a3 successfully with Mac OS X.I. (Dual headed on a PowerBook G3 no less!) I had a little bit of problem, but it was easily fixed. OS X replaces the BSD subsystem, so I had to go back into the system tcsh login and add /usr/X11R6/bin back into the path.

    A friend with an iBook had to reinstall XDarwin 1.0a3 to get it to work again.

    Good Hunting!
    Raph

  25. 10.1 breaking things. by hemisphere · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm using XDarwin and that runs fine for me on a Ti under 10.1. However, installing 10.1 did break cvs, fink and a bunch of other things. I kept getting library errors. Installing the 10.1 developer kit (upgrading from 10.04 or whichever) fixed my problems.

  26. PC Gamer / Computer Gaming World by |<amikaze · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I dont recall which one it was, but a few years ago, I was glancing at the CD, and I noticed the following comment on the package: "By inserting this disc into your CD-Rom drive, you agree to the terms of the license agreement. To view this agreement, please see the file LICENSE.TXT on the CD-Rom"

    Heh, catch 22.

  27. XFree4.1 does work on OS X 10.1... by GreenDot09 · · Score: 4, Informative

    You just need to go download the 1.0a2 rootless test patch (from the xonx sourceforge sight: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xonx ). I have it installed and X works fine on my pismo running 10.1

  28. Really Great EULAs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    For a really great EULA read the one that comes with the windows game "Heroes of Might and Magic 3" (HOMM3)

    Its quoted as saying "you will reccomend this game to all your friends and say it is the best game ever made" and many more suspicious terms...

  29. the bloodthirsty license by stud9920 · · Score: 2, Funny
    of course, you also have the bloodthirsty license

    The following is an ACTUAL copy of the first two pages inside a manual
    for a product called EASYFLOW.


    This is where the bloodthirsty license agreement is supposed to go,
    explaining that EasyFlow is a copyrighted package, sternly warning you
    not to pirate copies of it and explaining, in detail, the gory
    consequences if you do.


    We know that you are an honest person, and are not going to go around
    pirating copies of EasyFlow; this is just as well with us since we
    worked hard to perfect it and selling copies of it is our only method
    of making anything out of all the hard work. For your convenience
    EasyFlow Is distributed on a non copy-protected diskette and you are
    free to do what you want with it (make backups, move from machine to
    machine, etc.) provided that it is never in use by more than one
    person at a time.


    If, on the other hand, you are one of those few people who do go
    around pirating copies of software, you probably aren't going to pay
    much attention to a license agreement, bloodthirsty or not. Just keep
    your doors locked and look out for the HavenTree attack shark.


    Honest Disclaimer


    We don't claim EasyFlow is good for anything - if you think it is,
    great, but it's up to you to decide. If EasyFlow doesn't work: tough.
    if you lose a million because EasyFlow messes up, it's you that's out
    the million, not us. If you don't like this disclaimer, tough. We
    reserve the right to do the absolute minimum provided by law, up to
    and including nothing.


    This is basically the same disclaimer that comes with all software
    package but ours is in plain English and theirs is in legalese.


    We didn't really want to include any disclaimer at all, but our
    lawyers insisted. We tried to ignore them but they threatened us with
    the attack shark (see license agreement above) at which point we
    relented.


    DON'T LOSE THE MANUAL


    That's right; don't lose this manual. Especially don't lose it before
    you have read this page. Why are we telling you this? Isn't it obvious
    that you shouldn't lose the manual?


    That's what we thought. Then we started getting all these calls from
    people saying "Hi! I'm Joe Blow and you've never heard of me, but I
    bought a copy of EasyFlow from FlyByNite Software and now I can't find
    the manual... will you send me a new one free?".


    At first we were nice guys and went along with this. Then we started
    getting a bit more hard nosed about it; after all it is trivial to
    copy the disk but the manual involves somewhat more work. Now we had
    to agonize over each request and try to distinguish between the
    genuine unfortunate ("the dog chewed it up") and the merely
    unscrupulous looking for free software.


    So what does everybody else do? We phoned the local Chevy dealer and
    told them we had misplaced the engine out of our new Camaro; that call
    didn't get us much useful information. Well ... cars aren't software.
    We called Borland and gave them a song and dance about losing our
    Turbo Pascal manual; they said to mail a letter to their "Lost Manual
    Review Committee". Wow! What a good idea. So we immediately rushed
    out and set up our Lost Manual Review Committee. The Committee meets
    once a month. They don't send out many replacement manuals, but they
    seem to do a lot of howling, rolling around on the floor and saying
    things like, "Oh wow - listen to this one".


    Don't lose the manual.


    Replacement manuals are available without going through the Committee
    for US$147.95 each.

  30. The Backbones do Private Peering with each other by billstewart · · Score: 2
    The big US backbone carriers don't peer at the NAPs - not enough bandwidth, not enough control over performance. They mostly do private peering with each other, and with any middle-tier folks big enough to do peering. International peering is a different story - the bandwidths have typically been smaller, and there are more complex arrangements between European networks and US networks (and the rest of the world gets even stranger.) The usual goal is to carry 90-95% of your other-tier-1 traffic by private peering, partly for performance and partly for economics. For instance, AT&T has a bit over 40Gbits/sec of private peering connections in the US, in addition to their NAP connections (though something like 5Gbits of that is the @Home network) - while the NAPs and MAEs are no longer 100Mbps shared fast ethernets, they're still not that big. On the other hand, most of the peering between big carriers is in the same cities as the NAPs, especially when there are carriers with POPs in the same telco buildings or carrier hotels, which is fairly common. So nuking a dozen big cities, or having Dr. Evil arrange simultaneous earthquakes in them or hire a large number of guys named "Bubba" with backhoes, will still cause major disruption, because there's still a lot of concentration there. (The Internet has liberated us from geography, making it possible for anybody to work from anywhere in the world, which is why everybody moved to the San Francisco Bay Area....)


    If you're more realistically paranoid than that, look at the number of root domain servers. There's been recent discussion about what they're doing for security and reliability, mainly worrying about crackers disrupting the databases. (Beyond, of course, the bigger problems are the relationships between ICANN, NSI, the UDRP, disgruntled postmasters, etc. :-)

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  31. Bunker's real importance: Growing Hosting Center! by billstewart · · Score: 2
    While The Bunker is a technically cool site, and provides lots of entertainment for its PR folks, one of the really cool things about this announcement is that it's an internet hosting/colo site that's actually doing well enough to need more real estate. I don't know how much is overall growth in the UK and European markets for hosting/colo, and how much is individual competence out-running the other players. But it's a major contrast to the US market, which is hopelessly overbuilt and glutted - companies who run them are either responding to the wonderful simultaneity of the dot-com crash and construction boom by going Chapter 11 or by building even more space to run their competitors farther into the ground :-) Many of them, of course, are doing what they can to create market differentiation, such as running consulting services, and there are major differences in the business plans of independent hosting centers, like Exodus, and the ISP-related hosting centers, like Genuity, AT&T, Level 3, etc. that are partly there to sell internet bandwidth.

    Also, there have been whole ecologies of businesses around them, like companies providing dedicated managed computers in colo spaces, and companies providing shared hosting on the managed computers, and companies paying shared-hosting companies to market more shared hosting (either through legitimate business or pyramid scams), and ASPs running applications on the dedicated managed computers used by the shared-hosting customers as well as providing services to non-web-based business out in the real world, and spam hunting businesses trying to protect you from the pyramid-spammers selling shared hosting, and content provider businesses using the dedicated hosting to serve content to shared-hosting customers or other dedicated hosting customers, and billing companies providing billing services for those Internet businesses that actually can bill somebody, and advertising services trying to get the various hosting users to carry their ads.


    Disclaimer: some of the folks who run The Bunker and also Havenco on Sealand are friends of mine, and my employer's also in that business, but I'm not speaking for any of them.


    "Oh Dad, Poor Dad" - Wow, Blast from the past! I was in that play in high school summer theater, a few decades ago, playing "Dad", the corpse :-)

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  32. Re:gosh, that's not what I said at all by gig · · Score: 2

    10.1 ROCKS! The great reviews are not hype. The multitasking and the performance make it seem like the operating system is doing everything effortlessly. It's a pleasure to use.

  33. re: the new McCarthy by Tumbleweed · · Score: 2

    That's _Field Marshall_ Ashcroft, to you!

  34. Hexley by fm6 · · Score: 2

    The Darwin mascot is a platypus named Hexley. Who I find disturbing. Where are his poisonous spurs? Why does he look so much like Donald Duck?