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Slashback: Intentia, Ephemera, Restoration
With a baby and some makeup you can add in some aliens.
Docrobot writes "NASA is obviously tired of the recent fanatical conspiracy claims dealing with 'faked' Apollo Moon Landings, the 'Face on Mars,' and most recently EuroSeti's claim that enhanced SOHO satellite images show UFOs.
NASA debunks EuroSeti's resent image enhanced SOHO satellite UFO photos covered by us here with this snappy and smug how-to article entitled: How to Make Your Own UFO.
It looks like Euroseti should to go back to the drawing board, or up their meds..."
At least use a security envelope next time. mpawlo writes "As reported by Greplaw, Reuters will not be prosecuted due to the alleged hack of Intentia's web server. Intentia did not clearly state that the information was secret, nor did Intentia try protecting it. Intentia stated that the report would be available at a certain time, and you only had to slightly change the URL from the report of the previous quarter in order to obtain the current report. Hence, the prosecutor will not initiate proceedings against Reuters or any of its reporters."
(Here is Slashdot's previous story on this affair.)
A happy turn in the PCI list saga. DieNadel writes "I've received an email today from PCI-SIG regarding the End of the Free PCI Device List, that says:
'Dear PCI Community,The PCI Vendor and Device Lists located at http://www.yourvote.com/pci/ have been restored. The PCI-SIG recognizes the value of Jim Boemler's Web site and our officers have worked with him to restore it.
We are committed to working with Jim and the rest of the community to ensure this service is not interrupted in the future.
Thank you for your continued support of our technologies. We will keep you informed with any other updates.
Best Regards,
Tony Pierce
PCI-SIG Chairman.'
I think it's a nice move from PCI-SIG!"
Making money with Free software, explained. Yesterday, we posted a link to an article explaining Red Hat's new EOL schedule for various versions of its operating system. Red Hat's decision drew a lot of flak in the comments attached to that story; not that it won't again, but over on NewsForge, Red Hat's Jeremy Hogan has a reaction-to-the-reaction (not just on Slashdot) which the new EOL schedule drew.
Super Bowl was pretty fun. I didn't see no stinkin' X-Men 2 commercial, but dammit it I'm so stoked for The Matrix.
Lots of stuff going on in the code lately, and I'm getting more than the usual amount of flame bitching about it. Since I'm back from New York (pretty busy week all things considered, but I had a better time than I was expecting) I actually have some time to address a few things. This weekend has been loaded with heaping flames (relating to someone who spoofed my email on their web page) and a number of people bitching about me not staying on top of alerting people to changes on Slashdot.
First up, its worth noting that the last couple weeks have been somewhat hellish. Over Christmas we had some robot attacks, and some pretty serious hardware and software issues. Because of these things, and of course the shortened holiday schedules, we weren't able to do our usual wed. night code refresh. For those of you who don't pay attention, jamie usually syncs Slashdot to the latest tagged release on CVS every wed. Normally our code syncs are a few hundred lines of random stuff, but since this one was nearly a month worth of code and bug fixes held back because of the serious performance issues, this one was a doozy.
So there have been lots of fun little buglets to contend with. Some of them have been fixed, but here are a few: I'm pretty sure the comments on users.pl have the proper score now, and I'm pretty sure there are no more Score:6 comments. The reason for this is that we finally broke the Karma Bonus out into a user preference. For nearly 4 years now, the karma bonus was essentially hard coded to the users comment. But now it's actually a user preference. So if you're sick of karma whoring Score:2 default posters, you can disable the karma bonus. Honestly it would make more sense to set them as a Foe and and set the Foe penalty to -1, because a good number of Karma Bonus posters are fine, but if you wanna throw the baby out with the bathwater, thats cool with us.
Also worth noting is that a comment that gets 2 down mods loses the Karma bonus. The reason for this is that a comment with the bonus by default can't go lower than 0. Even if 3 people try to mod it down, the 3rd will have no real affect because of the bonus. This means that moderators use points on a Score:0 comment thinking that it can go to Score:-1, but the +1 default karma bonus prevents it. It creates a whole nasty cycle. The solution was simply to disable the Karma Bonus for any comment modded down twice. It's important that Karma Bonus users use their bonus wisely. Someday perhaps I'd like to enforce a stronger penalty for using the bonus to post a comment that ultimately drops to -1. Not a steep one, but that should definately be a consideration if the user is to continue to have access to the Bonus.
You've probably noticed a fair number of changes to users.pl. The layout of the user info pages is in serious flux. And by flux, I mean, Fucked Up. There are a few browser incompatibilities, and general layout screwups that really are making the users stuff hard to user. That will be cleaned up over the next couple of code refreshes.
We changed the moderation display on comments page. Originally we displayed them as a hard number (eg, Insightful=5, Offtopic=3....). And I had several issues with this. Mainly it was just hard to read on those comments that had many different moderation categories active, what with the word wrapping and all. So I changed it to be a percentage, and to only display the top 3. I find this display a much more simple and elegant view. Much more useful since for comments with few mods, its irrelevant, and with many mods, I really only want to know what the dominant couple of mods are. Especially since those are the ones that ultimately become the comment label and affect the score's comments.
The second half of this change is to add a second batch of labels that will show a user what other point modifiers are active on any given comment. The goal is eventually to make it clear what comments are triggering the long comment bonus, or the Karma Bonus, or, say the Friend of Friend bonus, and all according to your user preferences.
As you imagine, this data will greatly clarify the scores of comments for users, but it will also require some sacrifices in screen real estate to keep the whole thing understandable. So hang in there while we sort it out. This stuff is all a serious work in progress.
These changes have been some what controversial, and it will only get more controversial I promise. We've had a long standing feature request to revamp the scoring system. The existing system essentially is +1 for good, -1 for bad, and a handful of modifiers decided upon by the poster, and the reader. This is of course not a really scalable solution.
Dammit. The batteries in my wireless keyboard just died. It's 5 degrees out. I don't want to get new ones
Where was I. Scalable solutions. Historically, you could look at a Score:3 comment and kind fudge together that 1-3 moderators liked it (depending on whatever obvious factors existed like AC/Logged in you saw). This creates a lot of limits on the system, most substantially is that it enforces some sort of maximum number of moderators the system can have. Once 5 or so moderators have had their say on a given comment, what more needs to be done?
What do I mean? Well, the point of moderation is to filter cruft, and to let users control how many comments they read, and have some sort of quality level associated with that number. In other words, that there will be a pyramid of comments, and if you only wanna read 10 comments, you can be reasonably assured that the 10 or so score:5 comments are the best. The problem is that if we put in double the moderators, we start getting more and more Score:5 comments. We learned that a few months ago when we doubled the number of mod points in the system. THere was a substantial increase in Score:5, but I don't think that necessarily meant that we had a better discussion- comments posted later in the discussion are still kinda ignored by moderators.
One group of people just says "Add Score:6!" but I don't really want to do that. Instead I want to redesign how scoring works. There are hundreds of ways that this could be done, and I'm certainly open to suggestions (my inbox is always available, and I'm on irc.slashnet.org much of the time). This is still very much in the conceptual stages, but I'd like to factor in many components into computing the score of the comment.
A few examples (these are all just vague ideas, nothing concrete, no flames!)
Time since discussion creation: A comment posted 24 hours after a discussion was created, and moderated 36 hours after creation has something unique to it. Since most comments are posted & moderated in the first 12 hours, the fact that this comment bubbled up so late means perhaps it has a bit more value than a comment posted in the initial burst of discussion. Perhaps a scoring boost will help that. Part of this would be to encourage discussion to continue. And part of this would be to improve the value of moderation to those comments that number 1000+ in a discussion. Those big discussions really take a hit at some point.
User factors: we have countless factors that we could use. UID? Activity levels? Historical Moderation Fairness? Mod points used? If UID 2,000 is a constant reader, historically moderates 98% fairly, and never lets his 5 mod points expire, perhaps this could be rewarded.
Moderation Types: I think that the 5th 'Insightful' mod shouldn't mean as much as the first 'Insightful' mod. Some sort of diminished return. Also, I'd like to account for the number of mods in each category. I think that 6 insightfuls, 3 trolls, and 3 offtopics should have a net result of maybe +1, even tho the sum of the values of these moderations are 0, I think that the dominant moderation should have a stronger affect on the final score of the comment.
Capping Moderation: At some point a comment needs to be done being moderated just to encourage moderation points to be spent elsewhere. As I mentioned above, it only takes 5 moderators to get an AC comment from 0 to 5. So what is the point to the 20th moderator throwing his 2 bits in? I'd much rather encourage a moderator to look at some other comment more deserving of attention? So I don't know if my best bet is to explicitly disallow moderation of comments after a certain number of moderations have been used, or to have each moderation value successively less. Either essentially has the same result.
;)
We've also been slowly slapping in a few additional plums for Subscribers. One of them is to allow them to scroll back through comments. Currently we only let people see their last 24 comments (this is to prevent robots from crawling us, and to keep the db load down). We're letting subscribers have the next/prev links so they can browse more easily into history. Viewing those pages of course counts towards your subscription page count.
We've also set it so that subscribers can have double the friends in the Zoo system. This so far hasn't affected a lot of users, but there have been just enough people hitting the limits that we'd like to let them continue to befriend more people.
Future subscriber plums will be listed in the subscriber section of the FAQ. There are a couple of good ones coming that we're testing now. I think you'll like them. ANd as always, you can send ideas to me. IRC. Email. SourceForge. I'm usually fairly on top of all three.
That about wraps it up for me today. SimCity 4 is out, and I'm really hoping to have a few hours today to try to get a city with actual skyscrapers. So far I've not been lucky in this. And I still have friday's Farscape on the Tivo to enjoy. Also, that should give the complainers enough information to write derogatory discussions of the Slashdot Conspiracy in their journals explaining how the Slashdot Janitors are fascist demon children bent on destroying the world somehow or other
You just have to install apt4rpm on the Red Hat machine.
Why would you need to upgrade the "entire system"? If you need to upgrade some specific packages, use urpmi or something to handle the dependencies automatically. Of course doing this on `rpm -qa` will update all packages...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Based on that 5th paragraph, I can tell you're just being sarcastic. But I'm bored and feeling like explaining things, so:
1) Red Hat linux is only one distribution. Mandrake is, yes, based on Red Hat, but they aren't the same company. Red Hat does not *own* linux, nor did they even create it. Search for "Linus Torvalds" on google. Red Hat was merely one of the first companies to package it and sell it for money. I consider them the AOL of linux: They make it easier for idiots to use this operating system, what with their packagae manager.
Debian and Slackware have absolutely nothing to do with Red Hat, except providing a copy of the rpm software (mainly because it's so easy most people use it. I refuse to, I like to compile my own). Each distro has its own list of software packages that they include, and THAT'S what separates them. Each incremented version (Red Hat 7.0 vs Red Hat 8.0, or Slackware 8.0) only means there are more recent versions of the programs included, maybe some programs added or removed. I believe they all use the kernels available at kernel.org, but I could be wrong.
I personally don't think Red Hat themselves are going to get anywhere *near* as large as microsoft, but I'm sure they're trying.
2) The GPL (open-source license) is the reason linux is as big as it is today: It allows people the ability to acquire this and LEARN it, without having to shell out too much money-- Even better, it allows them to take the software and modify it, making it better or adapting it to their purpose. This is what the linux community is all about. Microsoft taking the code and changing it, and then *charging* for it (which you know they ain't gonna give nothing for free) would go against that license, and they could be sued.
What's to keep hackers from creating virii to specifically target this OS? Nothing. Except that then *they* become susceptible to this virus as well. Personal opinion, most hackers use some flavor of *nix.
3) Kill the command line? The *reason* *nix is as powerful as it is? When was the last time you were able to modify *every* one of your 1,421 mp3 files with a single command? Windows has NOT eliminated the command line. Every single version of windows (excepting maybe CE, perhaps) comes with what they call "Command Prompt" or "MS-DOS Shell". What do you think this program is? it's like the joke "Windows 98 is a 32-bit patch to a 16-bit overlay on an 8-bit operating system created by a 2-bit company." (Isn't there a "4-bit" in there?)
4) I totally agree on the games. I'd like to see linux surpass Mac on game availability. I *would* purchase games for linux that were not released under the GPL. Close-source that crap, I don't care, just don't make me boot into windows to play games! Especially you, Blizzard!
While the Red Hat distribution update works relatively reliable, I would not be willing to try that on production system. I takes time and skill to fine tune the sever. What happens if you finish your update to the new major version only to find that your configuration files are incompatible? Your 2 hours announced outage suddenly becomes much longer.
Update feature is nice for home system but for 24/7 shop you must came up with much more robust solution.
Okay I'm an idiot. Shoot me. The gist of the letter (found it) Does state that Jim's use of the name and logo may mislead people to believe he was associated with or endorsed by the PCI-SIG group. It does not, however, say that the website must be taken down, only that it must be modified and they, PCI-SIG, assured that there will be no confusion of his affiliation with PCI-SIG (or lack thereof, in this case).
/. audience's response, was: "Geezus criminy, you people are all overreacting."
If I'd been him, I would have just removed the logos and pasted a big "This website is not affiliated with PCI-SIG in any way, shape, or form." disclaimer. I still think his use of the logos was their main complaint, however. And before you go thinking that PCI-SIG is a big evil company bent on mass domination because they didn't want any possible confusion, the first communication directly says "request that you work through IBM to investigate the possibility of creaing a similar database of PCI(r) Vendor ID numbers..."
My immediate thought when I saw the first slashdot post, saw that Mr. Boemler had taken down the site, and read the general
This link will let you apply to most nasa jobs, including the aerospace engineering jobs. The company I work for built most of this site.
This link will let you apply to become an astronaut.
Instead, swap IP addresses.
If they're on the same network segment, that's all you need to do.
Female Prison Rape in NY
I am a "trained pilot" and that training may indeed help me recognize things in the air better than a baker would. But it doesn't take an Einstein to pilot an aircraft, and pilots do not have special deductive or analytical powers. Pilots can be gullible and jump to conclusions just like people in any other profession.
What I do know is that it is not possible for a pilot to determine the trajectory of another object in the air for certain. A gust of wind can pitch or yaw the plane that I am in, making it appear that objects outside my craft have made sudden jumps across the sky. Human inner-ear is not capable of adapting to some sorts of disorientation. Pilots are trained to not trust inner-ear orientation, and use other cues instead. A radar is not immune to this problem either; in fact radar's have more problems than you can shake a stick at, even ground based ones.
Ideally pilots would attribute apparent strange motion of flying objects to his own craft's instability. However, older pilots were not trained to distrust the inner ear; and many pilots are just plain stubborn and still try to fly 'by the seat of their pants'. This is to detriment of their own safety and credibility as well.
Bottom line is that pilots chasing strange things in the air is not cause for belief in aliens, but rather cause for reflection on human error.
Debian's "stable" branch is good for servers. It is, in fact, stable. The Debian guys back-port bug fixes from new packages to the stable packages, and security patches get out there quickly. You can upgrade with just a command line (ssh) and you don't need to reboot a system to upgrade it.
Historically, it has taken two years or more for Debian to release, so there are at least two years where any particular version is the official stable version. I think Debian doesn't keep officially supporting old releases very long after a new "stable" release happens... but again, Debian systems are very easy to upgrade.
If you want to try Debian, I say go for it. Of course you should start out small and make sure it works for you, with just one or two servers. I suggest you start out with that 486. See how it likes Debian.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
As a UNIX Systems Engineer, here's my perspective...
I understand that "if it ain't broke, don't touch it" is a good rule for IT.
Of course this is very true.
If it ain't broke, you don't need support, right?
Unfortunately, new exploits for software (such as sql, ssh, web, ftp and dns servers) come out all the time, and these programs need to be patched. The situation is even worse if you have users logging in and/or executing programs on the server.
While possible, installing programs without using 'official' packages throws away the benefits of using a RPM system in the first place, particularly it's ability to verify the integrity and compatibility of installed programs (which it's main point of superiority over Debian's package management system).
Fortunately having done this for various versions of Red Hat on many systems, I can say it's a complete breeze to upgrade Red Hat systems (and as such it's hard to criticise Red Hat for EOL'ing these old distributions). You only need to pop in a CD of the latest version of Red Hat and select 'Upgrade'. It does an excellent job of not screwing up your system configuration or other data, while still upgrading all your applications.
It's quite possible to let someone who's never run Linux in their life and doesn't know a single UNIX command to upgrade a Red Hat system, as it only requires clicking through the graphical installation wizard, selecting 'Upgrade' where appropriate. The only downside is having to hook up an interface (i.e. keyboard/monitor) to the server, and that it requires downtime.
Finally, I run Debian, and it's easy for me to upgrade a system with just an ssh connection. Can Red Hat admins remotely upgrade packages over ssh, without having to install APT for Red Hat?
You can upgrade packages over ssh, Red Hat systems are even capable of being updated with a single click over the web or 'pushed' signed updates by Red Hat's central server, if you register with the Red Hat Network (IIRC you may register 1 system with them for free, or pay ~$65 a year for each system, it's a genuinely excellent server management system and well worth it IMO). However this does not help when said system is running a version of the distribution that has been EOL'd, as there will be no official packages to patch the bugs which are subsequently found.
Additionally, the features of RPM which make it better in ensuring a high level of compatibility and allow it, unlike Debian, to offer package integrity checking also make it awkward to use in many cases (and not nearly as pleasant as Debian!), which of course would be cured by APT-GET for RPM, which brings us on to...
(And if not, how do real sysadmins feel about APT for Red Hat?)
I love APT. I use Debian on all my home systems, and I even use apt on my OS X based PowerBook. (Though I admit I have reservations about using APT on production servers).
Sadly, however, all implementations of APT for RPM that I have tried have been dreadful and hideously bug ridden, and I have only heard of the same poor experiences from friends and colleagues. I think a workable version of APT for RPM would require active effort by Red Hat, but I do not see that happening any time soon as they have other priorities (and the corporate market they are targeting does not bemoan the lack of APT, the existing RPM system adequately meets their needs).