If I recall correctly, one of 'em got sued and forced to remove someone from the blacklist. That was a private list, maintained by private individuals, utilized on privatly-owned systems, and they still got sued (and lost). (Someone help me out on the details here, please.)
I'm not sure that you do recall correctly. Yes, several blacklists have been sued, but none of those suits have succeeded as far as I know.
Furthermore, the suits have all been against maintainers (and publishers) of blacklists, not the ISPs that used them. The owner of a private network has just as much right to block traffic they deem undesirable (unsafe, whatever) as I have to eject a burglar, or other trespasser, from my home.
I have to agree to the license terms and pay a fee to get the source.
I also have to provide MS with a Dunn & Bradstreet ID number to prove that I'm really a company.
I have to authenticate all my requests via Passport, thus I am required to provide Microsoft all kinds of personal information AND give them permission to use it in any way they see fit.
Finally... I have to agree to an NDA that I can't read until I receive it, and which PROBABLY, having read Microsoft's various legal docs before, prohibits disclosure not only of the code, but also the terms of the license agreement, before I even get to decide whether I agree to the terms of the license or not.
Thanks Microsoft. You've just done the non-settling states job for them. You have conclusively proven the need for more stringent antitrust penalties against yourself.
I WILL be filing my comments with the DOJ later this morning.
Actually, Ad-Aware does a pretty good job of rooting out all the trash Gator, Bonzi Buddy and Comet Cursor leave behind when you uninstall them. In the "deep scan" mode it even manages to root out all the crap they leave in the registry. I recently installed it on my roomie's Windoze box and the first time I ran it it removed some 200 registry keys and (IIRC) 116 dlls that various crapware she had loaded on her machine over the years had left behind. Her box went from damn near unusable to fairly stable (for a Windows Box) in about an hour.
Pardon me for rearranging your staements, but I've grouped them by relevance to my responses...
Security issues: Yup. Fixed alot, but they still exist. They're still less than most others though.
Open source = bugs: Yup. Sorry, prerelease QA isn't exactly OSS's strong point. OSS guarantees the bugs will be found, and closed more quickly though.
No ch!t. I spotted the news of the OpenSSL overflows on slashdot literally minutes after they were posted... downloaded 0.9.6f, had it built and installed before the VU# was even released by CERT... just got 'officially' notified of the overflow by our Security and Disaster Recovery Team today... way I see it, my total time of exposure to this hole was zero hours...
Support: Most developers are not available to call in case of breakage. The hardware vendors don't support it, people are SOL. IBM fixed that for big iron, others try to support it for smaller machines, but it's not there yet.
'scuse me, but the fix was available before CERT and BugTraq knew a problem existed... I had it built and installed on several mission-critical servers and a couple dozen workstations before it got mainstream notice... do that on a Windoze box!
It's nice to be able to pop a floppy in and reboot when you do something like misconfigure a kernel or (OOPS!) forget to edit/etc/lilo.conf after installing a correctly configured kernel.
I definitely think the Ars cookbook would make an ADMIRABLE beginning point for this project. Not only are SOME of the recipes damned funny to read (see, e.g., "Popcorn Chicken" and "Pesto Chicken" (the recipe has a certain minimalist "je ne c'est quoi" to it that is CHAaah-ming")).
The greatest thing in the world, is a nice MLT- mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, when the mutton is nice and lean, and the tomato is ripe. They're so perky. I love that.
I LOVE lamb... but RAM (in this context) is... diGUSTing...
I guess no one ever told the Slashdot editors not to play with their food...:)
Actually, food is the ULTIMATE toy.
The interplay of aromas, flavors, colors, textures, etc., when combined with a playful presentation, can only result in one thing: the creation of pleasure...
the fact that it fulfills a necessity of living is pure (pardon the bad choice of words) gravy.:)
Why does it seem like this is the first "Ask Slashdot" in quite some time that actually falls under the rubric of "News for Nerds, Things that Matter"???
Re:There's a special boot loader, er disk overlay
on
Finding BIOS Upgrades?
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· Score: 2
This sounds like something like Western Digital's "EZ-Bios"... which even WD's Tech Support recommends that people NOT use unless there is NO other choice.
Since it is possible to finesse the BIOS limitation with a small/dev/hda1 of say, 10 MB, EZ-Bios and its equivalents sound like A Very Bad Idea(TM).
Wouldn't it also work to simply put a/boot partition in the first several cylinders of the disk? I think, then, that no floppies would be needed.
You are correct sir...
It is my understanding that a separate/boot partition will force the kernel down into the part of the disk that the ROM-BIOS can handle. The first 10 MB should give room for multiple kernels, etc.
Once the kernel is loaded, the IDE drivers will handle the disk at the hardware level and BIOS limitations become moot.
I've never had to fight with the 500 MB limit, but the kernel handily defeated the 2 GB limit of my old P166-MMX mobo...
A cdrom is approximately ( PI*5^2 - PI*0.75^2 )= 76.75 sq. inches of data surface If a cdrom has about 5.6 billion bits on that surface then the density is roughly 76 million bits per square inch.
Actually, it's ( PI*5^2/4 - PI*0.75^2 )= 17.86 in^2 of data area ( PI * R^2 or PI * D^2 / 4 ). A CD holds, nominally, 650MB * 8 = 5.2 Gbits. This yields a density of 291,153,415.45 bit/in^2 or, assuming uniformly distributed bits, 17063.22 bits/inch. The rule of thumb for scanners is that they need a resolution twice the size of the smallest feature to be resolved, therefore, a scnnare with a minimum resoltion of about 35000 DPI would be required. Assuming you used a ONE bit per pixel scan, you would need to transfer 21878500000 bits. At 400 Mbits/sec, that 54.7 seconds. This is assuming that you ignore the increased density of bits due to the inter-track blank space...
Well, I suppose that you COULD spin a hard drive platter at high enough speed that it would fail catastrophically, but it's MUCH more likely with the 3.5 and 2.5 inch drives than the old 5.25 inch drives.
The platters in 5.25 inch drives were aluminum, which is relatively soft and fairly ductile. I suspect that before the centrifugal force got high enough to cause the platter to fly apart, the spindle hole would stretch enough that the motor would no longer drive the platter...
The high strength materials used in the smaller drives would, IMHO, be MUCH more likey to hold together long enough to "explode."
Piracy implies action taken on the high seas, by force of arms, to deprive the rightful master of a vessel of his cargo and/or ship.
What is happening here is an infringement of a private "property" right. If you want to get HIGHLY technical about it, it's not even theft, which requires the "asportation of the totality of the res from it's proper and lawful location."
That being said, I agree with you up to a point. Anyone who serves copyrighted material on the public network should EXPECT this sort of thing to happen.
While I have NO love lost for the ??AA, I have little sympathy for P2P users who get in trouble over this. After all, I was one of the first banned from Napster over a SINGLE Metallica mp3. If they didn't KNOW what they were doing was wrong before they started, they should be intelligent enough to learn damned quickly when they are faced with a notice that they've been caught. I haven't done P2P since.
Let's leave the emotional "... Illegal search... ", "... PIRACY... " and "... THEFT... " out of it. If the content companies, operating through their hired thugs, want to enforce their rights privately, technology is available to do so, and the activities involved are all lawful.
The ??AA are living large in the grand old American tradition of chasing the almighty dollar. An authority higher than me will decide whether it was RIGHT for them to do so. As for me... I will continue NOT going to movie theaters and NOT buying CDs unless it is something I REALLY want to see or hear.
Just because I think they finally got THIS aspect of their activities right doesn't mean I have to pay for them doing it.
You think it's easy to hook up a CDRW or a scanner to a Sun?
Well, I haven't tried a scanner, but I have been installing Plextor CDRWs in the Ultra10s at work and they wok just fine under Solaris 8. No configuration necessary. They even automount under vold and ask if I want to format the blank floppy in/dev/cdrom0 when I insert blank media (needless to say, I click "No").
You are correct sir, but as the old saw says... "Some just suck less than others".
<rant> I just recently abandoned KDE2 and went back to Windowmaker running on top of GNOME for my desktop. The reason? GNOME apps tend to more closely adhere to the Windows menu organization and keyboard shortcuts (which is merely a refinement of the Macintosh menu organization and shortcuts).
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft spent a TRUCKLOAD of money on usability testing of the Win95/NT/98/ME/2K/XP user interface. The testing went so far as to present a list of commands to the test users along with a request that tell Microsoft which menu each command should appear on. Edit->Preferences may not make a hell of a lot of sense to a coder (who would probably prefer something like KMail's Settings->Configure KMail), which is fine if you only want coders to use your app).
I find it funny that all these Linux advocates wanting to see Linux to "take over the desktop" but who believe they need to remake something that works just fine right now. Apple innovated, Microsoft imitated, and Linux MUST play along if market penetration is to occur. Consistency from app-to-app might take some of the FUN out of programming (I assume we can agree that design work is more fun than grinding our code), but I'll GUARANTEE you that it enhances your app's adoptability.
This is something that ANYONE who has ever worked on a helldesk KNOWS.
If you disagree, remind yourself by looking at the UI organization in Mozilla and/or OpenOffice. It almost EXACTLY mirrors the organization of Windows and Mac apps. </rant>
One question... do you want something you can count on? Or... would you rather play with the latest and greatest toys.
It's been my experience that Linux apps (not to mention the kernel itself) tend to be stabler in bets than Windoze apps at approximately release level 4.0.
Going to beta-land is a decision you can only make for yourself, but... I have been running Debian woody (the current "testing" distro) for WELL over a year. I haven't had significant stability problems with it yet.
IMHO the ultimate geekwear is the line of "O'Really" t-shirts from copyleft.net...
My personal favorite is "Assembling Etherkillers" but you should pick your own fav...
I can't remember the URL for the site, but I saw a T once that topped these... best "got root" shirt I ever saw... French Blue... red outline pentagon on the chest... yellow background inside the pentagon... no "S"... nope... said "SU"... 'nuff said...
That's interesting... according to an IDG whitepaper I recently read, Linux growth as a server OS during 2001 was approximately 25%... the growth rate for Linux as a desktop OS was 107%...
Even if 75% of new Linux desktop installations were due to the availability of free downloads from the 'net, that STILL makes for a lot of "boxed sets" and "official" CDs...
hmmm, that's interesting. You mean files that could only be opened with MS Office?
Even more interesting will be the litigation that would ensue if a large corp. decided to migrate from, say, MSOffice to OpenOffice.org and MS refused to assist them in decrypting their documents...
BigCorp CEO: "Mr. Gates, what do you MEAN that your right to keep my business overrides MY right to have access my own company's files?"
Re:Luke, use the source...
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 2
The main concern is that if I install OpenSSH from source on all 50 of my servers when it comes time to patch it I've got myself a little inconvencience.
A little work with NFS mounts will quickly give you a single-point upgrade system. I admin a mix of SGIs (5), Suns (20), Alphas (36), PCs running Solaris (12) and PCs running Linux (5 workstations and 2 Beowulfs). In our operation, we build everything that didn't come on the CDs from source, yet I only have to compile and install 5 times to update all archs and all OS's because we export the appropriate directory (/usr/local <Yeah, I know it's deprecated, but my boss has been running Unix boxen for 30 years and old habits die hard, deprecated or not.>) to all hosts.
We don't install from source unless we absolutely have to. Actually, we try not to install any software that doesn't come with Mandrake but obviously this isn't always possible. In those cases we follow the convention where everything goes in/opt/pkg_name so we can easily get rid of them if we have to.
"Getting rid" of apps installed from source is not so difficult if the developer was considerate enough to include a "make uninstall" target in his Makefile (and several do this)... if not... add one yourself... send the developer a patch... contribute to the community. Or, alternatively, redirect the output of "make install" to a textfile so you have a list of files and installation directories. A simple edit will turn your textfile into an uninstall script.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, the suits have all been against maintainers (and publishers) of blacklists, not the ISPs that used them. The owner of a private network has just as much right to block traffic they deem undesirable (unsafe, whatever) as I have to eject a burglar, or other trespasser, from my home.
Spam in my mailbox
abuse acted on complaints
Joyous internet
Let me see if I understand this correctly ...
... I have to agree to an NDA that I can't read until I receive it, and which PROBABLY, having read Microsoft's various legal docs before, prohibits disclosure not only of the code, but also the terms of the license agreement, before I even get to decide whether I agree to the terms of the license or not.
I have to agree to the license terms and pay a fee to get the source.
I also have to provide MS with a Dunn & Bradstreet ID number to prove that I'm really a company.
I have to authenticate all my requests via Passport, thus I am required to provide Microsoft all kinds of personal information AND give them permission to use it in any way they see fit.
Finally
Thanks Microsoft. You've just done the non-settling states job for them. You have conclusively proven the need for more stringent antitrust penalties against yourself.
I WILL be filing my comments with the DOJ later this morning.
Actually, Ad-Aware does a pretty good job of rooting out all the trash Gator, Bonzi Buddy and Comet Cursor leave behind when you uninstall them. In the "deep scan" mode it even manages to root out all the crap they leave in the registry. I recently installed it on my roomie's Windoze box and the first time I ran it it removed some 200 registry keys and (IIRC) 116 dlls that various crapware she had loaded on her machine over the years had left behind. Her box went from damn near unusable to fairly stable (for a Windows Box) in about an hour.
Pardon me for rearranging your staements, but I've grouped them by relevance to my responses ...
... downloaded 0.9.6f, had it built and installed before the VU# was even released by CERT ... just got 'officially' notified of the overflow by our Security and Disaster Recovery Team today ... way I see it, my total time of exposure to this hole was zero hours ...
... I had it built and installed on several mission-critical servers and a couple dozen workstations before it got mainstream notice ... do that on a Windoze box!
Security issues: Yup. Fixed alot, but they still exist. They're still less than most others though.
Open source = bugs: Yup. Sorry, prerelease QA isn't exactly OSS's strong point. OSS guarantees the bugs will be found, and closed more quickly though.
No ch!t. I spotted the news of the OpenSSL overflows on slashdot literally minutes after they were posted
Support: Most developers are not available to call in case of breakage. The hardware vendors don't support it, people are SOL. IBM fixed that for big iron, others try to support it for smaller machines, but it's not there yet.
'scuse me, but the fix was available before CERT and BugTraq knew a problem existed
It's nice to be able to pop a floppy in and reboot when you do something like misconfigure a kernel or (OOPS!) forget to edit /etc/lilo.conf after installing a correctly configured kernel.
I definitely think the Ars cookbook would make an ADMIRABLE beginning point for this project. Not only are SOME of the recipes damned funny to read (see, e.g., "Popcorn Chicken" and "Pesto Chicken" (the recipe has a certain minimalist "je ne c'est quoi" to it that is CHAaah-ming")).
The greatest thing in the world, is a nice MLT- mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, when the mutton is nice and lean, and the tomato is ripe. They're so perky. I love that.
... but RAM (in this context) is ... diGUSTing ...
I LOVE lamb
I guess no one ever told the Slashdot editors not to play with their food... :)
...
:)
Actually, food is the ULTIMATE toy.
The interplay of aromas, flavors, colors, textures, etc., when combined with a playful presentation, can only result in one thing: the creation of pleasure
the fact that it fulfills a necessity of living is pure (pardon the bad choice of words) gravy.
The small signup may somehow be related to the number of machine gun nests on the highway into Seattle from Redmond ...
Why does it seem like this is the first "Ask Slashdot" in quite some time that actually falls under the rubric of "News for Nerds, Things that Matter"???
This sounds like something like Western Digital's "EZ-Bios" ... which even WD's Tech Support recommends that people NOT use unless there is NO other choice.
/dev/hda1 of say, 10 MB, EZ-Bios and its equivalents sound like A Very Bad Idea(TM).
Since it is possible to finesse the BIOS limitation with a small
Wouldn't it also work to simply put a /boot partition in the first several cylinders of the disk? I think, then, that no floppies would be needed.
...
/boot partition will force the kernel down into the part of the disk that the ROM-BIOS can handle. The first 10 MB should give room for multiple kernels, etc.
...
You are correct sir
It is my understanding that a separate
Once the kernel is loaded, the IDE drivers will handle the disk at the hardware level and BIOS limitations become moot.
I've never had to fight with the 500 MB limit, but the kernel handily defeated the 2 GB limit of my old P166-MMX mobo
A cdrom is approximately ( PI*5^2 - PI*0.75^2 )= 76.75 sq. inches of data surface If a cdrom has about 5.6 billion bits on that surface then the density is roughly 76 million bits per square inch.
...
Actually, it's ( PI*5^2/4 - PI*0.75^2 )= 17.86 in^2 of data area ( PI * R^2 or PI * D^2 / 4 ). A CD holds, nominally, 650MB * 8 = 5.2 Gbits. This yields a density of 291,153,415.45 bit/in^2 or, assuming uniformly distributed bits, 17063.22 bits/inch. The rule of thumb for scanners is that they need a resolution twice the size of the smallest feature to be resolved, therefore, a scnnare with a minimum resoltion of about 35000 DPI would be required. Assuming you used a ONE bit per pixel scan, you would need to transfer 21878500000 bits. At 400 Mbits/sec, that 54.7 seconds. This is assuming that you ignore the increased density of bits due to the inter-track blank space
Well, I suppose that you COULD spin a hard drive platter at high enough speed that it would fail catastrophically, but it's MUCH more likely with the 3.5 and 2.5 inch drives than the old 5.25 inch drives.
...
The platters in 5.25 inch drives were aluminum, which is relatively soft and fairly ductile. I suspect that before the centrifugal force got high enough to cause the platter to fly apart, the spindle hole would stretch enough that the motor would no longer drive the platter
The high strength materials used in the smaller drives would, IMHO, be MUCH more likey to hold together long enough to "explode."
Just my US$0.02
YOU ARE PIRATING ILLEGAL COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
... no ...
... Illegal search ... ", " ... PIRACY ... " and " ... THEFT ... " out of it. If the content companies, operating through their hired thugs, want to enforce their rights privately, technology is available to do so, and the activities involved are all lawful.
... I will continue NOT going to movie theaters and NOT buying CDs unless it is something I REALLY want to see or hear.
errrrmmm
Piracy implies action taken on the high seas, by force of arms, to deprive the rightful master of a vessel of his cargo and/or ship.
What is happening here is an infringement of a private "property" right. If you want to get HIGHLY technical about it, it's not even theft, which requires the "asportation of the totality of the res from it's proper and lawful location."
That being said, I agree with you up to a point. Anyone who serves copyrighted material on the public network should EXPECT this sort of thing to happen.
While I have NO love lost for the ??AA, I have little sympathy for P2P users who get in trouble over this. After all, I was one of the first banned from Napster over a SINGLE Metallica mp3. If they didn't KNOW what they were doing was wrong before they started, they should be intelligent enough to learn damned quickly when they are faced with a notice that they've been caught. I haven't done P2P since.
Let's leave the emotional "
The ??AA are living large in the grand old American tradition of chasing the almighty dollar. An authority higher than me will decide whether it was RIGHT for them to do so. As for me
Just because I think they finally got THIS aspect of their activities right doesn't mean I have to pay for them doing it.
To be completely honest, I haven't ever clicked the "Yes" button.
You think it's easy to hook up a CDRW or a scanner to a Sun?
/dev/cdrom0 when I insert blank media (needless to say, I click "No").
Well, I haven't tried a scanner, but I have been installing Plextor CDRWs in the Ultra10s at work and they wok just fine under Solaris 8. No configuration necessary. They even automount under vold and ask if I want to format the blank floppy in
In other words... All interfaces suck?
... "Some just suck less than others".
You are correct sir, but as the old saw says
<rant>
I just recently abandoned KDE2 and went back to Windowmaker running on top of GNOME for my desktop. The reason? GNOME apps tend to more closely adhere to the Windows menu organization and keyboard shortcuts (which is merely a refinement of the Macintosh menu organization and shortcuts).
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft spent a TRUCKLOAD of money on usability testing of the Win95/NT/98/ME/2K/XP user interface. The testing went so far as to present a list of commands to the test users along with a request that tell Microsoft which menu each command should appear on. Edit->Preferences may not make a hell of a lot of sense to a coder (who would probably prefer something like KMail's Settings->Configure KMail), which is fine if you only want coders to use your app).
I find it funny that all these Linux advocates wanting to see Linux to "take over the desktop" but who believe they need to remake something that works just fine right now. Apple innovated, Microsoft imitated, and Linux MUST play along if market penetration is to occur. Consistency from app-to-app might take some of the FUN out of programming (I assume we can agree that design work is more fun than grinding our code), but I'll GUARANTEE you that it enhances your app's adoptability.
This is something that ANYONE who has ever worked on a helldesk KNOWS.
If you disagree, remind yourself by looking at the UI organization in Mozilla and/or OpenOffice. It almost EXACTLY mirrors the organization of Windows and Mac apps.
</rant>
Should I forge ahead, and head into beta-land?
... do you want something you can count on? Or ... would you rather play with the latest and greatest toys.
... I have been running Debian woody (the current "testing" distro) for WELL over a year. I haven't had significant stability problems with it yet.
One question
It's been my experience that Linux apps (not to mention the kernel itself) tend to be stabler in bets than Windoze apps at approximately release level 4.0.
Going to beta-land is a decision you can only make for yourself, but
IMHO the ultimate geekwear is the line of "O'Really" t-shirts from copyleft.net ...
...
... best "got root" shirt I ever saw ... French Blue ... red outline pentagon on the chest ... yellow background inside the pentagon ... no "S" ... nope ... said "SU" ... 'nuff said ...
...
My personal favorite is "Assembling Etherkillers" but you should pick your own fav
I can't remember the URL for the site, but I saw a T once that topped these
If someone would post a link to it, I'd buy it
html2ps does a pretty nice job of rendering static webpages into PostScript files and KWord can load the webpage then save it to a PostScript file.
As Larry Wall says of Perl "TMTOWTDI"
"Linux isn't selling on the desktop, ... "
... according to an IDG whitepaper I recently read, Linux growth as a server OS during 2001 was approximately 25% ... the growth rate for Linux as a desktop OS was 107% ...
...
That's interesting
Even if 75% of new Linux desktop installations were due to the availability of free downloads from the 'net, that STILL makes for a lot of "boxed sets" and "official" CDs
Even more interesting will be the litigation that would ensue if a large corp. decided to migrate from, say, MSOffice to OpenOffice.org and MS refused to assist them in decrypting their documents
The main concern is that if I install OpenSSH from source on all 50 of my servers when it comes time to patch it I've got myself a little inconvencience.
/opt/pkg_name so we can easily get rid of them if we have to.
... if not ... add one yourself ... send the developer a patch ... contribute to the community. Or, alternatively, redirect the output of "make install" to a textfile so you have a list of files and installation directories. A simple edit will turn your textfile into an uninstall script.
A little work with NFS mounts will quickly give you a single-point upgrade system. I admin a mix of SGIs (5), Suns (20), Alphas (36), PCs running Solaris (12) and PCs running Linux (5 workstations and 2 Beowulfs). In our operation, we build everything that didn't come on the CDs from source, yet I only have to compile and install 5 times to update all archs and all OS's because we export the appropriate directory (/usr/local <Yeah, I know it's deprecated, but my boss has been running Unix boxen for 30 years and old habits die hard, deprecated or not.>) to all hosts.
We don't install from source unless we absolutely have to. Actually, we try not to install any software that doesn't come with Mandrake but obviously this isn't always possible. In those cases we follow the convention where everything goes in
"Getting rid" of apps installed from source is not so difficult if the developer was considerate enough to include a "make uninstall" target in his Makefile (and several do this)
Just my US$0.02, one admin to another.