I have a T1 line - this is not your average ISP issue. And, it's not really a scumbag ISP - they are not, from what I know, an especially spammer-friendly ISP - they just got on someone's nerves one day.
Look, I am a systems administrator, and I deal with a lot of spam every day, for myself as well as people who have email on my servers. I don't get what the problem is with using a labeling approach to spam, instead of simply blocking it. Yeah, it takes processing power, and time to administer, but it's way better than spending my time (and $) chasing after my ISP or filing lawsuits, or dealing with clients who can't send mail to one person or another, or what have you to stop this.
I think that ultimately, the blacklisting approach is 1) a losing battle - (how long will it take for most addresses to be blocked?) and 2) just manages to make the lives of more and more legitimate people difficult. For every block of a class C address (or several, in my case), you might be blocking one spammer, but 10s or perhaps even 100s of legit people who just want to send email. And the stories I've heard about nonprofit organizations that send a mass-email to their constituencies, and one irate person who may have been on the list accidentally complains, somehow they get on spews, or some such list, and all of a sudden, they have real trouble communicating with people. This whole approach is just, IMHO using a bear trap for a mouse.
Having been myself unfairly blacklisted (not by Spews, but by another list) because of the actions of my ISP, I really have come to have serious issues about the blacklisting process. I understand the principle - get innocent bystanders pissed off at their ISPs, then have them complain to their ISPs, or switch ISPs, and then ISPs change their behavior.
The problem is that many people, for a variety of reasons (geography being one) can't change ISPs, and many ISPs (mine included) did nothing in response to my complaints (because they knew I wasn't going to move). So what does this do? It certainly doesn't help anyone!
I hate spam as much as the next gal, and I think that the SpamAssassin approach (which is to label mail as spam depending upon certain criteria) is a much, much better approach than blacklisting.
It seems that the patent office has, in the last few years, lost their collective mind. Patents are incredibly broad, or amazingly misdirected, like in the case of the patents on human genes. They currently seem to protect only litigous patent holders, not the consumers or anyone else, for that matter. What is your organization doing to change this current patent landscape? Is there anything that can be done?
You all seem to be laughing, but the truth is, that this is a very natural extension of the way things are. In some ways, I'd say it's about time people whose cultures have been exploited start getting into the act. We have evolved an absolutely crazy sort of system which is quite problematic. I think that the Maori have as much right to sue over the use of their cultural characteristics (language, clothing, whatever) as Celera genetics has the right to patent human genes, or Monsanto the right to patent new kinds of tomotoes, or Amazon to patent one-click ordering. In a system governed by the increasing importance of data whatever that data be, people who see themselves (rightly or wrongly) as owning that data will more and more make sure they get a piece of the financial pie.
Personally, I think it's time to Open Source everything, but I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.
... and M$ Hailstorm won't make it. Combine the issue of privacy (let the user maintain their own info) as well as a much cheaper alternative, it's a slam-dunk (especially if it's made easy to use.) I think that Microsoft's success in making this project work depends on unified messaging standards - standards that an open-source version of this could take advantage of.
The issue here is not what people do, but where they do it. Utah is not the only place to work as a geek, thankfully, for if it were, youbetcha I'd be looking for another line of work. To some extent, whether or not one can have a balanced personal life comes into a lot of people's considerations of career. But I don't care how much I wanted to work at Iomega, and how much they'd be willing to pay me, I'd never in a million years work in Utah.
When so many packages have so many compile time options (Apache, PHP, Perl, etc) and with just about every distro being so lame with respect to the filesystem standard, why bother with 'em? God forbid you have library problems with RH, and god forbid you have to use dselect.
What is this "either/or" shit? There are times to use apt or rpm, and their are times to compile things from scratch. At this point, I use apt 70% of the time, and tarballs the rest. On RPM boxes, I probably use rpm only 40% of the time, and tarballs the rest, because it's nowhere near as easy to use rpms as it is to use apt. I use dselect only when I absolutely have to, like during an install.
Each method has some things to recommend it, and there isn't a reason to use one or the other exclusively, as far as I am concerned.
Re:Apt IS great, now if we could USE it.
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An RPM Port Of APT
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The Red Hat approach of 'install 900Mbyte of crap' is better. I don't want to become some expert Linuxologist knowing exactly what packages are on my system and what each one does. I just want the machine to set up a working system with a good selection of packages. If some disk space is wasted by installing crap I'll never use, that's not a problem - disk space is cheap. I'd rather waste disk space than waste time.
I'm one who thinks dselect is a pain, but hates the idea of installing crap I don't need. I thought it was way worth the 2 hours to go through the packages and pick what I wanted. It was actually a real learning experience - since I had the luxury of having another computer I could do web research on - so I'd see a package I didn't know about - and if it looked interesting, I could go find out what it was. Besides, I figured that 2 hours was going to save me 5 in troubleshooting some stupid processes down the line that I didn't know about that were interfering with something I wanted to do.
I've really come to be a total fan of debian for two basic reasons: 1) No assumptions about what I want - doesn't assume what I want (of course, this does make it hard if I don't know what I want - which is why debian is not for newbies) 2) apt.
Apt's availbility on other distros is peachy. But it's not going to change my mind and switch from debian.
As someone who does technology planning for non-profits, has put in a couple of linux networks for them, and done websites for non-profits I can tell you that 90% of the non-profits that I see can't afford to support more than 15 networked computers. Believe it or not, an organization I've been working with that has over 200 workstations, and a couple of servers does not have anyone dedicted to do tech support. The financial director is in charge. (Yes, he's supposed to do the books and payroll, too!)
Part of the issue is that it is hard to recruit techies to non-profits because of the pay - but in reality there are two major reasons: (1) A lack of recognition that an investment in technology infrastructure can, in the long run, save more money than is spent. Unlike the for-profit world, the mentality is (mostly because of necessity, sadly) penny-wise and pound-foolish. (2) Governmental agencies and private foundations don't like to give money to either technology infrastructure or personnel, only direct service. So non-profits that depend on grants are up shit's creek, they simply don't get enough money to invest in the technology, whether it be buying hardware or paying someone to run it.
I think that linux and open source software is one way to decrease cost of ownership - we've been working on evangelizing with local non-profits. But it's an uphill battle, because many of the managers of non-profits aren't technologically savvy, and don't know how to evaluate all of the options.
Hardware vs. Software routers
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Having worked with small non-profits with close to no money, as well as having used hardware routers for dial-up, cable and DSL like Netopia and Linksys, I think that there are easy arguments for both. Sometimes it is in fact quite a lot easier to just put a little box with good NAT and firewall capabilities that takes less than 30 minutes to configure in. Sometimes, that $200-400 is more than someone can afford, and converting an old 486 or pentium to use as a small network router is a good idea. It's not at all either or - there are good reasons and situations for both. Also, if you're installing a small network with a linux box for file serving, e-mail and the like, why not use the box as a router as well?
The basic software you need generally comes standard with any Linux distribution. You can find pretty much any other software you need (like ssh) either in binary form or source form on sites like freshmeat or the site that your distribution is from, like RedHat or Debian for example.
I think it would be far easier to implement this using a linux (or unix) solution than with WindowsNT/2000. All the basic funstionality for an internet server (e-mail, web, basic network stuff, firewall) is standard in most distros.
You mustn't think of bacteria as a 'disease'. They are self sufficient, independant organisms, and they are absolutely everywhere. Only a very small fraction of them is adapted to living inside the human body.
This is indeed true - but it is hubris for us to say that because of this, we should not worry about the potential implications - the truth is, we don't know enough to say "don't worry"!
First off, there are the more general ecological issues to think about - how would this organism interact with the environment? Plenty of organisms eventually can't compete with other organisms in the local ecosystem, but can do plenty of damage on their way to extinction.
Then, and of more concern to me, is the potential for DNA to be shared between this bacterium and it's potential relatives that still exist. Bacteria can share plasmid DNA between each other. I don't know how well this process happens between species of bacteria, but it is a process that can occur.
Also, this bacteria might evolve quickly to be able to survive in some environments that could do damage to the ecosystem in ways we can't necessarily predict.
In general, I guess my comment is that we think we know far more than we do. It's pretty dangerous to say, simply, "don't worry"
Am I missing something here? We've got virtual hosts set up on one server, all name based. We use easyDNS to point all of the variety of domain names to one server. All of the domains are listed in the hosts table, and we've got sendmail set up right using the virtusertable feature. Folks can ftp and telnet to their own domain, and check pop mail using their own domain. We could do DNS ourselves, but haven't gotten there yet. There are two snags. One, as mentioned several times, is SSL. The second is true POP aliasing. Since all of the accounts are on one server, each account name obviously has to be unique, and we've not yet found a way to alias pop accounts. (So we have yet to find a way to give two clients info@domain.com)
Yes, we are only doing this for about 20 domains, and I imagine it would get very unwieldy and problematic in a variety of ways for 1000. But that's not the business we're in.
Name based virtual hosts won't work for FTP and anything that relies on the Reverse DNS name of the host eg IRC
Well, I can't speak about IRC, as I've never implemented it. But we've got a very small virtual host setup for our clients (about 20) on one server - all name based. We use easyDNS right now, but we certaily could move to doing DNS ourselves. FTP, Telnet, etc., work just fine.
That's exactly right. As a professional web application programmer I use both tools a lot, but for totally different functions. My graphic designer uses macs exclusively, and I use macs to render her designs to the form I need them. We use only Linux servers and open source tools on the server side.
At the "buzz" level, I agree - Linux will outshine Macs in terms of who is seen as the primary competition to Microsoft - no question. But Macs are far from dead - and when the day comes (it will) when Windows is no longer the major OS, Mac will still be there, at probably close to the market share it is now. Why is this an issue?
Where do you live, and who do you hang out with?? I'm the only person I know with a home LAN (and I'm not the only geek I know)- even though cable access has been around for a while, it still is pretty new for people to have home LANs around here (Western Massachusetts).
I do know that in new homes, ethernet wiring is becoming a lot more standard - and electricians I know are doing it more and more - it's not a new thing to them. But I think the market penetration in most of the country is still pretty low. And it does take a bit of savvy (or a savvy friend) to figure out how best to wire one's house. No, it's not rocket science, but most people are so far away from having even enough savvy to figure out where to put the patch panel, and what that means, that it'll be a while.
I'm a bit confused by the idea that setting the time to search is a new idea - metacrawler has been doing that for years. In any event - a meta search en gine for up-to-date news is way cool, and it's about time. (I'm surprised it took so long, actually.)
Yes, we need newbies (ie. more users, who will all be newbies for a time) for the Linux movement to progress, but the last thing we need is a dumbing down of Linux to this level!!!
How much do you want Linux to succeed?? If you want Linux to remain second place in the desktop OS market, then porting AOL 5.0 is not an issue. But you have to face the fact that a HUGE chunk of basic computer users use AOL. As an avid Linux user (4 years) who spends lots of time working with organizations with lots of generic computer users for whom Windows is a challenge, I can tell you that Linux needs some work as a desktop OS. I think there is no question of Linux's success in the server market - but it still takes some convincing of those generic computer users. We have to step out of our shoes, and into the shoes of those for whom installing software on a Mac or Windoze is major trauma.
Well, besides cheap high bandwidth access, which is becoming ubiquitous everywhere except Kansas, who needs a city? I'm happily living out my geekdom in a smallish college town, and I love it. As for attracting geeks? I think having jobs helps.24 hour supermarkets help. Good music, and a fun atmosphere helps.
The amount of documentation available for Linux is quite adequate. Besides the great set of O'Reilly books, there's a whole load of others of varying quality. Also, the documentation available on the LDP site and others is really good. Any new Linux user who is a savvy computer user will do just fine. The problem is, you can't possibly write any documentation for Linux that "Mom" can use! Linux itself has to evolve to be a much user-friendly desktop OS. When people I know ask me about Linux, and ask me whether they should take the plunge, I give them advice based on what I know of their computer knowledge. If they've successfully fought the IRQ, or plug-and-pray game, re-installed Windoze several times, and they can download and install software in their sleep, I'll point them to "Running Linux" and say "go for it." Otherwise, I tell them to wait a year.
Is that slashdot keeps giving this fool airtime! I am not one to normally criticize slashdot's choices of articles to link to, but links to this guy's idiocy show up here on a fairly regular basis. I've yet to see any content in a single Dvorak column to justify this, particularly in light of slashdot's open-source emphesis.
Well, I certainly very often disagree with him, and there are times when he is just plain wrong or misinformed, but the truth is, that many people "out there" listen to him, and I get the impression that many people agree with him. So, knowing what he has to say, and getting a feeling for what people are thinking is worth it. Does it make a big difference that/. is giving him airtime? I think it's OK. Besides, I'm not sure there is such a thing as an intelligent anti-open source antagonist.
Some of those Silicon Valley startups expect you to work 16 hour days and sleep at work. know some guys who have beds right above their desks. What do you think? is it worth it?
Well, I certainly can't say whether joining a hot Silicon Valley start up and working 16 hours a day for stock options is worth it. I think that really depends on what you want in life. What I can say is that starting one's own company in a place that costs less to live in (Massachusetts), and being one's own boss (and still working 16 hour days) is way worth it. I probably will never be a paper millionaire, but I will have spent time trying to build my own vision. Can't beat that.
As an avid fan of BOTH macs and Linux, I still have yet to bother trying out PPC linux. Really, I have yet to find a reason, except earning myself serious geek points. The Mac OS is great at what it does - but putting Linux on a Mac box seems to me just to waste more expensive hardware. I've got 4 Linux boxes running, none of them cost a whole wad of cash. Macs have certainly come down in price, but I'm not about to waste the $2,500 I just spent on a G4 to make a linux box that can't do nearly everything that a $500 box could do.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a T1 line - this is not your average ISP issue. And, it's not really a scumbag ISP - they are not, from what I know, an especially spammer-friendly ISP - they just got on someone's nerves one day.
Look, I am a systems administrator, and I deal with a lot of spam every day, for myself as well as people who have email on my servers. I don't get what the problem is with using a labeling approach to spam, instead of simply blocking it. Yeah, it takes processing power, and time to administer, but it's way better than spending my time (and $) chasing after my ISP or filing lawsuits, or dealing with clients who can't send mail to one person or another, or what have you to stop this.
I think that ultimately, the blacklisting approach is 1) a losing battle - (how long will it take for most addresses to be blocked?) and 2) just manages to make the lives of more and more legitimate people difficult. For every block of a class C address (or several, in my case), you might be blocking one spammer, but 10s or perhaps even 100s of legit people who just want to send email. And the stories I've heard about nonprofit organizations that send a mass-email to their constituencies, and one irate person who may have been on the list accidentally complains, somehow they get on spews, or some such list, and all of a sudden, they have real trouble communicating with people. This whole approach is just, IMHO using a bear trap for a mouse.
Having been myself unfairly blacklisted (not by Spews, but by another list) because of the actions of my ISP, I really have come to have serious issues about the blacklisting process. I understand the principle - get innocent bystanders pissed off at their ISPs, then have them complain to their ISPs, or switch ISPs, and then ISPs change their behavior.
The problem is that many people, for a variety of reasons (geography being one) can't change ISPs, and many ISPs (mine included) did nothing in response to my complaints (because they knew I wasn't going to move). So what does this do? It certainly doesn't help anyone!
I hate spam as much as the next gal, and I think that the SpamAssassin approach (which is to label mail as spam depending upon certain criteria) is a much, much better approach than blacklisting.
It seems that the patent office has, in the last few years, lost their collective mind. Patents are incredibly broad, or amazingly misdirected, like in the case of the patents on human genes. They currently seem to protect only litigous patent holders, not the consumers or anyone else, for that matter. What is your organization doing to change this current patent landscape? Is there anything that can be done?
Personally, I think it's time to Open Source everything, but I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.
... and M$ Hailstorm won't make it. Combine the issue of privacy (let the user maintain their own info) as well as a much cheaper alternative, it's a slam-dunk (especially if it's made easy to use.) I think that Microsoft's success in making this project work depends on unified messaging standards - standards that an open-source version of this could take advantage of.
The issue here is not what people do, but where they do it. Utah is not the only place to work as a geek, thankfully, for if it were, youbetcha I'd be looking for another line of work. To some extent, whether or not one can have a balanced personal life comes into a lot of people's considerations of career. But I don't care how much I wanted to work at Iomega, and how much they'd be willing to pay me, I'd never in a million years work in Utah.
What is this "either/or" shit? There are times to use apt or rpm, and their are times to compile things from scratch. At this point, I use apt 70% of the time, and tarballs the rest. On RPM boxes, I probably use rpm only 40% of the time, and tarballs the rest, because it's nowhere near as easy to use rpms as it is to use apt. I use dselect only when I absolutely have to, like during an install.
Each method has some things to recommend it, and there isn't a reason to use one or the other exclusively, as far as I am concerned.
I'm one who thinks dselect is a pain, but hates the idea of installing crap I don't need. I thought it was way worth the 2 hours to go through the packages and pick what I wanted. It was actually a real learning experience - since I had the luxury of having another computer I could do web research on - so I'd see a package I didn't know about - and if it looked interesting, I could go find out what it was. Besides, I figured that 2 hours was going to save me 5 in troubleshooting some stupid processes down the line that I didn't know about that were interfering with something I wanted to do.
I've really come to be a total fan of debian for two basic reasons: 1) No assumptions about what I want - doesn't assume what I want (of course, this does make it hard if I don't know what I want - which is why debian is not for newbies) 2) apt.
Apt's availbility on other distros is peachy. But it's not going to change my mind and switch from debian.
Part of the issue is that it is hard to recruit techies to non-profits because of the pay - but in reality there are two major reasons: (1) A lack of recognition that an investment in technology infrastructure can, in the long run, save more money than is spent. Unlike the for-profit world, the mentality is (mostly because of necessity, sadly) penny-wise and pound-foolish. (2) Governmental agencies and private foundations don't like to give money to either technology infrastructure or personnel, only direct service. So non-profits that depend on grants are up shit's creek, they simply don't get enough money to invest in the technology, whether it be buying hardware or paying someone to run it.
I think that linux and open source software is one way to decrease cost of ownership - we've been working on evangelizing with local non-profits. But it's an uphill battle, because many of the managers of non-profits aren't technologically savvy, and don't know how to evaluate all of the options.
Having worked with small non-profits with close to no money, as well as having used hardware routers for dial-up, cable and DSL like Netopia and Linksys, I think that there are easy arguments for both. Sometimes it is in fact quite a lot easier to just put a little box with good NAT and firewall capabilities that takes less than 30 minutes to configure in. Sometimes, that $200-400 is more than someone can afford, and converting an old 486 or pentium to use as a small network router is a good idea. It's not at all either or - there are good reasons and situations for both. Also, if you're installing a small network with a linux box for file serving, e-mail and the like, why not use the box as a router as well?
Documentation for this stuff is all over the net - try the Linux Documentation Project for a start. A good site for Linux newbies is LinuxNewbie.org
I think it would be far easier to implement this using a linux (or unix) solution than with WindowsNT/2000. All the basic funstionality for an internet server (e-mail, web, basic network stuff, firewall) is standard in most distros.
This is indeed true - but it is hubris for us to say that because of this, we should not worry about the potential implications - the truth is, we don't know enough to say "don't worry"!
First off, there are the more general ecological issues to think about - how would this organism interact with the environment? Plenty of organisms eventually can't compete with other organisms in the local ecosystem, but can do plenty of damage on their way to extinction.
Then, and of more concern to me, is the potential for DNA to be shared between this bacterium and it's potential relatives that still exist. Bacteria can share plasmid DNA between each other. I don't know how well this process happens between species of bacteria, but it is a process that can occur.
Also, this bacteria might evolve quickly to be able to survive in some environments that could do damage to the ecosystem in ways we can't necessarily predict.
In general, I guess my comment is that we think we know far more than we do. It's pretty dangerous to say, simply, "don't worry"
Yes, we are only doing this for about 20 domains, and I imagine it would get very unwieldy and problematic in a variety of ways for 1000. But that's not the business we're in.
Well, I can't speak about IRC, as I've never implemented it. But we've got a very small virtual host setup for our clients (about 20) on one server - all name based. We use easyDNS right now, but we certaily could move to doing DNS ourselves. FTP, Telnet, etc., work just fine.
That's exactly right. As a professional web application programmer I use both tools a lot, but for totally different functions. My graphic designer uses macs exclusively, and I use macs to render her designs to the form I need them. We use only Linux servers and open source tools on the server side.
At the "buzz" level, I agree - Linux will outshine Macs in terms of who is seen as the primary competition to Microsoft - no question. But Macs are far from dead - and when the day comes (it will) when Windows is no longer the major OS, Mac will still be there, at probably close to the market share it is now. Why is this an issue?
Where do you live, and who do you hang out with?? I'm the only person I know with a home LAN (and I'm not the only geek I know)- even though cable access has been around for a while, it still is pretty new for people to have home LANs around here (Western Massachusetts). I do know that in new homes, ethernet wiring is becoming a lot more standard - and electricians I know are doing it more and more - it's not a new thing to them. But I think the market penetration in most of the country is still pretty low. And it does take a bit of savvy (or a savvy friend) to figure out how best to wire one's house. No, it's not rocket science, but most people are so far away from having even enough savvy to figure out where to put the patch panel, and what that means, that it'll be a while.
I'm a bit confused by the idea that setting the time to search is a new idea - metacrawler has been doing that for years. In any event - a meta search en gine for up-to-date news is way cool, and it's about time. (I'm surprised it took so long, actually.)
How much do you want Linux to succeed?? If you want Linux to remain second place in the desktop OS market, then porting AOL 5.0 is not an issue. But you have to face the fact that a HUGE chunk of basic computer users use AOL. As an avid Linux user (4 years) who spends lots of time working with organizations with lots of generic computer users for whom Windows is a challenge, I can tell you that Linux needs some work as a desktop OS. I think there is no question of Linux's success in the server market - but it still takes some convincing of those generic computer users. We have to step out of our shoes, and into the shoes of those for whom installing software on a Mac or Windoze is major trauma.
Well, besides cheap high bandwidth access, which is becoming ubiquitous everywhere except Kansas, who needs a city? I'm happily living out my geekdom in a smallish college town, and I love it. As for attracting geeks? I think having jobs helps.24 hour supermarkets help. Good music, and a fun atmosphere helps.
The amount of documentation available for Linux is quite adequate. Besides the great set of O'Reilly books, there's a whole load of others of varying quality. Also, the documentation available on the LDP site and others is really good. Any new Linux user who is a savvy computer user will do just fine. The problem is, you can't possibly write any documentation for Linux that "Mom" can use! Linux itself has to evolve to be a much user-friendly desktop OS. When people I know ask me about Linux, and ask me whether they should take the plunge, I give them advice based on what I know of their computer knowledge. If they've successfully fought the IRQ, or plug-and-pray game, re-installed Windoze several times, and they can download and install software in their sleep, I'll point them to "Running Linux" and say "go for it." Otherwise, I tell them to wait a year.
Well, I certainly very often disagree with him, and there are times when he is just plain wrong or misinformed, but the truth is, that many people "out there" listen to him, and I get the impression that many people agree with him. So, knowing what he has to say, and getting a feeling for what people are thinking is worth it. Does it make a big difference that /. is giving him airtime? I think it's OK. Besides, I'm not sure there is such a thing as an intelligent anti-open source antagonist.
Well, I certainly can't say whether joining a hot Silicon Valley start up and working 16 hours a day for stock options is worth it. I think that really depends on what you want in life. What I can say is that starting one's own company in a place that costs less to live in (Massachusetts), and being one's own boss (and still working 16 hour days) is way worth it. I probably will never be a paper millionaire, but I will have spent time trying to build my own vision. Can't beat that.
As an avid fan of BOTH macs and Linux, I still have yet to bother trying out PPC linux. Really, I have yet to find a reason, except earning myself serious geek points. The Mac OS is great at what it does - but putting Linux on a Mac box seems to me just to waste more expensive hardware. I've got 4 Linux boxes running, none of them cost a whole wad of cash. Macs have certainly come down in price, but I'm not about to waste the $2,500 I just spent on a G4 to make a linux box that can't do nearly everything that a $500 box could do.