I second this. I've had nothing but superb experiences and service from Gandi. Everything makes sense, their prices are great, and their TOS are clear as glass.
What I especially like is that "domain parking" (for when you don't happen to have a DNS server ready right this moment) is just a click away at no extra price--I realize that this can potentially be abused, but it's spectacularly convenient.
"Bob Smith from the New York Times. General, what do you have to say to the increasing clutter in space caused by US military satellites blasting away at each other?"
"Err....uh...erm those aren't military satellites, they're, uh, trash collectors. Yeah. Big trash collectors. We Blast the debris with nukes and then zot it into little tiny bits with super powered chemical lasers! What, the telescope? Espionage? Noo-hoo-hoo. That's just so we can look for dangerous space trash!"
Nothing un-American about it. Frankly, I don't care what anyone considers "American" and what "not". I see where you're coming from, but I think there's a bit of a difference between building an evil totalitarian nation in a game like Civilization, to see where it goes, and getting into an FPS with a "d00d! Hitler! Nazi! K00l!" attitude.
I am not making moral judgments about it (I play Axis or Soviet or whatever bad guys happen to be around quite a bit, if for example it's the team with free slots--no problem there. I just dislike it when people trivialize certain things like Nazi symbology and terminology in order to feel cool. That is, however, a purely personal preference.
The robots are being readied at a secret underground facility. However, we're still in contract negotiations with the Japanese Self-Defense Force for an exchange program to train big-eyed schoolgirls with blue hair to fly them.
US space warfare giant robot command staff are currently being equipped with billowing trenchcoats, small round mirrored glasses, and training in issuing curt commands with a gruff voice, in order to be able to properly coordinate giant robot space defense activity.
In addition, space war giant robot deployment is currently hampered by the fact that Warner Brothers "borrowed" the only working giant robot rail gun laser rifle prototype to make Eraser, and have not returned the US space awr giant robot secret development lab staff's phone calls asking them to return it.
A second giant space war robot laser rifle design was realized, it was thought, in time for giant robot reaction to the new commie Chinese space menace, but plans were shelved when suspicions arose that the new prototype was mistakenly sold as surplus and is currently being used as a backup power generator for the town of Provo, Utah. A third prototype could not be built, as the remaining supplies of Polonium-210, which powers the device, appear to have been accidentally taken home by an employee of the power plant supplying the isotope. Authorities are requesting information on an overweight balding man with yellow skin, who was last seen carrying a donut.
In short, my fellow citizens, we are doomed. The red menace has put a man into space. Our Asiatic foes are well on their way to winning the race to provide effective space-based Chinese food delivery. We _must_ increase funding to the United States Giant Space War Robot Defense Agency, or risk a national catastrophy.
Playing Battlefield 1942 online, I've noticed an unusually high proportion of juvenile fuckwits wanting to be badass nazi stormtroopers. They play as "Adolf Hitler", "22SSPzrDiv", "SS PnzrGrndr", and other trite combinations they pick up off some WWII history site.
Going online and playing as one of Uncle Joe Stalin's guardians of freedom and democracy and demolishing the pseudo-nazi little shits is always amusing.
Essentially I think two kinds of people who like to play bad as bad guys in games--the ones who enjoy watching Bond movies and say "damn" when the hero gets off Goldfinger's laser table in the nick of time, and the morons with inferiority complexes who give nazi salutes just to irritate people. Draw your own confusions.
Traffic avoidance does not exist. In any case, it is a concept for wimps. You build a road, a beautiful smooth curving road into the hills, an asphalt work of art calling out to you "driiive mee! Take that cuuuuurve!" and there's some yokel driving an old Pontiac station wagon at 20 mph. And buses coming the other way. It's a historical inevitability. You can't win.
Instead, I propose a traffic elimination system. It's been tested in numerous locations across the world, and has proven mighty effective in those really dense congestion situations.
Try GANDI. I have all my domains with them--they're cheap, reliable, have unambiguous (you bought it, you own it) terms of service, and offer instant domain parking if you can't get your dns server up right away.
If you're still with verisign, you've got a problem.
I disagree on this one. We've all seen the disarray the US IP (copyright/patent) system is in, and how little attention is actually paid to "common-sense" when handling IP issues.
If nobody reacted, a company like SCO would possibly get away with being given a legal backbone for its bogus invoices.
I'm not so concerned about their stock price (except a natural annoyance at seeing bastards earn money like this)--it doesn't really "hurt" me. I'd rather this be resolved through a hue and cry than there be some chance that SCO could slip this shit under the radar and get away with it. If a court were to ever say "these invoices are legit", you couldn't just ignore them and not pay them.
The kids were probably bored stiff of being made to hang out at the small table while their parents got hammered and reminisced about Duran Duran and ankle warmers:-)
I agree with you, but the problems are (a) speed (most sites aren't using the equivalent of Apache's mod_gzip, which can exhibit some funny behavior in any case), and (b) "security".
SSL/TLS is a great protocol family, insofar as it lends itself to some pretty funky uses. You can tunnel pretty much anything over it, as long as you encapsulate it with proper HTTP proxy syntax. There are several companies out there which are pretty wary of this sort of behavior and just flat-out block HTTPS.
Naturally this doesn't stop you from, say, tunnelling ssh over regular HTTP, but it helps explain why it's not more common.
I work with a small consulting outfit, which has had about 8 "generations" of sysadmins working for the same major bank. One of our most valuable and proven tools was "Molly", my baseball bat (named after Molly Millions from Neuromancer.)
It's amazing the amount of work it let you get done, if you brought it to meetings or just fidgeted with it a bit when people came to your office to discuss things.
Not to mention being very effective for justifying upgrades of ancient hardware (whoops boss, I have no idea how that stack of Boxhill drives got such a huge dent in it.)
When I was at Berkeley, a few friends of mine worked off-campus at the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics. This was connected to the campus network via a microwave relay mounted on the roofs of two buildings.
The story I was told by one of the sysadmins was that one day, the thing just stopped working, with no technical explanation. After doing all manner of tracing and debugging, they finally went to go check the campus-side transceiver, and found it turned 180 degrees in the other direction, with a note saying something to the extent of I know what you're doing, this is a CIA mind control device, if you try to keep reading my thoughts and fix this, I will find and kill you.
They fixed it and put a nice laminated piece of paper on it, explaining that, no, it's not part of the Orbital Mind Control Lasers, but rather an innocuous network component used for space research, and please don't mess it up, you could fall off the roof and hurt yourself
This is true, although for small companies with reasonably fast internal networks, web-based groupware can be nice--that's why I mentioned phprojekt.
And to be honest, I don't think 'appearance' and 'formatting' are really good criteria for web-based mailers, although I agree with you that they should be. For now, having platform-independent access to mail across firewalls/proxies when I can't use my own desktop for some reason more than makes up for the obvious deficiencies.
Why not use something web-based, like PHProjekt? There are a number of nice tools to let you manage discussions, threads and files online, and http is a "more open" standard than SMB--I only use Samba for file shares (including home drives) and printers.
With something PHP-or-whatever-based running on a web server, there's no mucking around with file locking problems and their ilk, and you can use SSL to protect user traffic (patch those OpenSSL installations, kids!)
I serve printers from samba boxes to WinXP and W2k clients. I do not like dealing with setting up print queues on unix (unix printing and modem handling are evil, created by spawns of satan to make systems administrators miserable for all eternity), and I don't like Samba's way of dealing with them. It's still a bit too black-magic-swing-a-cat-over-your-head-at-midnight -y for my tastes when I need it to work in a hurry.
I've found CUPS to be a magnificent way of dealing with this; the combination of Samba, Unix, and WinXP/2k actually deals with printers very nicely over IPP.
"Mr. Yarro said:
I know I've been painted in a rough light. I hope that our companies are our legacy and not our lawsuits."
It's a bit late for that, isn't it? While on the one hand, the massive publicity of the SCO lawsuits may have had, to some degree, the effect of creating some doubt in the minds of cautious CIOs/CTOs, by associating the word "Linux" with "unresolved, potentially damaging IP issues", the comparative lack of visibility of anything actually produced by SCO, combined with the massive media coverage of their seeming focus on litigation will certainly badly tarnish what's left of that company after this whole thing is over.
Large companies, which are normally fairly conservative on adoption of "new" technologies, will be just as loath to look at anything coming from a company so strongly perceived to be as lawsuit-happy as SCO...
You're right, it's crap. GSM is "an" (not "the") answer, at least the way it's implemented in most European countries. You have a GSM phone, there's a standard chip slot (same form factor is mini-smart cards used in USB dongles), and you get a new chip every time you switch providers (and you keep your number without any fees.)
Generally there are fairly hefty withdrawal fees, but you can get a new phone at a hefty discount when you sign up, and you can normally get a fairly decent phone at a good price every two years or so if you stick with your provider. The phone's yours.
I like it; I've had better quality services here (all over Europe) than anywhere I've used any cell phones back home in California. The pricing's a bit higher, although with all the surcharges US providers have, I don't think it makes too much of a difference. And the cool thing for me is that as long as I'm on my provider's network in Switzerland, all the calls are at the "mobile" rate. Long distance is only when you call to or from other countries (in all of which my phone works).
True, the rates are a bit higher if I call outside my provider's network, but that's a pretty insubstantial difference.
Slashdot Mirror
I second this. I've had nothing but superb experiences and service from Gandi. Everything makes sense, their prices are great, and their TOS are clear as glass.
What I especially like is that "domain parking" (for when you don't happen to have a DNS server ready right this moment) is just a click away at no extra price--I realize that this can potentially be abused, but it's spectacularly convenient.
"Bob Smith from the New York Times. General, what do you have to say to the increasing clutter in space caused by US military satellites blasting away at each other?"
"Err....uh...erm those aren't military satellites, they're, uh, trash collectors. Yeah. Big trash collectors. We Blast the debris with nukes and then zot it into little tiny bits with super powered chemical lasers! What, the telescope? Espionage? Noo-hoo-hoo. That's just so we can look for dangerous space trash!"
Nothing un-American about it. Frankly, I don't care what anyone considers "American" and what "not". I see where you're coming from, but I think there's a bit of a difference between building an evil totalitarian nation in a game like Civilization, to see where it goes, and getting into an FPS with a "d00d! Hitler! Nazi! K00l!" attitude.
I am not making moral judgments about it (I play Axis or Soviet or whatever bad guys happen to be around quite a bit, if for example it's the team with free slots--no problem there. I just dislike it when people trivialize certain things like Nazi symbology and terminology in order to feel cool. That is, however, a purely personal preference.
The robots are being readied at a secret underground facility. However, we're still in contract negotiations with the Japanese Self-Defense Force for an exchange program to train big-eyed schoolgirls with blue hair to fly them.
US space warfare giant robot command staff are currently being equipped with billowing trenchcoats, small round mirrored glasses, and training in issuing curt commands with a gruff voice, in order to be able to properly coordinate giant robot space defense activity.
In addition, space war giant robot deployment is currently hampered by the fact that Warner Brothers "borrowed" the only working giant robot rail gun laser rifle prototype to make Eraser, and have not returned the US space awr giant robot secret development lab staff's phone calls asking them to return it.
A second giant space war robot laser rifle design was realized, it was thought, in time for giant robot reaction to the new commie Chinese space menace, but plans were shelved when suspicions arose that the new prototype was mistakenly sold as surplus and is currently being used as a backup power generator for the town of Provo, Utah. A third prototype could not be built, as the remaining supplies of Polonium-210, which powers the device, appear to have been accidentally taken home by an employee of the power plant supplying the isotope. Authorities are requesting information on an overweight balding man with yellow skin, who was last seen carrying a donut.
In short, my fellow citizens, we are doomed. The red menace has put a man into space. Our Asiatic foes are well on their way to winning the race to provide effective space-based Chinese food delivery. We _must_ increase funding to the United States Giant Space War Robot Defense Agency, or risk a national catastrophy.
Playing Battlefield 1942 online, I've noticed an unusually high proportion of juvenile fuckwits wanting to be badass nazi stormtroopers. They play as "Adolf Hitler", "22SSPzrDiv", "SS PnzrGrndr", and other trite combinations they pick up off some WWII history site.
Going online and playing as one of Uncle Joe Stalin's guardians of freedom and democracy and demolishing the pseudo-nazi little shits is always amusing.
Essentially I think two kinds of people who like to play bad as bad guys in games--the ones who enjoy watching Bond movies and say "damn" when the hero gets off Goldfinger's laser table in the nick of time, and the morons with inferiority complexes who give nazi salutes just to irritate people. Draw your own confusions.
Traffic avoidance does not exist. In any case, it is a concept for wimps. You build a road, a beautiful smooth curving road into the hills, an asphalt work of art calling out to you "driiive mee! Take that cuuuuurve!" and there's some yokel driving an old Pontiac station wagon at 20 mph. And buses coming the other way. It's a historical inevitability. You can't win.
Instead, I propose a traffic elimination system. It's been tested in numerous locations across the world, and has proven mighty effective in those really dense congestion situations.
Yup, I'm with you. I think a search engine like Persian Kitty to help me find what I was probably looking for in the first place would be nice
Try GANDI. I have all my domains with them--they're cheap, reliable, have unambiguous (you bought it, you own it) terms of service, and offer instant domain parking if you can't get your dns server up right away.
If you're still with verisign, you've got a problem.
I disagree on this one. We've all seen the disarray the US IP (copyright/patent) system is in, and how little attention is actually paid to "common-sense" when handling IP issues.
If nobody reacted, a company like SCO would possibly get away with being given a legal backbone for its bogus invoices.
I'm not so concerned about their stock price (except a natural annoyance at seeing bastards earn money like this)--it doesn't really "hurt" me. I'd rather this be resolved through a hue and cry than there be some chance that SCO could slip this shit under the radar and get away with it. If a court were to ever say "these invoices are legit", you couldn't just ignore them and not pay them.
I guess SCO wasn't so happy about having its mp3/DivX archive raided.
The kids were probably bored stiff of being made to hang out at the small table while their parents got hammered and reminisced about Duran Duran and ankle warmers
I agree with you, but the problems are (a) speed (most sites aren't using the equivalent of Apache's mod_gzip, which can exhibit some funny behavior in any case), and (b) "security".
SSL/TLS is a great protocol family, insofar as it lends itself to some pretty funky uses. You can tunnel pretty much anything over it, as long as you encapsulate it with proper HTTP proxy syntax. There are several companies out there which are pretty wary of this sort of behavior and just flat-out block HTTPS.
Naturally this doesn't stop you from, say, tunnelling ssh over regular HTTP, but it helps explain why it's not more common.
What's 'PersonId'? They're keeping track of you
I think RMS is a kook, with some fairly questionable ideas, but this sort of imagery does not contribute to the idea of objective journalism.
I work with a small consulting outfit, which has had about 8 "generations" of sysadmins working for the same major bank. One of our most valuable and proven tools was "Molly", my baseball bat (named after Molly Millions from Neuromancer.)
It's amazing the amount of work it let you get done, if you brought it to meetings or just fidgeted with it a bit when people came to your office to discuss things.
Not to mention being very effective for justifying upgrades of ancient hardware (whoops boss, I have no idea how that stack of Boxhill drives got such a huge dent in it.)
When I was at Berkeley, a few friends of mine worked off-campus at the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics. This was connected to the campus network via a microwave relay mounted on the roofs of two buildings.
The story I was told by one of the sysadmins was that one day, the thing just stopped working, with no technical explanation. After doing all manner of tracing and debugging, they finally went to go check the campus-side transceiver, and found it turned 180 degrees in the other direction, with a note saying something to the extent of I know what you're doing, this is a CIA mind control device, if you try to keep reading my thoughts and fix this, I will find and kill you.
They fixed it and put a nice laminated piece of paper on it, explaining that, no, it's not part of the Orbital Mind Control Lasers, but rather an innocuous network component used for space research, and please don't mess it up, you could fall off the roof and hurt yourself
It never happened again; I guess they could have just ordered a few aluminum foil deflector beanies for the general public.
Forget the age-old technique of reducing your nervousness as a public speaker by imagine everyone without pants.
Now you can just make their pants fall down!
I can see it already: Microsoft RPC (Remote Pants Call) vulnerability discovered.
You could cause a buffer overflow...in someone's pants!
What about viruses? Could I unleash W32@Pants on the unsuspecting fashion world?
What if your jacket was a Mac and your pants run Windows? Would you need Samba to let your pants and yourt shirt communicate?
Man, why didn't I go into fashion design--you could blame mismatched colors and patterns on the user--RTFM, you idiot, your tie's crashed...
You finished reading my post before hitting 'reply'? Doesn't that violate the RFC?
This is true, although for small companies with reasonably fast internal networks, web-based groupware can be nice--that's why I mentioned phprojekt.
And to be honest, I don't think 'appearance' and 'formatting' are really good criteria for web-based mailers, although I agree with you that they should be. For now, having platform-independent access to mail across firewalls/proxies when I can't use my own desktop for some reason more than makes up for the obvious deficiencies.
Why not use something web-based, like PHProjekt? There are a number of nice tools to let you manage discussions, threads and files online, and http is a "more open" standard than SMB--I only use Samba for file shares (including home drives) and printers.
With something PHP-or-whatever-based running on a web server, there's no mucking around with file locking problems and their ilk, and you can use SSL to protect user traffic (patch those OpenSSL installations, kids!)
I serve printers from samba boxes to WinXP and W2k clients. I do not like dealing with setting up print queues on unix (unix printing and modem handling are evil, created by spawns of satan to make systems administrators miserable for all eternity), and I don't like Samba's way of dealing with them. It's still a bit too black-magic-swing-a-cat-over-your-head-at-midnigh
I've found CUPS to be a magnificent way of dealing with this; the combination of Samba, Unix, and WinXP/2k actually deals with printers very nicely over IPP.
It will be really interesting to see how Garry Kasparov measures up, playing a round of chess against IBM's Deep Monkey.
It's a bit late for that, isn't it? While on the one hand, the massive publicity of the SCO lawsuits may have had, to some degree, the effect of creating some doubt in the minds of cautious CIOs/CTOs, by associating the word "Linux" with "unresolved, potentially damaging IP issues", the comparative lack of visibility of anything actually produced by SCO, combined with the massive media coverage of their seeming focus on litigation will certainly badly tarnish what's left of that company after this whole thing is over.
Large companies, which are normally fairly conservative on adoption of "new" technologies, will be just as loath to look at anything coming from a company so strongly perceived to be as lawsuit-happy as SCO...
It's very small, but a lot bigger than your average US metropolitan area code. So the 'long distance' billing actually works out very well.
You're right, it's crap. GSM is "an" (not "the") answer, at least the way it's implemented in most European countries. You have a GSM phone, there's a standard chip slot (same form factor is mini-smart cards used in USB dongles), and you get a new chip every time you switch providers (and you keep your number without any fees.)
Generally there are fairly hefty withdrawal fees, but you can get a new phone at a hefty discount
when you sign up, and you can normally get a fairly decent phone at a good price every two years or so if you stick with your provider. The phone's yours.
I like it; I've had better quality services here (all over Europe) than anywhere I've used any cell phones back home in California. The pricing's a bit higher, although with all the surcharges US providers have, I don't think it makes too much of a difference. And the cool thing for me is that as long as I'm on my provider's network in Switzerland, all the calls are at the "mobile" rate. Long distance is only when you call to or from other countries (in all of which my phone works).
True, the rates are a bit higher if I call outside my provider's network, but that's a pretty insubstantial difference.
Ah, that explains my co-workers.