Anytime you call an 800 number, your caller ID is available
Well, not really caller ID. It's called ANI, I think. It is unrelated to caller ID. It has to do with billing. The owner of an 800 number has the right to know who is calling since they pay the bill.
So what would happen if I had a very fragile open mail relay? Let's say, a very old Mac, running MacOS 7.x, and some cheezy SMTP server that isn't closed off. A seperate Linux box running packet sniffers, capturing everything to a big hard disk.
Would it still be possible to catch and prosecute spammers using a setup like this? Would it require that the poor little Mac actually have some other use besides as a spammer trap? Would there have to be any actual damages? What if it crashed the machine (very likely, btw)?
See, that's just it - you don't know. You know what they wanted to open it with last time, not what they want to do with it last time. Do I want to render that HTML? Edit it? View it's source? Grep it?
Mac solves this problem nicely. Every file has a type and creator field. Type indicates what kind of data the content is. Creator indicates what program to open the document with. Simply double click a document, and it opens with the application that created it.
You can always grab a document and drag it on top of a different application and drop it there (drag-drop) to open a document with a different application. The different application only cares about what type the document is, not the creator. If the type is, say, jpeg, it doesn't matter what program created it. Some programs will display it. Some programs will edit it, etc.
You can always change the type or creator of a file. (Usually you leave the type alone.) It's about as easy doing a chown/chmod type operation, albeit graphically. End users don't have the tools to do this. The way that end users change the creator is to open the document in a different application and then save it. The saving application stamps it with it's own creator signature. To change the type, again just open it in a compatible application and save it as a different type. For instance, open an Excel 5 file, save it in Excel 2 format. The filetype changes -- but so does the content. If I open a JPEG file (created by Netscape, and having Netscape's creator) in Photoshop, and then save it, the type doesn't change only the content. If you didn't change anything, and if the application is smart, it doesn't actually "save" anything, it merely changes the file creator. Sadly, in practice, implementors just go through the entire motions of saving the document, since computing power is so cheap.
To an end user, these operations are intuitive side effects of the way applications naturally open and save documents. If I created a file in Photoshop, then it gets photoshop's creator and opens in photoshop -- unless I drag-drop it to a different application. But other applications know whether they can even open it or not based on the type.
And best of all, no filename extensions.
Think of the document as a noun. The application as a verb. Grab the document drag it to whatever application you want. This is how you signify that you want to edit it, render it, etc. in a different tool. Apps stamp type/creators into documents to keep everything straight automagically. When you double click a doc, the desktop cooperates by launching the right app based on the file's creator -- NOT the file's type.
Filename extensions can only indicate a mixture of type/creator. Sometimes you think of it as creator, sometimes as type. But the two concepts are muddied together.
I call this great application design. It allows me to do sophisticated things with my data. But the system keeps everything straight and does the right thing when I want to do simple things with my data.
If a file doesn't have a type/creator -- as is the case when it came from a different OS -- then the file displays a generic icon. The file extension is then used to lookup in a user-editable table to assign the type/creator from the extension.
Unfortunantly, I don't think we'll see such an elegant system on my new favorite system because it would require (a) a filesystem to have type/creator fields, and (b) a major desktop environment to make use of these fields.
Command line tools don't care about type/creator -- just as in the case of Apple's MPW command line tools on Mac. Although CLI tools can pay attention to type/creator if they want to. For instance, a CLI mp3 player could be smart enough not to play a file whose type says JPEG or HTML.
If I understand how VMWare works, that would be a problem because VMWare uses special Windows video and sound drivers that interface to the VMware virtual machine. But that can be solved as well, by emulating the video and sound hardware and running signed drivers on it.
Use Virtual PC on a Macintosh.
It emulates hardware, including the x86 processor. It's not fast, but it's great for certian uses. It spells out exactly what it emulates. A Dec 21041 ethernet card on IRQ 11. A Trio S3 64 video card. etc., etc. Just read the manual.
I love the Virtual PC approach because I can install any OS on it. The OS doesn't "know". Pity it only runs on Mac. Too bad we don't have source so we can put hooks into it to save the video / audio. Of course you can still do screen capture on the Mac itself, thus capturing Virtual PC. I suppose one could develop Mac software to capture the sound at the MacOS level, thus defeating all signed and secure pathways in Windows and the Virtual PC emulated hardware.
Soudns great for the apartment complex.... Just the way to store all that illegal porn so if the police arrives your machine is clean, as its on someone elses drive
Isn't that the reason you should use either the RubberHose filesystem or the StegFS filesystem?
In any kind of network, you must have some kind of equivalent of an "IP Address".
On some networks, such as AppleTalk, a device with very little smarts, or if you find your address is in use, or if you are unable to cache your address until next time -- you can dynamically acquire a new address. This is not done via. any kind of centralized server like dhcp.
Now, combine these two thoughts. Suppose in an apartment building, or dormitory, that everyone can anonymously share files via. a limited range wireless protocol -- and you dynamically acquire your address every time.
Wouldn't this make it pretty damned difficult to prosecute?
It doesn't inflame things between GNOME and KDE. It doesn't attack anyone. It isn't deliberately provacative. It doesn't try to offend anyone.
Oh! I see now! It attacks our cult! It says: But that's just one of the flaws with the open source, model I guess... and then proceeds to state an opinion.
Ok, I see now. I stand corrected. I guess qualifies as a troll.
Why does everyone always say that! Like a cult or something.
McDonalds makes Big Mac's. (Yuk!) I guess the extra choice is good. Microsoft makes Windows. I guess the extra choice is good. Look at how many brands of cigarettes. I guess the extra choice is good.
I guess I'll be getting a visit from the cult elders now.
Okay, after having read the above discussion, and seen how everyone is in agreement about the following points...
* Everyone has plenty of ram to spare
* Putting ramdisks into Unix is a great idea, for all the reasons others gave in other threads
* ramdisks have such a large positive effect on performance in the post-floppy disk world
...and in the true spirit of Microsoft innovation, I propose the following:
Put the/tmp filesystem on a ramdisk. Make the ramdisk dynamically resizable. If the ramdisk gets too big, then vm will page it out to disk. But wait! There's more. If the vm system is too slow, or runs out of real disk space, then you could make it use a swapfile and put that back on the ramdisk under/tmp.
The wonderfulness of this concept is that it involves no hacks to the Linux kernel, and so wouldn't give the BSD bigots anything to say. Furthermore, even in Microsoft's view of "innovation", this would be an innovation unmatched by Windows.
Hmmm.
(Reminds me of my idea for a generator on an electric car to keep the batteries fully charged while the car is driven. Oh wait -- I don't have the patent filed for that one yet.)
The hardware box looks identical to the two Cobalt Qubes I've worked with, including the sculpturing on the front -- except for the different color of the box.
If the software is the same, and it sounds like it is, then you simply go into their web browser based administration setup, and turn on telnet access. You can seperately choose to enable or disable root access. Once you turn it on, it stays on.
I'm not familiar with the feature you describe that temporarily enabled telnet access. But then, I never mess with the little buttons and LCD on the back of the box.
Re:Yes! Linux and Macs!
on
SuSE For PPC
·
· Score: 2
You can also remote control a Mac using VNC. You can either use VNC viewer on a remote machine, or just a web browser to control your mac.
You can use AppleShare IP to get to your files over the Internet from another Mac. Or you can run an FTP or Web server on your mac and get to files from any other computer over the Internet.
All of this can be done very inexpensively. Timbuktu, while it has nicer features (such as built in file transfer), will cost you money.
Slashdot Mirror
Anytime you call an 800 number, your caller ID is available
Well, not really caller ID. It's called ANI, I think. It is unrelated to caller ID. It has to do with billing. The owner of an 800 number has the right to know who is calling since they pay the bill.
you'd only be out the cost of the old machine
:-)
Just for grins... let's not forget that at one point in history Macs were outrageously expensive. Nowdays they're just expensive.
Which is a contributing factor to why I like Linux.
So what would happen if I had a very fragile open mail relay? Let's say, a very old Mac, running MacOS 7.x, and some cheezy SMTP server that isn't closed off. A seperate Linux box running packet sniffers, capturing everything to a big hard disk.
Would it still be possible to catch and prosecute spammers using a setup like this? Would it require that the poor little Mac actually have some other use besides as a spammer trap? Would there have to be any actual damages? What if it crashed the machine (very likely, btw)?
Opinions?
I already have 11 Macs. (At home. More at work.)
I've switched to Linux.
I still don't like 8.3 filenames. I don't find myself limited to 8.3 in Linux. Why not switch to Linux if you hate 8.3?
See, that's just it - you don't know. You know what they wanted to open it with last time, not what they want to do with it last time. Do I want to render that HTML? Edit it? View it's source? Grep it?
Mac solves this problem nicely. Every file has a type and creator field. Type indicates what kind of data the content is. Creator indicates what program to open the document with. Simply double click a document, and it opens with the application that created it.
You can always grab a document and drag it on top of a different application and drop it there (drag-drop) to open a document with a different application. The different application only cares about what type the document is, not the creator. If the type is, say, jpeg, it doesn't matter what program created it. Some programs will display it. Some programs will edit it, etc.
You can always change the type or creator of a file. (Usually you leave the type alone.) It's about as easy doing a chown/chmod type operation, albeit graphically. End users don't have the tools to do this. The way that end users change the creator is to open the document in a different application and then save it. The saving application stamps it with it's own creator signature. To change the type, again just open it in a compatible application and save it as a different type. For instance, open an Excel 5 file, save it in Excel 2 format. The filetype changes -- but so does the content. If I open a JPEG file (created by Netscape, and having Netscape's creator) in Photoshop, and then save it, the type doesn't change only the content. If you didn't change anything, and if the application is smart, it doesn't actually "save" anything, it merely changes the file creator. Sadly, in practice, implementors just go through the entire motions of saving the document, since computing power is so cheap.
To an end user, these operations are intuitive side effects of the way applications naturally open and save documents. If I created a file in Photoshop, then it gets photoshop's creator and opens in photoshop -- unless I drag-drop it to a different application. But other applications know whether they can even open it or not based on the type.
And best of all, no filename extensions.
Think of the document as a noun. The application as a verb. Grab the document drag it to whatever application you want. This is how you signify that you want to edit it, render it, etc. in a different tool. Apps stamp type/creators into documents to keep everything straight automagically. When you double click a doc, the desktop cooperates by launching the right app based on the file's creator -- NOT the file's type.
Filename extensions can only indicate a mixture of type/creator. Sometimes you think of it as creator, sometimes as type. But the two concepts are muddied together.
I call this great application design. It allows me to do sophisticated things with my data. But the system keeps everything straight and does the right thing when I want to do simple things with my data.
If a file doesn't have a type/creator -- as is the case when it came from a different OS -- then the file displays a generic icon. The file extension is then used to lookup in a user-editable table to assign the type/creator from the extension.
Unfortunantly, I don't think we'll see such an elegant system on my new favorite system because it would require (a) a filesystem to have type/creator fields, and (b) a major desktop environment to make use of these fields.
Command line tools don't care about type/creator -- just as in the case of Apple's MPW command line tools on Mac. Although CLI tools can pay attention to type/creator if they want to. For instance, a CLI mp3 player could be smart enough not to play a file whose type says JPEG or HTML.
If I understand how VMWare works, that would be a problem because VMWare uses special Windows video and sound drivers that interface to the VMware virtual machine. But that can be solved as well, by emulating the video and sound hardware and running signed drivers on it.
Use Virtual PC on a Macintosh.
It emulates hardware, including the x86 processor. It's not fast, but it's great for certian uses. It spells out exactly what it emulates. A Dec 21041 ethernet card on IRQ 11. A Trio S3 64 video card. etc., etc. Just read the manual.
I love the Virtual PC approach because I can install any OS on it. The OS doesn't "know". Pity it only runs on Mac. Too bad we don't have source so we can put hooks into it to save the video / audio. Of course you can still do screen capture on the Mac itself, thus capturing Virtual PC. I suppose one could develop Mac software to capture the sound at the MacOS level, thus defeating all signed and secure pathways in Windows and the Virtual PC emulated hardware.
Soudns great for the apartment complex.... Just the way to store all that illegal porn so if the police arrives your machine is clean, as its on someone elses drive
Isn't that the reason you should use either the RubberHose filesystem or the StegFS filesystem?
In any kind of network, you must have some kind of equivalent of an "IP Address".
On some networks, such as AppleTalk, a device with very little smarts, or if you find your address is in use, or if you are unable to cache your address until next time -- you can dynamically acquire a new address. This is not done via. any kind of centralized server like dhcp.
Now, combine these two thoughts. Suppose in an apartment building, or dormitory, that everyone can anonymously share files via. a limited range wireless protocol -- and you dynamically acquire your address every time.
Wouldn't this make it pretty damned difficult to prosecute?
Sex and drugs is ok
:-)
Sex and Linux is ok
Okay, let me guess...
You're really George W. Bush in disguise.
Keeping up Slashdot's quota of gramatical errors for over a 50th of a century.
How can the rollout of an OS that is so long overdue be a cultural event?
The new PowerPC OS rewritten from scratch was promised in 1994.
Whatever happened to American entrepeneurship and free-market capitalism?
It's in hiding, because if you do anything that competes with MS, you can't get VC, and you are likely to get squished like an annoying bug.
To make it worse, MS uses it's monopoly power to leverage it's way into new market segments and create monopolies there.
In what possible way is the post a troll?
It doesn't inflame things between GNOME and KDE. It doesn't attack anyone. It isn't deliberately provacative. It doesn't try to offend anyone.
Oh! I see now! It attacks our cult! It says: But that's just one of the flaws with the open source, model I guess... and then proceeds to state an opinion.
Ok, I see now. I stand corrected. I guess qualifies as a troll.
... I guess the extra choice is good.
Why does everyone always say that! Like a cult or something.
McDonalds makes Big Mac's. (Yuk!) I guess the extra choice is good. Microsoft makes Windows. I guess the extra choice is good. Look at how many brands of cigarettes. I guess the extra choice is good.
I guess I'll be getting a visit from the cult elders now.
Pick up your monitor, and rotate it exactly 90 degrees, how easy is that?
I hope you remembered to file a patent application prior to posting this idea.
Okay, after having read the above discussion, and seen how everyone is in agreement about the following points...
/tmp filesystem on a ramdisk. Make the ramdisk dynamically resizable. If the ramdisk gets too big, then vm will page it out to disk. But wait! There's more. If the vm system is too slow, or runs out of real disk space, then you could make it use a swapfile and put that back on the ramdisk under /tmp.
* Everyone has plenty of ram to spare
* Putting ramdisks into Unix is a great idea, for all the reasons others gave in other threads
* ramdisks have such a large positive effect on performance in the post-floppy disk world
...and in the true spirit of Microsoft innovation, I propose the following:
Put the
The wonderfulness of this concept is that it involves no hacks to the Linux kernel, and so wouldn't give the BSD bigots anything to say. Furthermore, even in Microsoft's view of "innovation", this would be an innovation unmatched by Windows.
Hmmm.
(Reminds me of my idea for a generator on an electric car to keep the batteries fully charged while the car is driven. Oh wait -- I don't have the patent filed for that one yet.)
If the software is the same, and it sounds like it is, then you simply go into their web browser based administration setup, and turn on telnet access. You can seperately choose to enable or disable root access. Once you turn it on, it stays on.
I'm not familiar with the feature you describe that temporarily enabled telnet access. But then, I never mess with the little buttons and LCD on the back of the box.
You can use AppleShare IP to get to your files over the Internet from another Mac. Or you can run an FTP or Web server on your mac and get to files from any other computer over the Internet.
All of this can be done very inexpensively. Timbuktu, while it has nicer features (such as built in file transfer), will cost you money.