In many cases, the best comments on slashdot come from people with first hand experience. It's been dissapointing that the place has been so overrun not only by trolls, but by armchair opinionists. Of course this is probably what makes the site so popular...
Still, I wish there was a moderation option called "The Horse's Mouth" or "The Straight Dope" so that people could filter on primary source comments.
Interbase (Firebird on sourceforge) has a nice niche in the open source database arena as well.
I would put it somewhere in between mysql and posgres in terms of ease of use, ease of installation, performance, features, and third party tool support.
One thing you could try would be to use the midgard web content management system (www.midgard-project.org) along with nadmin management interface developed by the guys at hklc.com.
This gives you full editable-through-a-browser PHP4 dynamic pages backed up by mysql (other database support under dev.), virtual hosting, mailling list, DNS, webmail, and who knows what else will be thrown in.
I've used this for a couple intranet sites. The initial configuration is hard, but once it's running you're good for years. Migard development is very active and support via the midgard mailing list is excellent.
Nadmin is still somewhere between alpha and beta quality, but it's coming along quickly.
The answer to this and other tantalizing questions is of course - privacy.
- Use freenet.
- Subscribe to a Zero-Knowledge type of service.
- Use trusted, logless proxies with SSL.
By default there's no privacy on today's internet, but the technology is there. So far the convenience factor has prevented most privacy technologies from achieving critical mass, but draconian content-control powergrabs by the MPAA and RIAA might just tip the balance.
As someone who packages with RPM 3.x regularly, I wish there was better documentation on the changes and new features in RPM 4+. All of the good public documentation for RPM is for version 2.x, and there are a only a few references for 3.x. I haven't been able to find any *usable* documentation for 4.x (No, the changelog is not usable). Is anyone working on this? Why should I stop using my "ancient" RPM version when the new one is undocumented?
It's really sad that this flaimbait has been moderated up to five. I can only hope that it got that high based on "+1 funny" votes for the double-irony of the content.
As someone who was affected by the northpoint fiasco and recently re-signed with another DSL company despite the lower costs of cable solutions, I think I can shed some light on the subject.
DSL is a tremendously important technology because it brings you greater than T1 performance (both download AND upload) at a fraction of the cost of a T1. This scares the sh*t out of incumbant telecoms- They have ZERO reason to spend money buying DSL equipment only so that they can make less money on data services.
Local and national telecoms have, as far as I can see, done everything in their power to prevent DSL technology from taking hold. When independent startup (rhythms, northpoint, covad, etc) companies attempt to go around the stalling telecoms and provide the DSL service that customers demand, their job is made as difficult as possible due the local telco's control of CO's.
At the same time that the incumbant telcos are sabotaging independent efforts to offer DSL service, they are telling their current and potential T1 customers how unreliable and poor DSL solutions are (First hand experience here). It's a brazen display of market power that should give anyone pause. There's a reason why AT&T on one hand declined to smoothly transition Northpoint's business DSL clients, and on the other hand sent out letters to @work businesses offering to "upgrade" them to a T1. AT&T sends the message of their own making loud an clear- DSL is "unstable", buy our expensive T1's like everyone else. It's a total racket.
The only vision that incumbant telcos have for DSL is in a crippled ADSL form. Unsurprisingly, this is very similar to their vision for cable modems.
ADSL, and asymetric cable modems, *by design* turn a generic internet connection into a consumer-only connection. Don't let the marketing fool you- This isn't a feature. Your ability to publish information is strongly and arbitrarily curtailed.
Ever notice how you can pay more money for faster download speeds with cable modems, but your upstream stream is always the same? Haven't you ever wondered why *no* decent upstream bandwidth is advertised by cable companies? Most cable and ADSL providers even go further than this and explicitly forbid "servers" in their terms and conditions. Why is this? Certainly it's not a question of bandwidth, since they are handing bandwidth out left and right (so long as it's downstream).
This effort to "consumerify" as many internet services as possible has far reaching affects besides simply protecting the inflated revenues of T1 sales. It effectively takes away your press. The harder Time Warner makes it for people to self-publish on the internet, the less competition will exist for their own offerings.
I'm not saying that everyone would want to publish information on the internet, or that people who really want to publish on the internet won't be able to, but the "war on upstream bandwidth" does weigh the dice in the favour of media and telco interests.
People don't demand one-way bandwidth- A feature that would truly be in the customer's interest would be a protocol where you could dynamically configure upstream and downstream bandwidth from a fixed pool. I find it highly suspicious that *no* cable company or telco-operated DSL service provides even an option for increased upstream bandwidth. It's certainly not a question of demand.
Anyway, I've ranted long enough on this, and it's just going to be marked flamebait anyway. But I'm voting with my wallet, and I'm giving money to companies who are stepping up and offering SDSL because because I believe that it's important, and I'm not going to sell out to AT&T or Verizon or roadrunner or @home, who are manipulating the low end of the bandwidth market to turn us all into happy little consumers.
I've been using mozilla as my primary browser for the past 4 months. The browsing speed is acceptable on my PII-400 linux box, but not exactly snappy. After reading the recent articles on KDE, I thought it might be time to check out the alternatives to straight mozilla.
Konquerer is quite nice, but I generally prefer to stick with the gmome/gtk apps. I was pleasantly surprised that Galeon has come a LONG way since I last looked at it. In some areas it has even surpassed mozilla's functionality:
- user interface to control pop ups & animations.
- nicer, more integrated bookmark management
- better support for external handlers, like ftp and page source viewers.
- crash recovery picks up browsing where you left off.
- something called tabbed mode that I haven't played around with yet.
- the starting points of integration with nautilus.
All this, and it looks better, runs faster, and uses less memory than straight Mozilla. A win all around.
Java 1.0 tech had too many limitations when Corel tried to build an office product around it.
Now, however, Java 1.3 has addressed many of these deficiencies. Printing support is there, performance is there, garbage collection, threading, and the graphics libraries are mature. I'd like to see someone give it another go, if not with Sun's jdk one of the others.
SOAP or CORBA could allow other languages to interface nicely.
If you look under the hood of the UW Imap server, you will see that it supports many more formats than straight mbox. I don't think that maildir is one of them, unfortunately, but there are a few (mbx comes to mind) that overcome some of the more blantant shortcomings of mbox.
Is UW Imap free software? If so, someone should feel free to give it maildir, db, sql, or other mailbox support. For some reason I seem to remember that IWImap was not free software, even though the source is available (some weird academic license hostile to commercial use?). The author is a good programmer and active in the standards process, but can be abrasive to work with.
Yes, you have a point that you need to read contracts before you sign them. However, the situation is not nearly as as simple as you make it out. Often a individual worker (yes, even a technical worker) negotiates from a position of weakness.
The company will get along just fine without you, but you may find yourself in serious difficulty without work. There are things you can do to lessen this equality, such as look for new jobs before you've left an existing one, but the fact remains that large numbers of people do not have the luxury of negotiating employment contracts.
There aren't any strong unions or even trade organizations in the technology sector, as their are in other more mature industries, to overcome this fundamental inequality. So yes, it's a noble idea that you don't have to sign a contract you don't agree with, but it doesn't always work that way in practice.
Just because some people are temporarily enjoying high salaries and a scarcity of competition for their jobs doesn't mean the system actually works.
You've say that XFS is very impressive, and that you've switched from ReiserFS to XFS.
Can you elaborate as to why you switched, using quantitative data? Does XFS boot faster after a crash? Does it require less memory? Is it faster for n-sized files? Is it faster for n-way SMP systems? Is it more secure, more reliable? Do you have any repeatable benchmarks?
I'm surprised that the bulk of the discussion here is along the lines of "How can we make advertising work on the internet?". This question presupposes that advertising on the internet is a good thing. Not to sound patronizing, but this is the real question that should be up for debate.
For someone who is bombarded by advertising every day, it may be difficult to see it for what it really is. Subtle mind control, 2nd generation corporate propaganda, a full-scale assault on free will. This may sound paranoid and extremist, but really think about it. Advertising is not informational- it does not appeal to your powers of logic.
In addition to the inherit problems with advertising, online advertising results in spam and privacy violations (in the name of "audience targetting").
I don't think it's at all obvious that we should publish designer disinformation in order to publish real information.
What does advertising give us? Is it worth the cost? Is there really no other way to finance information? I would dearly hope that the answer to this last question is no. Every once in a while I hear someone mention the idea of micropayments. I know that I would pay small amounts of money in lieu of watching advertising. Advertising *does* cost you- it's not really free. You might as well pay for it up front where you can see all of the costs, and make decisions based on reason.
Lots of people here are apparently surprised that it took so long for this backdoor to be found. I thought I'd try to present an explanation.
1. Interbase wasn't officially released under an open source license until last summer. I at least, did not spend any serious time with it until the license was correct.
2. The open source interbase got off to a very slow start. Here's why:
- Borland didn't release all the tools required to build and test interbase code.
- Many of the original developers had left Borland, meaning that there was a shortage of mentors for new developers.
- Borland yanked startup funding at the last minute from the group that was going to take over the management of the code base, causing many to question interbase's future.
- Documentation of the code base is still unfinished.
- The codebase is large and complex.
Independent interbase builds (firebird on sourceforge) didn't start happening until very recently. In my mind they found this bug faster than I would have expected.
This saying brings shame upon those who utter it. While teaching does have just as many incompetent members as every other job classification, it has far, far more people who truly care about their job and not about their paycheck.
I think everyone, no matter how awful your school was/is, can think of at least one outstanding teacher who changed your life- who challenged you to do something you otherwise would not have done, who helped you to pursue an interest that would otherwise have been out of reach, or who showed you a broader viewpoint on the world.
Most teachers *could* do plenty of other jobs if they wanted to. We should thank them for choosing to teach in places where they are sorely needed rather than pursue a selfish self-interest. Think of all the sacrifices many teachers make for their jobs (money, community support, time, in some places personal safety) and ask yourself if you could do the same.
Yes, there are some serious problems with a public education system where our most gifted individuals are unchallenged at best, persecuted at worse. Focus your attacks on the system. The teachers themselves are often victims as well.
For what it's worth, I've seen this particular kind of post before on other threads and now believe that it is a troll.
I replied to the first one I saw with a outrage, blah blah, but shortly afterward I found the "20inchfan" troll message board and realized that it was highly probable that I'd been played. (There was some fascinating stuff on that sid, BTW, I hope that it's preserved and can be analysed psychologically at some point)
Anyway, the modus operandi of this kind of troll involves posting as a profit-motivated "consultant" who appears subtly clueless and hostile towards an open source philosophy. Be warned!
Not to be a nitpicking editor, but the slashdot writeup of this article is a bit confusing.
WIPO is considering some new rules which would make it easier for plaintiffs to get domain names which are '"geographical terms," individuals' personal names and "tradenames"'.
I think it would be clearer to say that WIPO is considering some new rules that force people to give up domain names which are geographical terms, individuals' personal names, and fall into the loosely defined catagory of "tradenames".
.... and have even transferred domains away from defendants who were acting in good faith (read: cybersquatting).
I think you mean to say that WIPO is forcing people to give up their domain names even when they are NOT cybersquatting.
The story also discusses how WIPO now gets the lion's share of the domain name disputes because they rule for the plaintiff the most often.
What the poster is trying to say is that people who bring domain disputes get to choose which organization hears their case. WIPO has a track record of finding for the defendent 84% of the time, much more than competing organizations, so they are the favoured choice of people bringing such suits.
I personally don't understand how this ludricrious idea of letting the plantiff pick the court ever got off the ground! What kind of f*cked up legal system works this way?!?
Mozilla M18 nightly build 8/7/2000 -
29,870K Mem Usage
I would list internet explorer but it's so integrated into W2K that it's hard to get an accurate number.
The M18 nightly build is the most stable mozilla I've used yet, but there are still some serious issues. The bloat is one of them. The fact that the preference windows are still screwed up is another. They either display incorrectly or, after clicking on a few of them, the "OK" button stops working and you can only cancel and start all over.
Best things about M18? It's free software and it has a "Don't load images from external sites" feature which is great for stomping web bugs and banner ads.
There's some people out there who are intrinsically creators, and others who are more interested in destruction.
I'm reminded of a day at the beach a few years ago where I watched a father and his son build a sand castle. When the finished, the father said to his son, "Do you know what the the best part of this is, David? It's WRECKING the castle!" and then the boy proceded to kick and batter the towers while his father laughed encouragingly.
Script kiddies actually enjoy destroying other people's work. It makes them feel powerful. It's really sad that these leeches on society push us one step back for every two steps forward.
When I wrote the above, I was responding to the original poster who was complaining about the situation where an overclock-damaged CPU would reduce the reliability of a server.
I'm assuming the "server" he was talking about was an off-the-shelf or homebuilt PC, because if you're buying serious hardware for a high availity machine you're not going to be picking out the CPU in a place where you have to worry about buying an overclock-damaged CPU marked as new.
Most "servers" in this class don't have RAID, fan sensors with built in audible alarm, hot-pluggable drives, redundant power supplies, quality motherboard, or ECC memory. You will indeed run into the problems I've mentioned, and a few that I left out- most notably power supply failures. Even big power supplies that are underused and fed clean AC from a high end UPS fail, sometimes frequently. I have a dell poweredge server that has lost 2 450Watt power supplies in 4 years. Not a stellar record.
The stock Linux/BSD distributions don't appear to support hardware monitoring either. I bet a daemon to do this exists somewhere but I haven't run across it in either the latest redhat, mandrake, and openBSD distros.
Also, about the stray radiation: Studies have shown that a computer that is on 24x7 will be adversely affected in such a way approximately once every 3 months. Most of the time it doesn't do any harm, but occasionally it does. I can't prove that it's been the cause of any failures I've seen, but I've seen a couple sealed boxes that are normally 100% reliable run for years and one day reboot due to a memory parity error.
I have to keep a bunch of machines up 24x7. Most are quality boxes, but a few are normal PCs. The normal PCs do have the problems I've described, and while most of them fail less than 3 times a year occasionally one does fail that often, so I still think that 3 strange failures a year is within the range of "normal" behavior for such beasts..
I think mozilla's biggest strategic error was trying to do too much. My personal hindsight suggest that they should have used existing graphic libraries instead of writing their own widgets from scratch. Yes, this makes some platforms lag behind but it would make at least one major one come out faster. I have a feeling that it would encourage more developers to get involved as well. Having to learn yet another graphic library is a hassle that no doubt keeps some developers away.
I think it was also a huge mistake to try and make a communications platform with email etc instead of just a bare browser. You can always add on stuff later. Right now it's two years later and there's nothing usuable.
I tried M16 for a couple weeks and I was extremely disappointed with the number of blatant, serious bugs. It will a significant amount of time to fix them. *sigh*
The most promising thing I see coming out of mozilla is that Galleon project mentioned last week. I wish them luck.
Just in case the parent post was serious, I thought I'd mention a couple things:
1. Reputable retail outlets will not resell returned, potentially defective merchandise as new. They will return the product to the original manufacturer. The bulk of the major retailers fall into this catagory (compusa, cdw, necx, pcwarehouse, etc) as do many smaller places. If you are buying from a place that is not reputable, you have a lot more problems to worry about than overclockers.
2. Overclocking is safe and easy these days. AMD and especially Intel underclock some chips for purely nontechnical reasons. You might as well see what your CPU can really do.
3. Your reasoning here:
I don't want to hear about how "most" overclockers are responsible, blah blah. One person getting screwed on a machine that takes years for him to finally save up for is one screwing too many.
is outright wrong. I'm not going to justify this statement here because it would go offtopic, but it should be obvious.
4. As someone who runs unattended servers year round, 3 lockups a year is not unusual. You're going to have problems with hard disk failures, CPU and case fan failures, spontaneous memory failures caused by atmospheric raditation, as well as misc. cabling and environmental-related failures. I'm also assuming that you have a quality UPS. I would not consider a machine that locked up for mysterious reasons 3 times a year suspiciously unstable.
Please help keep overclocking an option for intelligent enthusiasts.
I would strongly recommend SecureCRT if you're not adverse to spending some money.
Besides having the best SSH implementation I've seen on windows, the terminal emulation is excellent and highly configurable. One of the reasons that I like it, even more than an xterm, is that when you scroll back in vi or some other editor, you actually go up in your document instead of going to the point on the shell just before you launched your editor. This makes cut and paste very easy, and there's even an option for printing out your selected text (Good for log analysis).
One other very nice thing is the free updates. I originally purchased SecureCRT 2.x and all bug fixes, beta releases, and official new releases so far have been without addition charge.
Slashdot Mirror
In many cases, the best comments on slashdot come from people with first hand experience. It's been dissapointing that the place has been so overrun not only by trolls, but by armchair opinionists. Of course this is probably what makes the site so popular...
Still, I wish there was a moderation option called "The Horse's Mouth" or "The Straight Dope" so that people could filter on primary source comments.
I'm sure there more, but I would say the biggest thing postgres has that interbase doesn't is support for objects and object-oriented behaviors.
Interbase (Firebird on sourceforge) has a nice niche in the open source database arena as well.
I would put it somewhere in between mysql and posgres in terms of ease of use, ease of installation, performance, features, and third party tool support.
For some of us it's a good compromise.
One thing you could try would be to use the midgard web content management system (www.midgard-project.org) along with nadmin management interface developed by the guys at hklc.com.
This gives you full editable-through-a-browser PHP4 dynamic pages backed up by mysql (other database support under dev.), virtual hosting, mailling list, DNS, webmail, and who knows what else will be thrown in.
I've used this for a couple intranet sites. The initial configuration is hard, but once it's running you're good for years. Migard development is very active and support via the midgard mailing list is excellent.
Nadmin is still somewhere between alpha and beta quality, but it's coming along quickly.
The answer to this and other tantalizing questions is of course - privacy.
- Use freenet.
- Subscribe to a Zero-Knowledge type of service.
- Use trusted, logless proxies with SSL.
By default there's no privacy on today's internet, but the technology is there. So far the convenience factor has prevented most privacy technologies from achieving critical mass, but draconian content-control powergrabs by the MPAA and RIAA might just tip the balance.
As someone who packages with RPM 3.x regularly, I wish there was better documentation on the changes and new features in RPM 4+. All of the good public documentation for RPM is for version 2.x, and there are a only a few references for 3.x. I haven't been able to find any *usable* documentation for 4.x (No, the changelog is not usable). Is anyone working on this? Why should I stop using my "ancient" RPM version when the new one is undocumented?
-OT
It's really sad that this flaimbait has been moderated up to five. I can only hope that it got that high based on "+1 funny" votes for the double-irony of the content.
As someone who was affected by the northpoint fiasco and recently re-signed with another DSL company despite the lower costs of cable solutions, I think I can shed some light on the subject.
DSL is a tremendously important technology because it brings you greater than T1 performance (both download AND upload) at a fraction of the cost of a T1. This scares the sh*t out of incumbant telecoms- They have ZERO reason to spend money buying DSL equipment only so that they can make less money on data services.
Local and national telecoms have, as far as I can see, done everything in their power to prevent DSL technology from taking hold. When independent startup (rhythms, northpoint, covad, etc) companies attempt to go around the stalling telecoms and provide the DSL service that customers demand, their job is made as difficult as possible due the local telco's control of CO's.
At the same time that the incumbant telcos are sabotaging independent efforts to offer DSL service, they are telling their current and potential T1 customers how unreliable and poor DSL solutions are (First hand experience here). It's a brazen display of market power that should give anyone pause. There's a reason why AT&T on one hand declined to smoothly transition Northpoint's business DSL clients, and on the other hand sent out letters to @work businesses offering to "upgrade" them to a T1. AT&T sends the message of their own making loud an clear- DSL is "unstable", buy our expensive T1's like everyone else. It's a total racket.
The only vision that incumbant telcos have for DSL is in a crippled ADSL form. Unsurprisingly, this is very similar to their vision for cable modems.
ADSL, and asymetric cable modems, *by design* turn a generic internet connection into a consumer-only connection. Don't let the marketing fool you- This isn't a feature. Your ability to publish information is strongly and arbitrarily curtailed.
Ever notice how you can pay more money for faster download speeds with cable modems, but your upstream stream is always the same? Haven't you ever wondered why *no* decent upstream bandwidth is advertised by cable companies? Most cable and ADSL providers even go further than this and explicitly forbid "servers" in their terms and conditions. Why is this? Certainly it's not a question of bandwidth, since they are handing bandwidth out left and right (so long as it's downstream).
This effort to "consumerify" as many internet services as possible has far reaching affects besides simply protecting the inflated revenues of T1 sales. It effectively takes away your press. The harder Time Warner makes it for people to self-publish on the internet, the less competition will exist for their own offerings.
I'm not saying that everyone would want to publish information on the internet, or that people who really want to publish on the internet won't be able to, but the "war on upstream bandwidth" does weigh the dice in the favour of media and telco interests.
People don't demand one-way bandwidth- A feature that would truly be in the customer's interest would be a protocol where you could dynamically configure upstream and downstream bandwidth from a fixed pool. I find it highly suspicious that *no* cable company or telco-operated DSL service provides even an option for increased upstream bandwidth. It's certainly not a question of demand.
Anyway, I've ranted long enough on this, and it's just going to be marked flamebait anyway. But I'm voting with my wallet, and I'm giving money to companies who are stepping up and offering SDSL because because I believe that it's important, and I'm not going to sell out to AT&T or Verizon or roadrunner or @home, who are manipulating the low end of the bandwidth market to turn us all into happy little consumers.
-DM
Nice troll.
Like all good trolls, it has a nice mix of true facts, plausible conclusions, and terrible logic.
- Anything that is mozilla based (galeon, etc) is a win for mozilla.
- you've forgotten cross platform issues.
- your cavalier dismissal of standards is naive.
- mozilla will only get better.
I've been using mozilla as my primary browser for the past 4 months. The browsing speed is acceptable on my PII-400 linux box, but not exactly snappy. After reading the recent articles on KDE, I thought it might be time to check out the alternatives to straight mozilla.
Konquerer is quite nice, but I generally prefer to stick with the gmome/gtk apps. I was pleasantly surprised that Galeon has come a LONG way since I last looked at it. In some areas it has even surpassed mozilla's functionality:
- user interface to control pop ups & animations.
- nicer, more integrated bookmark management
- better support for external handlers, like ftp and page source viewers.
- crash recovery picks up browsing where you left off.
- something called tabbed mode that I haven't played around with yet.
- the starting points of integration with nautilus.
All this, and it looks better, runs faster, and uses less memory than straight Mozilla. A win all around.
Thank you free software.
-OT
Java 1.0 tech had too many limitations when Corel tried to build an office product around it.
Now, however, Java 1.3 has addressed many of these deficiencies. Printing support is there, performance is there, garbage collection, threading, and the graphics libraries are mature. I'd like to see someone give it another go, if not with Sun's jdk one of the others.
SOAP or CORBA could allow other languages to interface nicely.
If you look under the hood of the UW Imap server, you will see that it supports many more formats than straight mbox. I don't think that maildir is one of them, unfortunately, but there are a few (mbx comes to mind) that overcome some of the more blantant shortcomings of mbox.
Is UW Imap free software? If so, someone should feel free to give it maildir, db, sql, or other mailbox support. For some reason I seem to remember that IWImap was not free software, even though the source is available (some weird academic license hostile to commercial use?). The author is a good programmer and active in the standards process, but can be abrasive to work with.
Yes, you have a point that you need to read contracts before you sign them. However, the situation is not nearly as as simple as you make it out. Often a individual worker (yes, even a technical worker) negotiates from a position of weakness.
The company will get along just fine without you, but you may find yourself in serious difficulty without work. There are things you can do to lessen this equality, such as look for new jobs before you've left an existing one, but the fact remains that large numbers of people do not have the luxury of negotiating employment contracts.
There aren't any strong unions or even trade organizations in the technology sector, as their are in other more mature industries, to overcome this fundamental inequality. So yes, it's a noble idea that you don't have to sign a contract you don't agree with, but it doesn't always work that way in practice.
Just because some people are temporarily enjoying high salaries and a scarcity of competition for their jobs doesn't mean the system actually works.
You've say that XFS is very impressive, and that you've switched from ReiserFS to XFS.
:)
Can you elaborate as to why you switched, using quantitative data? Does XFS boot faster after a crash? Does it require less memory? Is it faster for n-sized files? Is it faster for n-way SMP systems? Is it more secure, more reliable? Do you have any repeatable benchmarks?
Inquiring minds want to know
-OT
I'm surprised that the bulk of the discussion here is along the lines of "How can we make advertising work on the internet?". This question presupposes that advertising on the internet is a good thing. Not to sound patronizing, but this is the real question that should be up for debate.
For someone who is bombarded by advertising every day, it may be difficult to see it for what it really is. Subtle mind control, 2nd generation corporate propaganda, a full-scale assault on free will. This may sound paranoid and extremist, but really think about it. Advertising is not informational- it does not appeal to your powers of logic.
In addition to the inherit problems with advertising, online advertising results in spam and privacy violations (in the name of "audience targetting").
I don't think it's at all obvious that we should publish designer disinformation in order to publish real information.
What does advertising give us? Is it worth the cost? Is there really no other way to finance information? I would dearly hope that the answer to this last question is no. Every once in a while I hear someone mention the idea of micropayments. I know that I would pay small amounts of money in lieu of watching advertising. Advertising *does* cost you- it's not really free. You might as well pay for it up front where you can see all of the costs, and make decisions based on reason.
Lots of people here are apparently surprised that it took so long for this backdoor to be found. I thought I'd try to present an explanation.
1. Interbase wasn't officially released under an open source license until last summer. I at least, did not spend any serious time with it until the license was correct.
2. The open source interbase got off to a very slow start. Here's why:
- Borland didn't release all the tools required to build and test interbase code.
- Many of the original developers had left Borland, meaning that there was a shortage of mentors for new developers.
- Borland yanked startup funding at the last minute from the group that was going to take over the management of the code base, causing many to question interbase's future.
- Documentation of the code base is still unfinished.
- The codebase is large and complex.
Independent interbase builds (firebird on sourceforge) didn't start happening until very recently. In my mind they found this bug faster than I would have expected.
-OT
sulli writes
This saying brings shame upon those who utter it. While teaching does have just as many incompetent members as every other job classification, it has far, far more people who truly care about their job and not about their paycheck.
I think everyone, no matter how awful your school was/is, can think of at least one outstanding teacher who changed your life- who challenged you to do something you otherwise would not have done, who helped you to pursue an interest that would otherwise have been out of reach, or who showed you a broader viewpoint on the world.
Most teachers *could* do plenty of other jobs if they wanted to. We should thank them for choosing to teach in places where they are sorely needed rather than pursue a selfish self-interest. Think of all the sacrifices many teachers make for their jobs (money, community support, time, in some places personal safety) and ask yourself if you could do the same.
Yes, there are some serious problems with a public education system where our most gifted individuals are unchallenged at best, persecuted at worse. Focus your attacks on the system. The teachers themselves are often victims as well.
-OT
For what it's worth, I've seen this particular kind of post before on other threads and now believe that it is a troll.
I replied to the first one I saw with a outrage, blah blah, but shortly afterward I found the "20inchfan" troll message board and realized that it was highly probable that I'd been played. (There was some fascinating stuff on that sid, BTW, I hope that it's preserved and can be analysed psychologically at some point)
Anyway, the modus operandi of this kind of troll involves posting as a profit-motivated "consultant" who appears subtly clueless and hostile towards an open source philosophy. Be warned!
-OT
Not to be a nitpicking editor, but the slashdot writeup of this article is a bit confusing.
I think it would be clearer to say that WIPO is considering some new rules that force people to give up domain names which are geographical terms, individuals' personal names, and fall into the loosely defined catagory of "tradenames".
I think you mean to say that WIPO is forcing people to give up their domain names even when they are NOT cybersquatting.
What the poster is trying to say is that people who bring domain disputes get to choose which organization hears their case. WIPO has a track record of finding for the defendent 84% of the time, much more than competing organizations, so they are the favoured choice of people bringing such suits.
I personally don't understand how this ludricrious idea of letting the plantiff pick the court ever got off the ground! What kind of f*cked up legal system works this way?!?
-OTFrom Win2K Taskmanager:
Netscape 4.73 -
11,370K Mem Usage
Mozilla M18 nightly build 8/7/2000 -
29,870K Mem Usage
I would list internet explorer but it's so integrated into W2K that it's hard to get an accurate number.
The M18 nightly build is the most stable mozilla I've used yet, but there are still some serious issues. The bloat is one of them. The fact that the preference windows are still screwed up is another. They either display incorrectly or, after clicking on a few of them, the "OK" button stops working and you can only cancel and start all over.
Best things about M18? It's free software and it has a "Don't load images from external sites" feature which is great for stomping web bugs and banner ads.
There's some people out there who are intrinsically creators, and others who are more interested in destruction.
I'm reminded of a day at the beach a few years ago where I watched a father and his son build a sand castle. When the finished, the father said to his son, "Do you know what the the best part of this is, David? It's WRECKING the castle!" and then the boy proceded to kick and batter the towers while his father laughed encouragingly.
Script kiddies actually enjoy destroying other people's work. It makes them feel powerful. It's really sad that these leeches on society push us one step back for every two steps forward.
When I wrote the above, I was responding to the original poster who was complaining about the situation where an overclock-damaged CPU would reduce the reliability of a server.
I'm assuming the "server" he was talking about was an off-the-shelf or homebuilt PC, because if you're buying serious hardware for a high availity machine you're not going to be picking out the CPU in a place where you have to worry about buying an overclock-damaged CPU marked as new.
Most "servers" in this class don't have RAID, fan sensors with built in audible alarm, hot-pluggable drives, redundant power supplies, quality motherboard, or ECC memory. You will indeed run into the problems I've mentioned, and a few that I left out- most notably power supply failures. Even big power supplies that are underused and fed clean AC from a high end UPS fail, sometimes frequently. I have a dell poweredge server that has lost 2 450Watt power supplies in 4 years. Not a stellar record.
The stock Linux/BSD distributions don't appear to support hardware monitoring either. I bet a daemon to do this exists somewhere but I haven't run across it in either the latest redhat, mandrake, and openBSD distros.
Also, about the stray radiation: Studies have shown that a computer that is on 24x7 will be adversely affected in such a way approximately once every 3 months. Most of the time it doesn't do any harm, but occasionally it does. I can't prove that it's been the cause of any failures I've seen, but I've seen a couple sealed boxes that are normally 100% reliable run for years and one day reboot due to a memory parity error.
I have to keep a bunch of machines up 24x7. Most are quality boxes, but a few are normal PCs. The normal PCs do have the problems I've described, and while most of them fail less than 3 times a year occasionally one does fail that often, so I still think that 3 strange failures a year is within the range of "normal" behavior for such beasts..
Well, I hate to say it but I agree.
I think mozilla's biggest strategic error was trying to do too much. My personal hindsight suggest that they should have used existing graphic libraries instead of writing their own widgets from scratch. Yes, this makes some platforms lag behind but it would make at least one major one come out faster. I have a feeling that it would encourage more developers to get involved as well. Having to learn yet another graphic library is a hassle that no doubt keeps some developers away.
I think it was also a huge mistake to try and make a communications platform with email etc instead of just a bare browser. You can always add on stuff later. Right now it's two years later and there's nothing usuable.
I tried M16 for a couple weeks and I was extremely disappointed with the number of blatant, serious bugs. It will a significant amount of time to fix them. *sigh*
The most promising thing I see coming out of mozilla is that Galleon project mentioned last week. I wish them luck.
1. Reputable retail outlets will not resell returned, potentially defective merchandise as new. They will return the product to the original manufacturer. The bulk of the major retailers fall into this catagory (compusa, cdw, necx, pcwarehouse, etc) as do many smaller places. If you are buying from a place that is not reputable, you have a lot more problems to worry about than overclockers.
2. Overclocking is safe and easy these days. AMD and especially Intel underclock some chips for purely nontechnical reasons. You might as well see what your CPU can really do.
3. Your reasoning here:
is outright wrong. I'm not going to justify this statement here because it would go offtopic, but it should be obvious.4. As someone who runs unattended servers year round, 3 lockups a year is not unusual. You're going to have problems with hard disk failures, CPU and case fan failures, spontaneous memory failures caused by atmospheric raditation, as well as misc. cabling and environmental-related failures. I'm also assuming that you have a quality UPS. I would not consider a machine that locked up for mysterious reasons 3 times a year suspiciously unstable.
Please help keep overclocking an option for intelligent enthusiasts.
-OT
I would strongly recommend SecureCRT if you're not adverse to spending some money.
Besides having the best SSH implementation I've seen on windows, the terminal emulation is excellent and highly configurable. One of the reasons that I like it, even more than an xterm, is that when you scroll back in vi or some other editor, you actually go up in your document instead of going to the point on the shell just before you launched your editor. This makes cut and paste very easy, and there's even an option for printing out your selected text (Good for log analysis).
One other very nice thing is the free updates. I originally purchased SecureCRT 2.x and all bug fixes, beta releases, and official new releases so far have been without addition charge.