Also subscribe to the MAPS RSS and DUL lists. Out of the spam that I get here, 99% of it gets blocked by RSS and DUL, and the other 1% by RBL. I've not received a single spam since installing these.
If you have sendmail 8.10 or later, do this in your sendmail.mc file:
FEATURE(dnsbl,`blackholes.mail-abuse.org',`Mail rejected, see http://www.mail-abuse.org/rbl/')dnl
FEATURE(dnsbl,`relays.mail-abuse.org',`Open relay rejected, see http://www.mail-abuse.org/rss/')dnl
FEATURE(dnsbl,`dialups.mail-abuse.org',`Dialup rejected, see http://www.mail-abuse.org/dul/')dnl
FEATURE(`delay_checks')dnl
You won't see any more spam, and your log file will show the address they tried to send to (this is what delay_checks is for). ---
The usefulness in this isn't to play old looking games, or even to port classics like Asteriods, even though I'm sure a few people will do just that. Think exposing the next generation of kids to game programming. Or programming in general. ---
We have a whole bunch of in-house business apps designed for Windows. I've tested several of them with Wine, and they all run flawlessly under current CVS builds (as long as you have the Windows standard fonts installed).
If this company ever does decide to migrate to Linux, or even to Windows 2000, many of those little apps will be eliminated anyway (there's an ongoing project to do just that running now). The remainder of them will run under Wine, until they are replaced or eliminated.
For the really intractable apps, VMware might be a good solution, but we don't really seem to have any of those. I've even been able to check mail in Lotus Goats under Wine.
Like any migration, it just has to be well planned. I could migrate this company for about 105-110% of the cost of W2K licenses for all the workstations, but I won't propose it until KOffice and KDE improve further. Maybe at 3.0... ---
I may just see if we have any "Intranet" workers and see if a Linux/Netscape build PC crashes as much as a WinNT/Explorer build... Let's face it, Linux hasn't really been tested on the non-tech workforce yet. Users are pretty good at messing up systems. Sometimes they deliberately sabotage them in the hope of getting a new laptop.
Be sure and give them the root password! That way, when they can't mess up the whole system from their user account, they will have a way to "get their important work done." ---
I've had my share of stupid Linux users, too. Spoke with a Mandrake user this morning who didn't realize I was going to ask him to check his configuration. He didn't have the machine turned on! Linux won't make its users smarter. Then again, it wasn't designed for that - for that matter, Windows wasn't either.
Have you had 100 unclean shutdowns?
No, I've had many more than that, especially on my laptop, which likes to spontaneously un-suspend while I'm not looking, and it's unplugged. I've had fsck -a bail three times in the last six years, and all three were traced to hardware failure, and none of them were on my laptop.
78 days uptime on a box is not a big deal, regardless of the Operating System.
No, it's not a big deal, unless that box is used in common by 15 users accustomed to Windows (AND rebooting). Maybe it's because I haven't told them HOW to reboot the machine. The box has been running Linux for a year and a half, and no one's needed to know how to reboot it, except for me, when I update the kernel.
These problems are difficult to troubleshoot as NT provides no sure fire way of finding out what is wrong.
By contrast, Linux tells you exactly what's wrong, and sometimes will even tell you how to fix it! Of course, if you have a bizarre and mysterious error message, you should cross reference it against sig11. ---
Have you ever tried to get support from Microsoft? They make you call long distance to Redmond to speak to underpaid help desk staff they pulled off the streets of Seattle. (Well, actually, from the area's numerous temp agencies, but there's not much difference.)
If you want to speak to someone who knows what they're doing, you have to pay per incident, or have a prepaid contract which gets you X number of incidents per time period.
Don't believe me? Read it for yourself. And good luck getting an answer out of M$. At least with Linux I can find the answer to just about anything in ten minutes or less, without spending a dime. ---
I wasn't going to get into this argument either, but what the hell.
What happens, however, if a user turns his PC off with out shutting it down - It happens, especially when they want
to get out of the office as fast as possible on a Friday evening. Chances are that Linux will not boot up again,
Yes, this is a serious problem on a server. For a desktop client, the computer is idle most of the time so it has plenty of chance to sync, and the fsck passes 99% of the time. But your support costs will still go up, and your help desk will spend a lot of time saying, "No, don't reboot the machine, no, don't turn it off, yes, you can leave it on all weekend." Anybody that turns off a desktop machine here, regardless of OS, gets a stern warning from management, since the desktop people have a habit of pushing out updates via Tivoli over the weekends or at night.
For the really stupid users, try disconnecting the power button.
Their presentation app is ridiculous and
practically unuseable, besides why run KDE when StarOffice insists on having it's own (terribly bloated) desktop
environment.
I understand the bloated prsentation manager is off by default in OpenOffice or whatever it's called this week.
Linux has significantly higher support costs.
Higher than Windows 9x, sure. Anybody can come along and screw up the machine. NT doesn't really have this problem unless you give everyone the administrator password (you didn't, did you?)... So where are the support costs? Training? You have that expense with NT anyway. Migration? A one-time expense. Not one to ignore, certainly, but still a one-time expense. Help desk? Field techs? It's not hard to find people who know Linux. Ask around, I hear a lot of them hang out on this place called slashdot. You might even have a few of them among your current staff, and not even know it. And I guarantee they'll all be more competent than your average overpaid MCSE.
Nearly all desktop clients get rebooted daily.
I think I covered this one already.
But, as I've already said, you have to evaluate this kind of thing very carefully. For some organizations, such a migration is worth it. For others, migrating SOME of the desktops to Linux is the best bet. For many, not migrating from Windows is the way to go. ---
There isn't a day that goes by that my company's management fails to appall me for some reason or another. But we're not M$ nor are we in Virginia Beach, so...
Tell me where I can find a Unix admin job elsewhere in the eastern Iowa cornfields... ---
It's not the OS they're concerned about (though I imagine they'll get dinged on it anyway). Every computer came with a Microsoft OS on it, thanks to M$'s predatory and monopolistic business practices... remember the trial?
It's Office they're concerned about. Buy one copy and ghost/Tivoli/whatever it to 3,500 machines.
And we all know that copy protection never worked. It got in the way of legitimate users, and illegitimate users could bypass it anyway. That's why we have those silly CD keys now... ---
Is Unix ready for the desktop? KDE seems to think so. A four-year-old can use it, I imagine most corporate lusers won't really have a hard time with it. Or at least no harder of a time than they do with Windows.
KOffice is coming along nicely, and there's also StarOffice or OpenOffice or whatever it's called this week.
And it's a whole lot easier to keep people from playing silly games...administration is easier...Total Cost of Ownership is lower... one of our desktop Linux workstations at work has been up for 78 days now, while all the NT boxes around it are rebooted at least weekly... ---
...and not for M$. It's disruptive things like this that make IT departments stop and think seriously about their investment in Microsoft products.
I know that if the company I work for ever got audited, all hell would break loose. The licenses for each copy of NT Workstation 4.0 were left with the individual workstations, where they, uh, tend to disappear for some reason. And that doesn't even count Office, which every workstation has, but I've never seen a license for.
The question of the day is, would it cost more to pay M$ for the unaccounted-for pieces of software, or to switch to Linux? You can bet your a$$ that somebody in Virginia Beach is thinking hard about that very question right now.
The problem that PRIVACY Forum is trying to illustrate here is not that the records are available on the Web, but that they're public record in the first place.
In this state I can not only get a CD-ROM with the driver's license and vehicle registration for every licensed driver and vehicle in the state, I can get a subscription with quarterly updates!
Somebody cuts me off on the road, I get their license plate, look it up on my handy CD-ROM, and well, if I weren't such a nice guy, that person might start getting strange phone calls in the night, or have even worse things happen.
The only reason there isn't more of this kind of stuff happening is most people don't realize these things are public record, and so don't bother to go pick up a copy of the records!
Have we been so busy focusing on "Internet" privacy and controlling our information in corporate databases that we forgot about all the information in GOVERNMENT databases that's accessible to anyone just for the asking? ---
I am sure I can't be the only person out there who rarely or never uses bookmarks! Hm, I've had this browser config for a year now, and I've accumulated a grand total of three bookmarks.
Now since I found all of these through other means, what good is a new search engine? Now I know there are people who put practically every site they've ever visited in their bookmarks (which makes it surprising this site doesn't seem to have any porn) but I only bookmark things I want to find instantly six months from now, or things I might forget to look at otherwise. ---
I don't doubt that there is better care in a major trauma center in Calgary, but if the network brings improvements to the rural hospitals, it can't be all that bad. ---
Oh, they're spending ALL my tax dollars on this optical fibre crap when they could be spending it on HEALTH CARE!!!
Whine whine whine. Ever cosider the possibility that while you're skiing in Banff and run smack into a tree, fracturing your skull, the local hospital might just benefit from that network, and therefore you might just benefit?
At the very least, you could play Quake from your hospital bed... ---
So these Rambus people are claiming they invented SDRAM, too. Or at least Sansumg is paying them royalties on SDRAM. This was news to me. It would seem that Ramrod is trying to claim they invented RAM. This is even worse than the one-click patent... and it smells like ---
Accurate enough. In the Hurd, things like the TCP/IP stack (is this implemented in the Hurd yet?) are userspace programs. In Linux, it's kernel space. You theoretically could rewrite Linux like that, but it would take a massive amount of coding and you'd wind up with.. a microkernel! ---
The GPL says you have to either distribute the source with the binary; or provide a written offer, valid for three years, to provide the source; or to offer the source for download when you offer the binary for download.
The IBM public license doesn't specify HOW you are supposed to get hold of the source, but that you do have a right to get it.
If there is something atrocious about this license, I'd love to hear about it. It looks a whole lot like the Mozilla license, actually. ---
Actually that is precisely the point. Google does not index pages based on content per se, but what other
sites think of the contents of that site. So if I have many sites related to topic abc linking to your site on the
same topic, the rating for your site goes up. Similarly if your site on topic abc has links to another site on
the same topic which is known to be good, the rating for your site goes up. This system is much more
robust as the search engine does not have to keep track of the actual content you host, and hence cannot
be misled by using incorrect keywords. And that is why it is disturbing to hear that the system has been
potentially bypassed by using rings of sites which link to each other. Get it? Cheers, Anonymous Coward. (+1, Informative)
I get it now. But I still think we should be looking at image-recognition technology for search engines. Google should be able to tell the difference between real pr0n and "Liv Tyler nude."
Anyway, wouldn't it be easy enough to filter out these rings of sites that link to each other? Except in the case of pr0n sites where everybody links to everybody else, of course. He with the most referers wins, it seems. How about he with the most free pr0n wins? ---
How can people effectively vote their
hearts if they are too distracted by the FUD in the media about how Gore might lose if Nader gets too
many votes?
The real problem is that Nader might win if Nader gets too many votes. The system is set up to ensure that he (or anyone else) doesn't.
So, go out and vote your conscience, and fuck Gush and Bore. ---
Slashdot Mirror
Also subscribe to the MAPS RSS and DUL lists. Out of the spam that I get here, 99% of it gets blocked by RSS and DUL, and the other 1% by RBL. I've not received a single spam since installing these.
If you have sendmail 8.10 or later, do this in your sendmail.mc file:
FEATURE(dnsbl,`blackholes.mail-abuse.org',`Mail rejected, see http://www.mail-abuse.org/rbl/')dnl FEATURE(dnsbl,`relays.mail-abuse.org',`Open relay rejected, see http://www.mail-abuse.org/rss/')dnl FEATURE(dnsbl,`dialups.mail-abuse.org',`Dialup rejected, see http://www.mail-abuse.org/dul/')dnl FEATURE(`delay_checks')dnl
You won't see any more spam, and your log file will show the address they tried to send to (this is what delay_checks is for).
---
I have an idea. Just put the Quake server on the satellite! That way everyone will have a handicap of 236ms....
---
The usefulness in this isn't to play old looking games, or even to port classics like Asteriods, even though I'm sure a few people will do just that. Think exposing the next generation of kids to game programming. Or programming in general.
---
Tivoli for Linux (yes, it exists The Red Hat Update Agent (up2date) (when it works).
A clueful admin.
A clueful CIO.
---
If this company ever does decide to migrate to Linux, or even to Windows 2000, many of those little apps will be eliminated anyway (there's an ongoing project to do just that running now). The remainder of them will run under Wine, until they are replaced or eliminated.
For the really intractable apps, VMware might be a good solution, but we don't really seem to have any of those. I've even been able to check mail in Lotus Goats under Wine.
Like any migration, it just has to be well planned. I could migrate this company for about 105-110% of the cost of W2K licenses for all the workstations, but I won't propose it until KOffice and KDE improve further. Maybe at 3.0...
---
Be sure and give them the root password! That way, when they can't mess up the whole system from their user account, they will have a way to "get their important work done."
---
Have you had 100 unclean shutdowns?
No, I've had many more than that, especially on my laptop, which likes to spontaneously un-suspend while I'm not looking, and it's unplugged. I've had fsck -a bail three times in the last six years, and all three were traced to hardware failure, and none of them were on my laptop.
78 days uptime on a box is not a big deal, regardless of the Operating System.
No, it's not a big deal, unless that box is used in common by 15 users accustomed to Windows (AND rebooting). Maybe it's because I haven't told them HOW to reboot the machine. The box has been running Linux for a year and a half, and no one's needed to know how to reboot it, except for me, when I update the kernel.
These problems are difficult to troubleshoot as NT provides no sure fire way of finding out what is wrong.
By contrast, Linux tells you exactly what's wrong, and sometimes will even tell you how to fix it! Of course, if you have a bizarre and mysterious error message, you should cross reference it against sig11.
---
Have you ever tried to get support from Microsoft? They make you call long distance to Redmond to speak to underpaid help desk staff they pulled off the streets of Seattle. (Well, actually, from the area's numerous temp agencies, but there's not much difference.)
If you want to speak to someone who knows what they're doing, you have to pay per incident, or have a prepaid contract which gets you X number of incidents per time period.
Don't believe me? Read it for yourself. And good luck getting an answer out of M$. At least with Linux I can find the answer to just about anything in ten minutes or less, without spending a dime.
---
What happens, however, if a user turns his PC off with out shutting it down - It happens, especially when they want to get out of the office as fast as possible on a Friday evening. Chances are that Linux will not boot up again,
Yes, this is a serious problem on a server. For a desktop client, the computer is idle most of the time so it has plenty of chance to sync, and the fsck passes 99% of the time. But your support costs will still go up, and your help desk will spend a lot of time saying, "No, don't reboot the machine, no, don't turn it off, yes, you can leave it on all weekend." Anybody that turns off a desktop machine here, regardless of OS, gets a stern warning from management, since the desktop people have a habit of pushing out updates via Tivoli over the weekends or at night.
For the really stupid users, try disconnecting the power button.
Their presentation app is ridiculous and practically unuseable, besides why run KDE when StarOffice insists on having it's own (terribly bloated) desktop environment.
I understand the bloated prsentation manager is off by default in OpenOffice or whatever it's called this week.
Linux has significantly higher support costs.
Higher than Windows 9x, sure. Anybody can come along and screw up the machine. NT doesn't really have this problem unless you give everyone the administrator password (you didn't, did you?)... So where are the support costs? Training? You have that expense with NT anyway. Migration? A one-time expense. Not one to ignore, certainly, but still a one-time expense. Help desk? Field techs? It's not hard to find people who know Linux. Ask around, I hear a lot of them hang out on this place called slashdot. You might even have a few of them among your current staff, and not even know it. And I guarantee they'll all be more competent than your average overpaid MCSE.
Nearly all desktop clients get rebooted daily.
I think I covered this one already.
But, as I've already said, you have to evaluate this kind of thing very carefully. For some organizations, such a migration is worth it. For others, migrating SOME of the desktops to Linux is the best bet. For many, not migrating from Windows is the way to go.
---
There isn't a day that goes by that my company's management fails to appall me for some reason or another. But we're not M$ nor are we in Virginia Beach, so...
Tell me where I can find a Unix admin job elsewhere in the eastern Iowa cornfields...
---
I always type it in. Much faster than reaching for the mouse.
---
It's Office they're concerned about. Buy one copy and ghost/Tivoli/whatever it to 3,500 machines.
And we all know that copy protection never worked. It got in the way of legitimate users, and illegitimate users could bypass it anyway. That's why we have those silly CD keys now...
---
Is Unix ready for the desktop? KDE seems to think so. A four-year-old can use it, I imagine most corporate lusers won't really have a hard time with it. Or at least no harder of a time than they do with Windows.
KOffice is coming along nicely, and there's also StarOffice or OpenOffice or whatever it's called this week.
And it's a whole lot easier to keep people from playing silly games...administration is easier...Total Cost of Ownership is lower... one of our desktop Linux workstations at work has been up for 78 days now, while all the NT boxes around it are rebooted at least weekly...
---
I know that if the company I work for ever got audited, all hell would break loose. The licenses for each copy of NT Workstation 4.0 were left with the individual workstations, where they, uh, tend to disappear for some reason. And that doesn't even count Office, which every workstation has, but I've never seen a license for.
The question of the day is, would it cost more to pay M$ for the unaccounted-for pieces of software, or to switch to Linux? You can bet your a$$ that somebody in Virginia Beach is thinking hard about that very question right now.
And Virginia Beach is not all that far from Research Triangle Park...
---
In this state I can not only get a CD-ROM with the driver's license and vehicle registration for every licensed driver and vehicle in the state, I can get a subscription with quarterly updates!
Somebody cuts me off on the road, I get their license plate, look it up on my handy CD-ROM, and well, if I weren't such a nice guy, that person might start getting strange phone calls in the night, or have even worse things happen.
The only reason there isn't more of this kind of stuff happening is most people don't realize these things are public record, and so don't bother to go pick up a copy of the records!
Have we been so busy focusing on "Internet" privacy and controlling our information in corporate databases that we forgot about all the information in GOVERNMENT databases that's accessible to anyone just for the asking?
---
- TRS-80 & Tandy Color Computer Homepage
- Concealed Carry (CCW) Database: Home
- The Weather Channel - Cedar Rapids, IA (52404)
Now since I found all of these through other means, what good is a new search engine? Now I know there are people who put practically every site they've ever visited in their bookmarks (which makes it surprising this site doesn't seem to have any porn) but I only bookmark things I want to find instantly six months from now, or things I might forget to look at otherwise.---
I don't doubt that there is better care in a major trauma center in Calgary, but if the network brings improvements to the rural hospitals, it can't be all that bad.
---
Whine whine whine. Ever cosider the possibility that while you're skiing in Banff and run smack into a tree, fracturing your skull, the local hospital might just benefit from that network, and therefore you might just benefit?
At the very least, you could play Quake from your hospital bed...
---
So these Rambus people are claiming they invented SDRAM, too. Or at least Sansumg is paying them royalties on SDRAM. This was news to me. It would seem that Ramrod is trying to claim they invented RAM. This is even worse than the one-click patent... and it smells like
---
Accurate enough. In the Hurd, things like the TCP/IP stack (is this implemented in the Hurd yet?) are userspace programs. In Linux, it's kernel space. You theoretically could rewrite Linux like that, but it would take a massive amount of coding and you'd wind up with.. a microkernel!
---
IBM isn't doing this? What about:
- SashXB (LGPL)
- JFS (GPL)
- Jikes (IBM Public License)
Or how about all the money IBM is pouring into Linux?- IBM invests $200M in Asia-Pacific Linux
- IBM Linux Wristwatch
- IBM's Overview of Linux (for investors)
- IBM banks on Linux
This has been but a selection of articles I could find in five minutes.---
The IBM public license doesn't specify HOW you are supposed to get hold of the source, but that you do have a right to get it.
If there is something atrocious about this license, I'd love to hear about it. It looks a whole lot like the Mozilla license, actually.
---
I get it now. But I still think we should be looking at image-recognition technology for search engines. Google should be able to tell the difference between real pr0n and "Liv Tyler nude." Anyway, wouldn't it be easy enough to filter out these rings of sites that link to each other? Except in the case of pr0n sites where everybody links to everybody else, of course. He with the most referers wins, it seems. How about he with the most free pr0n wins?
---
TrollTec h CEO Haavard Nord said that after Qt was GPLed, they are now selling MORE commercial licenses, which "affected revenue in a positive way."
---
The real problem is that Nader might win if Nader gets too many votes. The system is set up to ensure that he (or anyone else) doesn't.
So, go out and vote your conscience, and fuck Gush and Bore.
---