No, simply having gain (different from "switching") does not make a transistor "more and more attractive" for processors. RF amplifiers, yes, but not for CPUs.
Many other properties are required to make transistors useful for implementing microprocessors, memory, or other complex peripherals used in computers. Complementary devices are needed (high speed in both N and P channel) to implement high density logic without excessive static power consumption. Withness the sucess of GaAs semiconductors for CPUs, using only N-channel devices! (but GaAs is well established for RF amplifiers of course).
High quality insulators are needed to fabricate many layers of metal interconnect (SiO2 happens to be glass... but obtaining good insulators on top of most materials is quite difficult). A way to produce a good ohmic contact in a tiny area between the semiconductor and metal is also needed (for a single transistor used in an amplifier, only 3 contacts are made and large area can be devoted to them). Vertical fabrication techniques used for high power single transistors obviously can't be used for complex circuits with many transistors, so all these requirements must be able to be met with many fabrication steps.... and the fact that they're growing the film at such a low temperature will make all the subsequent steps quite difficult. Even after acheiving all these difficult properties, a new material like diamond must support extreemly small geometries over very large areas to achieve the transistor counts required to be competitive with modern silicon CPUs.
Perhaps someday diamond semiconductors may be useful for complex circuitry.... but to think that now is quite silly. The targeted application is analog signal gain at these extreemly high frequencies, which will open up a massive portion of spectrum that's previously been unavailable. That is arguably even more important than continuing Moore's "law" for increase in CPU speed and memory size.
Last time I checked, linux-based email software would not pass to the shell the contents of any attached file who's first line was "#!/bin/sh" when the user simply clicks on the icon/text that represents the attachment. Likewise for ELF and a.out format binaries.
I personally use Mozilla for email on linux (redhat 9), and as a simple test I sent myself an email with the/bin/ls binary attached. When I click on the attachment, I get a save dialog box which gives me the option to "open using an application" or "save this file to disk". There is no option to execute the code, let alone having such a dangerous choice be the default!
Continuing the test, I saved the file to/tmp, and Mozilla set the permissons to -rw-------, so in order to actually execute the contents of that file, I would need to use "chmod" (or the equivilant in a gui-based file manager) before it could be executed.
I have not tested with Evolution or other popular email clients. But if they are anything like Mozilla, where the user CAN NOT EASILY EXECUTE ATTACHMENTS and all attachment files are SAVED WITHOUT EXECUTE PERMISSION, I think it's safe to say the linux-based systems are much more resiliant to email-based virus code.
Of course, Microsoft Windows could have been made similarily secure if Microsoft (and others) had taken these simple measures. Well, at least not allowing executable code to be executed with a single click of the attachment. It's been many years since the first MS executable virus code and it's a continuing problem. When with email client software on the Windows platform finally reform to disallow easily executing attachments ??
Even if that were the case, to equal the level of protection the Mozilla/linux has by default, windows would need to implement execute permission (does it have this feature, even if it's never used to disallow execution?). Then the software would need to save all attachements without permission to execute them.
This exists today on Linux with popular email clients. Until Microsoft and others take these exrteemly simply precautions to prevent casual users from easily executing attachments.... or creates of Linux-based email clients make these incredibly unwise design decisions to allow easy execution and turn on execution permsission by default on saved files, I believe it's safe to say that Linux systems are much more secure than Mircosoft windows based PCs, in terms of propagting email attachment virus code.
People bitch and moan about Sendmail being so hard to configure when really they haven't done the tiniest bit of research or RTFM.
I recently made a change to my sendmail config, and I spent a couple hours reading through sendmail's "manual"... it is complete garbage.
You write:
YOU DO NOT CODE THE CF BY HAND. YOU DO NOT EVEN TOUCH THE CF! The Sendmail gurus have been saying this for years and there is NO excuse for not heeding their warnings.
Well then, would you care to explain why the sendmail manual (if you could go so far as to call it that) is laced with lots of documentation that only refers to the.cf way to specifying things.... and then you need to search through all sorts of other documentation to find the M4 way of acheiving it?
Overall, the sendmail documenation is very poorly written. The scattered bits of reference to.cf lines are only one example of what's wrong. There is very little "larger picture" documentation to provide a conceptual model of how the system works... and what does exist makes lots of lots of references to sendmail's internal operation and lacks much explaination of how that relates to the overall task of delivery of messages. There are vast repositories of documentation of individual features, each with very terse and brief explaination, more often than not making reference to some other element (of course, without a hyperlink or reference to where it is).
Compare to Exim's documentation, which is well written. While somewhat verbose and therefore lengthy, everything is explained clearly in plain english that is easy to understand. Features are documented clearly with plenty of background material about how they relate to the overall objective of delivering mail. There is a default configuration file which is intended to work for most sites with only a few lines edited (compare to sendmail where the default is not intended to work easily). There is a whole chapter in the Exim manual that explains every little part of the default config... compare to sendmail where just abou the only docs you'll find on the default config are very hostile sounding warnings that it isn't meant for anyone else to use and you're a fool if you use it without editing everything.
While Exim is the only other MTA I've spent the time to learn, I'm sure Postfix and Qmail are also vastly better than sendmail in terms of ease of configuration and clarity of readability of their documentation.
So don't spout off about sendmail detractors not reading the fucking manual (RTFM). I read lots of that fucking manual only last week. It sucks. Anyone who spends an hour reading the poorly written sendmail documentation and then even a few minutes looking at the well composed, clearly explained and easy-to-read Exim manual can clearly see that anyone who does attempt to RTFM would clearly not perfer sendmail's horrid documenation. Perhaps Postfix and Qmail are somewhat better or worse compared to Exim..... but it's amazing just how badly composed Sendmail's documentation is.
By the way, I've resisted ditching sendmail for years, cause it was already set up and working. But GNU Mailman drove me to learning Exim, because Exim has a feature where it can deliver based on the existance of mailman's list config files, which allows me to have a list administator able to create new lists without editing/etc/alises.
I should have learned a better mailer years ago. But now that I'm familiar with a MTA that has an easy to understand config format that's structured based on a conceptual model that represents understandable steps involved in delivery of mail (as opposed to sendmail's very abstract model), and it actually has a well written manual.... I'll never go back to sendmail. I'm still running sendmail for my mail email, but next time a security advisory comes out or I have to change the sendmail config, instead I'll create a new Emix (or might try Postfix) config rather than continuing to limp along with a difficult-to-understand (larely due to poor documentation) sendmail installation.
On every SCO story, invariably someone posts a paranoid concern that
perhaps a clueless judge will be assigned to the case, and rule in
favor of SCO. These are often moderated to +5, which is
quite silly since
Judge
Dale A. Kimball has already be assigned to the case, and we can see
that he's got a reputation for being fair and capable of understanding
cases involving technology.
Groklaw has
very
extensive research on Kimball's history, which is nicely
summarized and easy to read. Every case has links to much more detail. The
overall appearance is that Kimball will probably do the right thing.
Probably most important is
the
Jacobsen vs Hughes
copyright case. Apart from considering much of the material
uncopyrightable historical facts, Judge Kimball was quite unimpressed
by the plaintif's failure to act in a timely manner to mitigate damages.
Quoting from that article:
"Had Jacobsen voiced his disapproval in 1996, Hughes would have had the
opportunity to take the offending material out of the books," Kimball wrote.
"For Jacobsen to wait until three volumes of the series had been published
before voicing his disapproval, when it is clear he had ample opportunity to
let Hughes know of his disapproval as early as 1996, results in extreme
prejudice to Hughes."
Obviously this bodes quite well for IBM and all Linux users. SCO of
course will claim they stopped distribution of linux, but this ruling
at least shows that Judge Kimball isn't likely to be be charmed with
the deplorable way SCO has conducted itself. Kimball's willingness to
consider the writing a separate work, even though a part of it was
loosely based on Jacobsen's also casts quite a shadow over SCO's
chances (assuming the unlikely worst case scenario that SCO has an ace up
its sleeve, rather than the bogus examples we've seen so far). It's
certainly a good sign that Kimball is unlikely to buy SCO expansive
theories about what constitutes a derivitive work.
The groklaw page has examples where Kimball has ruled against big
business, where he's shown competence at handling software intellectual
property disputes (eg, Altiris vs Symantec), and where he's
handled very complex cases.
While nothing is 100% certain going into the courtroom, it is a fact that
the Judge Kimball has been selected to hear this case. His history
shows he's competent, fair, and at least in Jacobsen vs Hughes, he doesn't
tollerate the sort of shenanigans SCO has been pulling!
...biggest danger here is that SCO lands itself in the courtroom with a stupid and/or tech ignorant judge
A couple weeks ago, I read somewhere about the judge who's already been selected to hear the case, and about how he had previously ruled quite cluefully against some other copyright/IP infringment case... something to the effect that the plaintif would have had a case if they'd complained early when they were given a copy of the material (a book, as I recall), but rather they waited until it was widely published and he ruled that they didn't act to mitigate damaged and were not entitled to any relief.
Of course, that case was indeed a case of copying, whereas this SCO case has many weaknesses on top of the fact that SCO is complaining late and not acting in good faith to limit damage.
Maybe someone knows the details? I shoulda saved a link to this, but by now it's long lost in the sea of daily SCO babble.
If everything IBM makes is of such high quality and lasts so long, perhaps I can interest you in a pile of used IBM 75 gig, 7200 rpm Deskstar hard drives?
If you had read the interview, rather than theopd's alarmist summary, you would have learned that this research is essentially about developing a "moderation" system that works automatically... sort of like how Google finds the good needles among the haystack of garbage.
Specifically mentioned in the interview is his opinion that an "explicit feedback system" (Ebay is used as an example) has a tendancy to "inflate". Indeed, if you look at slashdot's explicit feedback moderation system, lots of not very insightful messages like yours end up at +5 every day.
Your rant about never giving accurate personally identifying information is worthless in this context. If you actually read (and understand) the interview, you'll see that what they are attempting to do is sift through 20000+ daily usenet messages to find the threads that are worth reading, and the people who are insightful and helpful. So real or fake info doesn't matter... what matters is a pattern of posting messages (number per day, ratio of replies to new messages, distribution of posts to different threads) that can help predict if you are the sort of person who contributes valuable information, or if you're a flamer, or spammer, or one-off question asker, and so on. It is inconsequential if you used real or fake info, but if you regularily change you identity then it does foul up their efforts. But even then, you'll see near the end that they are concerned "about letting the cream float the top and not about letting the other stuff sink".
Obviously your very misplaced rant appealed to 3 or 4 explicit feedback slashdot moderators. In the spirit of this interview's topic (and not the inaccurate and alarmist summary posted on slashdot's front page), your comment achieving +5 only underscores the weakness of slashdot's explict feedback moderation system and the need to develop new and better ways to identify the truely insightful messages amoung discussion forums.
Is a suitable state of mind when large and powerful groups decide they want to spy on you.
By viewing your public usenet postings, and creating simple statistics involving the number of times you posted, number of different threads you posted into, ratio of replies to new threads, and so on. Pretty serious spying!
While you're protecting everyone's public privacy, better do something about google syping on everyone's websites and creating statistics on numbers of pages, words used in links, who links to whom, ratios of inbound to outbound links.
Hey, why not launch a 1 billion dollar lawsuit against someone for using your idea without authorization! You'd never win, 'cause only specific arts and expressions can be protected by copyright... but who cares about winning? You could make a fortune by creating a media frenzy to drive up your valueless stock's price. It doesn't matter if your hype would be utter nonesence in court, as it only needs to dup investors.
Hmmm... maybe I should copyright this idea. I wonder if anyone's already thought of it first??
Personally, I'd have written a worm that enables automatic updates and XP's inbuilt firewall.
That would conflict with the REAL payload of this worm, which is to install a TFTP-based backdoor on every computer it infects. Sure, it patches the original hole, but the author hardly had the computer owner's best interests in mind!
It is so great that everyone here in the/. community is so on top of this.
Some time ago, moderator points were scarce and usually fewer than 10 coments would end up at +5. Today, this popular article has already more than 50 comments moderated to +5, and quite frankly most of them are hardly "on top of this". Yes, a few are, but most are not.
One mentions checking the linux CVS repository history, yet the Linus has never used CVS and only revently started using bitkeeper.
Many posts stupidly suggest that this questionable code could have originated within linux and been copied by SCO. How stupid is that, when the code is from 1979 or possibly earlier?
Many others point out that because it appeared in Berkeley BSD, it must be legit... yet the version of BSD it appears in was long before the settlement with AT&T/USL, and before the effort to rewrite all of AT&T's code.
Now a few +5 posts (a small minority) insightfully point out that this code is within the two ancient unix sources that Caldera released with a BSD-style license within the last two years.
But denying that the ancient unix is not the source, or incredibly that it could have originated in linux between 1991 to present and been copied by SCO into the code from teh 70's and 80's is just downright stupid.
A moderation system where several such comments end up at "+5 insightful", thereby dilluting attention from the minority of +5 comments with good informtation is a vbery broken moderation system indeed.
Hardly what I'd call "everyone here in the/. community is so on top of this". Replace "everyone" with "a few needles in the haystack of bogus +5 comments" and I'd agree.
Given the same marketshare as Windows, Linux would be just as much targetted by the black hats and script kiddies alike as Windows is these days
Approximately 1/3 of all websites are hosted by IIS/Microsoft systems, yet the majority of defaced websites have been among the smaller portion hosted on Microsoft.
As linux-based marketshare grows, I predict that this well established trend will continue.
There is absolutely no chance this argument will hold up. It will be interesting to see if any lawyers are disbarred or fined for even bringing this argument to court.
They've already had a counter suit filed by IBM, and they're being sued by Red Hat... more or less for bringing a baseless case to court and creating a media circus around it in an attempt to disparage their competitors products.
It isn't clear they've attempted to make this bogus arguement to the court, is it? So far it looks like more media FUD, for which they will certainly be held accountable in the IBM and Red Hat suits (presuming they don't disolve the company by then, which seems quite likely).
If all OSes and their associated software had easy exploits, would it really be that hard to write a polymorphic worm?
Consider for a moment, if you will, that this particular worm exploits the same hole in Windows 2000 and XP, but it only works as the author intended on 2000. XP machines (reportedly) do not propage the worm and instead reboot in 60 seconds.
So while it may in theory be possible to write a cross-platform worm, in practice this real-world worm doesn't even successfully progate on very similar systems from the same vendor, using largely the same code base, with the same exploit.
I installed redhat 9 last week on a new machine, activated the demo redhat network account, and downloaded about 120 megs of updates. So the volume of updates is similar.
However, many of those updates are for very minor security problems... the sorts of things Microsoft would not even bother to fix.
the scope of the lawsuit is confined to breach of contract with IBM, not against the entire community.
It WAS only about breach of contract with IBM, neglecting language insulting to the community... eg, linux was a "bicycle" until IBM stole SCO's IP to turn it into a luxury car, open source developers were incapable of creating enterprise quality code, and so on.
The fact that the community has missed this point and taken that lawsuit as having a much broader scope than it does is unfortunate.
When McBride and Sontag made numerous public threats against the larger community, they left the realm of insults and directly threated litigation.
In at least one statement to the media, they mentioned the possibility of litigation against Linus and others. 1500 threatening letters were sent, not to developers but to users, with the intention to cause them to reconsider deloying linux. I'd call that an attack on the community.
But on a purely technical level, you are correct. The lawsuit is between SCO and IBM. Though SCO hasn't yet filed any other suits, the FUD-based media circus McBride and Sontag have created, the 1500 threating letters, and the licensing campaign are all additional facts that conspire to portray SCO as an enemy of the free software community.
I've often wondered why they don't suck in outside air?
Then the power supply would be blowing heated air INTO the computer, where cooling is needed the most. Not a smart idea.
BTW The power supply really should be at the bottom of the case not the top, since heat rises.
Hot air rises, in the presence of relatively still cooler air. This is a relatively small effect in the presence of fans forcing airflow.
Nonetheless, the slight buoyant force causing heated air to rise also helps it reach the power supply at the TOP of the case, where it is exhausted to the outside by the power supply's fan.
.
Of course, if you really want to keep your power supply cool at the expense of the CPU, video, disk and other devices, then by all means reverse the fan direction and put it at the bottom.
wouldn't it make sence to make the power-supply external.
Not if you must pass FCC (or CE in the rest of the world) radio frequency emissions tests.
Those wires are going to radiate both the switching noise from the power supply and noise from the motherboard. They must remain inside the steel case to have any chance of ever getting the radiated EMI under the FCC class B limit, which is required for sale to consumers for use in homes. Even the higher class A limit (allows more noise, for business use where people aren't as concerned about interference with their TV and radio) probably will be impossible with those wires exposed.
It is fiction, or satire if you will... just like everything at despair.com.
There are only a small handful of Fry's stores. If they'd really purchased 5000 of this Apathy poster, well, you'd have noticed it.
I've actually ordered posters and other goodies from Despair.com a couple times... they make great gifts for coworkers or friends you still maintain contact with at former employers. Just about everything Despair.com does is satire. The order confirmation email you get has a long rambling story about buyer's remorse. The invoice on the package had a blue stamp on it that read "Inspect By: Some random idiot". Every bit of paper or communication you get from them has some humorous corporate satire on it somewhere.
A T1 or higher link [and other stuff] should be enough to survive a slashdotting
In this case (Sunday afternoon), it looks like the peak was about 10 page view per second, of a page containing approximately 80 kbytes of data. Not including http and tcp/ip protocol overhead, that's about 800000 bytes/second.... quite a bit faster than a T1 line at approx 150000 bytes/second.
As many others have pointed out, static pages and plenty of bandwidth is a no-brainer.
DALLAS, TX - November 3, 1998 -- The call came in sometime after midnight. As soon as COO Kersten was informed that Fry's Electronics was calling, he rushed to
the telephone.
"I immediately sensed the limitless potential. My own customer experiences with
Fry's were so excruciatingly painful that I was overwhelmed with the possibilities of a relationship. They are truly Jedis of Customer Disservice", from whom I
could learn much," Kersten stated.
Kersten was flattered to learn that Fry's was calling to talk business. Company
President John Fry wanted to purchase APATHY Demotivators(tm), thousands of them. He had seen the design during a visit to his local post office, and felt it perfectly articulated their own indifferent sentiments towards customers. In completing the transaction, Fry's became the largest single customer of APATHY poster outside of the government sector.
"It is a wonderful irony that the company that turned Customer Disservice into an artform has entered into a relationship with the company that turned it into artwork. We couldn't be more flattered, offered Kersten on the purchase.
In reply, Fry offered, "This will keep our employees from losing sight of what is important. -- Nothing."
At one point, during a conversation with Fry, the notoriously unemotional Kersten found himself choked up with tears. His personal secretary and confidante of ten years, "Hey You", later commented that they had revealed some radical new techniques for Customer Disservice"; they intended to test in their Dallas store.
Kersten declined to reveal details, saying only, "How much does body armor go for these days" This led some to speculate that Fry's may be considering shooting
customers at random to gauge subsequent buying patterns.
Fry's legendary indifference to customer service, although occasionally drawing
criticism and media scrutiny, has only led to increased loyalty amongst their customer base and continued explosive growth. Analysts theorize that Fry.s customer base, heavily skewed towards poorly socialized, pure geek demographics, may actually derive some erotic gratification from the masochistic purchasing experience.
Why is this a necessity? I don't care if businesses can use it or not.
Because businesses are a great portion of the entire "market", whereas hobbists are a tiny portion.
The likelyhood of chip and board manufacturers releasing drives or technical specs needed to create drivers is directly proportional to their perception of how much of their "market" needs linux support.
For example, I just purchased a Via EPIA-M10000 motherboard with Via C3 processor (for an embedded application project which needs the small size and much lower power of this board). Via knows that linux is important because they perceive that a lot of the market uses it, or will use it soon. Having looked for drivers in the last few days, it's obvious Via took a windows style approach and released some binary only drivers some time ago (redhat 7, etc). They've come under a lot of pressure to improve their support for linux, and if you look at recent discussions on their viaarena discussion website, they've recently sent code to Alan Cox and they are in the processor of changing their source code release policies to better cater to the linux "market".
Without businesses using linux on a wide scale, Via would probably not consider linux important and we'd be stuck with little or no driver support for this uniquely special (very small and low power) motherboard. That means I'd have to choose a bigger, power-hungry board, or port my application to the only other OS that has good drivers for that motherboard.... Yuk.
That is why I care that businesses and in general a large market uses linux. And you should too.
Slashdot Mirror
Many other properties are required to make transistors useful for implementing microprocessors, memory, or other complex peripherals used in computers. Complementary devices are needed (high speed in both N and P channel) to implement high density logic without excessive static power consumption. Withness the sucess of GaAs semiconductors for CPUs, using only N-channel devices! (but GaAs is well established for RF amplifiers of course).
High quality insulators are needed to fabricate many layers of metal interconnect (SiO2 happens to be glass... but obtaining good insulators on top of most materials is quite difficult). A way to produce a good ohmic contact in a tiny area between the semiconductor and metal is also needed (for a single transistor used in an amplifier, only 3 contacts are made and large area can be devoted to them). Vertical fabrication techniques used for high power single transistors obviously can't be used for complex circuits with many transistors, so all these requirements must be able to be met with many fabrication steps.... and the fact that they're growing the film at such a low temperature will make all the subsequent steps quite difficult. Even after acheiving all these difficult properties, a new material like diamond must support extreemly small geometries over very large areas to achieve the transistor counts required to be competitive with modern silicon CPUs.
Perhaps someday diamond semiconductors may be useful for complex circuitry.... but to think that now is quite silly. The targeted application is analog signal gain at these extreemly high frequencies, which will open up a massive portion of spectrum that's previously been unavailable. That is arguably even more important than continuing Moore's "law" for increase in CPU speed and memory size.
The application they are targeting is single-transistor amplifiers (and mixers) for radio transmission and reception.
So it your world revolves around computers and gaming, forget about CPUs, and think extreemly high speed wireless bandwidth.
I personally use Mozilla for email on linux (redhat 9), and as a simple test I sent myself an email with the /bin/ls binary attached. When I click on the attachment, I get a save dialog box which gives me the option to "open using an application" or "save this file to disk". There is no option to execute the code, let alone having such a dangerous choice be the default!
Continuing the test, I saved the file to /tmp, and Mozilla set the permissons to -rw-------, so in order to actually execute the contents of that file, I would need to use "chmod" (or the equivilant in a gui-based file manager) before it could be executed.
I have not tested with Evolution or other popular email clients. But if they are anything like Mozilla, where the user CAN NOT EASILY EXECUTE ATTACHMENTS and all attachment files are SAVED WITHOUT EXECUTE PERMISSION, I think it's safe to say the linux-based systems are much more resiliant to email-based virus code.
Of course, Microsoft Windows could have been made similarily secure if Microsoft (and others) had taken these simple measures. Well, at least not allowing executable code to be executed with a single click of the attachment. It's been many years since the first MS executable virus code and it's a continuing problem. When with email client software on the Windows platform finally reform to disallow easily executing attachments ??
Even if that were the case, to equal the level of protection the Mozilla/linux has by default, windows would need to implement execute permission (does it have this feature, even if it's never used to disallow execution?). Then the software would need to save all attachements without permission to execute them.
This exists today on Linux with popular email clients. Until Microsoft and others take these exrteemly simply precautions to prevent casual users from easily executing attachments.... or creates of Linux-based email clients make these incredibly unwise design decisions to allow easy execution and turn on execution permsission by default on saved files, I believe it's safe to say that Linux systems are much more secure than Mircosoft windows based PCs, in terms of propagting email attachment virus code.
I recently made a change to my sendmail config, and I spent a couple hours reading through sendmail's "manual"... it is complete garbage.
You write:
YOU DO NOT CODE THE CF BY HAND. YOU DO NOT EVEN TOUCH THE CF! The Sendmail gurus have been saying this for years and there is NO excuse for not heeding their warnings.
Well then, would you care to explain why the sendmail manual (if you could go so far as to call it that) is laced with lots of documentation that only refers to the .cf way to specifying things.... and then you need to search through all sorts of other documentation to find the M4 way of acheiving it?
Overall, the sendmail documenation is very poorly written. The scattered bits of reference to .cf lines are only one example of what's wrong. There is very little "larger picture" documentation to provide a conceptual model of how the system works... and what does exist makes lots of lots of references to sendmail's internal operation and lacks much explaination of how that relates to the overall task of delivery of messages. There are vast repositories of documentation of individual features, each with very terse and brief explaination, more often than not making reference to some other element (of course, without a hyperlink or reference to where it is).
Compare to Exim's documentation, which is well written. While somewhat verbose and therefore lengthy, everything is explained clearly in plain english that is easy to understand. Features are documented clearly with plenty of background material about how they relate to the overall objective of delivering mail. There is a default configuration file which is intended to work for most sites with only a few lines edited (compare to sendmail where the default is not intended to work easily). There is a whole chapter in the Exim manual that explains every little part of the default config... compare to sendmail where just abou the only docs you'll find on the default config are very hostile sounding warnings that it isn't meant for anyone else to use and you're a fool if you use it without editing everything.
While Exim is the only other MTA I've spent the time to learn, I'm sure Postfix and Qmail are also vastly better than sendmail in terms of ease of configuration and clarity of readability of their documentation.
So don't spout off about sendmail detractors not reading the fucking manual (RTFM). I read lots of that fucking manual only last week. It sucks. Anyone who spends an hour reading the poorly written sendmail documentation and then even a few minutes looking at the well composed, clearly explained and easy-to-read Exim manual can clearly see that anyone who does attempt to RTFM would clearly not perfer sendmail's horrid documenation. Perhaps Postfix and Qmail are somewhat better or worse compared to Exim..... but it's amazing just how badly composed Sendmail's documentation is.
By the way, I've resisted ditching sendmail for years, cause it was already set up and working. But GNU Mailman drove me to learning Exim, because Exim has a feature where it can deliver based on the existance of mailman's list config files, which allows me to have a list administator able to create new lists without editing /etc/alises.
I should have learned a better mailer years ago. But now that I'm familiar with a MTA that has an easy to understand config format that's structured based on a conceptual model that represents understandable steps involved in delivery of mail (as opposed to sendmail's very abstract model), and it actually has a well written manual.... I'll never go back to sendmail. I'm still running sendmail for my mail email, but next time a security advisory comes out or I have to change the sendmail config, instead I'll create a new Emix (or might try Postfix) config rather than continuing to limp along with a difficult-to-understand (larely due to poor documentation) sendmail installation.
Groklaw has very extensive research on Kimball's history, which is nicely summarized and easy to read. Every case has links to much more detail. The overall appearance is that Kimball will probably do the right thing.
Probably most important is the Jacobsen vs Hughes copyright case. Apart from considering much of the material uncopyrightable historical facts, Judge Kimball was quite unimpressed by the plaintif's failure to act in a timely manner to mitigate damages. Quoting from that article:
Obviously this bodes quite well for IBM and all Linux users. SCO of course will claim they stopped distribution of linux, but this ruling at least shows that Judge Kimball isn't likely to be be charmed with the deplorable way SCO has conducted itself. Kimball's willingness to consider the writing a separate work, even though a part of it was loosely based on Jacobsen's also casts quite a shadow over SCO's chances (assuming the unlikely worst case scenario that SCO has an ace up its sleeve, rather than the bogus examples we've seen so far). It's certainly a good sign that Kimball is unlikely to buy SCO expansive theories about what constitutes a derivitive work.
The groklaw page has examples where Kimball has ruled against big business, where he's shown competence at handling software intellectual property disputes (eg, Altiris vs Symantec), and where he's handled very complex cases.
While nothing is 100% certain going into the courtroom, it is a fact that the Judge Kimball has been selected to hear this case. His history shows he's competent, fair, and at least in Jacobsen vs Hughes, he doesn't tollerate the sort of shenanigans SCO has been pulling!
A couple weeks ago, I read somewhere about the judge who's already been selected to hear the case, and about how he had previously ruled quite cluefully against some other copyright/IP infringment case... something to the effect that the plaintif would have had a case if they'd complained early when they were given a copy of the material (a book, as I recall), but rather they waited until it was widely published and he ruled that they didn't act to mitigate damaged and were not entitled to any relief.
Of course, that case was indeed a case of copying, whereas this SCO case has many weaknesses on top of the fact that SCO is complaining late and not acting in good faith to limit damage.
Maybe someone knows the details? I shoulda saved a link to this, but by now it's long lost in the sea of daily SCO babble.
If everything IBM makes is of such high quality and lasts so long, perhaps I can interest you in a pile of used IBM 75 gig, 7200 rpm Deskstar hard drives?
Specifically mentioned in the interview is his opinion that an "explicit feedback system" (Ebay is used as an example) has a tendancy to "inflate". Indeed, if you look at slashdot's explicit feedback moderation system, lots of not very insightful messages like yours end up at +5 every day.
Your rant about never giving accurate personally identifying information is worthless in this context. If you actually read (and understand) the interview, you'll see that what they are attempting to do is sift through 20000+ daily usenet messages to find the threads that are worth reading, and the people who are insightful and helpful. So real or fake info doesn't matter... what matters is a pattern of posting messages (number per day, ratio of replies to new messages, distribution of posts to different threads) that can help predict if you are the sort of person who contributes valuable information, or if you're a flamer, or spammer, or one-off question asker, and so on. It is inconsequential if you used real or fake info, but if you regularily change you identity then it does foul up their efforts. But even then, you'll see near the end that they are concerned "about letting the cream float the top and not about letting the other stuff sink".
Obviously your very misplaced rant appealed to 3 or 4 explicit feedback slashdot moderators. In the spirit of this interview's topic (and not the inaccurate and alarmist summary posted on slashdot's front page), your comment achieving +5 only underscores the weakness of slashdot's explict feedback moderation system and the need to develop new and better ways to identify the truely insightful messages amoung discussion forums.
By viewing your public usenet postings, and creating simple statistics involving the number of times you posted, number of different threads you posted into, ratio of replies to new threads, and so on. Pretty serious spying!
While you're protecting everyone's public privacy, better do something about google syping on everyone's websites and creating statistics on numbers of pages, words used in links, who links to whom, ratios of inbound to outbound links.
Hey, why not launch a 1 billion dollar lawsuit against someone for using your idea without authorization! You'd never win, 'cause only specific arts and expressions can be protected by copyright... but who cares about winning? You could make a fortune by creating a media frenzy to drive up your valueless stock's price. It doesn't matter if your hype would be utter nonesence in court, as it only needs to dup investors.
Hmmm... maybe I should copyright this idea. I wonder if anyone's already thought of it first??
Steel is a poor conductor of heat.
That would conflict with the REAL payload of this worm, which is to install a TFTP-based backdoor on every computer it infects. Sure, it patches the original hole, but the author hardly had the computer owner's best interests in mind!
Some time ago, moderator points were scarce and usually fewer than 10 coments would end up at +5. Today, this popular article has already more than 50 comments moderated to +5, and quite frankly most of them are hardly "on top of this". Yes, a few are, but most are not.
One mentions checking the linux CVS repository history, yet the Linus has never used CVS and only revently started using bitkeeper.
Many posts stupidly suggest that this questionable code could have originated within linux and been copied by SCO. How stupid is that, when the code is from 1979 or possibly earlier?
Many others point out that because it appeared in Berkeley BSD, it must be legit... yet the version of BSD it appears in was long before the settlement with AT&T/USL, and before the effort to rewrite all of AT&T's code.
Now a few +5 posts (a small minority) insightfully point out that this code is within the two ancient unix sources that Caldera released with a BSD-style license within the last two years.
But denying that the ancient unix is not the source, or incredibly that it could have originated in linux between 1991 to present and been copied by SCO into the code from teh 70's and 80's is just downright stupid.
A moderation system where several such comments end up at "+5 insightful", thereby dilluting attention from the minority of +5 comments with good informtation is a vbery broken moderation system indeed.
Hardly what I'd call "everyone here in the /. community is so on top of this". Replace "everyone" with "a few needles in the haystack of bogus +5 comments" and I'd agree.
Or due to the space characters slashdot added to the text-only URL.
Approximately 1/3 of all websites are hosted by IIS/Microsoft systems, yet the majority of defaced websites have been among the smaller portion hosted on Microsoft.
As linux-based marketshare grows, I predict that this well established trend will continue.
They've already had a counter suit filed by IBM, and they're being sued by Red Hat... more or less for bringing a baseless case to court and creating a media circus around it in an attempt to disparage their competitors products.
It isn't clear they've attempted to make this bogus arguement to the court, is it? So far it looks like more media FUD, for which they will certainly be held accountable in the IBM and Red Hat suits (presuming they don't disolve the company by then, which seems quite likely).
Consider for a moment, if you will, that this particular worm exploits the same hole in Windows 2000 and XP, but it only works as the author intended on 2000. XP machines (reportedly) do not propage the worm and instead reboot in 60 seconds.
So while it may in theory be possible to write a cross-platform worm, in practice this real-world worm doesn't even successfully progate on very similar systems from the same vendor, using largely the same code base, with the same exploit.
However, many of those updates are for very minor security problems... the sorts of things Microsoft would not even bother to fix.
It WAS only about breach of contract with IBM, neglecting language insulting to the community... eg, linux was a "bicycle" until IBM stole SCO's IP to turn it into a luxury car, open source developers were incapable of creating enterprise quality code, and so on.
The fact that the community has missed this point and taken that lawsuit as having a much broader scope than it does is unfortunate.
When McBride and Sontag made numerous public threats against the larger community, they left the realm of insults and directly threated litigation.
In at least one statement to the media, they mentioned the possibility of litigation against Linus and others. 1500 threatening letters were sent, not to developers but to users, with the intention to cause them to reconsider deloying linux. I'd call that an attack on the community.
But on a purely technical level, you are correct. The lawsuit is between SCO and IBM. Though SCO hasn't yet filed any other suits, the FUD-based media circus McBride and Sontag have created, the 1500 threating letters, and the licensing campaign are all additional facts that conspire to portray SCO as an enemy of the free software community.
Then the power supply would be blowing heated air INTO the computer, where cooling is needed the most. Not a smart idea.
BTW The power supply really should be at the bottom of the case not the top, since heat rises.
Hot air rises, in the presence of relatively still cooler air. This is a relatively small effect in the presence of fans forcing airflow.
Nonetheless, the slight buoyant force causing heated air to rise also helps it reach the power supply at the TOP of the case, where it is exhausted to the outside by the power supply's fan.
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Of course, if you really want to keep your power supply cool at the expense of the CPU, video, disk and other devices, then by all means reverse the fan direction and put it at the bottom.
Not if you must pass FCC (or CE in the rest of the world) radio frequency emissions tests.
Those wires are going to radiate both the switching noise from the power supply and noise from the motherboard. They must remain inside the steel case to have any chance of ever getting the radiated EMI under the FCC class B limit, which is required for sale to consumers for use in homes. Even the higher class A limit (allows more noise, for business use where people aren't as concerned about interference with their TV and radio) probably will be impossible with those wires exposed.
There are only a small handful of Fry's stores. If they'd really purchased 5000 of this Apathy poster, well, you'd have noticed it.
I've actually ordered posters and other goodies from Despair.com a couple times... they make great gifts for coworkers or friends you still maintain contact with at former employers. Just about everything Despair.com does is satire. The order confirmation email you get has a long rambling story about buyer's remorse. The invoice on the package had a blue stamp on it that read "Inspect By: Some random idiot". Every bit of paper or communication you get from them has some humorous corporate satire on it somewhere.
In this case (Sunday afternoon), it looks like the peak was about 10 page view per second, of a page containing approximately 80 kbytes of data. Not including http and tcp/ip protocol overhead, that's about 800000 bytes/second.... quite a bit faster than a T1 line at approx 150000 bytes/second.
As many others have pointed out, static pages and plenty of bandwidth is a no-brainer.
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DALLAS, TX - November 3, 1998 -- The call came in sometime after midnight. As soon as COO Kersten was informed that Fry's Electronics was calling, he rushed to the telephone.
"I immediately sensed the limitless potential. My own customer experiences with Fry's were so excruciatingly painful that I was overwhelmed with the possibilities of a relationship. They are truly Jedis of Customer Disservice", from whom I could learn much," Kersten stated.
Kersten was flattered to learn that Fry's was calling to talk business. Company President John Fry wanted to purchase APATHY Demotivators(tm), thousands of them. He had seen the design during a visit to his local post office, and felt it perfectly articulated their own indifferent sentiments towards customers. In completing the transaction, Fry's became the largest single customer of APATHY poster outside of the government sector.
"It is a wonderful irony that the company that turned Customer Disservice into an artform has entered into a relationship with the company that turned it into artwork. We couldn't be more flattered, offered Kersten on the purchase.
In reply, Fry offered, "This will keep our employees from losing sight of what is important. -- Nothing."
At one point, during a conversation with Fry, the notoriously unemotional Kersten found himself choked up with tears. His personal secretary and confidante of ten years, "Hey You", later commented that they had revealed some radical new techniques for Customer Disservice"; they intended to test in their Dallas store.
Kersten declined to reveal details, saying only, "How much does body armor go for these days" This led some to speculate that Fry's may be considering shooting customers at random to gauge subsequent buying patterns.
Fry's legendary indifference to customer service, although occasionally drawing criticism and media scrutiny, has only led to increased loyalty amongst their customer base and continued explosive growth. Analysts theorize that Fry.s customer base, heavily skewed towards poorly socialized, pure geek demographics, may actually derive some erotic gratification from the masochistic purchasing experience.
Because businesses are a great portion of the entire "market", whereas hobbists are a tiny portion.
The likelyhood of chip and board manufacturers releasing drives or technical specs needed to create drivers is directly proportional to their perception of how much of their "market" needs linux support.
For example, I just purchased a Via EPIA-M10000 motherboard with Via C3 processor (for an embedded application project which needs the small size and much lower power of this board). Via knows that linux is important because they perceive that a lot of the market uses it, or will use it soon. Having looked for drivers in the last few days, it's obvious Via took a windows style approach and released some binary only drivers some time ago (redhat 7, etc). They've come under a lot of pressure to improve their support for linux, and if you look at recent discussions on their viaarena discussion website, they've recently sent code to Alan Cox and they are in the processor of changing their source code release policies to better cater to the linux "market".
Without businesses using linux on a wide scale, Via would probably not consider linux important and we'd be stuck with little or no driver support for this uniquely special (very small and low power) motherboard. That means I'd have to choose a bigger, power-hungry board, or port my application to the only other OS that has good drivers for that motherboard.... Yuk.
That is why I care that businesses and in general a large market uses linux. And you should too.