Then consider switching the entire project team to OpenOffice. It's free (unlike MS-Office, where as a user community you're forced to upgrade when the first team member starts using the MS-Office-du-jour he got "for free" with his new laptop).
I've had consistently bad experience with collaboration using MS-Office because of incompatibilities between MS-Office revisions and the cost of rectifying that situation.
Pointing a link to the confusion^Wknowledgebase is not a very good way to argue any particular issue that afflicts Windoze users. Microsoft, despite their stranglehold on the market and their influence on hardware design, still has to play the hand they're dealt by the hardware vendors.
And frankly, in this case, I would not be surprised to learn that Microsoft (as a key player in the development of ACPI) shot themselves in the foot by allowing, or maybe even encouraging, the atrocious complexity behind ACPI.
The only piece of hardware I have ever owned that suspended/resumed reliably all the time was my ancient Apple PowerBook 100. I have used dozens of laptops since, from Toshiba and Dell to Compaq and HP, running various flavors of BSD and Windoze in a dual-boot configuration, and have never found a configuration that works reliably. And the more I learn about ACPI, the less likely I think this will ever be resolved.
I'm considering buying a Mac laptop again after all. I got away with PC laptops all these years because my commute was a forty minute train ride. Now, it's two fifteen minute trainrides with a five minute layover, and despite a net gain of five minutes, my useful time to work on my laptop is reduced from 30 to a hair over 10 minutes because of the time lost in the boot/shutdown process.
But, bottom line, I think Microsoft is not to blame for this screwup (other than allowing ACPI to mushroom the way it did, but second-system-syndrome is a far better explanation of the mess).
Quicky quiz: is your cron up to using time zones? If you run a daily job at 02:30 local time, will it be skipped when a DST changeover advances local time by one hour? Or run it twice when 02:30 comes by a second time the same day?
No peeking!
I don't recall the correct answer offhand (I seem to recall most Free OS's got it right), but when a colleagued asked me this question my initial counterquestion was: why would it matter? Haven't you designed in resilience?
Too many people (especially pundits) see such a list and take it as irrefutable evidence that the thing in question is destined to take over the industry.
Too many people (especially managers) see such a list and take it as irrefutable evidence that the pundits got it right this time.:-)
Around Y2K, I came under pressure from management to switch an Apache server to IIS. An employee had approached them with propaganda^W an independant white paper that showed that IIS was cheaper to operate, more secure and easier to develop for than Apache. Needless to say, this got my attention.
The white paper turned out to be a paid-for reprint of a magazine article. I went through ten reference customers, and found that three had their static content on Apache servers, two had unix based application level firewalls to scrub URLs, and one had an expensive load balancer in front. A further three were mere presence web sites, serving static content to a handful of users. The only site that really had gone whole hog was Disney. By the way, according to Netcraft, even they have seen the light.
At this stage, the pundit reprint backfired. If nine out of ten reference customers don't make the advertized solution shine, then what is a manager to do?
Buy iPlanet instead, of course. Sigh.
Let McNealy, Gates and Stallman dyke it out.
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 1
I think you'll find most of us don't have anything against Solaris as such [...]
I think you'll find that many of the old punters that read this thread hate both Sun and Solaris2 with a vengeance:-)
Solaris2, for those tuning in late, is the Windows NT 3.51 of *NIX: unfinished at release time, overly hyped, and released in that broken state for political reasons only. Oh, and for years after the initial release, the picture didn't improve appreciably (which OS, four releases later, still couldn't manage to give more or less accurate output for who(1) without patching? Yup, that'd be Solaris 2.4)
Sun was hellbent on destroying SunOS 4. Which is fine by me; by the time it became apparent that simple things like the DNS resolver were not going to be fixed in SunOS 4, NetBSD was ready to fill the void and I never looked back.
I'm exceedingly happy to note that by trying to kill off BSD, Sun succeeded in alienating enough people to sustain BSD development long after the Regents gave up on it. And then, when Linux became a marketing success, Sun forgot to include BSD in its list of initiatives to marginalize.
I for one would not lose sleep if McNealy, Gates and Stallman managed to keep each other off the street by trying to slash their respective counterparts throats whenever the opponent isn't looking. Heck, I'm not losing any sleep watching them do just that as we speak:-)
What provision doe s Spamhaus have for making exceptions to non-spamming IPs withing a blocked class B?
What makes you think Spamhaus would list a class B when it could list just the class Cs or even the/32s that are controlled by the spammers?
Spamhaus.org is, in my experience, pretty conservative in their listing policies. They will list individual IPs to start with. Expansion occurs when the ISP starts to move the spammer around the IP space, at which point outside observers have no way to see which IP space is under control of the spammers. And the information available to anyone on www.spamhaus.org is pretty upfront about how the size of the listing was established.
But again, it barely makes sense to discuss this because we still don't know what IP range or ISP you're talking about.
I don't know. It isn't my IP being blocked. [...] Also, I find it hard to believe that every address in that block is assigned to a spammer.
You'd be surprised at the address space some spammers command. But that is beside the point. Until you tell the world which class B was blocked, inappropriately in your view, your entire argument hinges on proof by vigorous handwaving.
As others have pointed out, by the time spamhaus.org expands a listing to/16 there are legitimate doubts about whether that ISP is a solid investment.
Again, without knowing which ISP and which netspace we're talking about, it's hard to say anything for sure, but it wouldn't be the first time a spam friendly ISP used their last remaining non-spamming customers as human shields.
You're absolutely right. In those days, computers were just becoming affordable to small businesses or even home users, but anyone buying one either had a real compelling business need for one, or was a wizard already. Or both.
In those days it wasn't uncommon that "installing" a device meant modifying the code to be able to use it, especially if you mixed and matched gear.
Among the things you weren't surprised to find in the shipping box were complete schematics, engineering drawings (with exploded views of some hard-to-service mechanical bits), and a hard-copy listing of the monitor software. I think it was the TRS-80 that was the first to do away with all those user-unfriendly bits of paperwork.
Apparently, Penn and Teller consist a national security risk. When I try to view http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/home.do I get:
Sorry,
We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States.
What's next? Should I give them an SSN to view this web page? If so, whose SSN? A hair sample? Should I start shopping RoadRunner for an Open Proxy? I only have to look at the Received lines of the Herbal Viagra offerings in my Inbox for the shopping list:-)
Hmmm, apparently Norwegian law has some teeth. Where can I, a Dutch citizen, file a lawsuit against a US based spammer who advertises a web site in China with a French domain registrar, spammed through a hacked cable modem in Germany, if the product is shipped from Canada? Do I just call Oslo directory information and ask for the spam court?
Oh, and in case you wondered, I wrote to all of the ISP's involved and got zero cooperation from any of them, so tying the US based spammer to a specific violation of Norwegian law might pose some... issues.
If this was some unmanned satellite the same detailed account would have no impact.
I can watch crash test dummies on TV for hours.
I've read all four volumes of Macarthur Job's epic "Air Disaster" series. The best episodes are the ones where the crew get the plane down with no loss of life.
Have I been away from Slashdot that long? In my day and age, only the trolls and the odd whistleblower had to resort to posting as AC's. Phtooey.
Anyway, if I read this "Insightful +1" post as if it was, well, Insightful +1, I must disagree. The days have gone that you could install a Windows box without having to add grot to it. I have it on good authority that even installing XP is nigh impossible unless you allow it to install whatever feature du jour Bill decides you should have, automatically, through the Internet.
Friend nor foe of Windows seem to mind that the process of a base install has become entirely unreproducable.
And that's why I like BSD. All of them, any of them. If I go through the motions once, find something that works, I can reproduce it. Once, twice, or a hundred times. Without resorting to tricks like using Ghost. BSD has got ghost too; only it's called dump/restore and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
And the GUI? I'm still carrying my ancient copy of FVWM95 with me. Microsoft did come up with a workable GUI in Win'95. I'd give them even more credit if they hadn't blown it in '98 -- ugly icons, the unfathomable decision to make My Computer half explorer, half guardian of the hidden treasure maps... And the Linux community (which, truth be known, is the engine behind desktop stuff on *nix) took the bait; hook, line and sinker!
I want a BSD base OS with a 1996 vintage X environment, plus a bug free Pine and a recent Galeon to browse the web.
Down with cool icons! Down with user friendly automatic updates! Long live the usability revolution!
For example they could hunt down all uninitialized variables, resource leaks, possible buffer overflows, etc.
I've been on the receiving end of security fixes for an Open Source tool. One day, I woke up to find a patch in the SourceForge tracker that touched roughly half the files. The majority of "fixes" addressed the use of things like strcpy in cases where actually looking at the code showed the usage was safe. What's worse, some complex encoding routines were fixed in a way that is entirely unobvious, with wrapper routines that were not documented to boot.
And needless to say, the fixes broke the code.
Now, if these guys had used the developer mailing list, we could have dealt with the security issues in a more constructive fashion.
It is my observation that lack of communication more than anything is the cause of perpetuating sloppy coding.
Hmmmm.... What's the toll free number for the Herbal Viagra spammer again?
This approach will work for the GAP, or Walmart, or any company that will pay at least a couple of pennies per prospect contacted (as would be the case for snailmail or phone spammers).
Good luck getting free documentation out of the Unaccredited University Diploma spammer.
Your idea is worthwhile, and the brick and mortar companies I deal with have already wisened up to the fact that e-mail marketing requires more care than the likes of Eddy Marin will ever expend on it.
Guerilla marketing may have its place, but any company who practices it exposes itself to the wrath of the marketplace. Companies who have something to lose are already staying away from it. If they're not, they're bound to be educated.
It's the guys who don't have something to lose that cause the trouble. Especially under Florida law, because you can't force them to sell their trailer and their '85 Chevy.
...they are being sued because they sell products/list information...
Yeah, I got a good giggle when I saw the word "sell". I never payed spamhaus.org nor Steve Linford a penny in return for his spare time. Likewise for Joe Jared. As to the other named defendants, I know them by reputation and none of the defendants ever solicited money from me. The only money I ever spent on anti-spam efforts was for legal defense funds, and I'm darn sure the only folks profiting from that were the legal beagles.
As far as I can tell, the only folks making a profit out of spam, apart from the spammers obviously, are the commercial anti-spam services -- who are conspicously absent from the suit.
If this thing actually goes to court, it's gonna be fun to see the ISP's mentioned in the suit present their side of the contract. "You see, y'r honor, we signed on these respectable businessman, but SPEWS strongarmed us into disconnecting them. We didn't mean to deprive the short shlonged population of this country of the critical information about helpful products!"
NOW do you see where they get people who will pay for this service?
We knew all along. It's been over a year ago when one spammer bragged about his one in ten million spams resulting in a sale, and still being able to turn a profit.
PT Barnum was right.
I'm wondering what kind of world our childrens children will live in. You don't have to look at spam to see where the Internet is heading; just look at the banner ads on websites. Did I say banner ads? They take half the screen these days.
I think we'll see a generation of shlong enlarging sociopaths with a small countermovement of kids who will read books, enjoy the outdoors, and perhaps browse the enlightened bits of the Internet through a rediscovered protocol called Gopher.
There are two things that can go wrong with root name servers:
1- Compromise: returning bad data, etcetera 2- Denial of service
It's important to look at the failure mode, and at the effects and probability of each.
If half the root servers are compromised, there's a 50-50 chance that a user gets compromised DNS records. That means that the chance of it getting detected quickly goes up rather than down if there is no monoculture, as someone is bound to spot the inconsistency. If all root servers return bogus data, focus will initially be deflected to the source of the data (i.e., the database itself). I investigate corrupted DNS issues at least once a month (so far, never an issue on the root DNS servers, but bogus DNS data is rife on corporate and ISP name servers; and the fact that someone picks up the phone and asks me to look into an issue is testament to the fact that discrepancies are spotted more easily than all out failures).
If half the root servers suffer a DoS, hardly anyone will notice. Seeing that DoS attacks on the root DNS servers are rather common these days, I'd say diversity is a win no matter what.
And as a matter of fact, I think that attacks on DNS caches at ISP's and corporations will increase. Already spammers are taking advantage of obscure BIND features to cover their tracks. But that's got nothing to do with the root servers.
An added benefit of the NSD initiative: a piece of software written to deal exclusively with this subset of DNS functionality is inherently easier to verify by desk checking. Which will quite likely result in the monoculture shifting towards NSD eventually:-)
I expect NSD to pan out simply because it has less "moving parts" than BIND has, and I think that is a very important consideration.
Yeah, it is a shame that it is necessary to block outbound port 25 from dorm room PC's. I too prefer to live in a world where such measures aren't necessary.
Yet, I wonder how academic freedom could be affected by forcing students to send their outbound mail through the appointed outbound mail gateway.
One of the nastiest and hidden side effect of the current levels of spam is that many corporate sysadmins will not think twice about blocking all of a university's netspace when they get complaints from their users.
Many companies block all of Asia at the firewall. Universities might be next.
Actually, K12 institutions are a worse source of spam relay than universities are. I sometimes get visions of Mr Hat managing the security of Southpark Elementary internet access. Now, I also have to worry about Kenny. Ohmygawd! Those... bastards!
It is a personal dislike, and not even fully rational. I just don't like it.
nicely tuned colourisation in ls does help you navigate and perform your tasks easier
I never saw a nicely tuned color config. As a matter of fact, the default ls color scheme, and the default VIM color scheme hurt my eyes to the point of distracting me from my work.
I wouldn't dream of running my FreeBSD boxes with unproven drivers. I hate being stuck with a DVI Geforce4 card driving a DVI LCD (even though I have reason to believe the Xfree86 support on Linux would suck as badly). If weird device support were important to me, I'd be running a flavor of Linux by now.
And I hate all of the parochialism as much as you do. Trust me, I shed many a tear over the unavailability of a native FreeBSD port of VMware. But I cope with it because FreeBSD serves me better in other respects (and most of them immaterial -- my main dislike for Linux stems from the default colorized ls in Linux 0.something, back in the days when the whole install fit on te floppies).
You're looking at the wrong page, you want PicoBSD.
I used to have a full development system with BSDI or NetBSD on two 100MB drives, with Xwindows source. Those days are well behind us now.
I'm not sure I mind, seeing that disk is cheap these days, but the disk footprint of the 5.0 DP2 kernel was just shocking (filling the better part of a 128MB root partition). Now, I realize that is probably because that kernel was built with -g, but it is shocking nonetheless to see that an out of the box kernel takes up more disk space than my entire production systems in the BSDI 0.9.3 era.
(I'm not aware of any pthreads implementation being of the "npw" variety, so I changed the subject to match what I think the original poster intended -- but then again, the _np suffix has bit me more than once in the past, so there very well might be a Non Portable Windows standard by now, pardon my ignorance).
Or you asking about kernel threads?
I still see pthreads as a programming convenience, and as such, FreeBSD pthreads has served me very well.
Once you get to serious pthreads programming, all but a few commercial implementations fall flat on their face. Needless to say, to support those Serious Programming efforts, those commercial implementations generally do not rank highly on performance, as all that multi-CPU stuff more often than not eats CPU time in spinlocks, and most apps that on the surface could do with multiple CPU's turn out to be disk bound in the first place.
It is so rare that I see apps that actually would benefit from multiple CPU's that I'm consistently stunned to see this issue receiving attention from folks who are not doing fluid dynamics or some other highly parallelizable task.
Right now there's no reason at all for me to switch.
Hey, if Linux does the job for you, why switch? One mans elitist stance is another mans sign of quality. And vice versa. I think that if you look around in the Linux world, you'll find that Debian is much closer to FreeBSD, than Redhat is. If you look around in the BSD world, you'll find that FreeBSD is much closer to Redhat than NetBSD is.
All are excellent OSes. If it were anything near practical, I'd be multibooting Linux for productivity apps, FreeBSD for server development, NetBSD for kernel development, Debian for server deployment, OpenBSD for security critical stuff, Win98 for games and Win2k for Windows support. All of them tasks I perform at times. Stuck with limited disk space and the annoyance of reboots, I use FreeBSD for work and Win98 for games. And I payed the Microsoft tax for the games. So sue me.
As Opus so eloquently put it, "to each his dentifrice".
This is Evil, I quite agree. But from what little research I've done, even a getppid() call on Linux seems to involve opening/proc.
I only wished mount had an option to make a file system visible under emulation only.
Last I checked, I was unable to restore/proc from tape, rendering it totally useless for me as a file system. But then again, I'm not a plan 9 fan either, which probably makes me a heretic in many UNIX users eyes.
Native VMware support for FreeBSD is when I unzip my purse again. I have a hard time believing it'll take more than a day or two for a VMware engineer to fix up the fallout from a "make World" on FreeBSD. Oh well. I think too many FreeBSD users overestimate the engineer/marketer ratio at VMware, and I believe they'll have a hard time getting an engineer off his proverbial to do such a port, and train the support staff ("look, when you tell the user to type "uname -a" and he mentiones FreeBSD, go to page 5 of your cheat sheet"). I'm only half joking there; educating the support staff is an important job, and while I feel VMware support is less than stellar, I challenge any commercial operation to do a better job (or Plex86 to come up with a better Open Source equivalent, FWIW, and I sure lack the time to assist there).
Slashdot Mirror
Then consider switching the entire project team to OpenOffice. It's free (unlike MS-Office, where as a user community you're forced to upgrade when the first team member starts using the MS-Office-du-jour he got "for free" with his new laptop).
I've had consistently bad experience with collaboration using MS-Office because of incompatibilities between MS-Office revisions and the cost of rectifying that situation.
Pointing a link to the confusion^Wknowledgebase is not a very good way to argue any particular issue that afflicts Windoze users. Microsoft, despite their stranglehold on the market and their influence on hardware design, still has to play the hand they're dealt by the hardware vendors.
And frankly, in this case, I would not be surprised to learn that Microsoft (as a key player in the development of ACPI) shot themselves in the foot by allowing, or maybe even encouraging, the atrocious complexity behind ACPI.
The only piece of hardware I have ever owned that suspended/resumed reliably all the time was my ancient Apple PowerBook 100. I have used dozens of laptops since, from Toshiba and Dell to Compaq and HP, running various flavors of BSD and Windoze in a dual-boot configuration, and have never found a configuration that works reliably. And the more I learn about ACPI, the less likely I think this will ever be resolved.
I'm considering buying a Mac laptop again after all. I got away with PC laptops all these years because my commute was a forty minute train ride. Now, it's two fifteen minute trainrides with a five minute layover, and despite a net gain of five minutes, my useful time to work on my laptop is reduced from 30 to a hair over 10 minutes because of the time lost in the boot/shutdown process.
But, bottom line, I think Microsoft is not to blame for this screwup (other than allowing ACPI to mushroom the way it did, but second-system-syndrome is a far better explanation of the mess).
Quicky quiz: is your cron up to using time zones? If you run a daily job at 02:30 local time, will it be skipped when a DST changeover advances local time by one hour? Or run it twice when 02:30 comes by a second time the same day?
No peeking!
I don't recall the correct answer offhand (I seem to recall most Free OS's got it right), but when a colleagued asked me this question my initial counterquestion was: why would it matter? Haven't you designed in resilience?
Too many people (especially pundits) see such a list and take it as irrefutable evidence that the thing in question is destined to take over the industry.
:-)
Too many people (especially managers) see such a list and take it as irrefutable evidence that the pundits got it right this time.
Around Y2K, I came under pressure from management to switch an Apache server to IIS. An employee had approached them with propaganda^W an independant white paper that showed that IIS was cheaper to operate, more secure and easier to develop for than Apache. Needless to say, this got my attention.
The white paper turned out to be a paid-for reprint of a magazine article. I went through ten reference customers, and found that three had their static content on Apache servers, two had unix based application level firewalls to scrub URLs, and one had an expensive load balancer in front. A further three were mere presence web sites, serving static content to a handful of users. The only site that really had gone whole hog was Disney. By the way, according to Netcraft, even they have seen the light.
At this stage, the pundit reprint backfired. If nine out of ten reference customers don't make the advertized solution shine, then what is a manager to do?
Buy iPlanet instead, of course. Sigh.
I think you'll find most of us don't have anything against Solaris as such [...]
:-)
:-)
I think you'll find that many of the old punters that read this thread hate both Sun and Solaris2 with a vengeance
Solaris2, for those tuning in late, is the Windows NT 3.51 of *NIX: unfinished at release time, overly hyped, and released in that broken state for political reasons only. Oh, and for years after the initial release, the picture didn't improve appreciably (which OS, four releases later, still couldn't manage to give more or less accurate output for who(1) without patching? Yup, that'd be Solaris 2.4)
Sun was hellbent on destroying SunOS 4. Which is fine by me; by the time it became apparent that simple things like the DNS resolver were not going to be fixed in SunOS 4, NetBSD was ready to fill the void and I never looked back.
I'm exceedingly happy to note that by trying to kill off BSD, Sun succeeded in alienating enough people to sustain BSD development long after the Regents gave up on it. And then, when Linux became a marketing success, Sun forgot to include BSD in its list of initiatives to marginalize.
I for one would not lose sleep if McNealy, Gates and Stallman managed to keep each other off the street by trying to slash their respective counterparts throats whenever the opponent isn't looking. Heck, I'm not losing any sleep watching them do just that as we speak
What provision doe s Spamhaus have for making exceptions to non-spamming IPs withing a blocked class B?
/32s that are controlled by the spammers?
What makes you think Spamhaus would list a class B when it could list just the class Cs or even the
Spamhaus.org is, in my experience, pretty conservative in their listing policies. They will list individual IPs to start with. Expansion occurs when the ISP starts to move the spammer around the IP space, at which point outside observers have no way to see which IP space is under control of the spammers. And the information available to anyone on www.spamhaus.org is pretty upfront about how the size of the listing was established.
But again, it barely makes sense to discuss this because we still don't know what IP range or ISP you're talking about.
You _still_ have not provided any info about the ISP in question, so you're still ruffling your feathers without contributing to the discussion.
I don't know where you get the idea that I think any ISP loves spam. Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
I don't know. It isn't my IP being blocked. [...] Also, I find it hard to believe that every address in that block is assigned to a spammer.
/16 there are legitimate doubts about whether that ISP is a solid investment.
You'd be surprised at the address space some spammers command. But that is beside the point. Until you tell the world which class B was blocked, inappropriately in your view, your entire argument hinges on proof by vigorous handwaving.
As others have pointed out, by the time spamhaus.org expands a listing to
Again, without knowing which ISP and which netspace we're talking about, it's hard to say anything for sure, but it wouldn't be the first time a spam friendly ISP used their last remaining non-spamming customers as human shields.
You're absolutely right. In those days, computers were just becoming affordable to small businesses or even home users, but anyone buying one either had a real compelling business need for one, or was a wizard already. Or both.
In those days it wasn't uncommon that "installing" a device meant modifying the code to be able to use it, especially if you mixed and matched gear.
Among the things you weren't surprised to find in the shipping box were complete schematics, engineering drawings (with exploded views of some hard-to-service mechanical bits), and a hard-copy listing of the monitor software. I think it was the TRS-80 that was the first to do away with all those user-unfriendly bits of paperwork.
Apparently, Penn and Teller consist a national security risk. When I try to view http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/home.do I get:
:-)
Sorry,
We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States.
What's next? Should I give them an SSN to view this web page? If so, whose SSN? A hair sample? Should I start shopping RoadRunner for an Open Proxy? I only have to look at the Received lines of the Herbal Viagra offerings in my Inbox for the shopping list
Hmmm, apparently Norwegian law has some teeth. Where can I, a Dutch citizen, file a lawsuit against a US based spammer who advertises a web site in China with a French domain registrar, spammed through a hacked cable modem in Germany, if the product is shipped from Canada? Do I just call Oslo directory information and ask for the spam court?
Oh, and in case you wondered, I wrote to all of the ISP's involved and got zero cooperation from any of them, so tying the US based spammer to a specific violation of Norwegian law might pose some... issues.
If this was some unmanned satellite the same detailed account would have no impact.
I can watch crash test dummies on TV for hours.
I've read all four volumes of Macarthur Job's epic "Air Disaster" series. The best episodes are the ones where the crew get the plane down with no loss of life.
Have I been away from Slashdot that long? In my day and age, only the trolls and the odd whistleblower had to resort to posting as AC's. Phtooey.
Anyway, if I read this "Insightful +1" post as if it was, well, Insightful +1, I must disagree. The days have gone that you could install a Windows box without having to add grot to it. I have it on good authority that even installing XP is nigh impossible unless you allow it to install whatever feature du jour Bill decides you should have, automatically, through the Internet.
Friend nor foe of Windows seem to mind that the process of a base install has become entirely unreproducable.
And that's why I like BSD. All of them, any of them. If I go through the motions once, find something that works, I can reproduce it. Once, twice, or a hundred times. Without resorting to tricks like using Ghost. BSD has got ghost too; only it's called dump/restore and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
And the GUI? I'm still carrying my ancient copy of FVWM95 with me. Microsoft did come up with a workable GUI in Win'95. I'd give them even more credit if they hadn't blown it in '98 -- ugly icons, the unfathomable decision to make My Computer half explorer, half guardian of the hidden treasure maps... And the Linux community (which, truth be known, is the engine behind desktop stuff on *nix) took the bait; hook, line and sinker!
I want a BSD base OS with a 1996 vintage X environment, plus a bug free Pine and a recent Galeon to browse the web.
Down with cool icons! Down with user friendly automatic updates! Long live the usability revolution!
For example they could hunt down all uninitialized variables, resource leaks, possible buffer overflows, etc.
I've been on the receiving end of security fixes for an Open Source tool. One day, I woke up to find a patch in the SourceForge tracker that touched roughly half the files. The majority of "fixes" addressed the use of things like strcpy in cases where actually looking at the code showed the usage was safe. What's worse, some complex encoding routines were fixed in a way that is entirely unobvious, with wrapper routines that were not documented to boot.
And needless to say, the fixes broke the code.
Now, if these guys had used the developer mailing list, we could have dealt with the security issues in a more constructive fashion.
It is my observation that lack of communication more than anything is the cause of perpetuating sloppy coding.
Hmmmm.... What's the toll free number for the Herbal Viagra spammer again?
This approach will work for the GAP, or Walmart, or any company that will pay at least a couple of pennies per prospect contacted (as would be the case for snailmail or phone spammers).
Good luck getting free documentation out of the Unaccredited University Diploma spammer.
Your idea is worthwhile, and the brick and mortar companies I deal with have already wisened up to the fact that e-mail marketing requires more care than the likes of Eddy Marin will ever expend on it.
Guerilla marketing may have its place, but any company who practices it exposes itself to the wrath of the marketplace. Companies who have something to lose are already staying away from it. If they're not, they're bound to be educated.
It's the guys who don't have something to lose that cause the trouble. Especially under Florida law, because you can't force them to sell their trailer and their '85 Chevy.
...they are being sued because they sell products/list information...
Yeah, I got a good giggle when I saw the word "sell". I never payed spamhaus.org nor Steve Linford a penny in return for his spare time. Likewise for Joe Jared. As to the other named defendants, I know them by reputation and none of the defendants ever solicited money from me. The only money I ever spent on anti-spam efforts was for legal defense funds, and I'm darn sure the only folks profiting from that were the legal beagles.
As far as I can tell, the only folks making a profit out of spam, apart from the spammers obviously, are the commercial anti-spam services -- who are conspicously absent from the suit.
If this thing actually goes to court, it's gonna be fun to see the ISP's mentioned in the suit present their side of the contract. "You see, y'r honor, we signed on these respectable businessman, but SPEWS strongarmed us into disconnecting them. We didn't mean to deprive the short shlonged population of this country of the critical information about helpful products!"
NOW do you see where they get people who will pay for this service?
We knew all along. It's been over a year ago when one spammer bragged about his one in ten million spams resulting in a sale, and still being able to turn a profit.
PT Barnum was right.
I'm wondering what kind of world our childrens children will live in. You don't have to look at spam to see where the Internet is heading; just look at the banner ads on websites. Did I say banner ads? They take half the screen these days.
I think we'll see a generation of shlong enlarging sociopaths with a small countermovement of kids who will read books, enjoy the outdoors, and perhaps browse the enlightened bits of the Internet through a rediscovered protocol called Gopher.
There are two things that can go wrong with root name servers:
:-)
1- Compromise: returning bad data, etcetera
2- Denial of service
It's important to look at the failure mode, and at the effects and probability of each.
If half the root servers are compromised, there's a 50-50 chance that a user gets compromised DNS records. That means that the chance of it getting detected quickly goes up rather than down if there is no monoculture, as someone is bound to spot the inconsistency. If all root servers return bogus data, focus will initially be deflected to the source of the data (i.e., the database itself). I investigate corrupted DNS issues at least once a month (so far, never an issue on the root DNS servers, but bogus DNS data is rife on corporate and ISP name servers; and the fact that someone picks up the phone and asks me to look into an issue is testament to the fact that discrepancies are spotted more easily than all out failures).
If half the root servers suffer a DoS, hardly anyone will notice. Seeing that DoS attacks on the root DNS servers are rather common these days, I'd say diversity is a win no matter what.
And as a matter of fact, I think that attacks on DNS caches at ISP's and corporations will increase. Already spammers are taking advantage of obscure BIND features to cover their tracks. But that's got nothing to do with the root servers.
An added benefit of the NSD initiative: a piece of software written to deal exclusively with this subset of DNS functionality is inherently easier to verify by desk checking. Which will quite likely result in the monoculture shifting towards NSD eventually
I expect NSD to pan out simply because it has less "moving parts" than BIND has, and I think that is a very important consideration.
Yeah, it is a shame that it is necessary to block outbound port 25 from dorm room PC's. I too prefer to live in a world where such measures aren't necessary.
Yet, I wonder how academic freedom could be affected by forcing students to send their outbound mail through the appointed outbound mail gateway.
One of the nastiest and hidden side effect of the current levels of spam is that many corporate sysadmins will not think twice about blocking all of a university's netspace when they get complaints from their users.
Many companies block all of Asia at the firewall. Universities might be next.
Actually, K12 institutions are a worse source of spam relay than universities are. I sometimes get visions of Mr Hat managing the security of Southpark Elementary internet access. Now, I also have to worry about Kenny. Ohmygawd! Those... bastards!
It might be a personal dislike
It is a personal dislike, and not even fully rational. I just don't like it.
nicely tuned colourisation in ls does help you navigate and perform your tasks easier
I never saw a nicely tuned color config. As a matter of fact, the default ls color scheme, and the default VIM color scheme hurt my eyes to the point of distracting me from my work.
Color is overused and underutilized. IMHO.
If you're happy with Linux, why not stick to it?
I wouldn't dream of running my FreeBSD boxes with unproven drivers. I hate being stuck with a DVI Geforce4 card driving a DVI LCD (even though I have reason to believe the Xfree86 support on Linux would suck as badly). If weird device support were important to me, I'd be running a flavor of Linux by now.
And I hate all of the parochialism as much as you do. Trust me, I shed many a tear over the unavailability of a native FreeBSD port of VMware. But I cope with it because FreeBSD serves me better in other respects (and most of them immaterial -- my main dislike for Linux stems from the default colorized ls in Linux 0.something, back in the days when the whole install fit on te floppies).
You're looking at the wrong page, you want PicoBSD.
I used to have a full development system with BSDI or NetBSD on two 100MB drives, with Xwindows source. Those days are well behind us now.
I'm not sure I mind, seeing that disk is cheap these days, but the disk footprint of the 5.0 DP2 kernel was just shocking (filling the better part of a 128MB root partition). Now, I realize that is probably because that kernel was built with -g, but it is shocking nonetheless to see that an out of the box kernel takes up more disk space than my entire production systems in the BSDI 0.9.3 era.
(I'm not aware of any pthreads implementation being of the "npw" variety, so I changed the subject to match what I think the original poster intended -- but then again, the _np suffix has bit me more than once in the past, so there very well might be a Non Portable Windows standard by now, pardon my ignorance).
Or you asking about kernel threads?
I still see pthreads as a programming convenience, and as such, FreeBSD pthreads has served me very well.
Once you get to serious pthreads programming, all but a few commercial implementations fall flat on their face. Needless to say, to support those Serious Programming efforts, those commercial implementations generally do not rank highly on performance, as all that multi-CPU stuff more often than not eats CPU time in spinlocks, and most apps that on the surface could do with multiple CPU's turn out to be disk bound in the first place.
It is so rare that I see apps that actually would benefit from multiple CPU's that I'm consistently stunned to see this issue receiving attention from folks who are not doing fluid dynamics or some other highly parallelizable task.
Right now there's no reason at all for me to switch.
Hey, if Linux does the job for you, why switch? One mans elitist stance is another mans sign of quality. And vice versa. I think that if you look around in the Linux world, you'll find that Debian is much closer to FreeBSD, than Redhat is. If you look around in the BSD world, you'll find that FreeBSD is much closer to Redhat than NetBSD is.
All are excellent OSes. If it were anything near practical, I'd be multibooting Linux for productivity apps, FreeBSD for server development, NetBSD for kernel development, Debian for server deployment, OpenBSD for security critical stuff, Win98 for games and Win2k for Windows support. All of them tasks I perform at times. Stuck with limited disk space and the annoyance of reboots, I use FreeBSD for work and Win98 for games. And I payed the Microsoft tax for the games. So sue me.
As Opus so eloquently put it, "to each his dentifrice".
VMware uses /proc (or rather, /usr/compat/linux/proc ;-)
/proc.
/proc from tape, rendering it totally useless for me as a file system. But then again, I'm not a plan 9 fan either, which probably makes me a heretic in many UNIX users eyes.
This is Evil, I quite agree. But from what little research I've done, even a getppid() call on Linux seems to involve opening
I only wished mount had an option to make a file system visible under emulation only.
Last I checked, I was unable to restore
Native VMware support for FreeBSD is when I unzip my purse again. I have a hard time believing it'll take more than a day or two for a VMware engineer to fix up the fallout from a "make World" on FreeBSD. Oh well. I think too many FreeBSD users overestimate the engineer/marketer ratio at VMware, and I believe they'll have a hard time getting an engineer off his proverbial to do such a port, and train the support staff ("look, when you tell the user to type "uname -a" and he mentiones FreeBSD, go to page 5 of your cheat sheet"). I'm only half joking there; educating the support staff is an important job, and while I feel VMware support is less than stellar, I challenge any commercial operation to do a better job (or Plex86 to come up with a better Open Source equivalent, FWIW, and I sure lack the time to assist there).