So let me get this straight, you believe that we're the only civilisation in all the universe? Careful when you say that, it's a big place.
I'm not making a comparison like "London is a big place", I mean truly mind-bogglingly huge. Our galaxy has a hundred times more stars than we have human beings on this planet, and they're on average about 6 light years apart. Even if the chances of our being here are a billion to one, that gives us several hundred civilisations to work with here.
And considering that recent discoveries are showing that the liklihood of planets forming around a star are only about two to one, and one forming in the temperate zone where we live is probably at most about one thousand to one, rolling those dice a billion times is going to come up with a whole heck of a lot of life in the galaxy.
Nevermind the rest of the universe, but don't you think that it would be a spectacular waste of effort on God's part to create a billion billion galaxies each with a hundred billion planets just so we have something to look at at night? Is God really so frivolous as to indulge the entire universe with only one thinking race?
is helped out by the fact that we are so unique amoung all the species on earth.
99.99% of our DNA is precisely the same in humans as it is in elephants. Every mammal and most reptiles on this planet have two eyes, two ears, four limbs, five fingers and five toes. We all have bones made out of exactly the same material, and nervous systems that work the same way. Human beings aren't totally unique, we're just a minor variation that worked out really well. About the only animal on earth we're unique in comparison to are insects and shellfish.
It's optional and most ISP's I've used don't have strong authentication. They could, but choose not to.
We don't for a very good reason: our users are stupid. They choose stupid passwords, which increases the security risk of authenticated SMTP over plain smtp. Spammers can and do try to access athenticated SMTP servers using common passwords, and it works. One user with the login joe and the password 'password' essentially makes you into an open relay. And I'll be damned if forcing them to change their settings isn't a 3 month long nightmare, followed by another 8 months of increasingly mind-boggling stupidity as the stragglers clue in to the fact that their mail doesn't work. Two weeks, my ass.
The author of the original article is a twit. Either that or he's intentionally scaremongering. I think he really wants a job writing in the finance pages.
Consider the opening line:
If there's a gamer in your life, chances are you've noticed some strange behavior since last week.
If there's a gamer in your life, he has a way better computer than the system specs. There's no need to say "Look out! You'll need to upgrade big time!"
It's also full of gems like this, about video card upgrades:
It's also where computer makers, looking to cut corners on mainstream systems, often wimp out.
Wowee mister wizard! You've managed to establish that when you buy a PC in a bundle, you get sucky components! It's also worth noting that these sucky components don't run *yesterday's* games either, never mind today's! So if you're in the least bit interested in playing Doom 3, I'd bet dollars to donuts that you *don't* have a Dell with the cheapo onboard video processor.
The interesting thing is that I don't think he's actually all that clueless. What I think is that he's got half a dozen ads for computer stores surrounding his article, and that he thinks he'll get more if he boosts sales.
Before Mozilla, my PC was getting 0wn3d three times a day. I kept getting virus after malware after popup. Every time I turned around, there were a dozen popups on my screen, multiplying by the second, and my home page kept changing to random porn sites.
Now that I have Mozilla, my computer is getting 0wn3d only once a day! New technology has come out to save me from my own gullible self, but the power of human stupidity prevails. Thanks Mozilla!
He does not make software for users, he makes software for himself to streamline his own tasks.
No, I make *servers* for users. The trick here is that systems administration is indeed a complex task like development that, should it be interrupted, is hard to get back into. Should it be interrupted 40 times a day by users wanting to set up their e-mail and people who can't spell their password right, nothing gets done.
This is why developers are shielded from their users at least somewhat, and that they only interact with them rarely (and speaking to your customers once or twice a week is indeed "rarely", from my point of view).
I'm a unix sysadmin, and though I've never used slackware and have little use for Linux in general, my impression of this distro has always been that it's built by slackers (thus, the name), and as such I wouldn't want to put it on *any* server.
Although the article says it's supposed to be a distribution for servers, I think that this article reaffirms my opinion, since it's pretty clear that its toolset is pretty limited. Installing stuff is awkward and lacking any automation at all, a clear sign of laziness on the behalf of the programmers and designers. When you're actually being paid to spend time doing something, it's in the best interests of those paying you to do it faster, which is why I insist on such shortcuts. Sorry guys, I'm not interested.
The further insulated your developers and support staff are from the user base, the less effective they become.
This must work on some kind of a polynomial curve, because the reverse is also true, that the closer developers get to the user base, the less work they get done because the fucking users won't bloody well leave them alone.
I know that personally as a sysadmin working for a small ISP that insists that I also do technical support to cut costs, it takes at least four times longer to do any non-trivial task because I'm being constantly interrupted.
This text is an instructional manual on proper telephone manners for secretaries, customer service personnel, and anyone else who must use a telephone as part of their job.
It's worth noting that many of these not only hold true today, but that they're still taught to people today. I once picked up such a manual after I got my first technical support job, so many years ago.
Heh. Actually, our secondary nameserver, which also works as our RADIUS authenticator, has been running on the same P100 24/7 for the past ten years.
I wish it had that kind of uptime (not that it would mean anything, since I've only been working here a little over 2 years), but Jesus, the same hardware is still doing its job! Cheap PC hardware my ass!
The solution to the problem of having your swap filesystem on your 1 GB flash disk is to have 0.5 GB of RAM and the system never touches the swap space.
That might be a little hard in this guy's case, but I'm sure he'll find a way to not use swap. We've been avoiding this for years after all.
I did that once when I was in college and a laptop was useful to me.
I bought an old laptop at a great deal - a 386 with windows 3.11 and office 2.1 (that ancient version of excel did wonders for physics experiments!) installed, all for $50. After tax, shipping, and the exchange rate, it cost me $100 CDN.
The trick was finding an adapter. After scouring the internet, I managed to find a place that would actually sell me one. For about $50 including shipping. The battery was another $50.
Ouch. Not such a great deal after all. Then the motherboard died suddenly after about 6 months use. While I was using it. I've never seen anything like it before or since. Oh well. It's since been replaced by my Cassiopeia A-20 which is actually faster and more stuff, it just fits in my pocket. For large values of pocket.
One of the really cool things about not having a harddrive in a laptop is that harrdrives suck back power like nothing else on a laptop. Thus, you can effectively double the battery life in the laptop if you could keep your data below the gig or so you can get Flash cards in.
As others point out though, flash is slow even compared to harddrives. But if it means that you can use the thing throughout an 8 hour flight, I'm all for it myself.
A little while ago, our POP server started telling me a tale of woe about errors the boot disk was generating on the/usr partition. There is a RAID array that is read after boot for the/var partition and all the mailboxes.
First, I try to fsck the drive while the machine is up, but it won't finish it because of the errors on the drive.
"Okay," I think "I guess I'll need to unmount the drive before fscking, but first I'll have to reboot the machine and do this in its physical presence." All our servers are sitting in hosting space separate from our office you see.
So after work one day (it's worth noting I don't get off work until 9pm) I go downtown, shut down the machine, boot into single user mode, and then do my fsck. I mean: I *try* to do my fsck. It fails. I try to mount the drive again. It fails.
Oh shit.
The story gets much shorter if I just tell you that I had to call my boss so he could grab a new disk somewhere and come downtown, and that I didn't go home until about 4:00 AM when the birds are starting to wake up.
Then there was that time when I logged into our primary DNS server with ssh so that I could telnet to our APC with reasonable security. Unfortunately all the plugins on the APC were unlabelled in the software and I had to recall from memory which one was the server I wanted to reboot. The first one I tried turned out to be the primary DNS server.
Remember that APCs will not allow you to log in a second time, and that the timeout on a telnet session is about 15-20 minutes. All of those plugins are now properly labelled.
RIAA: People are downloading what they want off the internet and not buying the shite we shovel onto them through our old distribution channels! Save us! MPAA: People are downloading what they want off the internet and not buying the shite we shovel onto them through our old distribution channels! Save us! Cable TV: People are downloading what they want off the internet and not buying the shite we shovel onto them through our old distribution channels! Save us!
These are people who just got run over by the cluetrain. It came, it tried to deliver, but the station was empty because the receivers were sitting on the tracks having their lunch break. It's really a shame, because if they were paying attention they would know that their customers have been complaining to them for years about how they're not getting what they want, what it is they want, and how it should be delivered.
And now they want the government to save them. Puhleeze.
Yes, but a diamond is still a diamond, even if it is one among thousands. They are just as rare, beautiful, and precious regardless of how many there actually are.
All you really need to know is that you (yes, you!) need to quickly patch together a perl or shell script that repeatedly accesses the site http://www.send-safe.com.
The word vigilant, is too close to vigilante for my comfort:)
This is the most civilized way of handling any annoying situation:
1) Confront the annoying person directly, and politely. 2) If 1) fails, inform his superiors or some authority that can punish him for his misdeeds. 3) If 2) fails, try again. 4) If 3) fails, inform said authorities that if they cannot deal with the problem properly, you will take matters into your own hands since they are clearly not doing their jobs. 5) If 4) fails, bury the fucker appropriately out of sight of a backroad in New Jersey.
I'd have to admit that for the most part net.vigilantes jumped right to 5 about 10 years ago, but considering what the government is doing to stop known spammers despite the fact that we have more than enough evidence against them to convict, I think it's about bloody time that we started putting some heads on sticks. If it doesn't teach the others the error of their ways, it will thin their ranks considerably.
That's nothing. You should see the wankers trying to sell hosting space on their home DSL lines. We get calls from their customers all the time about how they want the DNS hosting to change every 2.5 days with the DHCP changes.
There's a large difference between ad blocking (what google does) and disabling the "feature" that advertisers use to annoy us with. Ad blocking is inherently flawed because it relies on a defensive technique that is easily circumvented. Disabling all popups doesn't just pull the rug from under the feet of the annoying, it pulls out the floor.
It's also worth noting that this doesn't surprise me in the least. I work as a mail administrator for an ISP.
I don't suppose it's occurred to you that the reason they don't care is that all they'd have to do is hire another sysadmin with the same knowledge you have?
If I suddenly bought the farm, there's at least one other coworker who would be able to reset the root password on all my boxen and carry on without me. I've even left detailed notes on how I configured everything (like any good sysadmin should) so that should anyone care in the future, they can find out.
Alternatively, if you leave a cell phone in your bag when it's stolen, it can be recovered based on the fact that it's a radio transmitter that is frequently triangulated. Some cell phones even have GPS to assist 911 services.
This not only eliminates the mugger for a period of time, it recovers your stolen goods, and maybe even the goods of other people.
Oh yeah, and it also helps contribute to a civilized society by ensuring the safety of criminals from the public.
Slashdot Mirror
I also believe in divine creation of humans,
So let me get this straight, you believe that we're the only civilisation in all the universe? Careful when you say that, it's a big place.
I'm not making a comparison like "London is a big place", I mean truly mind-bogglingly huge. Our galaxy has a hundred times more stars than we have human beings on this planet, and they're on average about 6 light years apart. Even if the chances of our being here are a billion to one, that gives us several hundred civilisations to work with here.
And considering that recent discoveries are showing that the liklihood of planets forming around a star are only about two to one, and one forming in the temperate zone where we live is probably at most about one thousand to one, rolling those dice a billion times is going to come up with a whole heck of a lot of life in the galaxy.
Nevermind the rest of the universe, but don't you think that it would be a spectacular waste of effort on God's part to create a billion billion galaxies each with a hundred billion planets just so we have something to look at at night? Is God really so frivolous as to indulge the entire universe with only one thinking race?
is helped out by the fact that we are so unique amoung all the species on earth.
99.99% of our DNA is precisely the same in humans as it is in elephants. Every mammal and most reptiles on this planet have two eyes, two ears, four limbs, five fingers and five toes. We all have bones made out of exactly the same material, and nervous systems that work the same way. Human beings aren't totally unique, we're just a minor variation that worked out really well. About the only animal on earth we're unique in comparison to are insects and shellfish.
It's optional and most ISP's I've used don't have strong authentication. They could, but choose not to.
We don't for a very good reason: our users are stupid. They choose stupid passwords, which increases the security risk of authenticated SMTP over plain smtp. Spammers can and do try to access athenticated SMTP servers using common passwords, and it works. One user with the login joe and the password 'password' essentially makes you into an open relay. And I'll be damned if forcing them to change their settings isn't a 3 month long nightmare, followed by another 8 months of increasingly mind-boggling stupidity as the stragglers clue in to the fact that their mail doesn't work. Two weeks, my ass.
The author of the original article is a twit. Either that or he's intentionally scaremongering. I think he really wants a job writing in the finance pages.
Consider the opening line:
If there's a gamer in your life, chances are you've noticed some strange behavior since last week.
If there's a gamer in your life, he has a way better computer than the system specs. There's no need to say "Look out! You'll need to upgrade big time!"
It's also full of gems like this, about video card upgrades:
It's also where computer makers, looking to cut corners on mainstream systems, often wimp out.
Wowee mister wizard! You've managed to establish that when you buy a PC in a bundle, you get sucky components! It's also worth noting that these sucky components don't run *yesterday's* games either, never mind today's! So if you're in the least bit interested in playing Doom 3, I'd bet dollars to donuts that you *don't* have a Dell with the cheapo onboard video processor.
The interesting thing is that I don't think he's actually all that clueless. What I think is that he's got half a dozen ads for computer stores surrounding his article, and that he thinks he'll get more if he boosts sales.
Bad reporter! Bad!
Before Mozilla, my PC was getting 0wn3d three times a day. I kept getting virus after malware after popup. Every time I turned around, there were a dozen popups on my screen, multiplying by the second, and my home page kept changing to random porn sites.
Now that I have Mozilla, my computer is getting 0wn3d only once a day! New technology has come out to save me from my own gullible self, but the power of human stupidity prevails. Thanks Mozilla!
He does not make software for users, he makes software for himself to streamline his own tasks.
No, I make *servers* for users. The trick here is that systems administration is indeed a complex task like development that, should it be interrupted, is hard to get back into. Should it be interrupted 40 times a day by users wanting to set up their e-mail and people who can't spell their password right, nothing gets done.
This is why developers are shielded from their users at least somewhat, and that they only interact with them rarely (and speaking to your customers once or twice a week is indeed "rarely", from my point of view).
I'm a unix sysadmin, and though I've never used slackware and have little use for Linux in general, my impression of this distro has always been that it's built by slackers (thus, the name), and as such I wouldn't want to put it on *any* server.
Although the article says it's supposed to be a distribution for servers, I think that this article reaffirms my opinion, since it's pretty clear that its toolset is pretty limited. Installing stuff is awkward and lacking any automation at all, a clear sign of laziness on the behalf of the programmers and designers. When you're actually being paid to spend time doing something, it's in the best interests of those paying you to do it faster, which is why I insist on such shortcuts. Sorry guys, I'm not interested.
The further insulated your developers and support staff are from the user base, the less effective they become.
This must work on some kind of a polynomial curve, because the reverse is also true, that the closer developers get to the user base, the less work they get done because the fucking users won't bloody well leave them alone.
I know that personally as a sysadmin working for a small ISP that insists that I also do technical support to cut costs, it takes at least four times longer to do any non-trivial task because I'm being constantly interrupted.
This text is an instructional manual on proper telephone manners for secretaries, customer service personnel, and anyone else who must use a telephone as part of their job.
It's worth noting that many of these not only hold true today, but that they're still taught to people today. I once picked up such a manual after I got my first technical support job, so many years ago.
Heh. Actually, our secondary nameserver, which also works as our RADIUS authenticator, has been running on the same P100 24/7 for the past ten years.
I wish it had that kind of uptime (not that it would mean anything, since I've only been working here a little over 2 years), but Jesus, the same hardware is still doing its job! Cheap PC hardware my ass!
The solution to the problem of having your swap filesystem on your 1 GB flash disk is to have 0.5 GB of RAM and the system never touches the swap space.
That might be a little hard in this guy's case, but I'm sure he'll find a way to not use swap. We've been avoiding this for years after all.
I did that once when I was in college and a laptop was useful to me.
I bought an old laptop at a great deal - a 386 with windows 3.11 and office 2.1 (that ancient version of excel did wonders for physics experiments!) installed, all for $50. After tax, shipping, and the exchange rate, it cost me $100 CDN.
The trick was finding an adapter. After scouring the internet, I managed to find a place that would actually sell me one. For about $50 including shipping. The battery was another $50.
Ouch. Not such a great deal after all. Then the motherboard died suddenly after about 6 months use. While I was using it. I've never seen anything like it before or since. Oh well. It's since been replaced by my Cassiopeia A-20 which is actually faster and more stuff, it just fits in my pocket. For large values of pocket.
One of the really cool things about not having a harddrive in a laptop is that harrdrives suck back power like nothing else on a laptop. Thus, you can effectively double the battery life in the laptop if you could keep your data below the gig or so you can get Flash cards in.
As others point out though, flash is slow even compared to harddrives. But if it means that you can use the thing throughout an 8 hour flight, I'm all for it myself.
This was actually pretty recent.
/usr partition. There is a RAID array that is read after boot for the /var partition and all the mailboxes.
A little while ago, our POP server started telling me a tale of woe about errors the boot disk was generating on the
First, I try to fsck the drive while the machine is up, but it won't finish it because of the errors on the drive.
"Okay," I think "I guess I'll need to unmount the drive before fscking, but first I'll have to reboot the machine and do this in its physical presence." All our servers are sitting in hosting space separate from our office you see.
So after work one day (it's worth noting I don't get off work until 9pm) I go downtown, shut down the machine, boot into single user mode, and then do my fsck. I mean: I *try* to do my fsck. It fails. I try to mount the drive again. It fails.
Oh shit.
The story gets much shorter if I just tell you that I had to call my boss so he could grab a new disk somewhere and come downtown, and that I didn't go home until about 4:00 AM when the birds are starting to wake up.
Then there was that time when I logged into our primary DNS server with ssh so that I could telnet to our APC with reasonable security. Unfortunately all the plugins on the APC were unlabelled in the software and I had to recall from memory which one was the server I wanted to reboot. The first one I tried turned out to be the primary DNS server.
Remember that APCs will not allow you to log in a second time, and that the timeout on a telnet session is about 15-20 minutes. All of those plugins are now properly labelled.
RIAA: People are downloading what they want off the internet and not buying the shite we shovel onto them through our old distribution channels! Save us!
MPAA: People are downloading what they want off the internet and not buying the shite we shovel onto them through our old distribution channels! Save us!
Cable TV: People are downloading what they want off the internet and not buying the shite we shovel onto them through our old distribution channels! Save us!
These are people who just got run over by the cluetrain. It came, it tried to deliver, but the station was empty because the receivers were sitting on the tracks having their lunch break. It's really a shame, because if they were paying attention they would know that their customers have been complaining to them for years about how they're not getting what they want, what it is they want, and how it should be delivered.
And now they want the government to save them. Puhleeze.
Yes, but a diamond is still a diamond, even if it is one among thousands. They are just as rare, beautiful, and precious regardless of how many there actually are.
You can't run a lot of windows apps on linux.
Granted, they're cool because they apparently run on one rail rather than too, but, um...
What good does it do?
I mean really. What, besides added expense and "it looks cool" are the advantages of a monorail system over your regular everyday commuter trains?
All you really need to know is that you (yes, you!) need to quickly patch together a perl or shell script that repeatedly accesses the site http://www.send-safe.com.
Let the uberslashdotting begin!
The word vigilant, is too close to vigilante for my comfort :)
This is the most civilized way of handling any annoying situation:
1) Confront the annoying person directly, and politely.
2) If 1) fails, inform his superiors or some authority that can punish him for his misdeeds.
3) If 2) fails, try again.
4) If 3) fails, inform said authorities that if they cannot deal with the problem properly, you will take matters into your own hands since they are clearly not doing their jobs.
5) If 4) fails, bury the fucker appropriately out of sight of a backroad in New Jersey.
I'd have to admit that for the most part net.vigilantes jumped right to 5 about 10 years ago, but considering what the government is doing to stop known spammers despite the fact that we have more than enough evidence against them to convict, I think it's about bloody time that we started putting some heads on sticks. If it doesn't teach the others the error of their ways, it will thin their ranks considerably.
That's nothing. You should see the wankers trying to sell hosting space on their home DSL lines. We get calls from their customers all the time about how they want the DNS hosting to change every 2.5 days with the DHCP changes.
There's a large difference between ad blocking (what google does) and disabling the "feature" that advertisers use to annoy us with. Ad blocking is inherently flawed because it relies on a defensive technique that is easily circumvented. Disabling all popups doesn't just pull the rug from under the feet of the annoying, it pulls out the floor.
It's also worth noting that this doesn't surprise me in the least. I work as a mail administrator for an ISP.
I don't suppose it's occurred to you that the reason they don't care is that all they'd have to do is hire another sysadmin with the same knowledge you have?
If I suddenly bought the farm, there's at least one other coworker who would be able to reset the root password on all my boxen and carry on without me. I've even left detailed notes on how I configured everything (like any good sysadmin should) so that should anyone care in the future, they can find out.
The man you're looking for in that case is called a locksmith.
Alternatively, if you leave a cell phone in your bag when it's stolen, it can be recovered based on the fact that it's a radio transmitter that is frequently triangulated. Some cell phones even have GPS to assist 911 services.
This not only eliminates the mugger for a period of time, it recovers your stolen goods, and maybe even the goods of other people.
Oh yeah, and it also helps contribute to a civilized society by ensuring the safety of criminals from the public.
This is our pop server, which accepts some 60,000 messages per day and does all the spam filtering on this one machine:
Mem: 48M Active, 167M Inact, 90M Wired, 18M Cache, 60M Buf, 175M Free
Swap: 4096M Total, 0K Used, 4096M Free
It's only got 512 Megs of RAM.