In the past 2 months, using a combination of tools including SpamAssassin, I have managed to block approximately 32000 spam mail a week. This is more than 50% of our incoming mail.
I will note that in general this is only coming to around 20% of our users. It is approximately 100 messages per user per day. This actually seems reasonable compared to one of my email accounts that is on a webpage.
So I would say the only reason the amount of spam is so low is that enough people in our firm don't give out their firm email addresses on the internet to strangers.
Although they do miss out on alot of great offers for Hovercraft Toys.
An ISP may only have a responsibility to provide bandwidth, but they also should not be the cause of problems for their users. While it may not be feasible to protect their network by acting effectively to block worms and virus's, it is certainly possible for them to organize class action suits against various people who are responsible for the problem.
If the problem is that a piece of software is improperly configured and is causing a problem, the user of the software should be liable for traffic. The ISP should help their users effectively collect penalties from such users.
If the problem is a flaw in software, then the maker of the software should be held liable unless they have proven responsible action (such as contacting all their registered users with information about the vulnerability and solutions to it), in which case the user of the malignant software is at fault.
In any case, an ISP can state that a user is responsible for all the traffic they get, whether they want or even use that traffic, but then they have to provide better traffic shaping, and the costs of that will increase the user costs, although the bandwidth will certainly be more valuable. Imagine being able to enter in that you don't want traffic from a certain ip, or a certain port, and instead of that getting blocked at your door, have it blocked at the ISP's door. Or even have it blocked right at the senders door.
I guess it is a question of balance. If bandwidth is really cheap then an ISP can afford to let it be entirely open. If it is really expensive, then technology needs to be developed to restrict use of bandwidth to what is appropriate. QOS on an internet wide scale...
In any case, I would say that a provider who really wants to keep customers will seek to punish the people causing their bandwidth problems rather than users who do their part to reduce the problems with worms, viruses and otherwise.
Is there a license requirement to use GNU software that makes it so that all products that have either used the software, or contain the products, must also name their products with GNU? Is the requirement ONLY for Linux? I believe the idea behind the FSF and Open-source movmenet is that we DO need contracts, and we do need to create contracts that allow and encourage the maximum freedom. I believe the benefits of those movements in general is that we have created software that is infact better than closed source on many levels and for many tasks. I do not believe that trivial issues such as the name of a user group, are legitimate topics for a software contract.
It is not just wrong to require such things in a contract, it is wrong to require such things without stating it in that contract as well. The licenses that exist do not state that you need to use GNU in the name of the project, nor in the name of anything. What you need to do IS in the GPL and other appropriate licenses, and unless I am mistaken, none of them require you to name your project, company, software, group anything at all.
Yes Richard is right to point out that Linux isn't the only important component of the distributions that exist, and he is even right to point out that the use and requirement for others to use a commercial product is dangerous in an open-source project, however, if he had wanted to speak at Austin SIGLINUX's group their name would have been part of his topic when he spoke, and why they should change it should be his argument. What he instead did is create a situation that would bring a greater attention to his ideology without having to bother speaking in front of these people. He should atleast be honest that he was not interested in speaking there, and point out also that it should be GNU/Linux, rather than use his speaking as a carrot. Because if the only reason people follow Richard Stallman's requests is that it is the best way to get something they want, then it is no different than a person who uses open-source tools because they are the best tools and not because they are the right thing to do. Richard seems to think that it is important to act based on what is right and wrong and not just on what is efficient, and that right and wrong are long term issues, the idea of freedom being lost due to negligance and ignorance. He is right to believe those things, and the recent Peruvian discussion with Microsoft went a long way towards explaining why open source tools are sometimes the ONLY ones that suit a transparent and appropriately maintained computer system. However in the LONG run, is it more important to bring up your point while pissing off people, rather than by trying to reach out to people woh are interested in what you have to say and make the points in a context of progress, of an understanding that there is a value to all the aspects of open-source and free software both the ideological and the practical results of those ideologies?
The proof of open-source, and GNU is that by contributing you benefit even if your contributions are not attributed. As long as no one else takes credit for your work and profits from it you really have no argument. My name is not in any open source project, yet I have actually contributed to several over several years. I never asked for attribution when I provided a patch or pointed out a bug, or researched hardware.
It is true that there are questions as to what the best way to handle Linux is. I don't know if there is any restriction to what you name that piece of software is, or whether I could go and fork it and call it Stallmix. Or Henrieta Mark III.
Maybe the GNU folks should finish Hurd (Debian has been working hard towards a distribution) and prove why their way of doing things is better than Linux, not because one is right and one is wrong, but because doing it the right way in the end produces the best result.
In any case, ideology is important, but it is important because you BELIEVE that it is the right thing to do, and if you discover that it isn't you should change your direction. Software should not be faith oriented. No one benefits by simply believing that an algorithm will work. We test and infact skepticism and debate are more important than faith in our ideology. Richard exhibits skepticism and debate but in some ways he wants others to simply believe without proof. The whole idea in software design is that you have a philosophical logical model that you can actually see work. You do not simply have an argument, you have a result. Richard DOES work hard towards keeping a debate alive, but i think he could do so with more consideration and honesty.
I personally have never seen a single spam that has my real name. If I sign up on some website for something then certainly I can't be really suprised if folks from that website opt me in. Giving them my email and name and such is an invititation to recieving email unless they specifically state they will not send anything.
Much of the spam I do recieve is of the type where they are sending mail to all the DLG's out there for instance.
Also much of the spam I get comes through the email addresses that are on webpages... I infact will recieve the same spam several times a day. The only thing that might change is the subject name. (I have never understood why someone thinks that sending me 20 of the same exact advertisement overnight is wise..)
In any case, I don't know if this process will reduce all spam for all people, but considering that even with blackholes I still get a sizeable amount of spam, anything is worth trying...
>> This wont work. All that will happen is that the spammers will just modify their spam programs to slightly modify each message they send out.
It will however require them to send each specific message separately rather than sending large cc's or using some sort of relay. That alone is a big step since right now most spammers can get away with sending a single email message and relying on an open relay to retransmit to a larger group.
Furthermore I have doubts that for the time being this project will concern spammers. Infact I am pretty sure spammers are not really interested in wasting their own time trying to spam people who consider spam a violation. It is more convenient to ignore those people (which is why they don't bother to check if you want spam or not before they send it to you).
This is getting slightly annoying, I just compiled 2.4.11 on my box last night and now I hafta do it again, only to learn of a new bug.
Actually I am not sure what people keep talking about with this bug. As far as I could tell this error is caught by the compiler...
gcc -D__KERNEL__ -I/usr/src/kernels/linux/include -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wno-trigraphs -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -pipe -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 -march=i686 -malign-functions=4 -DMODULE -DMODVERSIONS -include/usr/src/kernels/linux/include/linux/modversions.h -c -o ieee1284_ops.o ieee1284_ops.c
ieee1284_ops.c: In function `ecp_forward_to_reverse':
ieee1284_ops.c:365: `IEEE1284_PH_DIR_UNKNOWN' undeclared (first use in this function)
ieee1284_ops.c:365: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
ieee1284_ops.c:365: for each function it appears in.)
ieee1284_ops.c: In function `ecp_reverse_to_forward':
ieee1284_ops.c:397: `IEEE1284_PH_DIR_UNKNOWN' undeclared (first use in this function)
make[2]: *** [ieee1284_ops.o] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/linux/drivers/parport'
make[1]: *** [_modsubdir_parport] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/linux/drivers'
make: *** [_mod_drivers] Error 2
So if you compiled it and it worked you aren't using the module that this was in. Or your compiler is broke.:)
In September came out with their most unique computer in atleast a decade. It was fanless, had an entirely different shape and form and was running with a top notch processor. Yet what happened?
Well #1, and I think this goes for all of Apple's line, the lack of the new exciting OS to go with the new exciting hardware caused people to hold back from buying new computers. The fact was that Apple had a very bad release despite releasing great equipment. They took a loss for that quarter.
#2. Typical of Apple, they had problems getting the machines into the hands of the users. Alot of folks I knew ordered them and discovered they were not coming when they expected. Then there were issues with the powerbuttons and expectation of upgrades and a struggle with the atypical monitor cables and such.
#3 In the end, business users did not need the quiet elegant but limited expanssion machine. It was closer to the old Mac Classic design then the Mac II and in comparison to the Powermac G4's this just wasn't a business machine. Probably they should have worked to get it into college dorms and such. But the price is just too high compared to the iMac and the pc compatibles.
In the end it is a shame. I also wanted a Cube. Hopefully they will find a way of dropping the price (iCube?) on a similar technology.
Although this sounds good for Linux, now in the number 2 most powerful computer in the world. Another sign that Linux is on the rise and not "dead"
I don't see a reference to Linux in the description of this supercomputer. I see the following link to the specs which describes the OS as:
The operating system used for the Service, I/O, and System Partitions is Intel's distributed version of UNIX (POSIX 1003.1 and XPG3, AT&T System V.3 and 4.3 BSD Reno VFS) developed for the Paragon XP/S Supercomputer. The Paragon OS presents a single system image to the user. This means that users see the system as a single UNIX machine despite the fact that the operating system is running on a distributed collection of nodes.
As much as I like to push Linux (I use it as my desktop) it just isn't correct to say it is in the #2 in the top 500 list.
As to whether one can charge for GPL sure... But as far as I can tell, if someone else posted a copy of the libranet distro and offered for free that also would be legal. Infact anyone else, based on GPL could even charge for the CD, or charge for the downloads, and never have to pay Libranet.
Atleast that is my recollection of the argument. You can charge for distributing but you can't keep others from distributing except as far as the GPL does.
---
Whether or NOT libranet provides a service that is worth paying for, or whether they deserve to be paid for it, the question is more effectively whether anyone wants to pay for it. As far as it goes, if they have written some software they want to sell, well GPL isn't always the best way to get money. If it isn't GPL'ed then of course whatever license they choose to use is their business. In any case it seems to me unlikely that anyone who is sophisticated is going to pay for libranet. Debian itself is quite easy to handle and they DO provide cd images as well as other several other installation methods. Infact Libranet just takes debian and adds to it if I recall correctly.
Just a few notes. IE crashes on me in Win98. It always has. It displays things differently in Mac and Windows. It doesn't run in Linux or any other OS at all. If Microsoft was working to provide a standards based WWW browser on every platform it could, well I would say great. But to suggest that the IE saga has been somehow faster and more efficient than Mozilla, while offering the same quality of product, well you are wrong.
IE was barely useable until version 4. The next version (6) will remove builtin java support.
Furthermore the number of upgrades I have seen for IE during my time using Win98 is pretty regular. The fact that they are beta testing in a closed environment versus an open environment is not a benefit.
One question I have for you is "Do you use Mozilla?" and "Have you ever had a bug report to them?" I have done both, and my experience has been that in most situations the organization of the Mozilla developers is quite sophisticated in closing out significant bugs. Whether Microsoft is similiarly efficient is impossible to know, since you can't watch and track bug reports made about IE.
I do know that in all bugs I have made I have recieved direct responses from a developer, either confirming the bug, showing it is a duplicate of an earlier one, or asking for more info.
The OPEN SOURCE development model is NOT merely a lengthy beta test anymore then Windows is. The fact is that mozilla has, as a nightly build functioned extremely well for me. There are times when I have to back out of an upgrade but I DO attempt to do nightly build installations. This is so that I can help out, giving bug reports, and further.
Mozilla is targetted over a wide range of platforms. It is an ambituous project with goals that aren't entire equivalent to Microsoft's IE.
That what was once a rough and slow performing webbrowser has become a fast rendering relatively well behaved app is a great thing. The fact that the Mozilla folks don't say "We are done" when they have it mostly done isn't a negative. Microsoft has consistently beta tested on their paying costumer... Look towards DOS 4.0 as one of the early examples of 'wait until the.1'...
I must have missed the part in the article in which the Gnome developers are 'dissin'' their own project. What I saw was a brief explanation on what was motivating improvements, and how the 1.4 was aimed at those improvements. Perhaps I am rising to a troll but as far as I can tell this was anything but an example of anyone dissin' anything.
The only thing I can think, is that the reader here prefers over aggrandized marketing lingo to what is generally self-effacing programmer attitude (in which we learn that programmers always say it is broken even if it isn't 'broken' so as to avoid expectations. as opposed to marketers who never say anything is broken but call bugs features.)
I personally have enjoyed gnome lately. The apps are functional and the toolkit seems to be making it easier for developers to produce some pretty professional looking apps. In combination with Debian (using apt-get) I have been able to keep up to date with gnome and easily added new apps as I heard of them. There is alot of work to go but there seems to be a lot of action. I have been continuously running Helix (Ximian) Gnome desktop for over a month and it is far more stable than any other gui I have ever used. Gimp-print outputs without flaw... And Gimp itself is a rock of stability. The Sawfish desktop is quick and very flexible. Infact running recent Gnome with nightly builds of mozilla, xemacs, eterm, gimp, gpilot, gphoto and xmms has been a pleasure.
Yes there are bugs, and I am an expert user (and thus can pretty much figure out just how I mangled everything, but given a month or two at this rate, and I think ya'll will be suprised.
I am really looking forward to stuff using the X Render extension (anyone have any examples of anyone using it? Docs on how to use them? I so want real transparent terminals...)...
As to Nautilus, well I am still a strong advocate of the command line where file management comes in. Still occasionally I call up the file manager... Certainly not the worst I have seen. Nautilus seems nice looking, and I guess it will appease folks who don't understand cp and mv, but bash with filename completion means I move damned fast when I want a file.
Anyhow,
I am not a 'normal' user with experience since Linux.99p16 but I avoided X for a long time. My experience with gnome, X 4.02 (with Matrox acceleration) has made me a fast clean easy to use desktop. I doubt I will ever abandon command line, but maintaining multiple machines with X is a pleasure at this point.
I have been a web designer for approximately 7 years now. That is a long time. I have seen what the web is, and what a web designer is, change several times.Like back when all transparent graphics made the same grey as the default background of Mosaic because if the browser didn't support transparency it probably didnt support backgrounds either. And we were taught to never count out the text only users. Alt tags!!! Hell back then we didn't assume anything about layout. We didn't have tables or other methods. The best we had was we could run the text next to a graphic on either the left or right side. Oh and Lists...
So anyway, in all that time I have learned that it does not matter what browser 90% uses, or what browser has the most features, or best features, or whatnot. What matters is that when your client calls, and says "A reporter I wanted to cover our new web opening called, and he says it doesn't work" or "THe vice president in charge of marketting says your site crashes his browser" or "My college buddy says that your page looks like crap on a Sun using Netscape 3.0 beta 7 with a 1600x1200 screen (because the background image is a 1x1000 image...)" All of this has happened. Infact I had one of the earlier uses of Javascript to do roll over menus for one of the top Internet Providers, and they had me remove it from 300 pages (well ok search and replace made that work really easily) because it crashed a Netscape 3.0 beta user on Sun (a really small impact but) who was covering the company for Newsweek.
Folks like to claim that 10% is a small percent of the user base in the world. 10% of the 100 million users in america is 10 million. That is a very very big group you are alienating.No one would in their right mind give up 10 million potential customers merely because of a browser choice. Any web producer who suggests they can will lose to the one that says it is no problem to support both. Basicly I can say as an experienced web developer that I deliver 10% more client eyes automatically than someone who makes it IE browser dependent.
Javascript has it's place. ASP's are certainly used a great deal by companies that DON'T find it difficult to produce for Netscape. Hell. My Mozilla doesn't have problems talking to Microsoft websites.:) They certainly don't want to lose my business...
In the long run, the web is not the best manner to do alot of things we want to do, and PC's aren't the natural client for them. Handheld browsers, consumer set top boxes, PLAYSTATIONS, and other NON MICROSOFT products are going to dominate the user base, just as AOL began to do 5 years ago. You all don't remember what a panic it used to be "Our page won't show right on AOL browsers! %!@$@!$" before they started using more standards.
Let me remind you all that Microsoft was late to the internet party. They had their own proprietary page format they were going to use for Microsoft and then slam bam, they had to change directions. That allowed Netscape to grow so large they forgot to make good products, and forced Microsoft to accept all sorts of standards. I can assure you that Amazon can't afford to run a server with software that cuts off 10% marketshare. That 10% will go right to the one who doesn't.
Lets talk about it from a sheer number argument. There are 10 sites. There are 100 users. 90 use IE, 10 use other... All the sites but 1 say, Well IE is the only way to go... Each site is equally good besides that. Ok... Well each site gets 9 IE users....(including the 1 that supports other browsers) but the 1 supporting the other browsers gets the OTHER 10... Which site survives longest?
So while I can see arguments why one might want to use Microsoft only technology in a web page having some virtue (Well yeah it only works for 90% but it lets me enhance it enough to make a big difference to my usability...) there is no excuse for not delivering some service to any class browser. I have basicly rejected employee applicants because their sample websites were all graphics for instance. No search engine would find anything ont heir site. Or blind folks. Or Text only browsers. ETc...
And that is another thing. The ASP Alliance site is rejecting search engines if it only allows IE browsers. It's content is an island.
Been watching these boxes for a while, and I think there are a few things to note.
1. The dual processors... Apple can go back to dual processors again when OS X is on them mainstream. Right now with 9.04 multiprocessing is barely useful for most users (photoshop users being perennial exception. Meanwhile a 733mhz G4 at 133mhz is pretty big news since what it will do is make everything faster in the short term.
2. MacOs X is not gonna be truly ready until September (a year late but hey, Win95 was supposed to come in 93 and we know NT 5 was supposed to come out in 95.:)) At that point I hope to see Dual 733's at 133mhz bus.What will the Win world have? WinME running Pentium III's?
3. It would be great if MacOS ran on more boxes than just Apples but they didn't do so well with that. Asking them to move to cheap commodity hardware is not really rational.The real deal here is that folks don't recognize true cost of ownership with computers until they have owned a few. The real shame is that Apple HAS reduced costs by using crappier equipment and it bit them.
4. The biggest problem Apple had was that no one wants to buy a new machine until OS X comes out. Apple was ready with a whole new set of boxes that would have looked really perty with the perty new OS but instead they are running same old OS 9. If Apple really wanted to get new models sold and empty it's inventory, finish the OS in the 1Q...
I am a longtime Apple user and Linux user and I hope to use both for a long time to come. As long as Apple makes machines that last me 5+ years I am not gonna bitch much. Since I am still using a 7600 with a g3 upgrade card I am definately waiting. I like the idea of a dual processing 733mhz, but in truth there is a sweet spot right now with dual 450....1999...No matter what anyone says about comparing 300 dollar pc's with this, the G4 is a better chip than anything Intel makes. Athlon might manage to screw that up if they keep raising the mhz but sheerly for media related stuff, the G4 rocks.Just RIP a few CD's...
When in the history of Linux did it matter if a company supported Linux running on their OS. The point of Linux was an OS that because of its open nature could be easily adapted by USERS to the hardware they had, and through their contribution of their personal drivers, could empower other users in the same equipment. That has always been the case. If some hacker dude had your hardware you were lucky. The fact that some very standard hardware items weren't supported early on, while some really freaky stuff was, directly was related to this issue. The fact that NOW big companies lend help in these things, that the marketting power of redhat and such has made it important to release specification on some hardware, that companies who refuse to release such specifications have to produce their own drivers, all is a clear indication that open source and hardware manufacturer support are negligibly relevant to each other. IBM has been very supportive of Linux with their software, and has generally supported standards in hardware that were approachable by hackers, and to a large extent the benefit of linux is the commodity hardware that it runs on. Linux geeks have ported their OS to things that shouldn't even have OS's...
If the machine doesn't boot FreeBSD maybe it requires a special tweak. There have always been wierd things involving bios's and harddrives and such. My Alpha has a bios so distant from the crappy bios on the commodity PC that it is indescribable. In any case I don't think this is a major issue. I think it is as always a hacker challenge.
#1. This is not a confidential intel roadmap, nor is it even represented to be one. It stipulates all that on the first page.
#2. Even if it was direct from the horses mouth (or Intel's) it would not be meaningful except historically. Intel has been lately forced to rush their chips to match market forces where for years they were able to determine their pace of innovation on their own. As such we have watched them flounder.
#3. As to WHO needs 2ghz chips, who needs more than 640k ram? In 5 years we have to assume that applicaitons will be much more involved on some levels. The idea of wordprocessing might be dead by then, with dictation as the primary purpose. Multimedia interactive reports might be the norm, and pure text might be considered retro...
#4. Multiple Processors would be nice if we had truly modular computers. I would love to see a computer which you can just snap together from parts and increase in ram, processors, storage, and such without any limitation, and without turning off machines. Anyone wanna give me some money to create it?
Well I can't claim to be an expert kernel hacker, but I have had to use Linux for what was essentially real time interactivity, relying on controlled conditions to provide me with CLOSE ENOUGH. The fact that Linux IS reliable and predictable and has been for some time, has allowed alot of folks to use it as if it was a fully multitasking system, and in many ways that sort of quality of service (having programs not freeze because of other programs) is what I think
drew me to Linux in the first place.
For a time I explored BeOS and the BeBox in particular, but the slowness of that development and the abandonment of the hardware left me cold. Still it had some interesting ability that other OS's don't have involving streaming media, and anything that brings such things (Rendering in a window continuing smoothly while window was being dragged as one example) is a good thing for the user community as well as for the embedded.
While people DO seem to throw alot of hardware at problems to make operations smooth, with my Athlon 500 and 256 ram I cannot run an IE 5 session without getting skips out of winamp. This sort of performance depresses me so much I have already begun to switch over to Linux on the machine for normal use, despite it being purchased for windows development (necessary evil).
I don't know how long it will take to get this sort of performance up, and I know that the danger of RTOS functions is that a badly programmed high priority thread can cause havoc, but if there were proper guards against such things, it would probably be enough to make Linux my OS of choice for interactive exhibits (which it is close to being as it stands).
As to why we are already talking about 2.4, what I really want to know is why 2.5 is meaningful, when it is an unstable track and thus unlikely to be seen until 2.6 in most desktops. What does this mean? If we are talking about something that is done now that is not going to be in a stable release for another year, but with 10 and 100 fold improvements, does that mean we are going to have to start supporting development kernel releases for clients because the feature set is too important to miss? It hasn't been the case for me since 1.3.. I really DON'T want to be doing kernel catchup in the modern era.
If this is important technology, then why can't we postpone 2.4 a little and move it in?
What kinds of schedules are we really talking about?
Is 2.4 expected this week? Is this RT stuff expected this year?
Unlike with Windows and Mac, I don't think that many people are sitting on the edge of their seat waiting for 2.4. I don't think it is keeping folks from choosing Linux. I am not sure I can understand the purpose of rushing forward if there is good technology that can become PART of the mainstream kernel without causing radical change in usage.
Ok, well to start I have been running a server on the internet for 6 years and I admit that I am not always the best administrator, especially in terms of security updates. One of the risks of having an OS that can stay up for a year at a time is that you leave it alone since it is working. As time goes on and exploits are discovered it takes a special attention or a full time job to catch every security hole. As such one has to commend Kurt for making an effort to analyze security issues in ANY distro. As to his lack of understanding of DEBIAN's policy on backfixes, well perhaps it should be made clearer. I am a VERY experienced programmer and administrator in terms of Linux and I LIKE reading changelogs but I don't always get a chance to and a Novice is unlikely to know much about that. In any case Kurt made a mistake and he apologized gracefully, as opposed to the Debian response which was sort of harsh.
That brings me to TWO points. Alot of this discussion has turned into "Everybody Knows" and people need to shut off everything in the machine to make it secure.
#1. If everybody knows, that implies a culture which doesn't accept newcomers with a proper sense of respect. We want new people to use Linux (supposedly) but then we say that it is ok to leave certain security holes because everybody knows to close them. That is nonsensical because what it implies is that the only important people to consider on these installations is experienced users, when a truly experienced suer is NOT the target of this sort of install. Infact one of the joys of Linux is that a really experienced user can make their own canned distro anytime they want, and can essentially fix the assumptions of a distro to their own desire. Yey... Newbies on the otherhand need alot of guidance, more than Linux or Microsoft give. My understanding is that Apple managed to make it so that one can turn on their G4 models with airport and run a webbrowser immediately. That is FAR closer to what newbies need. Closing off security holes as the first step is NOT.
#2. My father has been in the industry since the 60's and he basicly told me that the perfectly secure machine has NO access. Basicly on one side is the availability of services, and on the other side is security. the more services the less secure. People ehre are mandating locking floppy drives, welding shut cases, turning off services.
This is sort of ironic. Even when I started using Linux (Slackware with kernel.99p16) there were good services available and THAT was why I began running it. Fear of being hacked was not what turned me on to Linux. it was the fact that I could take my little 386sx and make it a SERVER. SERVER implies SERVICE. Now I understand folks are trying to switch linux into a desktop machine, and for that maybe it is best to take on the macintosh model of NO SERVICES. Seems to me that could be a REALLY small distro compared to these massive cd sized ones. Even so eveyone wants a webserver, having your own nameserver is nice, a mailserver can be handy, an ftp server solves alot of problem, and hey its nice to have remote access, even if you jsut want your friend to help you on the machine, and so it goes.
Before one evaluates security one needs to evaluate use, and while a distro can be helpful to give a new user an idea of the risks versus the benefits of any decision they make in terms of services and security, there is never going to be a hard enough solution to protect against local penetration, no matter what folks say. In circumstances where someone has physical access to a server even if one can't physically tamper with the machine, effective surveilance, keyboard taps, and any sort of wiretap on datalines makes true security difficult especially in circumstances where the average user STILL probably uses a variation of his/her kid's name as a root password. Or worst writes it down.
Linux has come a long way, and Debian, Redhat, Slackware, SUSE, and every other distro makes a competition of both features and philosophy that is so valuable to the community, that discussion of fragmentation has seemed to fall off in the last year. We can see that ALL Linux is growing, and we are indebted to all those who have examined security issues on EVERY package, every DISTRO, every OS, every kernel. However security is a wide scale and no system that runs power is truly secure. Lets just be thankful that we are talking about a system where users CAN learn to secure their system by themselves.
Having been the victim of forged email headers (and having had to explain how to read headers for 4 years now) I was very pleased to see the following website. It seems legit to me although you never know, it could be a smear... Of course there are photos so it should be easy to tell...
http://belps.freewebsites.com/
Basicly someone hacked a spam company and got all sorts of logs and even some pictures of the perps.
As someone who has written search engines, both as spiders and as meta search engines, I found the existence of the robots.txt standard to be a real blessing. It was a way for me to easily follow rules that kept my site from simply being BLOCKED at a firewall. By further doing things like not going to a specific site twice in a row and other wierd tricks, I could know that I was not abusing other peoples site with my code running automatically.
In the case of a system that is essentially placing their own interface ontop of another system, what I don't understand is why EBay didn't simply refuse the packets. It should not have been THAT difficult. No user has a right to see a site. I have blocked parts of my site from certain users during times when they perhaps inadvertantly caused trouble. I have blocked use of my email system for the purposes of redirection. All of this I do with the technology available to me. The fact is that IF the improper usage of the site is impossible to detect by the owners of the site it isn't a technical problem. On the other hand, if the issue is that they are successfully using the site in a non intrusive manner to profit, it is a business problem, and the problem is NOT with the offendor but with the offended.
The problem is the notion that a site can control how it is viewed.
If you tell me that it is illegal to look at a site without seeing its ads then we are in for a long hard battle. Browsers are being built with the ability to recognize advertising banners and exclude them from being viewed. Text based browsers have always avoided banner ads. The use internet for advertising sales will someday be impossible unless the advertising is completely the same as content, which it IS to a large extent. Content can be filtered, and should be. I look at slashdot with a WAP enabled phone. No ads are sent. Sooner or later someone will fix that somehow but in truth the ad will be just a link to another site, which is fine with me.
In the future it is considered likely that everyone will have a semiautomated search engine customized for them personally. Near future. In the long run, automated agents will be the primary conduit between a user and data, the web browser will be a thing of the past, and the idea that people won't filter out advertising when it bothers them/wastes their bandwidth is nonsensical.
The Robot.txt file says, "Don't check these URL's for content" which basicly means "Don't read me". In the future sites that restrict use of their pages won't be read. If the only revenue a site gets is through advertising, then they will have to find another way to deliver it.
This seems like a good project, although I am sure there have been other freeform interactive projects out there. I was thinking of one recently to follow up on my 'hyperflow' interactive dictionary. I thought maybe a graphic version of hyperflow. Anyhow I love seeing folks doing anything new with http.
Not that I want to toot my own horn but I set up hyperflow about 5 years ago as an interactive dictionary, with no censorship. At this point it has passed 10000 words. I entered maybe the first 50...Since it was my first CGI program I am somewhat proud of it despite its retro feel. Currently trying to make it WAP compatible.
Excuse the graphic problems. We just moved it from its original site and I haven't had time to repretty it.
As a note: We recieved about 100 hate letters yesterday from a Jesus freak who didn't like what some of the posters had sent. Since I don't censor anything that isn't blatantly illegal I have had to leave things that I find distasteful. If you also have some lack of tolerance then don't bother...
The BeOS was originally part of a package called a BeBox. I have one. It is holding up some books right now. It has 2 133mhz PowerPC 603 processors, midi in and out, a slew of serial ports, scsi, infra red ports, a GEEK port which has a bunch of DAC and ADC on one standard port. It was very quick when we got it. It took me months to get my developer software. But that was ok. We didn't have much in the way of docs for the API, their developer manuals weren't done, but we had some.h files to work with and I managed to get a program compiled and running pretty quick. Then the OS went up a version and I started over. Then they abandoned the hardware.
I have to explain, the reason we wanted BeBoxen were that we produce live exhibits and its ability to play MANY streams of media at once was needed. We were stretching our Macintoshes thin. This sounded like a solution. I remember one person who was using it to develop an ambient noise generator for a zoo. I knew folks who were doing similiar light controlers... It was a MEDIA OS with a MEDIA Hardware...
We were notified at first that they would not be supporting the BeBox with new OS after a year... Since all their developers were at that point BeBox owners, they backed off on that. I still am technically a Be developer but hell if I trust them to do ANYTHING right...
Maybe I have been missing out, but with a choice between Linux and Mac OS X and BeOs is there even 100000 BeOS users who don't use one of the other OS'S for their primary work?
This discussion keeps referring to 90% and 99% uptime as giving credit to PC hardware. I have, in 5 years, with 4 Linux servers, seen 3 hd crashes, 1 network card, 2 modems, and 1 motherboard go down. Each one of these was what I would consider a major crash (You say modem crashing is minor but these were internal and at the time primary IP devices).
Given that several hundred day uptime has been my experience with downtown being planned, I would say that standard pc availability is closer to.1% likelyhood of failure with some accumulation of likelyhood being more accurate (I.E a working new pc is unlikely to fail if it is entirely working but at 5 years the likelyhood of a harddrive or powersupply failure is probably 1%.).
That being said, I do not think that the issue hereis cost of replacing parts or the costs involved in running high availabilty. Just adding hotswappable redundant power and fan, and hotswappable raid, good power conditioning, and decent backup+hotspare gives you acceptable performance. One of the reasons we consider the Beowulf cluster as economical is the notion that to increase performance you just buy commodity hardware and replace out old/worn machines. The process of doing so is probably not much different than the hotswappable parts of a mainframe.
Obviously the issue is the I/O involved with typical mainframe applications. Most PC users simply have no capacity to understand what bandwidth really is necessary for many real life applications. Someone mentioned 9 million record databases at 2k. Considering demographic data regularly run at credit card companies to determine NEW customers (where they are using 100million name lists), the person using a 9 million record database is actually a mid range user. Having tested a standard Pentium class PC with SQL, I find that over a million records makes queries very slow (30 seconds-2 minutes) Now certainly I could thrown more power, but larger databases create geometrical demands as the order of magnitude changes.
Having worked for the City of New York in the late 80's, I installed one of the first PC based LAN's and database solutions and I can tell you the benefit of this versus the Mainframe with their terminals had nothing to do with performance. It had to do with the politics of wanting to add fields, add reports, and prioritization of work demands. Centralizing computing power meant that changes to a database might require 6-10 months simply to add a field. This led to bastardization of fields, and what can only be refered to as DENORMALIZATION of data. Statistical analysis was even more cumbersome. A question being asked by a new commisioner would require new statistical analysis, and the response would be needed quickly. But the request for a new report would require a bureaucratic nightmare. Because of this many tasks were being done by hand by large staffs (8 people ddedicated to a single report).
When we recieved PC's, I was hired to handle the databases (relatively large 10-100 thousand primary keys) and the ability to create a new statistical model to view data being made in 1 day instead of half a year changed the way things were done. I had seen reports that took 2 weeks that were monthly reports and required a 8 people turn into 30 minute processing jobs that required 1.
The growth of the PC in departments was not because of the performance. it was because MIS departments were notoriously self-empowered and there was no way for a small department to influence their priorties.
People seem to be under the perception that the mainframe was somehow unsuitable, but it was always clear to us that the issue was management of the resources and a need by computer savvy managers to have their own programmers with their own priorities.
My father, a mainframe COBOL programmer/analyst for 30 years was pleased to see Linux sharing some of the same concepts as he was familiar with. However we both are well aware that the sort of performance he was used to programming (batches of 100million records overnight) is just not available nor are the management features. Hell, you can't even RUN COBOL in Linux.
In any case, I really think a major reason that there is so much anti-mainframe perspective is that mainframes have so often been considered expensive not for the uninitiated's touch, by the generation of programmers who were raised with the PC. They haven't used them, haven't considered what a COMPUTER is on a fundamental level, and don't have appreciation for the kind of programming that was done 30-40 years ago. My father used to brag about being able to write largescale applications in 8k of ram but with unlimited storage, a computer that fit in a room, but barely.
Of course Mainframes aren't dead, and of course IBM made money even when it lost the lead with PC's. IBM gives away mainframes. It doesn't need to earn a cent from hardware. It has the largest patent library in the world, and sells techniques, not technology. Its Supercomputers, Mainframes, Mini's PC's and palmtops are part of a SERVICE oriented drive to provide solutions to problems. The reason Linux is important to them is that they envision a POSIX compliant standards OS that they can run from top to bottom with no additional learning curve at each stage. No doubt THEY would not suggest a mainframe for solutions in which a Beowulf cluster or a multiple high availability cluster would be superior in cost. They would make their money supporting their user with whatever was the most effective solution for the pay. If we consider the world through the PC Vs Mainframe religious war view, then we lose the opportunity to evaluate just how much the PC has evolved into a personal mainframe, and just what we can accomplish in the next 10 years with Linux in the commodity market as well as what Linux can bring to the Mainframe market.
I think the article brought up several excellent examples of how a mainframe webserver farm might be advantageous. CoLocation is a bastard solution intended to move the machine closer to the bandwidth since we can't seem to provide fibre effectively to the location. As Media requirements change, colocation will stop being valuable (renting shelfspace atsomeone elses facility and losing physical access? Not acceptable) Anyone with usage requirements that need a 390 is not going to care about the cost of multiple T3's. The idea that a new client could be granted a FULL operating environment that could be backedup as an image, could be given increased performance, storage, network facilities based on a level of service agreement, all sounds exciting.
Where we now have burstable T1's for growing companies that allow you to pay for the usage you actually see rather than spending based on your MAXIMUM usages, we would see every facility adapt to the usage. Suddenly see a 10fold increase in server usage? Instead of having to run around to solve a problem you didn't have a day ago, you could have a service agreement that would automaticly up your billing rate as your performance was increased. The benefits would not be just the ability to support a website with a 10million hit per day but to also support a 100000 sites that each MIGHT grow into a 10million hit per day site, without requiring capital costs to address that expansion, and reducing the cost of failure not in terms of system failure, but in BUSINESS failure.
Isn't that one of the benefits of Linux? To allow a company to take a risk without the costs inherent in the high end solutions? This article merely points out that the same benefit exists at every level of hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
In the past 2 months, using a combination of tools including SpamAssassin, I have managed to block approximately 32000 spam mail a week. This is more than 50% of our incoming mail.
I will note that in general this is only coming to around 20% of our users. It is approximately 100 messages per user per day. This actually seems reasonable compared to one of my email accounts that is on a webpage.
So I would say the only reason the amount of spam is so low is that enough people in our firm don't give out their firm email addresses on the internet to strangers.
Although they do miss out on alot of great offers for Hovercraft Toys.
An ISP may only have a responsibility to provide bandwidth, but they also should not be the cause of problems for their users. While it may not be feasible to protect their network by acting effectively to block worms and virus's, it is certainly possible for them to organize class action suits against various people who are responsible for the problem.
If the problem is that a piece of software is improperly configured and is causing a problem, the user of the software should be liable for traffic. The ISP should help their users effectively collect penalties from such users.
If the problem is a flaw in software, then the maker of the software should be held liable unless they have proven responsible action (such as contacting all their registered users with information about the vulnerability and solutions to it), in which case the user of the malignant software is at fault.
In any case, an ISP can state that a user is responsible for all the traffic they get, whether they want or even use that traffic, but then they have to provide better traffic shaping, and the costs of that will increase the user costs, although the bandwidth will certainly be more valuable. Imagine being able to enter in that you don't want traffic from a certain ip, or a certain port, and instead of that getting blocked at your door, have it blocked at the ISP's door. Or even have it blocked right at the senders door.
I guess it is a question of balance. If bandwidth is really cheap then an ISP can afford to let it be entirely open. If it is really expensive, then technology needs to be developed to restrict use of bandwidth to what is appropriate. QOS on an internet wide scale...
In any case, I would say that a provider who really wants to keep customers will seek to punish the people causing their bandwidth problems rather than users who do their part to reduce the problems with worms, viruses and otherwise.
Ironically, I started reading the article, but it looks like it has been Slashdotted.:)
Is there a license requirement to use GNU software that makes it so that all products that have either used the software, or contain the products, must also name their products with GNU? Is the requirement ONLY for Linux?
I believe the idea behind the FSF and Open-source movmenet is that we DO need contracts, and we do need to create contracts that allow and encourage the maximum freedom. I believe the benefits of those movements in general is that we have created software that is infact better than closed source on many levels and for many tasks. I do not believe that trivial issues such as the name of a user group, are legitimate topics for a software contract.
It is not just wrong to require such things in a contract, it is wrong to require such things without stating it in that contract as well. The licenses that exist do not state that you need to use GNU in the name of the project, nor in the name of anything. What you need to do IS in the GPL and other appropriate licenses, and unless I am mistaken, none of them require you to name your project, company, software, group anything at all.
Yes Richard is right to point out that Linux isn't the only important component of the distributions that exist, and he is even right to point out that the use and requirement for others to use a commercial product is dangerous in an open-source project, however, if he had wanted to speak at Austin SIGLINUX's group their name would have been part of his topic when he spoke, and why they should change it should be his argument. What he instead did is create a situation that would bring a greater attention to his ideology without having to bother speaking in front of these people. He should atleast be honest that he was not interested in speaking there, and point out also that it should be GNU/Linux, rather than use his speaking as a carrot. Because if the only reason people follow Richard Stallman's requests is that it is the best way to get something they want, then it is no different than a person who uses open-source tools because they are the best tools and not because they are the right thing to do. Richard seems to think that it is important to act based on what is right and wrong and not just on what is efficient, and that right and wrong are long term issues, the idea of freedom being lost due to negligance and ignorance. He is right to believe those things, and the recent Peruvian discussion with Microsoft went a long way towards explaining why open source tools are sometimes the ONLY ones that suit a transparent and appropriately maintained computer system. However in the LONG run, is it more important to bring up your point while pissing off people, rather than by trying to reach out to people woh are interested in what you have to say and make the points in a context of progress, of an understanding that there is a value to all the aspects of open-source and free software both the ideological and the practical results of those ideologies?
The proof of open-source, and GNU is that by contributing you benefit even if your contributions are not attributed. As long as no one else takes credit for your work and profits from it you really have no argument. My name is not in any open source project, yet I have actually contributed to several over several years. I never asked for attribution when I provided a patch or pointed out a bug, or researched hardware.
It is true that there are questions as to what the best way to handle Linux is. I don't know if there is any restriction to what you name that piece of software is, or whether I could go and fork it and call it Stallmix. Or Henrieta Mark III.
Maybe the GNU folks should finish Hurd (Debian has been working hard towards a distribution) and prove why their way of doing things is better than Linux, not because one is right and one is wrong, but because doing it the right way in the end produces the best result.
In any case, ideology is important, but it is important because you BELIEVE that it is the right thing to do, and if you discover that it isn't you should change your direction. Software should not be faith oriented. No one benefits by simply believing that an algorithm will work. We test and infact skepticism and debate are more important than faith in our ideology. Richard exhibits skepticism and debate but in some ways he wants others to simply believe without proof. The whole idea in software design is that you have a philosophical logical model that you can actually see work. You do not simply have an argument, you have a result. Richard DOES work hard towards keeping a debate alive, but i think he could do so with more consideration and honesty.
I personally have never seen a single spam that has my real name. If I sign up on some website for something then certainly I can't be really suprised if folks from that website opt me in. Giving them my email and name and such is an invititation to recieving email unless they specifically state they will not send anything.
Much of the spam I do recieve is of the type where they are sending mail to all the DLG's out there for instance.
Also much of the spam I get comes through the email addresses that are on webpages... I infact will recieve the same spam several times a day. The only thing that might change is the subject name. (I have never understood why someone thinks that sending me 20 of the same exact advertisement overnight is wise..)
In any case, I don't know if this process will reduce all spam for all people, but considering that even with blackholes I still get a sizeable amount of spam, anything is worth trying...
DLG
>> This wont work. All that will happen is that the spammers will just modify their spam programs to slightly modify each message they send out.
It will however require them to send each specific message separately rather than sending large cc's or using some sort of relay. That alone is a big step since right now most spammers can get away with sending a single email message and relying on an open relay to retransmit to a larger group.
Furthermore I have doubts that for the time being this project will concern spammers. Infact I am pretty sure spammers are not really interested in wasting their own time trying to spam people who consider spam a violation. It is more convenient to ignore those people (which is why they don't bother to check if you want spam or not before they send it to you).
DLG
This is getting slightly annoying, I just compiled 2.4.11 on my box last night and now I hafta do it again, only to learn of a new bug.
/usr/src/kernels/linux/include/linux/modversions.h -c -o ieee1284_ops.o ieee1284_ops.c
Actually I am not sure what people keep talking about with this bug. As far as I could tell this error is caught by the compiler...
gcc -D__KERNEL__ -I/usr/src/kernels/linux/include -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wno-trigraphs -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-common -pipe -mpreferred-stack-boundary=2 -march=i686 -malign-functions=4 -DMODULE -DMODVERSIONS -include
ieee1284_ops.c: In function `ecp_forward_to_reverse':
ieee1284_ops.c:365: `IEEE1284_PH_DIR_UNKNOWN' undeclared (first use in this function)
ieee1284_ops.c:365: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
ieee1284_ops.c:365: for each function it appears in.)
ieee1284_ops.c: In function `ecp_reverse_to_forward':
ieee1284_ops.c:397: `IEEE1284_PH_DIR_UNKNOWN' undeclared (first use in this function)
make[2]: *** [ieee1284_ops.o] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/linux/drivers/parport'
make[1]: *** [_modsubdir_parport] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/linux/drivers'
make: *** [_mod_drivers] Error 2
So if you compiled it and it worked you aren't using the module that this was in. Or your compiler is broke.:)
d
In September came out with their most unique computer in atleast a decade. It was fanless, had an entirely different shape and form and was running with a top notch processor. Yet what happened?
Well #1, and I think this goes for all of Apple's line, the lack of the new exciting OS to go with the new exciting hardware caused people to hold back from buying new computers. The fact was that Apple had a very bad release despite releasing great equipment. They took a loss for that quarter.
#2. Typical of Apple, they had problems getting the machines into the hands of the users. Alot of folks I knew ordered them and discovered they were not coming when they expected. Then there were issues with the powerbuttons and expectation of upgrades and a struggle with the atypical monitor cables and such.
#3 In the end, business users did not need the quiet elegant but limited expanssion machine. It was closer to the old Mac Classic design then the Mac II and in comparison to the Powermac G4's this just wasn't a business machine. Probably they should have worked to get it into college dorms and such. But the price is just too high compared to the iMac and the pc compatibles.
In the end it is a shame. I also wanted a Cube. Hopefully they will find a way of dropping the price (iCube?) on a similar technology.
d
Although this sounds good for Linux, now in the number 2 most powerful computer in the world. Another sign that Linux is on the rise and not "dead"
I don't see a reference to Linux in the description of this supercomputer. I see the following link to the specs which describes the OS as:
The operating system used for the Service, I/O, and System Partitions is Intel's distributed version of UNIX (POSIX 1003.1 and XPG3, AT&T System V.3 and 4.3 BSD Reno VFS) developed for the Paragon XP/S Supercomputer. The Paragon OS presents a single system image to the user. This means that users see the system as a single UNIX machine despite the fact that the operating system is running on a distributed collection of nodes.
As much as I like to push Linux (I use it as my desktop) it just isn't correct to say it is in the #2 in the top 500 list.
As to whether one can charge for GPL sure... But as far as I can tell, if someone else posted a copy of the libranet distro and offered for free that also would be legal. Infact anyone else, based on GPL could even charge for the CD, or charge for the downloads, and never have to pay Libranet.
Atleast that is my recollection of the argument. You can charge for distributing but you can't keep others from distributing except as far as the GPL does.
---
Whether or NOT libranet provides a service that is worth paying for, or whether they deserve to be paid for it, the question is more effectively whether anyone wants to pay for it. As far as it goes, if they have written some software they want to sell, well GPL isn't always the best way to get money. If it isn't GPL'ed then of course whatever license they choose to use is their business. In any case it seems to me unlikely that anyone who is sophisticated is going to pay for libranet. Debian itself is quite easy to handle and they DO provide cd images as well as other several other installation methods. Infact Libranet just takes debian and adds to it if I recall correctly.
d
Just a few notes. IE crashes on me in Win98. It always has. It displays things differently in Mac and Windows. It doesn't run in Linux or any other OS at all. If Microsoft was working to provide a standards based WWW browser on every platform it could, well I would say great. But to suggest that the IE saga has been somehow faster and more efficient than Mozilla, while offering the same quality of product, well you are wrong.
.1'...
IE was barely useable until version 4. The next version (6) will remove builtin java support.
Furthermore the number of upgrades I have seen for IE during my time using Win98 is pretty regular. The fact that they are beta testing in a closed environment versus an open environment is not a benefit.
One question I have for you is "Do you use Mozilla?" and "Have you ever had a bug report to them?" I have done both, and my experience has been that in most situations the organization of the Mozilla developers is quite sophisticated in closing out significant bugs. Whether Microsoft is similiarly efficient is impossible to know, since you can't watch and track bug reports made about IE.
I do know that in all bugs I have made I have recieved direct responses from a developer, either confirming the bug, showing it is a duplicate of an earlier one, or asking for more info.
The OPEN SOURCE development model is NOT merely a lengthy beta test anymore then Windows is. The fact is that mozilla has, as a nightly build functioned extremely well for me. There are times when I have to back out of an upgrade but I DO attempt to do nightly build installations. This is so that I can help out, giving bug reports, and further.
Mozilla is targetted over a wide range of platforms. It is an ambituous project with goals that aren't entire equivalent to Microsoft's IE.
That what was once a rough and slow performing webbrowser has become a fast rendering relatively well behaved app is a great thing. The fact that the Mozilla folks don't say "We are done" when they have it mostly done isn't a negative. Microsoft has consistently beta tested on their paying costumer... Look towards DOS 4.0 as one of the early examples of 'wait until the
I must have missed the part in the article in which the Gnome developers are 'dissin'' their own project. What I saw was a brief explanation on what was motivating improvements, and how the 1.4 was aimed at those improvements. Perhaps I am rising to a troll but as far as I can tell this was anything but an example of anyone dissin' anything.
.99p16 but I avoided X for a long time. My experience with gnome, X 4.02 (with Matrox acceleration) has made me a fast clean easy to use desktop. I doubt I will ever abandon command line, but maintaining multiple machines with X is a pleasure at this point.
The only thing I can think, is that the reader here prefers over aggrandized marketing lingo to what is generally self-effacing programmer attitude (in which we learn that programmers always say it is broken even if it isn't 'broken' so as to avoid expectations. as opposed to marketers who never say anything is broken but call bugs features.)
I personally have enjoyed gnome lately. The apps are functional and the toolkit seems to be making it easier for developers to produce some pretty professional looking apps. In combination with Debian (using apt-get) I have been able to keep up to date with gnome and easily added new apps as I heard of them. There is alot of work to go but there seems to be a lot of action. I have been continuously running Helix (Ximian) Gnome desktop for over a month and it is far more stable than any other gui I have ever used. Gimp-print outputs without flaw... And Gimp itself is a rock of stability. The Sawfish desktop is quick and very flexible. Infact running recent Gnome with nightly builds of mozilla, xemacs, eterm, gimp, gpilot, gphoto and xmms has been a pleasure.
Yes there are bugs, and I am an expert user (and thus can pretty much figure out just how I mangled everything, but given a month or two at this rate, and I think ya'll will be suprised.
I am really looking forward to stuff using the X Render extension (anyone have any examples of anyone using it? Docs on how to use them? I so want real transparent terminals...)...
As to Nautilus, well I am still a strong advocate of the command line where file management comes in. Still occasionally I call up the file manager... Certainly not the worst I have seen. Nautilus seems nice looking, and I guess it will appease folks who don't understand cp and mv, but bash with filename completion means I move damned fast when I want a file.
Anyhow,
I am not a 'normal' user with experience since Linux
d
I have been a web designer for approximately 7 years now. That is a long time. I have seen what the web is, and what a web designer is, change several times.Like back when all transparent graphics made the same grey as the default background of Mosaic because if the browser didn't support transparency it probably didnt support backgrounds either. And we were taught to never count out the text only users. Alt tags!!! Hell back then we didn't assume anything about layout. We didn't have tables or other methods. The best we had was we could run the text next to a graphic on either the left or right side. Oh and Lists...
So anyway, in all that time I have learned that it does not matter what browser 90% uses, or what browser has the most features, or best features, or whatnot. What matters is that when your client calls, and says "A reporter I wanted to cover our new web opening called, and he says it doesn't work" or "THe vice president in charge of marketting says your site crashes his browser" or "My college buddy says that your page looks like crap on a Sun using Netscape 3.0 beta 7 with a 1600x1200 screen (because the background image is a 1x1000 image...)" All of this has happened. Infact I had one of the earlier uses of Javascript to do roll over menus for one of the top Internet Providers, and they had me remove it from 300 pages (well ok search and replace made that work really easily) because it crashed a Netscape 3.0 beta user on Sun (a really small impact but) who was covering the company for Newsweek.
Folks like to claim that 10% is a small percent of the user base in the world. 10% of the 100 million users in america is 10 million. That is a very very big group you are alienating.No one would in their right mind give up 10 million potential customers merely because of a browser choice. Any web producer who suggests they can will lose to the one that says it is no problem to support both. Basicly I can say as an experienced web developer that I deliver 10% more client eyes automatically than someone who makes it IE browser dependent.
Javascript has it's place. ASP's are certainly used a great deal by companies that DON'T find it difficult to produce for Netscape. Hell. My Mozilla doesn't have problems talking to Microsoft websites.:) They certainly don't want to lose my business...
In the long run, the web is not the best manner to do alot of things we want to do, and PC's aren't the natural client for them. Handheld browsers, consumer set top boxes, PLAYSTATIONS, and other NON MICROSOFT products are going to dominate the user base, just as AOL began to do 5 years ago. You all don't remember what a panic it used to be "Our page won't show right on AOL browsers! %!@$@!$" before they started using more standards.
Let me remind you all that Microsoft was late to the internet party. They had their own proprietary page format they were going to use for Microsoft and then slam bam, they had to change directions. That allowed Netscape to grow so large they forgot to make good products, and forced Microsoft to accept all sorts of standards. I can assure you that Amazon can't afford to run a server with software that cuts off 10% marketshare. That 10% will go right to the one who doesn't.
Lets talk about it from a sheer number argument. There are 10 sites. There are 100 users. 90 use IE, 10 use other... All the sites but 1 say, Well IE is the only way to go... Each site is equally good besides that. Ok... Well each site gets 9 IE users....(including the 1 that supports other browsers) but the 1 supporting the other browsers gets the OTHER 10... Which site survives longest?
So while I can see arguments why one might want to use Microsoft only technology in a web page having some virtue (Well yeah it only works for 90% but it lets me enhance it enough to make a big difference to my usability...) there is no excuse for not delivering some service to any class browser. I have basicly rejected employee applicants because their sample websites were all graphics for instance. No search engine would find anything ont heir site. Or blind folks. Or Text only browsers. ETc...
And that is another thing. The ASP Alliance site is rejecting search engines if it only allows IE browsers. It's content is an island.
If it has any.
DLG
Been watching these boxes for a while, and I think there are a few things to note.
1. The dual processors... Apple can go back to dual processors again when OS X is on them mainstream. Right now with 9.04 multiprocessing is barely useful for most users (photoshop users being perennial exception. Meanwhile a 733mhz G4 at 133mhz is pretty big news since what it will do is make everything faster in the short term.
2. MacOs X is not gonna be truly ready until September (a year late but hey, Win95 was supposed to come in 93 and we know NT 5 was supposed to come out in 95.:)) At that point I hope to see Dual 733's at 133mhz bus.What will the Win world have? WinME running Pentium III's?
3. It would be great if MacOS ran on more boxes than just Apples but they didn't do so well with that. Asking them to move to cheap commodity hardware is not really rational.The real deal here is that folks don't recognize true cost of ownership with computers until they have owned a few. The real shame is that Apple HAS reduced costs by using crappier equipment and it bit them.
4. The biggest problem Apple had was that no one wants to buy a new machine until OS X comes out. Apple was ready with a whole new set of boxes that would have looked really perty with the perty new OS but instead they are running same old OS 9. If Apple really wanted to get new models sold and empty it's inventory, finish the OS in the 1Q...
I am a longtime Apple user and Linux user and I hope to use both for a long time to come. As long as Apple makes machines that last me 5+ years I am not gonna bitch much. Since I am still using a 7600 with a g3 upgrade card I am definately waiting. I like the idea of a dual processing 733mhz, but in truth there is a sweet spot right now with dual 450....1999...No matter what anyone says about comparing 300 dollar pc's with this, the G4 is a better chip than anything Intel makes. Athlon might manage to screw that up if they keep raising the mhz but sheerly for media related stuff, the G4 rocks.Just RIP a few CD's...
dlg
When in the history of Linux did it matter if a company supported Linux running on their OS. The point of Linux was an OS that because of its open nature could be easily adapted by USERS to the hardware they had, and through their contribution of their personal drivers, could empower other users in the same equipment. That has always been the case. If some hacker dude had your hardware you were lucky. The fact that some very standard hardware items weren't supported early on, while some really freaky stuff was, directly was related to this issue. The fact that NOW big companies lend help in these things, that the marketting power of redhat and such has made it important to release specification on some hardware, that companies who refuse to release such specifications have to produce their own drivers, all is a clear indication that open source and hardware manufacturer support are negligibly relevant to each other. IBM has been very supportive of Linux with their software, and has generally supported standards in hardware that were approachable by hackers, and to a large extent the benefit of linux is the commodity hardware that it runs on. Linux geeks have ported their OS to things that shouldn't even have OS's...
If the machine doesn't boot FreeBSD maybe it requires a special tweak. There have always been wierd things involving bios's and harddrives and such. My Alpha has a bios so distant from the crappy bios on the commodity PC that it is indescribable. In any case I don't think this is a major issue. I think it is as always a hacker challenge.
#1. This is not a confidential intel roadmap, nor is it even represented to be one. It stipulates all that on the first page.
#2. Even if it was direct from the horses mouth (or Intel's) it would not be meaningful except historically. Intel has been lately forced to rush their chips to match market forces where for years they were able to determine their pace of innovation on their own. As such we have watched them flounder.
#3. As to WHO needs 2ghz chips, who needs more than 640k ram? In 5 years we have to assume that applicaitons will be much more involved on some levels. The idea of wordprocessing might be dead by then, with dictation as the primary purpose. Multimedia interactive reports might be the norm, and pure text might be considered retro...
#4. Multiple Processors would be nice if we had truly modular computers. I would love to see a computer which you can just snap together from parts and increase in ram, processors, storage, and such without any limitation, and without turning off machines. Anyone wanna give me some money to create it?
Well I can't claim to be an expert kernel hacker, but I have had to use Linux for what was essentially real time interactivity, relying on controlled conditions to provide me with CLOSE ENOUGH. The fact that Linux IS reliable and predictable and has been for some time, has allowed alot of folks to use it as if it was a fully multitasking system, and in many ways that sort of quality of service (having programs not freeze because of other programs) is what I think
drew me to Linux in the first place.
For a time I explored BeOS and the BeBox in particular, but the slowness of that development and the abandonment of the hardware left me cold. Still it had some interesting ability that other OS's don't have involving streaming media, and anything that brings such things (Rendering in a window continuing smoothly while window was being dragged as one example) is a good thing for the user community as well as for the embedded.
While people DO seem to throw alot of hardware at problems to make operations smooth, with my Athlon 500 and 256 ram I cannot run an IE 5 session without getting skips out of winamp. This sort of performance depresses me so much I have already begun to switch over to Linux on the machine for normal use, despite it being purchased for windows development (necessary evil).
I don't know how long it will take to get this sort of performance up, and I know that the danger of RTOS functions is that a badly programmed high priority thread can cause havoc, but if there were proper guards against such things, it would probably be enough to make Linux my OS of choice for interactive exhibits (which it is close to being as it stands).
As to why we are already talking about 2.4, what I really want to know is why 2.5 is meaningful, when it is an unstable track and thus unlikely to be seen until 2.6 in most desktops. What does this mean? If we are talking about something that is done now that is not going to be in a stable release for another year, but with 10 and 100 fold improvements, does that mean we are going to have to start supporting development kernel releases for clients because the feature set is too important to miss? It hasn't been the case for me since 1.3.. I really DON'T want to be doing kernel catchup in the modern era.
If this is important technology, then why can't we postpone 2.4 a little and move it in?
What kinds of schedules are we really talking about?
Is 2.4 expected this week? Is this RT stuff expected this year?
Unlike with Windows and Mac, I don't think that many people are sitting on the edge of their seat waiting for 2.4. I don't think it is keeping folks from choosing Linux. I am not sure I can understand the purpose of rushing forward if there is good technology that can become PART of the mainstream kernel without causing radical change in usage.
Or is this not so important after all?
Ok, well to start I have been running a server on the internet for 6 years and I admit that I am not always the best administrator, especially in terms of security updates. One of the risks of having an OS that can stay up for a year at a time is that you leave it alone since it is working. As time goes on and exploits are discovered it takes a special attention or a full time job to catch every security hole. As such one has to commend Kurt for making an effort to analyze security issues in ANY distro. As to his lack of understanding of DEBIAN's policy on backfixes, well perhaps it should be made clearer. I am a VERY experienced programmer and administrator in terms of Linux and I LIKE reading changelogs but I don't always get a chance to and a Novice is unlikely to know much about that. In any case Kurt made a mistake and he apologized gracefully, as opposed to the Debian response which was sort of harsh.
.99p16) there were good services available and THAT was why I began running it. Fear of being hacked was not what turned me on to Linux. it was the fact that I could take my little 386sx and make it a SERVER. SERVER implies SERVICE. Now I understand folks are trying to switch linux into a desktop machine, and for that maybe it is best to take on the macintosh model of NO SERVICES. Seems to me that could be a REALLY small distro compared to these massive cd sized ones. Even so eveyone wants a webserver, having your own nameserver is nice, a mailserver can be handy, an ftp server solves alot of problem, and hey its nice to have remote access, even if you jsut want your friend to help you on the machine, and so it goes.
That brings me to TWO points. Alot of this discussion has turned into "Everybody Knows" and people need to shut off everything in the machine to make it secure.
#1. If everybody knows, that implies a culture which doesn't accept newcomers with a proper sense of respect. We want new people to use Linux (supposedly) but then we say that it is ok to leave certain security holes because everybody knows to close them. That is nonsensical because what it implies is that the only important people to consider on these installations is experienced users, when a truly experienced suer is NOT the target of this sort of install. Infact one of the joys of Linux is that a really experienced user can make their own canned distro anytime they want, and can essentially fix the assumptions of a distro to their own desire. Yey... Newbies on the otherhand need alot of guidance, more than Linux or Microsoft give. My understanding is that Apple managed to make it so that one can turn on their G4 models with airport and run a webbrowser immediately. That is FAR closer to what newbies need. Closing off security holes as the first step is NOT.
#2. My father has been in the industry since the 60's and he basicly told me that the perfectly secure machine has NO access. Basicly on one side is the availability of services, and on the other side is security. the more services the less secure. People ehre are mandating locking floppy drives, welding shut cases, turning off services.
This is sort of ironic. Even when I started using Linux (Slackware with kernel
Before one evaluates security one needs to evaluate use, and while a distro can be helpful to give a new user an idea of the risks versus the benefits of any decision they make in terms of services and security, there is never going to be a hard enough solution to protect against local penetration, no matter what folks say. In circumstances where someone has physical access to a server even if one can't physically tamper with the machine, effective surveilance, keyboard taps, and any sort of wiretap on datalines makes true security difficult especially in circumstances where the average user STILL probably uses a variation of his/her kid's name as a root password. Or worst writes it down.
Linux has come a long way, and Debian, Redhat, Slackware, SUSE, and every other distro makes a competition of both features and philosophy that is so valuable to the community, that discussion of fragmentation has seemed to fall off in the last year. We can see that ALL Linux is growing, and we are indebted to all those who have examined security issues on EVERY package, every DISTRO, every OS, every kernel. However security is a wide scale and no system that runs power is truly secure. Lets just be thankful that we are talking about a system where users CAN learn to secure their system by themselves.
dlg
Having been the victim of forged email headers (and having had to explain how to read headers for 4 years now) I was very pleased to see the following website. It seems legit to me although you never know, it could be a smear... Of course there are photos so it should be easy to tell...
http://belps.freewebsites.com/
Basicly someone hacked a spam company and got all sorts of logs and even some pictures of the perps.
Check it out.
"Engines of war have long since reached their limits, and I see no further
hope of any improvement in the art."
-- Frontinus, 90 A.D.
As someone who has written search engines, both as spiders and as meta search engines, I found the existence of the robots.txt standard to be a real blessing. It was a way for me to easily follow rules that kept my site from simply being BLOCKED at a firewall. By further doing things like not going to a specific site twice in a row and other wierd tricks, I could know that I was not abusing other peoples site with my code running automatically.
In the case of a system that is essentially placing their own interface ontop of another system, what I don't understand is why EBay didn't simply refuse the packets. It should not have been THAT difficult. No user has a right to see a site. I have blocked parts of my site from certain users during times when they perhaps inadvertantly caused trouble. I have blocked use of my email system for the purposes of redirection. All of this I do with the technology available to me. The fact is that IF the improper usage of the site is impossible to detect by the owners of the site it isn't a technical problem. On the other hand, if the issue is that they are successfully using the site in a non intrusive manner to profit, it is a business problem, and the problem is NOT with the offendor but with the offended.
The problem is the notion that a site can control how it is viewed.
If you tell me that it is illegal to look at a site without seeing its ads then we are in for a long hard battle. Browsers are being built with the ability to recognize advertising banners and exclude them from being viewed. Text based browsers have always avoided banner ads. The use internet for advertising sales will someday be impossible unless the advertising is completely the same as content, which it IS to a large extent. Content can be filtered, and should be. I look at slashdot with a WAP enabled phone. No ads are sent. Sooner or later someone will fix that somehow but in truth the ad will be just a link to another site, which is fine with me.
In the future it is considered likely that everyone will have a semiautomated search engine customized for them personally. Near future. In the long run, automated agents will be the primary conduit between a user and data, the web browser will be a thing of the past, and the idea that people won't filter out advertising when it bothers them/wastes their bandwidth is nonsensical.
The Robot.txt file says, "Don't check these URL's for content" which basicly means "Don't read me". In the future sites that restrict use of their pages won't be read. If the only revenue a site gets is through advertising, then they will have to find another way to deliver it.
This seems like a good project, although I am sure there have been other freeform interactive projects out there. I was thinking of one recently to follow up on my 'hyperflow' interactive dictionary. I thought maybe a graphic version of hyperflow. Anyhow I love seeing folks doing anything new with http.
Not that I want to toot my own horn but I set up hyperflow about 5 years ago as an interactive dictionary, with no censorship. At this point it has passed 10000 words. I entered maybe the first 50...Since it was my first CGI program I am somewhat proud of it despite its retro feel. Currently trying to make it WAP compatible.
Check it out...
Excuse the graphic problems. We just moved it from its original site and I haven't had time to repretty it.
As a note: We recieved about 100 hate letters yesterday from a Jesus freak who didn't like what some of the posters had sent. Since I don't censor anything that isn't blatantly illegal I have had to leave things that I find distasteful. If you also have some lack of tolerance then don't bother...
DNo.:) I am not selling it. Yes it still works. I haven't installed the most recent BeOs on it but I suspect it will be fine.
To those who haven't seen them the coolest thing is the large led banks on the side that can monitor CPU usage (2 banks for the 2 CPU's)
Why am I not selling it?
I am developing an application I intend to run on Linux, Mac, and Be BEFORE Windows, so I still need a test platform.:)
Sorry...
The BeOS was originally part of a package called a BeBox. I have one. It is holding up some books right now. It has 2 133mhz PowerPC 603 processors, midi in and out, a slew of serial ports, scsi, infra red ports, a GEEK port which has a bunch of DAC and ADC on one standard port. It was very quick when we got it. It took me months to get my developer software. But that was ok. We didn't have much in the way of docs for the API, their developer manuals weren't done, but we had some .h files to work with and I managed to get a program compiled and running pretty quick. Then the OS went up a version and I started over. Then they abandoned the hardware.
I have to explain, the reason we wanted BeBoxen were that we produce live exhibits and its ability to play MANY streams of media at once was needed. We were stretching our Macintoshes thin. This sounded like a solution. I remember one person who was using it to develop an ambient noise generator for a zoo. I knew folks who were doing similiar light controlers... It was a MEDIA OS with a MEDIA Hardware...
We were notified at first that they would not be supporting the BeBox with new OS after a year... Since all their developers were at that point BeBox owners, they backed off on that. I still am technically a Be developer but hell if I trust them to do ANYTHING right...
Maybe I have been missing out, but with a choice between Linux and Mac OS X and BeOs is there even 100000 BeOS users who don't use one of the other OS'S for their primary work?
I don't think so.
This discussion keeps referring to 90% and 99% uptime as giving credit to PC hardware. I have, in 5 years, with 4 Linux servers, seen 3 hd crashes, 1 network card, 2 modems, and 1 motherboard go down. Each one of these was what I would consider a major crash (You say modem crashing is minor but these were internal and at the time primary IP devices).
.1% likelyhood of failure with some accumulation of likelyhood being more accurate (I.E a working new pc is unlikely to fail if it is entirely working but at 5 years the likelyhood of a harddrive or powersupply failure is probably 1%.).
Given that several hundred day uptime has been my experience with downtown being planned, I would say that standard pc availability is closer to
That being said, I do not think that the issue hereis cost of replacing parts or the costs involved in running high availabilty. Just adding hotswappable redundant power and fan, and hotswappable raid, good power conditioning, and decent backup+hotspare gives you acceptable performance. One of the reasons we consider the Beowulf cluster as economical is the notion that to increase performance you just buy commodity hardware and replace out old/worn machines. The process of doing so is probably not much different than the hotswappable parts of a mainframe.
Obviously the issue is the I/O involved with typical mainframe applications. Most PC users simply have no capacity to understand what bandwidth really is necessary for many real life applications. Someone mentioned 9 million record databases at 2k. Considering demographic data regularly run at credit card companies to determine NEW customers (where they are using 100million name lists), the person using a 9 million record database is actually a mid range user. Having tested a standard Pentium class PC with SQL, I find that over a million records makes queries very slow (30 seconds-2 minutes) Now certainly I could thrown more power, but larger databases create geometrical demands as the order of magnitude changes.
Having worked for the City of New York in the late 80's, I installed one of the first PC based LAN's and database solutions and I can tell you the benefit of this versus the Mainframe with their terminals had nothing to do with performance. It had to do with the politics of wanting to add fields, add reports, and prioritization of work demands. Centralizing computing power meant that changes to a database might require 6-10 months simply to add a field. This led to bastardization of fields, and what can only be refered to as DENORMALIZATION of data.
Statistical analysis was even more cumbersome. A question being asked by a new commisioner would require new statistical analysis, and the response would be needed quickly. But the request for a new report would require a bureaucratic nightmare.
Because of this many tasks were being done by hand by large staffs (8 people ddedicated to a single report).
When we recieved PC's, I was hired to handle the databases (relatively large 10-100 thousand primary keys) and the ability to create a new statistical model to view data being made in 1 day instead of half a year changed the way things were done. I had seen reports that took 2 weeks that were monthly reports and required a 8 people turn into 30 minute processing jobs that required 1.
The growth of the PC in departments was not because of the performance. it was because MIS departments were notoriously self-empowered and there was no way for a small department to influence their priorties.
People seem to be under the perception that the mainframe was somehow unsuitable, but it was always clear to us that the issue was management of the resources and a need by computer savvy managers to have their own programmers with their own priorities.
My father, a mainframe COBOL programmer/analyst for 30 years was pleased to see Linux sharing some of the same concepts as he was familiar with. However we both are well aware that the sort of performance he was used to programming (batches of 100million records overnight) is just not available nor are the management features. Hell, you can't even RUN COBOL in Linux.
In any case, I really think a major reason that there is so much anti-mainframe perspective is that mainframes have so often been considered expensive not for the uninitiated's touch, by the generation of programmers who were raised with the PC. They haven't used them, haven't considered what a COMPUTER is on a fundamental level, and don't have appreciation for the kind of programming that was done 30-40 years ago. My father used to brag about being able to write largescale applications in 8k of ram but with unlimited storage, a computer that fit in a room, but barely.
Of course Mainframes aren't dead, and of course IBM made money even when it lost the lead with PC's. IBM gives away mainframes. It doesn't need to earn a cent from hardware. It has the largest patent library in the world, and sells techniques, not technology. Its Supercomputers, Mainframes, Mini's PC's and palmtops are part of a SERVICE oriented drive to provide solutions to problems. The reason Linux is important to them is that they envision a POSIX compliant standards OS that they can run from top to bottom with no additional learning curve at each stage. No doubt THEY would not suggest a mainframe for solutions in which a Beowulf cluster or a multiple high availability cluster would be superior in cost. They would make their money supporting their user with whatever was the most effective solution for the pay. If we consider the world through the PC Vs Mainframe religious war view, then we lose the opportunity to evaluate just how much the PC has evolved into a personal mainframe, and just what we can accomplish in the next 10 years with Linux in the commodity market as well as what Linux can bring to the Mainframe market.
I think the article brought up several excellent examples of how a mainframe webserver farm might be advantageous. CoLocation is a bastard solution intended to move the machine closer to the bandwidth since we can't seem to provide fibre effectively to the location. As Media requirements change, colocation will stop being valuable (renting shelfspace atsomeone elses facility and losing physical access? Not acceptable)
Anyone with usage requirements that need a 390 is not going to care about the cost of multiple T3's. The idea that a new client could be granted a FULL operating environment that could be backedup as an image, could be given increased performance, storage, network facilities based on a level of service agreement, all sounds exciting.
Where we now have burstable T1's for growing companies that allow you to pay for the usage you actually see rather than spending based on your MAXIMUM usages, we would see every facility adapt to the usage. Suddenly see a 10fold increase in server usage? Instead of having to run around to solve a problem you didn't have a day ago, you could have a service agreement that would automaticly up your billing rate as your performance was increased. The benefits would not be just the ability to support a website with a 10million hit per day but to also support a 100000 sites that each MIGHT grow into a 10million hit per day site, without requiring capital costs to address that expansion, and reducing the cost of failure not in terms of system failure, but in BUSINESS failure.
Isn't that one of the benefits of Linux? To allow a company to take a risk without the costs inherent in the high end solutions? This article merely points out that the same benefit exists at every level of hardware.
Sorry for the rant... Well not really.:)
DLG