Would actual candidates who differed from each other and offered something of interest reduce apathy?
Would a belief that the candidates are not chosen (through funding) by corporations and lobbies perhaps increase voting?
Would a non-binding "none of the above" give people a way to come out and make a statement, rather than stay home and not vote at all?
Would a "check off all acceptable candidates" (not 1-4, just yeah/nay) make a difference and broaden the number of parties from the republicrat monopoly?
Or is the answer closed source voting software controlled by questionably influenced companies?
And please, no rants about driving and using a cell phone. I saw you talking on yours while holding up traffic in the fast lane yesterday.
No, I was the guy on the motorcycle you cut off because you didn't signal cause your hand was on your dick^W Cell Phone.
Hang up or get off the road. You're steering a 1ton plus metal vehicle, not sitting in your lazy boy
---
I want the jammer button on my bike: Hello? Hello? damn, I can't hear you. I'll call you later. Maybe I'll pay attention to driving my 12mpg, 3 ton, own-zipcode SUV that will never see a dirt road.
I'm with you on the Bluetooth headset thing - either support the standard or don't. Nokia-only is not the standard.
If your were "awakened at midnight" by an alarm, perhaps that reduces your geekpoints a lot & should be factored into the credibility of your answer.
I really just get rolling at midnight. I saw 6AM kinda recently. Just heading to bed.
When I first got a Motif "hello world" program
(open a window with hello world in it), I was stunned.
about 3 pages of muck.
Motif failed. It never caught on. Dare I say it helped windows get the desktops.
I view KDE (based on QT which has both GPL or "pay us" licenses if you want proprietary) and Gnome as the answer by kids who grew up with GUIs (I grew up with vt52s and vt100s) who perhaps thought: Hey, unix doesn't have to suck to use.
I've run huge networks on Motif desktops and it was a bitch. Tools weren't there, programs were impossible to write. Hell, TK (with tcl or perl) were a godsend to slap up a quick X gui thing at t he time.
OSF gave us the now dominant (*cough*) counter to Sun+ATT's SysVr4 and Motif. And few higher end widgets and no design dictates such as "Every App Shall Have a File Menu Item and Open/Save/Save as/Quit as Options".
No, in this program, you type q in the window, in that one you hit something else. It's like DOS 3.3 (Lotus 123: "/qyy", WordPerf: "[F7]y", dbase:.quity"
That motif came up as (1) proprietary (open motif is too little too late) and (2) during the Lotus/Apple look and feel lawsuits to make up for their lack of innovation make them an interesting footnote in the history of Unix.
Perhaps the X developers (1987 or so) made MISTAKES and KDE and GNOME manage to recover from them nicely. QT is both programmable, usable and popular. Motif was close to unprogrammable, could be usable if you did lots of work - hardly innate, and was popular as the only thing out there.
The replacement of CDE (Commitee designed environment) with GNOME by vendors is just another brad in the coffin of motif and XWindows-classic.
For FreeBSD users, KDE/Gnome are not part of the OS. They are a port that lives on TOP of the OS. In BSD, we don't shove every damn addon into/usr/bin/. We do generally have a man page for about every file on the system. (openbsd is anal about it, netbsd is pretty good, freebsd is good; but I use redhat and find something like 5 man pages and 40,000 files:).
Oh, and I can build from source! remember source? Yeah, I don't trust joe-random "I have an RPM for you" builder on my own.
That's why (and no, NAT is not a firewall, it's not close to a firewall, it's the wrong answer). I'm tired of wacking a NAT, and dealing with redirecting stuff to this address over to that NATd machine. I'm tires of wierd hack to get IPSec to remotely work. I"m tires of no QOS, I'm tired of DHCP. I'm tired of dealing with two companies who both use 10/8 addresses who merge. I'm tired of ISP's with their heads in the sand no even looking at this during a 8 years of testing so far (1996-current).
There are a bunch of responses here from apparent idiots (sort of par).
These ones think it means a withdrawal of IPv6.
Far from it. The 6bone was established when nobody had IPv6 stacks really, nobody really used it. It was a playground to try it out. And we have been.
Now, Sun has IPv6, Cisco has it ready and waiting, the BSD's all have, Linux has it, AIX, HPUX, MacOS X. Hell even Windows has it. (I await MS's announcement of its invention soon).
IPv6 is here and ready and tested.
The notion of closing the 6bone (discussed for months on the 6bone lists), is that in 3 years you SHOULD be able to get IPv6. Not tunneled, no long hops.
Me? I call my cable modem people (dsl before I moved) and would get the second level tech support people and ask for IPv6 support. Try to get it on their radar. Wouldn't you love your cell phone to have an IP address? Hell, wouldn't you love a (firewalled) IPv6 aware electrical outlet? (x10 is getting old and lame).
So you have 3 years to convince your ISP that they should have IPv6.
This isn't the place to go into details, but it's designed and planned to run concurrently with IPv4. This isn't like the NCP/TCP change over where there was a huge redflag day for all 200 hosts on the Arpa net.
Everything in my house speaks IPv6 except a printer and a terminal server (you do all have terminal servers for those serial toys, yes?). Those will never be upgraded - too old. When I ssh, mail or browse, if they have a 6 address and I can reach it, it gets used. Otherwise it falls back to IPv4.
At work, if you have a subnet with all IPv6, you can turn off IPv4 and let your edge gateway it. But you may not be turning off all the IPv4 until that last printer dies. Do it subnet by subnet and leave IPv4, but just watch it not be used.
Bonuses?
No more need for NAT (I have 65 thousand INTERNETS of addresses here).
IPv6 stacks are looking faster than IPv4 (not based on a presumption of 16 bit PDP-11 processors).
So where the hell is www.slashdot.org?
nslookup -q=aaaa www.slashdot.org
Can't find www.slashdot.org: Non-existent host/domain
When http was spec'd, there were a variety of non-graphical clients out there. Granted it looked like a replacement for gopher, but it had hyperlinks that worked! Ted Nelson's dream, of a sort.
My NeXT was running web clients in 1991 or 1992. Not much to see, if you didn't put it up.
Mosaic was a milestone, but it didn't mark the start line.
It's slow, DoS attacks are easy (from the neighbor who has SOMETHING that turns on the damn light (or worse, coffee maker) at 2AM) to those stupid motion sensors - if you have 5, the AC lines are too "clogged" to get wanted X10 over them.
Signals can take 2 seconds to reach the device. Ouch.
Right Answer: High Speed something over wireless or power to a real IP stack that can authenticate, perhaps encrypt and take an action.
I'm reading these and it's like this is the first device that could make temperature reading possible.
Sorry, it's just not.
At $30/pop, yes, handy for things that cost $600+ that might want ethernet (it's still 5%, so up that even more until it's 2-3%).
It's a serial-> ethernet device. For $30/port, serial is cheaper.
Want to monitor a fridge? There are a billion devices that can read temp over serial devices.
Wanna do a hole house? Scatter around some microcontrollers.
PIC and many others make chips that have serial, talk a little programming and have things like digital IO or 12 A/Ds.
Put one in each room - they fit in an outlet box with room to spare.
Wire up sensors:
one reads light levels (along with time of day and other sensors, central computing can decide that the light is on, or it's just sunny).
some for TEMP (LM34/LM35's are the expensive option, but easy)
-- one in the fridge, one at waist level for the room, one outside
humidity
Digital IO can:
tell you if outlets are on with decent circuit work
tell if an (internal, see below) door is open or changes state
tell you if someone steps on the carpet (in the bathroom at 7AM so it knows to turn the coffee on).
control smart sockets (X10 is barely smart).
read a simple button push, unlock an internal door (below), can read the chip in your neck to see that you are now in the room (you know about the chip, right:), whatever.
(It's a bad plan for burlar alarm functions, you want those run separately)
The Controller is "taught" what type of sensor is on each input, it reads the values, actions may have it talk (96kb is more than fast enough) down a CAT3 or 5 to the central computer. This wire may also power it.
Perhaps a temp threshold (high/low/change rate) triggers a report.
Perhaps it just reports every N seconds (N=120 is still lots of useless data)
Perhaps it also has OUTPUT. But it has little intelligence.
Central computing can also "read" the burglar alarm and know that you just entered (it was your code), it's dark out and cold, it's dinner time, so it can turn on a couple lights, spit a message to your (serial) LCD in the hall with messages (your girlf is leaving you cause you leave the seat up and work on your computer too much and why the hell can't she turn on the damn lights like a normal person!).
Central computer gets ethernet. Runs with no disk (flash boot), doesn't do much else. It can talk to a Real Computer that has the MP3s, etc.
Central computer might just be a general MicroController, but it's taking 20 different serial connections in (232? or I2O or shared RS232 with a protocol (Device A: Read Sensor B @ value 116 becomes
ASCII "AB00000116". or something). ASCII makes life easier, packets longer).
For $30, I can get the PIC chip ($55 with basic to program it) and run 4 conducter alarm wire along a room (push it into drywall, spackle).
For $30 at Q10,000, I want bluetooth or 802.11{a,b,g,i} and IPv6 and IPSec.
Want all the serials to be ethernet instead and go into a 16 port hub?
HUB: $100, 6x$30 for these: adds $280 plus development (at 10k rates).
For the CAT5, I might as well stick with the serial. Let one machine agreggate the data and offer it over the network.
Looking at CERT, I see the last remote exploit of sendmail predates Postfix entirely (1997?).
There was a website hack of code, but that was a web server attack and checking the.sig would have shown it to have been altered.
Me? I'll take Sendmail with TLS and SMTPAUTH with people who know it and look at it (and this bug is obtuse enough that it slipped by LOTS OF VERY EXPERINCED EYES for years) as being fast and secure and djb free.
(chat with dan about using patches (such as TLS) on his pristine qmail code sometime).
Diversity of mailers good, but there is a diversity. Or will be until MS owns that too - as soon as they invent and patent email. Or at least make it so proprietary that Open Standards code fails.
Of course, as good system admins, you DO read the code right? You do verify distributions? You never use binaries made by untrusted parties (like most RPMs from non-vendors), right?
Umm, might it be that SENDMAIL has learned from the past?
In 1988, when the Morris worm hit, you could log into many systems as guest. We telnet'd everywhere.
So if your window (sendmail) is open, someone could walk in, but mostly we had no locks on the doors.
Since then, sendmail's undergone pretty freaking major rewrites.
The last remote exploit was 1997, AFAIK. Before postfix came out.
It offers MORE security in many ways.
I can use SMTP over SSL (TLS). Ask djb about support in qmail for that qmail patch. I've seen a few good rants from him about using qmail with any patches at all. You must use it unchanged from 1997.
patch your binary, move on. Just like last summer with SSL and SSH and Apache. Just like every week with Exchange.
It's a protection racket...
They "predict" a couple and then they use their secretly hidden devices to cause them.
Remember that "earthquake swarm" in San Ramon (a town of burb claves just over the hills from SanFran/Oakland)??? I think it made national news (my dad in New England rang me about it)...
Perhaps that was their testing of their "prediction" scheme.
So they predict a few, then the maybe "predict" an 8.5 for San Francisco if they don't pony up perhaps Venture Capital.
"Maybe you're safe, see? Or maybe there's an earthquake coming to your mudda's house. Or your kid's school, see? So let's see some investment here or we'll predict the penninsula back to orchards"
I used a mac. I used one in 1984. A kid in the dorm got one.
Wrote a paper or 3 on it when MacWrite could only hold 3-4 pages, and
you saved and opened the next file (128k, baby!).
Mac II came out (and eventually docs to program Macs). B&W programs running with random colors was amusing for that first month or two.
Used them through the 80s. Helped clients buy them (film folks mainly). Mostly because the Mac folks didn't call me every couple days
for basic help like the DOS folks did. Windows 3.0 came along and didn't help any. ("My disk was full, do I trashed the old version of WP by dragging it to the trash". No, the icon doesn't actually contain the file, it's just a pointer to it, you have to pretty much his DOS. Welcome back to 1982.).
Always worked on Unix (and VMS). Film place had Unix accounting. I replaced a couple pages of commands to do backups with a shell script. The guy was delighted. But it was an old mini (I have it now) and it was terminals.
The next job had mostly just Unix. And NeXT. I referred to the NeXT's as "Mac III". New Interface, killer OS hidden beneath (we called it "B - S - D"). Objective C and Display PS and NetInfo was just Jobs being annoying like Jobs must be.
Thanks to poor decisions (absurdly high case costs, selling $10k machines through businessLand and to students only, etc), they sort of tanked. Meanwhile, Apple's MacOS didn't really change - got a little more polished.
In 1995, Copland didn't come out but Win95 did, Win95 because better in many ways (eg. multi-tasking, better than win31 interface).
Apple was going to fail (again). NeXT bought them (trojan horse buy, but look who's in charge of the OS and what OS X is).
I talk to guys who want their Macs of 1994. And I point them to "Application has quite expectedly quit, restart your computer" and TCP/IP lameness and so forth, and it seems they want the idea of their old macs.
Apple was failing. Apple needed a rebuild of their OS. NeXT had one. *We* unix folks win cause it's not a brand new piece of crap one (*cough* NT *cough*). Perhaps BeOS had interesting things, but the NeXT culture fit better.
"Classic" MacOS isn't coming back. It was time for it to die. Photoshop finally is available (someone's ass at adobe needed a kicking). Quark needs to be or they will lose Apple customers (and apple will lose quark customers). It's embarrassing. XP Still sucks and I don't expect Quark for RHAS out soon.
We had a group of tech writers...
Used FrameMaker. Had floating licenses on Unix (desktops were Sun, SGI, HP-UX, and others). Common for the time (1992/3). Nice software for what we needed. A little smarter than WordPerfect/Word and ran on PC/Mac and Motif. We had no PeeCees (includes macs). Just Unix boxes, XTerminals and Diskless Unix boxes. Life was good.
Needed to get more licenses and an upgrade
They came back at $2300+ per license.
When the rep called back to see if we wanted it, I mentioned that for only $1500 per user, I'd gone out and gotten a slightly used Mac and a new version of Quark. Yes, I could have gotten fixed Mac licenses for FrameMaker for a mere $600, but if we were changing platforms we might as well go with dominant software and, well, fuck you for wanting to charge me $2300 for each copy of glorified word processing.
We used the old version of FrameMaker for most of the text writing work and Quark for layout of new projects.
Adobe owns FrameMaker now. It was pretty nice. It was $500 of nice *maybe*. If they lost the market to quark, it's their own damn fault. They never got money from me again. Short sighted price hikes kept them from getting probably $10's of thousands via my later customers/employers.
lesse, OpenBSD focusses hard on security. Being non-US, it meant they had SSL and IPSEC in their base while Free and NET (being based in the US, mainly) couldn't put that in thanks to ITAR.
OpenBSD also focussed hard on security through auditing the code.
I guess this is redundant to the other BSDs. But wait! Reading the kernel commits (see, we use CVS in bsd-land), I can see that FreeBSD has taken (thank you Mr Leffler) many of the crypto kernel and userland utils into FreeBSD from OpenBSD. And OpenBSD just recently sync'd up a bunch of their USB utils with NetBSDs.
So are they doing redundant work or keeping up a healthy but friendly competition? Many successfull companies will have a couple groups doing similar things - keeps the edge....
So FreeBSD code appears in Net and OpenBSD, NetBSD coders work appears in Open and FreeBSD, etc, etc. They share with each other to the benefit of everyone.
As a bonus, it's easy to build from source./usr/ports/ (pkgsrc on netbsd) lets me just (cd/usr/ports/mail/mutt;make install) and built mutt FROM THE SOURCE for my system.
No games of "find the RPM" and trust like hell that the person who built that mutt rpm isn't evil. And that they had the same glibc that I had. And they used the options I wanted (
env FLAVOR="imap ssl" make install
- for that.
So different kernels? Yeah. Different idea's being explored. The best ones trickle into the other kernels. We end up with good VMs (remember the Linux VM battles?), we end up with Solid SMP, advanced file systems (thank you Kirk), we end up with computer science.
Say, I found an annoying, non-security bug in one of the convoluted (non fsf) programs that came with my Linux distro. I fixed it. Where to I send in a fix that will end up in all 30 linux distros by the next year?
Oh, right. And there is no "cvs.linux.org" to contain all the patches. There is no strong peer auditing to keep craps from floating upon the water of the distros. The kernel control is pretty admirable, but after that....
At least it ain't Windows and the good linux hackers often graduate up to BSD with useful skills.
I'm looking at a 500k kernel (compressed) and
a crunchgen'd set of binaries taht fit onto an 8MB
flash with networking, a shell and far too many other
things to really be considered embedded (stuff I
need for other reasons). With trimming, I'm sure
we could get it down to 4MB for truly embedded use.
Of course, these guys
do embedded systems and own a respectable BSD when they bought BSDI. Of course, we can't figure out why they bought
BSDi since their first year appeared to focus on pissing off existing customers when FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD were as good as or better than BSDi in many respects. At least if I want mediocre support, I can get it for free:)
The bonus is that we don't have to put up with RMS yammering all the time. I watched and waited for HURD forever and just presumed that Emacs would get boot code. He can call that GNU/HURD all he wants. I still wish Linus has made the arbitrary choice of using the BSD-lite userland utils instead. At least the CSRG aren't as strident.
but.. what is openldap? It's a client and server suite that uses the LDAP protocol to talk to a simple database (typically the Berkeley DB) which is usually used to hold user identification and authentication data.
BZZZT. No!. LDAP is a PROTOCOL to access a DIRECTORY
But thank you for your information which will likely confuse many admins and get them thinking about LDAP in the wrong way.
X.500 was an ambitious attempt
LDAP a Lighter weight version of the rarely implemented bloat that is X.500 directory brought to us by the ISO (those euro's who wrote OSI, a clean room replacement for TCP/IP without the burdens of actually writing code; specs were available for $$$$ if you wanted to use it).
To the ex-ISO brit who whined about MAIL: being taken over for email use by Netscape's schema and that it was intended to be for postal mail, I've offered that well, X500 was thought up and imposed on the world and it never scaled well or really worked. It took the UMich team (many went to Netscape) to actually fix it to be where it works, where people can us it without a room full of machines and 20 administrators. The UMich goal was to have machines that people actually have (at the time, 4MB machines) be able to get information. X500 required a high end server to even LOOK at the data. Bloat.
It's intended to be OS-independent free software, but it reportedly runs best on linux at this time.
It is intended to be implemented on computers and runs really nicely on machines with lots of RAM and decent disk. Given that you can hit MILLIONS on a modest (by 2002 standards) machine, while it DOES scale really well on an 8 way machine (Sun, SGI), you generally don't need that. OpenLDAP 2.x screams on Solaris, BSD, Linux and AIX.
LDAP directories on Unix are often implemented using Berkeley/Sleepycat DB on the back end. Why? Cause its fast as hell. You can use SQL, you can use flat text files, if you wanted. You can write your own.
ldapman has some stuff that the guy wrote for Sendmail.net (RIP). Sorta helpful.
A directory entry basically consists of a blob of data lines about a user or machine or whatever. You can then look for those bits of data via structured queries (show me the MAIL entry for the user who's alias is $THIS and who's server is $THAT. Show me the PHOTO entry for the student whoes name is $THIS and whose class in $THEN.).
You still have to build the database the old-fashioned way...
You have to feed the server (not the database) the data somehow.
This can be done via perl scripts (and web front ends), it's often initially done with some hand work to create LDIF files. A little perl or awk to merge several points of data into directory entries is done ONCE.
The biggest difference is re-thinking about your data.
You don't think about "I have this alias for that user, I have another alias for that user, I have this alias for a list".
Now you have "I have this user. Among his entries are THESE aliases."
The user also has other features: An office, a phone, a picture maybe, vacation (email) information, and other attributes.
"I have this list, it contains these USERS (whose mail addresses might change" and these EMAIL addresses on it (for external users who aren't in your realm of control)"
Like DNS is hard. I worked with it doing rote memorization in the early 90s (DNS, not LDAP). Then this great big light bulb went off. Its basically a Key -> Value lookup.
Hesiod made sense (we put 30k aliases into HESIOD therefore DNS TXT records) to serve a global directory for 500 email SERVERS (and 20k clients).
LDAP is hard to "get". Trying to read really bad documentation, I struggled. By working with someone who used it a lot, and in the context of getting mail (again) running, I suddenly "got it". The tools out there are generally either useless or too abstract to get a grip on what LDAP does.
Sendmail, Inc, has an LDAP tool through their ProServices group. (Not that you could find out from their web site). Not cheap, it's intended for high end sites and offered from the consulting group for that. Cheaper than Active Directory, once you count machines (2 - a master server that few people access and the slave server that people actually use) and software licenses?
A pretty web GUI lets a secretary add/remove/manage users in LDAP.
Linux, Solaris, MacOS and BSD all authenticate to it, mail is routed with it, it can even store student ID pictures for the librarians to see when the scan an ID. With ACLs, you can only let certain users/places see certain fields so administrators can see addresses (home or school), but anyone on campus can see their email address.
Quota information can be kept in it, pretty much any field you want in a directory could be put in there your your own apps to use (ie. this person can use this door access at this time, but not after midnight). That part's up to you.
As a database, it's not great (though 2.1 and DB 4 are indicating that it's
not as bad at writes as previously experienced). As a repository for READING information, in small chunks, with mostly fixed queries, it's
great. INFINITELY faster than SQL. I've heard big-shot consultants/ think tanks say that SQL will replace LDAP. These people didn't quite "get" that you can't access SQL server by $COMPANY_of_Choice in a single way. LDAP is a protocol and lets you do that.
LDAP is hard, it's powerful and complex, it scales like a MoFo (2 CPU, 1GB RAM machine handled beating hard on it with several million entries using OpenLDAP 2.0.x and DB3.x. Far more than we expected in tests.
(and I don't know what a GNU desktop is. Been hearing about HURD for several decades. Still waiting. Is someone going to port the BSD userland to Linux just to get stallman to shut up?)
A friend lives in a skankie neighborhood. Has DirectTV.
He had the dish mounted in his backyard on a low beam so it's about 3' high total. It points back south towards (and over) his house. There's a BIG plastic trashcan on the top of it. Atop that is some scrapwood and some old logs rest near the base. It looks like corner-of-the-yard junk.
But given that gunshots are not unknown in the neighborhood, it means that everyone else sees yard junk.
(We moved stuff the computers in in various random boxes, a 40" TV came in inside a refrigerator box, he drives a 75 Lincoln (by some bizarre preference) that nobody will steal (despite my efforts and hopes)).
The point? You can disguise the dish. Plastic/rubber are invisible to magical sky rays. If you really wanted it INSIDE, you could stick it in an upstairs windows with lucite in front of it (and perhaps around it for insulation). Clever folks might bury it in an outside wall and paint over a covering or put a box around in on and outside wall. You don't have to see it.
Actually, in a video/film class, the teacher was briefing us one the tape we were about to check out.
He was standing in front of two TV's both with color test bars on them. No sound, just showing what was the default feed before a tape came on.
As a communications prof, he noticed our eyes being sucked to the screens, against our wishes. Just color bars.
As he reached up to turn them off, he noted:
Never teach in front of a television that's on. They radiate far more light than you do and therefore scream for attention.
He finished his talk, kicked on the TVs and we watch the tape.
So when I train people, I turn off (loud) projectors during the talk part. I've been known to wire up monitors to a different string of power strips and reach down during a talk to kick them all off. I had a coworker turn pull the network on the machine that was the company IRC server during a company wide meeting, to the anguish of the back row and thence the note of the front row.
1) animation often involves lots of coding.
Ever program light sources? That change over time? Didn't think so.
2) you presume that ability to speak english clearly equates to the speakers knowledge of a subject and intelligence.
Well you reflect on the intelligence of one person.
Er, George Bush isn't necessarily the brightest bulb on the line. But he, like reagan, speaks in simpleton for his audience as part of that.
Keep is simple and easy to unnerstan and the foolish minority that voted for him follows him.
You think it's accidental? (with his Mom and Dad's diction, I'm willing to bet a fair amount that it's a put-up. I'm from a heavily accented city, but my midwest parentage means that I never had that regional accent - my brother and I both left 20 years ago, with him in Asia for 5 years and we both speak about the same.)
Perhaps racist is the wrong word. A better fit might be "narrow-minded, provincial American?"
Perhaps this is why Americans are so widely respected abroad.
I boggle a bit at your equivalence of regional american accents with foreign upbringing.
You'd rather learn something from an unqualified local guy if the alternative was an expert with an accent?
It's not really my loss that you've not been abroad or exposed to other sounds and other cultures as it appears from your notes. One just sort of figures taht your parents were the same, and theirs and perhaps your offspring will be just as narrow.
Slashdot Mirror
Would a belief that the candidates are not chosen (through funding) by corporations and lobbies perhaps increase voting?
Would a non-binding "none of the above" give people a way to come out and make a statement, rather than stay home and not vote at all?
Would a "check off all acceptable candidates" (not 1-4, just yeah/nay) make a difference and broaden the number of parties from the republicrat monopoly?
Or is the answer closed source voting software controlled by questionably influenced companies?
No, I was the guy on the motorcycle you cut off because you didn't signal cause your hand was on your dick^W Cell Phone.
Hang up or get off the road. You're steering a 1ton plus metal vehicle, not sitting in your lazy boy
---
I want the jammer button on my bike:
Hello? Hello? damn, I can't hear you. I'll call you later. Maybe I'll pay attention to driving my 12mpg, 3 ton, own-zipcode SUV that will never see a dirt road.
If your were "awakened at midnight" by an alarm, perhaps that reduces your geekpoints a lot & should be factored into the credibility of your answer.
I really just get rolling at midnight. I saw 6AM kinda recently. Just heading to bed.
about 3 pages of muck.
Motif failed. It never caught on. Dare I say it helped windows get the desktops.
I view KDE (based on QT which has both GPL or "pay us" licenses if you want proprietary) and Gnome as the answer by kids who grew up with GUIs (I grew up with vt52s and vt100s) who perhaps thought: Hey, unix doesn't have to suck to use.
I've run huge networks on Motif desktops and it was a bitch. Tools weren't there, programs were impossible to write. Hell, TK (with tcl or perl) were a godsend to slap up a quick X gui thing at t he time.
OSF gave us the now dominant (*cough*) counter to Sun+ATT's SysVr4 and Motif. And few higher end widgets and no design dictates such as "Every App Shall Have a File Menu Item and Open/Save/Save as/Quit as Options".
No, in this program, you type q in the window, in that one you hit something else. It's like DOS 3.3 (Lotus 123: "/qyy", WordPerf: "[F7]y", dbase: .quity"
That motif came up as (1) proprietary (open motif is too little too late) and (2) during the Lotus/Apple look and feel lawsuits to make up for their lack of innovation make them an interesting footnote in the history of Unix.
Perhaps the X developers (1987 or so) made MISTAKES and KDE and GNOME manage to recover from them nicely. QT is both programmable, usable and popular. Motif was close to unprogrammable, could be usable if you did lots of work - hardly innate, and was popular as the only thing out there.
The replacement of CDE (Commitee designed environment) with GNOME by vendors is just another brad in the coffin of motif and XWindows-classic. For FreeBSD users, KDE/Gnome are not part of the OS. They are a port that lives on TOP of the OS. In BSD, we don't shove every damn addon into /usr/bin/. We do generally have a man page for about every file on the system. (openbsd is anal about it, netbsd is pretty good, freebsd is good; but I use redhat and find something like 5 man pages and 40,000 files :).
Oh, and I can build from source! remember source? Yeah, I don't trust joe-random "I have an RPM for you" builder on my own.
Ever deal with NAT?
That's why (and no, NAT is not a firewall, it's not close to a firewall, it's the wrong answer). I'm tired of wacking a NAT, and dealing with redirecting stuff to this address over to that NATd machine. I'm tires of wierd hack to get IPSec to remotely work. I"m tires of no QOS, I'm tired of DHCP. I'm tired of dealing with two companies who both use 10/8 addresses who merge. I'm tired of ISP's with their heads in the sand no even looking at this during a 8 years of testing so far (1996-current).
These ones think it means a withdrawal of IPv6.
Far from it. The 6bone was established when nobody had IPv6 stacks really, nobody really used it. It was a playground to try it out. And we have been.
Now, Sun has IPv6, Cisco has it ready and waiting, the BSD's all have, Linux has it, AIX, HPUX, MacOS X. Hell even Windows has it. (I await MS's announcement of its invention soon).
IPv6 is here and ready and tested.
The notion of closing the 6bone (discussed for months on the 6bone lists), is that in 3 years you SHOULD be able to get IPv6. Not tunneled, no long hops.
Me? I call my cable modem people (dsl before I moved) and would get the second level tech support people and ask for IPv6 support. Try to get it on their radar. Wouldn't you love your cell phone to have an IP address? Hell, wouldn't you love a (firewalled) IPv6 aware electrical outlet? (x10 is getting old and lame).
So you have 3 years to convince your ISP that they should have IPv6.
This isn't the place to go into details, but it's designed and planned to run concurrently with IPv4. This isn't like the NCP/TCP change over where there was a huge redflag day for all 200 hosts on the Arpa net.
Everything in my house speaks IPv6 except a printer and a terminal server (you do all have terminal servers for those serial toys, yes?). Those will never be upgraded - too old. When I ssh, mail or browse, if they have a 6 address and I can reach it, it gets used. Otherwise it falls back to IPv4.
At work, if you have a subnet with all IPv6, you can turn off IPv4 and let your edge gateway it. But you may not be turning off all the IPv4 until that last printer dies. Do it subnet by subnet and leave IPv4, but just watch it not be used.
Bonuses?
No more need for NAT (I have 65 thousand INTERNETS of addresses here).
IPv6 stacks are looking faster than IPv4 (not based on a presumption of 16 bit PDP-11 processors).
So where the hell is www.slashdot.org?
nslookup -q=aaaa www.slashdot.org
Can't find www.slashdot.org: Non-existent host/domain
My NeXT was running web clients in 1991 or 1992. Not much to see, if you didn't put it up.
Mosaic was a milestone, but it didn't mark the start line.
I was given a Psion 3 that's got IrDA, serial and a programming language. My P3 died LONG LONG ago and is now a zaurus.
As a generic terminal, it was great.
LCD. Serial. Built. Not ugly (ok, no ducttape and "hold that wire" of home hackery).
It's slow, DoS attacks are easy (from the neighbor who has SOMETHING that turns on the damn light (or worse, coffee maker) at 2AM) to those stupid motion sensors - if you have 5, the AC lines are too "clogged" to get wanted X10 over them.
Signals can take 2 seconds to reach the device. Ouch.
Right Answer: High Speed something over wireless or power to a real IP stack that can authenticate, perhaps encrypt and take an action.
Sorry, it's just not.
At $30/pop, yes, handy for things that cost $600+ that might want ethernet (it's still 5%, so up that even more until it's 2-3%).
It's a serial-> ethernet device. For $30/port, serial is cheaper.
Want to monitor a fridge? There are a billion devices that can read temp over serial devices.
Wanna do a hole house? Scatter around some microcontrollers.
PIC and many others make chips that have serial, talk a little programming and have things like digital IO or 12 A/Ds.
Put one in each room - they fit in an outlet box with room to spare.
Wire up sensors:
- one reads light levels (along with time of day and other sensors, central computing can decide that the light is on, or it's just sunny).
- some for TEMP (LM34/LM35's are the expensive option, but easy)
-- one in the fridge, one at waist level for the room, one outside
- humidity
Digital IO can:- tell you if outlets are on with decent circuit work
- tell if an (internal, see below) door is open or changes state
- tell you if someone steps on the carpet (in the bathroom at 7AM so it knows to turn the coffee on).
- control smart sockets (X10 is barely smart).
- read a simple button push, unlock an internal door (below), can read the chip in your neck to see that you are now in the room (you know about the chip, right
:), whatever.
(It's a bad plan for burlar alarm functions, you want those run separately)The Controller is "taught" what type of sensor is on each input, it reads the values, actions may have it talk (96kb is more than fast enough) down a CAT3 or 5 to the central computer. This wire may also power it.
Perhaps a temp threshold (high/low/change rate) triggers a report.
Perhaps it just reports every N seconds (N=120 is still lots of useless data)
Perhaps it also has OUTPUT. But it has little intelligence.
Central computing can also "read" the burglar alarm and know that you just entered (it was your code), it's dark out and cold, it's dinner time, so it can turn on a couple lights, spit a message to your (serial) LCD in the hall with messages (your girlf is leaving you cause you leave the seat up and work on your computer too much and why the hell can't she turn on the damn lights like a normal person!).
Central computer gets ethernet. Runs with no disk (flash boot), doesn't do much else. It can talk to a Real Computer that has the MP3s, etc.
Central computer might just be a general MicroController, but it's taking 20 different serial connections in (232? or I2O or shared RS232 with a protocol (Device A: Read Sensor B @ value 116 becomes ASCII "AB00000116". or something). ASCII makes life easier, packets longer).
For $30, I can get the PIC chip ($55 with basic to program it) and run 4 conducter alarm wire along a room (push it into drywall, spackle).
For $30 at Q10,000, I want bluetooth or 802.11{a,b,g,i} and IPv6 and IPSec.
Want all the serials to be ethernet instead and go into a 16 port hub? HUB: $100, 6x$30 for these: adds $280 plus development (at 10k rates).
For the CAT5, I might as well stick with the serial. Let one machine agreggate the data and offer it over the network.
OTOH, with Solar/wind and batteries, running 48VDC is getting less uncommon. LED's like 48VDC 9with big resistors.
There was a website hack of code, but that was a web server attack and checking the .sig would have shown it to have been altered.
Me? I'll take Sendmail with TLS and SMTPAUTH with people who know it and look at it (and this bug is obtuse enough that it slipped by LOTS OF VERY EXPERINCED EYES for years) as being fast and secure and djb free.
(chat with dan about using patches (such as TLS) on his pristine qmail code sometime).
Diversity of mailers good, but there is a diversity. Or will be until MS owns that too - as soon as they invent and patent email. Or at least make it so proprietary that Open Standards code fails.
Of course, as good system admins, you DO read the code right? You do verify distributions? You never use binaries made by untrusted parties (like most RPMs from non-vendors), right?
In 1988, when the Morris worm hit, you could log into many systems as guest. We telnet'd everywhere.
So if your window (sendmail) is open, someone could walk in, but mostly we had no locks on the doors.
Since then, sendmail's undergone pretty freaking major rewrites.
The last remote exploit was 1997, AFAIK. Before postfix came out.
It offers MORE security in many ways.
I can use SMTP over SSL (TLS). Ask djb about support in qmail for that qmail patch. I've seen a few good rants from him about using qmail with any patches at all. You must use it unchanged from 1997.
patch your binary, move on. Just like last summer with SSL and SSH and Apache. Just like every week with Exchange.
They "predict" a couple and then they use their secretly hidden devices to cause them.
Remember that "earthquake swarm" in San Ramon (a town of burb claves just over the hills from SanFran/Oakland)??? I think it made national news (my dad in New England rang me about it)...
Perhaps that was their testing of their "prediction" scheme.
So they predict a few, then the maybe "predict" an 8.5 for San Francisco if they don't pony up perhaps Venture Capital.
"Maybe you're safe, see? Or maybe there's an earthquake coming to your mudda's house. Or your kid's school, see? So let's see some investment here or we'll predict the penninsula back to orchards"
Wrote a paper or 3 on it when MacWrite could only hold 3-4 pages, and you saved and opened the next file (128k, baby!).
Mac II came out (and eventually docs to program Macs). B&W programs running with random colors was amusing for that first month or two.
Used them through the 80s. Helped clients buy them (film folks mainly). Mostly because the Mac folks didn't call me every couple days for basic help like the DOS folks did. Windows 3.0 came along and didn't help any. ("My disk was full, do I trashed the old version of WP by dragging it to the trash". No, the icon doesn't actually contain the file, it's just a pointer to it, you have to pretty much his DOS. Welcome back to 1982.).
Always worked on Unix (and VMS). Film place had Unix accounting. I replaced a couple pages of commands to do backups with a shell script. The guy was delighted. But it was an old mini (I have it now) and it was terminals.
The next job had mostly just Unix. And NeXT. I referred to the NeXT's as "Mac III". New Interface, killer OS hidden beneath (we called it "B - S - D"). Objective C and Display PS and NetInfo was just Jobs being annoying like Jobs must be.
Thanks to poor decisions (absurdly high case costs, selling $10k machines through businessLand and to students only, etc), they sort of tanked. Meanwhile, Apple's MacOS didn't really change - got a little more polished.
In 1995, Copland didn't come out but Win95 did, Win95 because better in many ways (eg. multi-tasking, better than win31 interface).
Apple was going to fail (again). NeXT bought them (trojan horse buy, but look who's in charge of the OS and what OS X is).
I talk to guys who want their Macs of 1994. And I point them to "Application has quite expectedly quit, restart your computer" and TCP/IP lameness and so forth, and it seems they want the idea of their old macs.
Apple was failing. Apple needed a rebuild of their OS. NeXT had one. *We* unix folks win cause it's not a brand new piece of crap one (*cough* NT *cough*). Perhaps BeOS had interesting things, but the NeXT culture fit better.
"Classic" MacOS isn't coming back. It was time for it to die. Photoshop finally is available (someone's ass at adobe needed a kicking). Quark needs to be or they will lose Apple customers (and apple will lose quark customers). It's embarrassing. XP Still sucks and I don't expect Quark for RHAS out soon.
Used FrameMaker. Had floating licenses on Unix (desktops were Sun, SGI, HP-UX, and others). Common for the time (1992/3). Nice software for what we needed. A little smarter than WordPerfect/Word and ran on PC/Mac and Motif. We had no PeeCees (includes macs). Just Unix boxes, XTerminals and Diskless Unix boxes. Life was good.
Needed to get more licenses and an upgrade
They came back at $2300+ per license.
When the rep called back to see if we wanted it, I mentioned that for only $1500 per user, I'd gone out and gotten a slightly used Mac and a new version of Quark. Yes, I could have gotten fixed Mac licenses for FrameMaker for a mere $600, but if we were changing platforms we might as well go with dominant software and, well, fuck you for wanting to charge me $2300 for each copy of glorified word processing.
We used the old version of FrameMaker for most of the text writing work and Quark for layout of new projects.
Adobe owns FrameMaker now. It was pretty nice. It was $500 of nice *maybe*. If they lost the market to quark, it's their own damn fault. They never got money from me again. Short sighted price hikes kept them from getting probably $10's of thousands via my later customers/employers.
Take a busy machine that's mounting, say, email boxes via NFS.
Turn off the NFS server (or just wait for your P.O.S. EMC to crash
Wait a moment or three as it becomes unresponsive.
Type "uptime" and wait 3 minutes for it to return with a load average of 2085.
Now, actual CPU usage is the key. But getting a really solid stack is what FreeBSD excels at.
OpenBSD also focussed hard on security through auditing the code.
I guess this is redundant to the other BSDs. But wait! Reading the kernel commits (see, we use CVS in bsd-land), I can see that FreeBSD has taken (thank you Mr Leffler) many of the crypto kernel and userland utils into FreeBSD from OpenBSD. And OpenBSD just recently sync'd up a bunch of their USB utils with NetBSDs.
So are they doing redundant work or keeping up a healthy but friendly competition? Many successfull companies will have a couple groups doing similar things - keeps the edge....
So FreeBSD code appears in Net and OpenBSD, NetBSD coders work appears in Open and FreeBSD, etc, etc. They share with each other to the benefit of everyone.
As a bonus, it's easy to build from source. /usr/ports/ (pkgsrc on netbsd) lets me just (cd /usr/ports/mail/mutt;make install) and built mutt FROM THE SOURCE for my system.
- for that. So different kernels? Yeah. Different idea's being explored. The best ones trickle into the other kernels. We end up with good VMs (remember the Linux VM battles?), we end up with Solid SMP, advanced file systems (thank you Kirk), we end up with computer science.No games of "find the RPM" and trust like hell that the person who built that mutt rpm isn't evil. And that they had the same glibc that I had. And they used the options I wanted (
Say, I found an annoying, non-security bug in one of the convoluted (non fsf) programs that came with my Linux distro. I fixed it. Where to I send in a fix that will end up in all 30 linux distros by the next year?
Oh, right. And there is no "cvs.linux.org" to contain all the patches. There is no strong peer auditing to keep craps from floating upon the water of the distros. The kernel control is pretty admirable, but after that....
At least it ain't Windows and the good linux hackers often graduate up to BSD with useful skills.
I'm looking at a 500k kernel (compressed) and a crunchgen'd set of binaries taht fit onto an 8MB flash with networking, a shell and far too many other things to really be considered embedded (stuff I need for other reasons). With trimming, I'm sure we could get it down to 4MB for truly embedded use.
Of course, these guys do embedded systems and own a respectable BSD when they bought BSDI. Of course, we can't figure out why they bought BSDi since their first year appeared to focus on pissing off existing customers when FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD were as good as or better than BSDi in many respects. At least if I want mediocre support, I can get it for free :)
And there are other folks in the free world doing embedded work too.
The bonus is that we don't have to put up with RMS yammering all the time. I watched and waited for HURD forever and just presumed that Emacs would get boot code. He can call that GNU/HURD all he wants. I still wish Linus has made the arbitrary choice of using the BSD-lite userland utils instead. At least the CSRG aren't as strident.
It's a client and server suite that uses the LDAP protocol to talk to a simple database (typically the Berkeley DB) which is usually used to hold user identification and authentication data.
BZZZT. No!. LDAP is a PROTOCOL to access a DIRECTORY
But thank you for your information which will likely confuse many admins and get them thinking about LDAP in the wrong way.
X.500 was an ambitious attempt
LDAP a Lighter weight version of the rarely implemented bloat that is X.500 directory brought to us by the ISO (those euro's who wrote OSI, a clean room replacement for TCP/IP without the burdens of actually writing code; specs were available for $$$$ if you wanted to use it).
To the ex-ISO brit who whined about MAIL: being taken over for email use by Netscape's schema and that it was intended to be for postal mail, I've offered that well, X500 was thought up and imposed on the world and it never scaled well or really worked. It took the UMich team (many went to Netscape) to actually fix it to be where it works, where people can us it without a room full of machines and 20 administrators. The UMich goal was to have machines that people actually have (at the time, 4MB machines) be able to get information. X500 required a high end server to even LOOK at the data. Bloat.
It's intended to be OS-independent free software, but it reportedly runs best on linux at this time.
It is intended to be implemented on computers and runs really nicely on machines with lots of RAM and decent disk. Given that you can hit MILLIONS on a modest (by 2002 standards) machine, while it DOES scale really well on an 8 way machine (Sun, SGI), you generally don't need that. OpenLDAP 2.x screams on Solaris, BSD, Linux and AIX.
LDAP directories on Unix are often implemented using Berkeley/Sleepycat DB on the back end. Why? Cause its fast as hell. You can use SQL, you can use flat text files, if you wanted. You can write your own.
ldapman has some stuff that the guy wrote for Sendmail.net (RIP). Sorta helpful.
A directory entry basically consists of a blob of data lines about a user or machine or whatever. You can then look for those bits of data via structured queries (show me the MAIL entry for the user who's alias is $THIS and who's server is $THAT. Show me the PHOTO entry for the student whoes name is $THIS and whose class in $THEN.).
You still have to build the database the old-fashioned way...
You have to feed the server (not the database) the data somehow. This can be done via perl scripts (and web front ends), it's often initially done with some hand work to create LDIF files. A little perl or awk to merge several points of data into directory entries is done ONCE.
The biggest difference is re-thinking about your data.
You don't think about "I have this alias for that user, I have another alias for that user, I have this alias for a list".
Now you have "I have this user. Among his entries are THESE aliases." The user also has other features: An office, a phone, a picture maybe, vacation (email) information, and other attributes.
"I have this list, it contains these USERS (whose mail addresses might change" and these EMAIL addresses on it (for external users who aren't in your realm of control)"
Hesiod made sense (we put 30k aliases into HESIOD therefore DNS TXT records) to serve a global directory for 500 email SERVERS (and 20k clients).
LDAP is hard to "get". Trying to read really bad documentation, I struggled. By working with someone who used it a lot, and in the context of getting mail (again) running, I suddenly "got it". The tools out there are generally either useless or too abstract to get a grip on what LDAP does.
Sendmail, Inc, has an LDAP tool through their ProServices group. (Not that you could find out from their web site). Not cheap, it's intended for high end sites and offered from the consulting group for that. Cheaper than Active Directory, once you count machines (2 - a master server that few people access and the slave server that people actually use) and software licenses?
A pretty web GUI lets a secretary add/remove/manage users in LDAP.
Linux, Solaris, MacOS and BSD all authenticate to it, mail is routed with it, it can even store student ID pictures for the librarians to see when the scan an ID. With ACLs, you can only let certain users/places see certain fields so administrators can see addresses (home or school), but anyone on campus can see their email address.
Quota information can be kept in it, pretty much any field you want in a directory could be put in there your your own apps to use (ie. this person can use this door access at this time, but not after midnight). That part's up to you.
As a database, it's not great (though 2.1 and DB 4 are indicating that it's not as bad at writes as previously experienced). As a repository for READING information, in small chunks, with mostly fixed queries, it's great. INFINITELY faster than SQL. I've heard big-shot consultants/ think tanks say that SQL will replace LDAP. These people didn't quite "get" that you can't access SQL server by $COMPANY_of_Choice in a single way. LDAP is a protocol and lets you do that.
LDAP is hard, it's powerful and complex, it scales like a MoFo (2 CPU, 1GB RAM machine handled beating hard on it with several million entries using OpenLDAP 2.0.x and DB3.x. Far more than we expected in tests.
(and I don't know what a GNU desktop is. Been hearing about HURD for several decades. Still waiting. Is someone going to port the BSD userland to Linux just to get stallman to shut up?)
He had the dish mounted in his backyard on a low beam so it's about 3' high total. It points back south towards (and over) his house. There's a BIG plastic trashcan on the top of it. Atop that is some scrapwood and some old logs rest near the base. It looks like corner-of-the-yard junk.
But given that gunshots are not unknown in the neighborhood, it means that everyone else sees yard junk.
(We moved stuff the computers in in various random boxes, a 40" TV came in inside a refrigerator box, he drives a 75 Lincoln (by some bizarre preference) that nobody will steal (despite my efforts and hopes)).
The point? You can disguise the dish. Plastic/rubber are invisible to magical sky rays. If you really wanted it INSIDE, you could stick it in an upstairs windows with lucite in front of it (and perhaps around it for insulation). Clever folks might bury it in an outside wall and paint over a covering or put a box around in on and outside wall. You don't have to see it.
Preview didn't reveal the mistake. Stupid preview.
/ / / dot
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He was standing in front of two TV's both with color test bars on them. No sound, just showing what was the default feed before a tape came on.
As a communications prof, he noticed our eyes being sucked to the screens, against our wishes. Just color bars.
As he reached up to turn them off, he noted:
Never teach in front of a television that's on. They radiate far more light than you do and therefore scream for attention.
He finished his talk, kicked on the TVs and we watch the tape.
So when I train people, I turn off (loud) projectors during the talk part. I've been known to wire up monitors to a different string of power strips and reach down during a talk to kick them all off. I had a coworker turn pull the network on the machine that was the company IRC server during a company wide meeting, to the anguish of the back row and thence the note of the front row.
2) you presume that ability to speak english clearly equates to the speakers knowledge of a subject and intelligence.
Well you reflect on the intelligence of one person.
Er, George Bush isn't necessarily the brightest bulb on the line. But he, like reagan, speaks in simpleton for his audience as part of that.
Keep is simple and easy to unnerstan and the foolish minority that voted for him follows him.
You think it's accidental? (with his Mom and Dad's diction, I'm willing to bet a fair amount that it's a put-up. I'm from a heavily accented city, but my midwest parentage means that I never had that regional accent - my brother and I both left 20 years ago, with him in Asia for 5 years and we both speak about the same.)
Perhaps racist is the wrong word. A better fit might be "narrow-minded, provincial American?"
Perhaps this is why Americans are so widely respected abroad.
I boggle a bit at your equivalence of regional american accents with foreign upbringing.
You'd rather learn something from an unqualified local guy if the alternative was an expert with an accent?
It's not really my loss that you've not been abroad or exposed to other sounds and other cultures as it appears from your notes. One just sort of figures taht your parents were the same, and theirs and perhaps your offspring will be just as narrow.