I'll keep my data on my own box, and not use a thin client to upload everything to their servers, thank you very much. Bugs wouldn't be my biggest worry -- it's the idea that my data could be held hostage by some sysadmin honked off because I nailed his wife or riled up about some joke I made about Scott McNealy's gigantic fucking teeth. Forget that mess.
One the one hand, you have people like me who use Hotmail as a spam catcher. (I do actually skim for actual messages to me once a week or so, in case someone's trying to reach me through it.) If someone got into my account to read all my spam, I couldn't really care less.
On the other hand, for those that actually use it as a major provider for their email, they've got to weigh the possibility of a breach happening to Hotmail in the future (and not happening to the other web email services) against the hassle of getting all their acquaintances to use their new email address. As someone who still gets email from an account I closed over two years ago (it still gets forwarded to me thanks to an understanding ISP), I can testify that it's a pain. You also have to consider that those people who do use web email as a major provider are rarely the type to come into contact with hacker types -- they're more the ma and pa type of user -- and were very unlikely to be targeted.
The taxes that I've paid have helped send relief over there to help out, and I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of the charities that I support helped out there, too. Perhaps less of my hard earned money would need to be transfered to Turkey if we didn't have the Linux users there griping about a measly membership fee instead of helping out their countrymen.
No offense, but I would think that at this point in time in Turkey, people could be doing a lot more useful things with their time than worrying about computer user groups. Like maybe giving some assistance to the approximately one percent of Turkey's population that was left homeless because of the quake?
Hmmm, I'm not really into the goth thing myself, but she does have a very pretty face and gorgeous eyes anyway. Definitely the type I'd ask out on a casual date if I lived in the same city, barring a major personality clash. (Ya never know if ya never ask.) Thanks for the info, Craig.
I don't want her to get harassed or stalked or anything, but could someone please post a link to a picture of her? My curiosity is definitely piqued. Besides, girls in chains rawk.
Maybe I misread something, but it didn't seem like Linux, contrary to Hemos's claim, had anything to do with people's phone calls going through. The story sounded like Bell was just using Linux for monitoring, not that it was doing any of the actual grunt work; i.e., Linux is just making sure that the computers actually running the show are operating properly. The statement that Linux was only used in about 10% of the computers seems to jibe with this.
Step 1: Witness your business struggling. Step 2: In a last ditch effort, embrace Linux. Step 3: Watch your company leader leave posthaste as your company crumbles.
Gads, you really are an idiot. So NT users can't choose which services to run? Tell us another one. And yeah, RedHat's being so public about all their bugs the way they bury it on their website. Guess they wouldn't want all those Wall Street investors to be able to see how shoddy it really is.
As for informing people, thank you for showing the hypocracy that I'm talking about. The reason a lot of people here found out about the Hotmail problem here before Microsoft said anything about it is because Slashdot ACTUALLY REPORTED IT -- whereas they DIDN'T REPORT the RedHat problem. If they held RedHat to the same standard that they hold RedHat, most people here indeed would have heard about it here first; plenty of people knew about the problem before RedHat ever deigned to mention it. Nice try, junior.
By that reasoning, the only time RedHat should notify their customers of problems is when there's a bug or security hole in their installer, or some other RedHat-specific piece of their distribution. They bundle the kernel and all the various apps and tools and stick their RedHat Linux brand on it, so it's incumbent upon them to take responsibility for anything that goes into their distribution. If they're not willing to do that, they should yank the offending app from their product. For a company whose business model is almost entirely based on support and services, their response is not reassuring.
Dead right -- it's the company's equipment, and you're paid to do work-related things, not wank around on the job.
Yeah, I know the above's redundant, but I wanted to show a little support for the position as well as mention something I saw on TV tonight.
Congressman Bob Barr was on the Fox News Channel tonight (on the O'Reilly report) discussing ECHELON. He said that the House Intelligence Committee summoned a National Security Agency representative before their committee to (1) explain exactly what it is that they're doing, and (2) explain why they're doing it. The NSA official refused to answer any of the questions, invoking attorney-client privilege.
Kinda makes you wonder if the agency is accountable to anyone. So basically, nevermind the workplace, it sounds like those of us in the USA, UK, Australia, and New Zealand have had our right to privacy taken away from us anyway. I wish I were confident that my PGP- and Blowfish-encrypted stuff was safe, but I've got the feeling that the NSA can break those if they really feel like it.
Hmm, let's see. Microsoft announced the problem on both Hotmail's home page, as well as on the home page of www.microsoft.com.
Now, what I'd like to know is: Why isn't Slashdot bitching about Redhat? The am-utils package that they've been shipping is "being actively exploited on the internet" to give root access on machines running amd. Wow! Something like that's just gotta be on RedHat's home page, right? Ooops. Guess not -- not a single peep.
So, after clicking on "Updates, Fixes, & Errata," I still see no warnings. Click on "Redhat 6.0." Click on "amd." Ahh, finally!
I dunno, but for a problem that's being "actively exploited on the Internet," you'd think that (at least by Slashdot's apparent standards), RedHat would be making a lot more noise about this. At least the Hotmail hole is no longer there.
Face it, you would've been bitching no matter what they said while giving RedHat a free pass on all the holes that have been uncovered in just the past month.
I wasn't exactly baiting (hell, for one I apologized for my phrasing beforehand, and if I really wanted to, I woulda said something like "dump linux and apache for NT and IIS"), but there have been some big problems with Slashdot's website being down the past few days. I just find the average "luser" fascination with things like "uptime", "beowulf", and "squid" annoying. My mindset is more along the lines of, "Hey, could you iron out the problems and get it working and then play with your buzzwords?"
Not that I really blame whoever moderated me down -- it wasn't exactly the nicest thing I've ever said.
Cheers, ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
The Great Linux Uptime Myth exposed
on
Kernel 2.2.12
·
· Score: 2
Linux rulez, d00d! My system uptime is now almost 1000 days!
*whispering* Ummm, installing a new kernel every two weeks and rebooting nightly into my Windows partition to play games, read email, and surf the web don't count against my uptime, right? It's not like it crashed or sumpthin', right? Right?
I apologize for my brusqueness, but perhaps you could spend a little less time masturbating over your uptime stats and a little more time making sure that this web site is actually up and working?
Dude, while I appreciate your enthusiasm, this wasn't even close to being the first time. Back in 1996, Lexis-Nexis met the wrath of The People when they put up a service to let subscribers look up other people's social security numbers. Not that I'm claiming that that was the first time, either, just that it predates this Amazon episode by a good three years.
Just as an aside, we really don't have that much privacy, anyway. Just check out http://www.pretext.com/nov97/featu res/story1.htm for some good evidence of it, as well as some of the facts of the oft-misreported Lexis-Nexis P-TRAK story.
Long enough for me to set up a crawler to download the entire Purchase Circle portion of their website, sans images. Which is what I did, and I'm sure I'm not alone, as soon as the original story was announced on Slashdot a few days ago.
Why? Oh, nothing sinister -- I just thought (1) it would be interesting (not important, just interesting) data to have, and (2) I knew Amazon would back down and start pulling at least some of it off the web as soon as the privacy guys started going nuts. So, they can pull it down now if they want, but since they already let the cat out of the bag, that data is as good as public.
When the Linux 2.0.0 kernel came out in January, it didn't even take them four months before 2.0.9 came out. At least 8 of those kernel updates included bugfixes; most likely all 9 of them did.
Keep in mind that we're not even going into bugs throughout an entire average Linux system -- we're talking about all the bugfixes just for the kernel.
Hmmm, what was that old saying about people in glass houses...?:)
Has any Nick Petreley project ever been successful? Seriously. Just thinking about all his OS/2, Java, and Network Computer efforts that died. LinuxWorld doesn't seem to be doing too poorly at all, but I definitely would suggest partnering with other people given Nick's track record of failures. If I had to pick something to blame it on, it's that he seems to have no "vision" whatsoever other than to promote something counter to Microsoft. Ray Noorda can tell you how successful that strategy is.
Hi Hany, I haven't been able to post replies to all of your posts, so I'll try to combine all of them into this post.
i heard that GNU tools are much better than company specific ones.
Well, it depends which ones you're talking about, and in what aspects. I think many would agree that the VC++ compiler and debugger are better than the GNU offerings, as far as use and performance (but not portability) go.
so i'm curious if you have them on your solaris.
gcc, gdb, and emacs come to mind. I've got other Open Source software on it, but I can't recall if any of it is something that's specifically from GNU itself.
As for your comments about the different CLI's I'm using (an xterm from Solaris, nxterms from Linux, and yes there's not much difference between them), I think you're misunderstanding my point. See, there aren't really any look-and-feel issues with all the software you listed, because they're all just character-based apps. Plus, they're not in bytecode for JVMs, they're all compiled for your specific platform. So, the things you bring up don't really change my point about Java.
In other words, leaving aside the look-and-feel arguments, why isn't there any push for GNU to quit wasting time with C source code portability, and just rewrite all their tools in Java? (I'm sure that someone out there is doing just that.) It sure would be easier, just having one.java/.class file out there for everyone, whether they're running Unix, Windows, BeOS, OS/2, or Macs, right? Are you ready to trade in the speed of your natively-compiled GNU tools for their WORA Java equivalents? I'm not.
In an earlier reply from you, you asked me if it was all right that those "only 10%" of users (the non-Windows ones) are hurt by not having access to some of the same software. I think it would be great if everyone could use every piece of software out there on every platform, but it's just not realistic as long as software companies are in the business of making money.
Mozilla is not the real JavaGator: (1) It's not a Java app, like the real JavaGator was supposed to be. (2) It's not Write-Once-Run-Anywhere in the least. If it were, you wouldn't need separate Win32, Mac, Linux, etc. teams. It's laughable for you to say that Mozilla's going to take over the world when it's already so late and can't even match the current Communicator, much less the vastly superior IE5. And yes, I've tried Mozilla lately -- one of last week's builds, as a matter of fact. So...why aren't they coding it in Java? If they did, they could stop people from wasting time on portability issues and have them working on the core browser. Do you know something that they don't?
Wow, right now I'm sitting at a Win2K box running an X Server providing me terms from both my Linux box and my Sparc, so I guess I'm better than you, right?
Heh, I can't say that that exact thought didn't enter my mind at the time, although it really did seem to be an honest mistake with this particular chap.
From the article "story," I mistakenly thought that questions would be chosen just on the basis of a post's score. After reading your post and going back to read the article submission, I see my misunderstanding -- thanks.
I'm not one to normally clog bandwidth with thanks, but (1) I think you're doing a good job, Roblimo, and (2) I think this topic needed a few more non-flames. I get the feeling that there's a lot of jealousy of success and fame rearing its head here, based on some of the completely uncalled-for flames that I've seen heaped upon this guy.
I despise MTV and mainly don't watch it except for the superb Tom Green Show, and have never gotten into Road Rules, but lighten up on the kid. He had a free opportunity to get out in the world with some babes and get some TV time. A lot of people would jump at the chance. I'm sure that he'd get flamed by some people no matter what he did on the show. Criticizing is one thing, but some of the cruel and personal attacks on him that I've read here have been pretty disgusting. Consider how you'd feel if it was one of your family members getting trashed merely because they decided to do something harmless and fun and get a tiny bit of fame in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll keep my data on my own box, and not use a thin client to upload everything to their servers, thank you very much. Bugs wouldn't be my biggest worry -- it's the idea that my data could be held hostage by some sysadmin honked off because I nailed his wife or riled up about some joke I made about Scott McNealy's gigantic fucking teeth. Forget that mess.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
One the one hand, you have people like me who use Hotmail as a spam catcher. (I do actually skim for actual messages to me once a week or so, in case someone's trying to reach me through it.) If someone got into my account to read all my spam, I couldn't really care less.
On the other hand, for those that actually use it as a major provider for their email, they've got to weigh the possibility of a breach happening to Hotmail in the future (and not happening to the other web email services) against the hassle of getting all their acquaintances to use their new email address. As someone who still gets email from an account I closed over two years ago (it still gets forwarded to me thanks to an understanding ISP), I can testify that it's a pain. You also have to consider that those people who do use web email as a major provider are rarely the type to come into contact with hacker types -- they're more the ma and pa type of user -- and were very unlikely to be targeted.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
The taxes that I've paid have helped send relief over there to help out, and I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of the charities that I support helped out there, too. Perhaps less of my hard earned money would need to be transfered to Turkey if we didn't have the Linux users there griping about a measly membership fee instead of helping out their countrymen.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
No offense, but I would think that at this point in time in Turkey, people could be doing a lot more useful things with their time than worrying about computer user groups. Like maybe giving some assistance to the approximately one percent of Turkey's population that was left homeless because of the quake?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Hmmm, I'm not really into the goth thing myself, but she does have a very pretty face and gorgeous eyes anyway. Definitely the type I'd ask out on a casual date if I lived in the same city, barring a major personality clash. (Ya never know if ya never ask.) Thanks for the info, Craig.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I don't want her to get harassed or stalked or anything, but could someone please post a link to a picture of her? My curiosity is definitely piqued. Besides, girls in chains rawk.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Maybe I misread something, but it didn't seem like Linux, contrary to Hemos's claim, had anything to do with people's phone calls going through. The story sounded like Bell was just using Linux for monitoring, not that it was doing any of the actual grunt work; i.e., Linux is just making sure that the computers actually running the show are operating properly. The statement that Linux was only used in about 10% of the computers seems to jibe with this.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Step 1: Witness your business struggling. Step 2: In a last ditch effort, embrace Linux. Step 3: Watch your company leader leave posthaste as your company crumbles.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Gads, you really are an idiot. So NT users can't choose which services to run? Tell us another one. And yeah, RedHat's being so public about all their bugs the way they bury it on their website. Guess they wouldn't want all those Wall Street investors to be able to see how shoddy it really is.
As for informing people, thank you for showing the hypocracy that I'm talking about. The reason a lot of people here found out about the Hotmail problem here before Microsoft said anything about it is because Slashdot ACTUALLY REPORTED IT -- whereas they DIDN'T REPORT the RedHat problem. If they held RedHat to the same standard that they hold RedHat, most people here indeed would have heard about it here first; plenty of people knew about the problem before RedHat ever deigned to mention it. Nice try, junior.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
he never quite reached the master thespian potential that he showed on Red Shoe Diaries.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
By that reasoning, the only time RedHat should notify their customers of problems is when there's a bug or security hole in their installer, or some other RedHat-specific piece of their distribution. They bundle the kernel and all the various apps and tools and stick their RedHat Linux brand on it, so it's incumbent upon them to take responsibility for anything that goes into their distribution. If they're not willing to do that, they should yank the offending app from their product. For a company whose business model is almost entirely based on support and services, their response is not reassuring.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Dead right -- it's the company's equipment, and you're paid to do work-related things, not wank around on the job.
Yeah, I know the above's redundant, but I wanted to show a little support for the position as well as mention something I saw on TV tonight.
Congressman Bob Barr was on the Fox News Channel tonight (on the O'Reilly report) discussing ECHELON. He said that the House Intelligence Committee summoned a National Security Agency representative before their committee to (1) explain exactly what it is that they're doing, and (2) explain why they're doing it. The NSA official refused to answer any of the questions, invoking attorney-client privilege.
Kinda makes you wonder if the agency is accountable to anyone. So basically, nevermind the workplace, it sounds like those of us in the USA, UK, Australia, and New Zealand have had our right to privacy taken away from us anyway. I wish I were confident that my PGP- and Blowfish-encrypted stuff was safe, but I've got the feeling that the NSA can break those if they really feel like it.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Hmm, let's see. Microsoft announced the problem on both Hotmail's home page, as well as on the home page of www.microsoft.com.
Now, what I'd like to know is: Why isn't Slashdot bitching about Redhat? The am-utils package that they've been shipping is "being actively exploited on the internet" to give root access on machines running amd. Wow! Something like that's just gotta be on RedHat's home page, right? Ooops. Guess not -- not a single peep.
So, after clicking on "Updates, Fixes, & Errata," I still see no warnings. Click on "Redhat 6.0." Click on "amd." Ahh, finally!
I dunno, but for a problem that's being "actively exploited on the Internet," you'd think that (at least by Slashdot's apparent standards), RedHat would be making a lot more noise about this. At least the Hotmail hole is no longer there.
Face it, you would've been bitching no matter what they said while giving RedHat a free pass on all the holes that have been uncovered in just the past month.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I wasn't exactly baiting (hell, for one I apologized for my phrasing beforehand, and if I really wanted to, I woulda said something like "dump linux and apache for NT and IIS"), but there have been some big problems with Slashdot's website being down the past few days. I just find the average "luser" fascination with things like "uptime", "beowulf", and "squid" annoying. My mindset is more along the lines of, "Hey, could you iron out the problems and get it working and then play with your buzzwords?"
Not that I really blame whoever moderated me down -- it wasn't exactly the nicest thing I've ever said.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Linux rulez, d00d! My system uptime is now almost 1000 days!
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I apologize for my brusqueness, but perhaps you could spend a little less time masturbating over your uptime stats and a little more time making sure that this web site is actually up and working?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Dude, while I appreciate your enthusiasm, this wasn't even close to being the first time. Back in 1996, Lexis-Nexis met the wrath of The People when they put up a service to let subscribers look up other people's social security numbers. Not that I'm claiming that that was the first time, either, just that it predates this Amazon episode by a good three years.
Just as an aside, we really don't have that much privacy, anyway. Just check out http://www.pretext.com/nov97/featu res/story1.htm for some good evidence of it, as well as some of the facts of the oft-misreported Lexis-Nexis P-TRAK story.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Long enough for me to set up a crawler to download the entire Purchase Circle portion of their website, sans images. Which is what I did, and I'm sure I'm not alone, as soon as the original story was announced on Slashdot a few days ago.
Why? Oh, nothing sinister -- I just thought (1) it would be interesting (not important, just interesting) data to have, and (2) I knew Amazon would back down and start pulling at least some of it off the web as soon as the privacy guys started going nuts. So, they can pull it down now if they want, but since they already let the cat out of the bag, that data is as good as public.
Robot.txt? What's that? :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
When the Linux 2.0.0 kernel came out in January, it didn't even take them four months before 2.0.9 came out. At least 8 of those kernel updates included bugfixes; most likely all 9 of them did.
Keep in mind that we're not even going into bugs throughout an entire average Linux system -- we're talking about all the bugfixes just for the kernel.
Hmmm, what was that old saying about people in glass houses...? :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Has any Nick Petreley project ever been successful? Seriously. Just thinking about all his OS/2, Java, and Network Computer efforts that died. LinuxWorld doesn't seem to be doing too poorly at all, but I definitely would suggest partnering with other people given Nick's track record of failures. If I had to pick something to blame it on, it's that he seems to have no "vision" whatsoever other than to promote something counter to Microsoft. Ray Noorda can tell you how successful that strategy is.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Hi Hany, I haven't been able to post replies to all of your posts, so I'll try to combine all of them into this post.
i heard that GNU tools are much better than company specific ones.
Well, it depends which ones you're talking about, and in what aspects. I think many would agree that the VC++ compiler and debugger are better than the GNU offerings, as far as use and performance (but not portability) go.
so i'm curious if you have them on your solaris.
gcc, gdb, and emacs come to mind. I've got other Open Source software on it, but I can't recall if any of it is something that's specifically from GNU itself.
As for your comments about the different CLI's I'm using (an xterm from Solaris, nxterms from Linux, and yes there's not much difference between them), I think you're misunderstanding my point. See, there aren't really any look-and-feel issues with all the software you listed, because they're all just character-based apps. Plus, they're not in bytecode for JVMs, they're all compiled for your specific platform. So, the things you bring up don't really change my point about Java.
In other words, leaving aside the look-and-feel arguments, why isn't there any push for GNU to quit wasting time with C source code portability, and just rewrite all their tools in Java? (I'm sure that someone out there is doing just that.) It sure would be easier, just having one .java/.class file out there for everyone, whether they're running Unix, Windows, BeOS, OS/2, or Macs, right? Are you ready to trade in the speed of your natively-compiled GNU tools for their WORA Java equivalents? I'm not.
In an earlier reply from you, you asked me if it was all right that those "only 10%" of users (the non-Windows ones) are hurt by not having access to some of the same software. I think it would be great if everyone could use every piece of software out there on every platform, but it's just not realistic as long as software companies are in the business of making money.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Exactly who do they have picking their names for them?
Lineo?
Embedix?
Embrowser?
Embarrassing.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Mozilla is not the real JavaGator: (1) It's not a Java app, like the real JavaGator was supposed to be. (2) It's not Write-Once-Run-Anywhere in the least. If it were, you wouldn't need separate Win32, Mac, Linux, etc. teams. It's laughable for you to say that Mozilla's going to take over the world when it's already so late and can't even match the current Communicator, much less the vastly superior IE5. And yes, I've tried Mozilla lately -- one of last week's builds, as a matter of fact. So...why aren't they coding it in Java? If they did, they could stop people from wasting time on portability issues and have them working on the core browser. Do you know something that they don't?
Wow, right now I'm sitting at a Win2K box running an X Server providing me terms from both my Linux box and my Sparc, so I guess I'm better than you, right?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Heh, I can't say that that exact thought didn't enter my mind at the time, although it really did seem to be an honest mistake with this particular chap.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
From the article "story," I mistakenly thought that questions would be chosen just on the basis of a post's score. After reading your post and going back to read the article submission, I see my misunderstanding -- thanks.
I'm not one to normally clog bandwidth with thanks, but (1) I think you're doing a good job, Roblimo, and (2) I think this topic needed a few more non-flames. I get the feeling that there's a lot of jealousy of success and fame rearing its head here, based on some of the completely uncalled-for flames that I've seen heaped upon this guy.
I despise MTV and mainly don't watch it except for the superb Tom Green Show, and have never gotten into Road Rules, but lighten up on the kid. He had a free opportunity to get out in the world with some babes and get some TV time. A lot of people would jump at the chance. I'm sure that he'd get flamed by some people no matter what he did on the show. Criticizing is one thing, but some of the cruel and personal attacks on him that I've read here have been pretty disgusting. Consider how you'd feel if it was one of your family members getting trashed merely because they decided to do something harmless and fun and get a tiny bit of fame in the process.
Keep up the good work, Roblimo.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com