The basic problem is that local money is being sent to the feds which is sending it right back again, with conditions. Wouldn't it be better for the federal government to reduce taxes by 80% or so, and local governments could then afford to raise local taxes for local projects? People can't afford? Then don't do the projects. Money is a LOT more accountable at the local level. This is the way it USED to be.
Um, I'm calling bullshit on the E450 running in a car. First pothole you hit and it's time for new hard drives. Hell, notebook hard drives are bad enough and they are DESIGNED for higher shocks. There are some new notebook drives that are pretty good, but server drives? Nope. No frickin way.
Um, I haven't seen voters being able to vote against copy protection EVER. What MAY help is a physical letter sent US Mail to your representatives. While you are at it, mention Fair Use, the DMCA, bad software patents, and a few other things that are related. You can vote all you want, but unless you tell your reps what you want, you are not gonna get it. Period.
FWIW, I can't look at salon. It redirect's me to http://www.salon.com/src/ads/house/gateway/virgin_ mobile_gateway.html?http://www.salon.com/ which I can't see as I use adzap. Oh well, no biggie. Not much on that site anymore. The fixed width garbage ideas come from marketing consultant morons who's surveys indicate that people like fixed width sites better. We,, if you compare a fixed width site with a version that does a shitty job scaling, then Sure you would like the fixed width version better!!
What's worse IMHO is sites that even at 1600x1200 you have to scroll left and right to read stuff.
Yes. We should freeze the kernel API no matter what impact it has on future features, performance, scalability, etc.
There is a reason the API's change. The kernel needs to evolve, and the API needs to evolve along with it. It's not changing "every day" or anything, it changes every several years, and it's usually not radical (with a few exceptions.) It's not that much work to track the development kernels as they near freeze.
I suppose some enterprising individual could come up with a compatability layer, but then you will doom all users of a manufactures driver to substandard flakey performance.
On the plus side, there is good work being done on a userspace USB driver layer that makes it a snap to develop drivers that can run on different underlying OS's (such as BSD.)
Of course the best answer is for device manufacturer's to stop being a bunch of pinheads and start releasing specs - and none of this NDA garbage either. The excuses of "competition" is bullshit. There are no VALID excuses. Then the manufacturers don't have to do jack.
That works until >99% of your email is spam. I retired an account I've had for over 8 years because of this. You get so much spam that the real messages get lost. Crank up the spam filter levels and the real messages get blocked. 8 years ago, that email address was all over the place including DNS registrations because there WAS no spam - you didn't have to be careful. At this point, it's in every spammers database to the tune of over 10,000 spams per day. Sure, an occasional mosquito bite is annoying, but getting swarmed by thousands is a whole different ballgame.
But this ignores the real issue. Spam is so bad and getting worse at such a fast pace, that servers are dying under the load. ISP's and businesses are installing really bad filters that do more damage than good, blocking lots of legit mail. A couple years from now and you can kiss email goodbye as it won't be functional. The current laws on the books are pathetically weak, the proposals to help (SPF, domainkeys, etc.) are insufficiant (no critical mass, basic design flaws, etc.) and quite clearly filtering can only catch so much before the false positives kick in. About the only thing that really works is challenge / response systems (and I HATE those.)
In addition, protocol enhancements (hashcash) or replacements are 5 - 10 years off due to deployment / critical mass issues.
Nope, I'll stick with my 2 year forcast of the death of email as a viable communications tool.
I have a dongle designed for a Mac that also works on Linux - I assume it will also work on Windows. It has both a PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse port, and plugs into the USB port on a PC. The parent is 100% right on this. You need one with active circuitry and not just a cable adapter. These devices run around $50. Maybe the OP was trying to be too cheap??? They are easy to find via google. First hit in fact.
I used this on my Thinkpad T21 a few years ago with my older keyboard. No longer use it as all my devices are USB.
There are other reasons not to want to use your DB for everything. What if it goes down / gets corrupted? What if some wacked query for some other application makes your DNS server unresponsive?
The best way to use a DB in maintaining zone files is to store the master copy there, but then dump a BIND zone file out for production. Many huge ISP's do this.
Exim does that. Exim seemed to be just a wee bit more flexable than postfix which is why I went with it to replace sendmail. I have a Very complicated setup as far as routing, filters, AUTH, SSL/TLS, spam / av, etc. goes. The difficulty of doing all that in sendmail is the whole reason I dumped it after using it for almost 15 years. It just wasn't maintainable anymore. That, and I couldn't find anyone else that could work with the sendmail cf files - how the hell do you take a vacation???
Again I have to reitterate, bind is not like sendmail. Comparing bind configuration file to sendmail is just wrong. Compare it to apache or exim, but it's even easier than both of those. It's just not that hard. Along that line, there is no way in HELL I would use a GUI to maintain more than a very simple zone file. When I want to make changes in bulk, there is no better way than scripts / vi / emacs / awk / whatever over a plain text file.
As someone who used to run sendmail (from the late 80's to 2002 before switching to exim) it gives you native support for UUCP!! It also gives you good brain excercises so you can do things like complex regular expressions, the US tax code, etc.:-)
Seriously, if you really need to customize sendmail, you need to understand the rewrite rules in depth which are quite bizzare to someone not familiar. Adding additional functionality like sql DB lookups for virtual users with SMTP Auth, etc. can be a challenge for even the more seasoned sendmail admin. Once you get beyond the simple soho stuff, sendmail becomes quite awkward to work with. Sendmail Milter's is a horrible interface. Add on message archiving, spam / virus filters, special handling for certain addresses / domains, etc. and exim really starts to look good. Unless you are a full time mail administrator, you probably have better things to learn than sendmail syntax, and that's the bottom line.
Bind is no sendmail. Bind's syntax is actually quite clean - more like apache or exim than sendmail. There are no bizzare ruleset's to learn - it's more like defining a structure in C.
Software that so few use or look at is MUCH more likely not to have reported vulnerabilities. Doesn't mean that there aren't any. Since bind is standard on 99.9%+ unix like OS's and is supported by several large unix houses (IBM, HP, SUN, etc.) it's going to have LOTS of eyeballs looking at it.
While bind may not be "super simple moron proof", It's also not that frigging hard either. Add on top all the various GUI management tools for it that make it not hard at all. Looking at some of the zones managed by clueless Windows (and linux) administrators using Active Directory or other tools, it's clear that some people need to read the O'Reilly DNS and BIND book. There is more to DNS than the server software - you need to understand WHAT the records do, and HOW to use them correctly. You also need to know how to use tools like dig and nslookup. Bind is only one part of the equation, and it's just not that hard to learn. While there are a lot of options, most people won't need but a few. There are MANY MANY good examples and tutorials.
Bind is also rock solid. It doesn't die. I have servers that run bind that have been running for YEARS without a reboot, and bind has never needed to be restarted. The answer is quite simple. It's not THAT hard, and it works. Why change? Occasionally someone will find a security hole, so you patch and move on, just like everything else.
Um, Free World Dialup just handles call setup, then your sip devices directly talk to each other. Vonage != FWD != e164.org. They are all very different.
The reason you buy the real Digium FXO cards is because it's a great way to support the company that provides most of the coding for Asterisk. You will also get support which can be very valuable when playing with something as complicated as Asterisk for the first time.
I'm a little baffeled as to why skype was even mentioned. It completely different and not at all compatible with everything else listed. It's not "phone over internet" even though the authors of skype imply that it is. There is no PSTN connection anywhere. VoIP has certain stadards such as SIP, H.323, etc that are designed to interoperate and pass real phone calls over an IP network. Skype is proprietary and only talks to skype. Ditto with Teamspeak. It's not that they're bad, but they are not IP Telephony.
I live in a town of about 50K, and there is only ONE local station. I live on the top of a hill and can see Mount Washington 60 miles away, yet I can't get ANYTHING on my TV with an in-house antenna - If I want to receive any stations (including the "local" one,) I need a big roof-top antenna with a rotor. Needless to say, I don't bother and use DirecTV which is supposed to carry local channels in my area starting sometime this or next month. I would love to beam my DSL (soon to be fiber) and internal LAN to my lake house (which I can see with a telescope.) I use asterisk for my phone system, so theoretically I should be able to work from my boat with a laptop, relayed through the lake house to my main house:-)
If I can get 768K bandwidth, that would be enough! Current wifi seems a little too low-powered, and has too much competition in the 2.4G band. I didn't want to spend the $$$ on a wireless link unless I was pretty sure it was going to work. Between me and the lake house, there is a cell tower and most of "downtown." The new bands may be just the ticket once equipment is available...
There are the "telezapper" products that may help, but they are kinda lame. I use a linux-based asterisk phone system. If your caller ID is not on the (mysql based) white list, you need to navigate the menu. Numbers I dial are automatically added to the white list, and I also have a web-based management tool for it.
There is also a Telemarketer Torture script for asterisk someone came up with...:-)
I agree with this. The older (pre 2.0) gnomes had TONS of configuration options that just went missing in later releases. At first, I thought it was just a matter of not having everything migrated to "the new way", but then several more releases went by and the problem gets worse, not better.
As a long time Gnome fan, maybe KDE is worth another look.
Try that in the "real world" and you will find that your application vendors will not support that kind of configuration. You also find that the performance of many of these apps are so freekin bad that they NEED their own box. Case in point: Intraspect (now Vignette BCS.)
Slashdot Mirror
The basic problem is that local money is being sent to the feds which is sending it right back again, with conditions. Wouldn't it be better for the federal government to reduce taxes by 80% or so, and local governments could then afford to raise local taxes for local projects? People can't afford? Then don't do the projects. Money is a LOT more accountable at the local level. This is the way it USED to be.
Um, I'm calling bullshit on the E450 running in a car. First pothole you hit and it's time for new hard drives. Hell, notebook hard drives are bad enough and they are DESIGNED for higher shocks. There are some new notebook drives that are pretty good, but server drives? Nope. No frickin way.
That's what adzap is for.
Um, I haven't seen voters being able to vote against copy protection EVER. What MAY help is a physical letter sent US Mail to your representatives. While you are at it, mention Fair Use, the DMCA, bad software patents, and a few other things that are related. You can vote all you want, but unless you tell your reps what you want, you are not gonna get it. Period.
FWIW, I can't look at salon. It redirect's me to http://www.salon.com/src/ads/house/gateway/virgin_ mobile_gateway.html?http://www.salon.com/ which I can't see as I use adzap. Oh well, no biggie. Not much on that site anymore. The fixed width garbage ideas come from marketing consultant morons who's surveys indicate that people like fixed width sites better. We,, if you compare a fixed width site with a version that does a shitty job scaling, then Sure you would like the fixed width version better!!
What's worse IMHO is sites that even at 1600x1200 you have to scroll left and right to read stuff.
Maybe not linear, but the price jump from a 4 CPU box to a 6 was something like a factor of 10 last time I checked. That's nuts.
Yes. We should freeze the kernel API no matter what impact it has on future features, performance, scalability, etc.
There is a reason the API's change. The kernel needs to evolve, and the API needs to evolve along with it. It's not changing "every day" or anything, it changes every several years, and it's usually not radical (with a few exceptions.) It's not that much work to track the development kernels as they near freeze.
I suppose some enterprising individual could come up with a compatability layer, but then you will doom all users of a manufactures driver to substandard flakey performance.
On the plus side, there is good work being done on a userspace USB driver layer that makes it a snap to develop drivers that can run on different underlying OS's (such as BSD.)
Of course the best answer is for device manufacturer's to stop being a bunch of pinheads and start releasing specs - and none of this NDA garbage either. The excuses of "competition" is bullshit. There are no VALID excuses. Then the manufacturers don't have to do jack.
That works until >99% of your email is spam. I retired an account I've had for over 8 years because of this. You get so much spam that the real messages get lost. Crank up the spam filter levels and the real messages get blocked. 8 years ago, that email address was all over the place including DNS registrations because there WAS no spam - you didn't have to be careful. At this point, it's in every spammers database to the tune of over 10,000 spams per day. Sure, an occasional mosquito bite is annoying, but getting swarmed by thousands is a whole different ballgame.
But this ignores the real issue. Spam is so bad and getting worse at such a fast pace, that servers are dying under the load. ISP's and businesses are installing really bad filters that do more damage than good, blocking lots of legit mail. A couple years from now and you can kiss email goodbye as it won't be functional. The current laws on the books are pathetically weak, the proposals to help (SPF, domainkeys, etc.) are insufficiant (no critical mass, basic design flaws, etc.) and quite clearly filtering can only catch so much before the false positives kick in. About the only thing that really works is challenge / response systems (and I HATE those.)
In addition, protocol enhancements (hashcash) or replacements are 5 - 10 years off due to deployment / critical mass issues.
Nope, I'll stick with my 2 year forcast of the death of email as a viable communications tool.
I have a dongle designed for a Mac that also works on Linux - I assume it will also work on Windows. It has both a PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse port, and plugs into the USB port on a PC. The parent is 100% right on this. You need one with active circuitry and not just a cable adapter. These devices run around $50. Maybe the OP was trying to be too cheap??? They are easy to find via google. First hit in fact.
I used this on my Thinkpad T21 a few years ago with my older keyboard. No longer use it as all my devices are USB.
Yeah, and then they have to wait hours before that BIND zone has been reparsed and reloaded if updated
That's an implementation design issue, not a technical limitation of the concept.
And you know they were "rootable" exactly how? You DO realize that Unix is Not Windows and you can patch most of the OS without rebooting, right???
Of course it's obvious that you completely missed the point of my post, instead choosing to troll. Nice.
There are other reasons not to want to use your DB for everything. What if it goes down / gets corrupted? What if some wacked query for some other application makes your DNS server unresponsive?
The best way to use a DB in maintaining zone files is to store the master copy there, but then dump a BIND zone file out for production. Many huge ISP's do this.
Exim does that. Exim seemed to be just a wee bit more flexable than postfix which is why I went with it to replace sendmail. I have a Very complicated setup as far as routing, filters, AUTH, SSL/TLS, spam / av, etc. goes. The difficulty of doing all that in sendmail is the whole reason I dumped it after using it for almost 15 years. It just wasn't maintainable anymore. That, and I couldn't find anyone else that could work with the sendmail cf files - how the hell do you take a vacation???
Again I have to reitterate, bind is not like sendmail. Comparing bind configuration file to sendmail is just wrong. Compare it to apache or exim, but it's even easier than both of those. It's just not that hard. Along that line, there is no way in HELL I would use a GUI to maintain more than a very simple zone file. When I want to make changes in bulk, there is no better way than scripts / vi / emacs / awk / whatever over a plain text file.
what does sendmail offer you that exim doesn't
:-)
As someone who used to run sendmail (from the late 80's to 2002 before switching to exim) it gives you native support for UUCP!! It also gives you good brain excercises so you can do things like complex regular expressions, the US tax code, etc.
Seriously, if you really need to customize sendmail, you need to understand the rewrite rules in depth which are quite bizzare to someone not familiar. Adding additional functionality like sql DB lookups for virtual users with SMTP Auth, etc. can be a challenge for even the more seasoned sendmail admin. Once you get beyond the simple soho stuff, sendmail becomes quite awkward to work with. Sendmail Milter's is a horrible interface. Add on message archiving, spam / virus filters, special handling for certain addresses / domains, etc. and exim really starts to look good. Unless you are a full time mail administrator, you probably have better things to learn than sendmail syntax, and that's the bottom line.
Bind is no sendmail. Bind's syntax is actually quite clean - more like apache or exim than sendmail. There are no bizzare ruleset's to learn - it's more like defining a structure in C.
Software that so few use or look at is MUCH more likely not to have reported vulnerabilities. Doesn't mean that there aren't any. Since bind is standard on 99.9%+ unix like OS's and is supported by several large unix houses (IBM, HP, SUN, etc.) it's going to have LOTS of eyeballs looking at it.
While bind may not be "super simple moron proof", It's also not that frigging hard either. Add on top all the various GUI management tools for it that make it not hard at all. Looking at some of the zones managed by clueless Windows (and linux) administrators using Active Directory or other tools, it's clear that some people need to read the O'Reilly DNS and BIND book. There is more to DNS than the server software - you need to understand WHAT the records do, and HOW to use them correctly. You also need to know how to use tools like dig and nslookup. Bind is only one part of the equation, and it's just not that hard to learn. While there are a lot of options, most people won't need but a few. There are MANY MANY good examples and tutorials.
Bind is also rock solid. It doesn't die. I have servers that run bind that have been running for YEARS without a reboot, and bind has never needed to be restarted. The answer is quite simple. It's not THAT hard, and it works. Why change? Occasionally someone will find a security hole, so you patch and move on, just like everything else.
Um, Free World Dialup just handles call setup, then your sip devices directly talk to each other. Vonage != FWD != e164.org. They are all very different.
The reason you buy the real Digium FXO cards is because it's a great way to support the company that provides most of the coding for Asterisk. You will also get support which can be very valuable when playing with something as complicated as Asterisk for the first time.
I'm a little baffeled as to why skype was even mentioned. It completely different and not at all compatible with everything else listed. It's not "phone over internet" even though the authors of skype imply that it is. There is no PSTN connection anywhere. VoIP has certain stadards such as SIP, H.323, etc that are designed to interoperate and pass real phone calls over an IP network. Skype is proprietary and only talks to skype. Ditto with Teamspeak. It's not that they're bad, but they are not IP Telephony.
I live in a town of about 50K, and there is only ONE local station. I live on the top of a hill and can see Mount Washington 60 miles away, yet I can't get ANYTHING on my TV with an in-house antenna - If I want to receive any stations (including the "local" one,) I need a big roof-top antenna with a rotor. Needless to say, I don't bother and use DirecTV which is supposed to carry local channels in my area starting sometime this or next month. I would love to beam my DSL (soon to be fiber) and internal LAN to my lake house (which I can see with a telescope.) I use asterisk for my phone system, so theoretically I should be able to work from my boat with a laptop, relayed through the lake house to my main house :-)
If I can get 768K bandwidth, that would be enough! Current wifi seems a little too low-powered, and has too much competition in the 2.4G band. I didn't want to spend the $$$ on a wireless link unless I was pretty sure it was going to work.
Between me and the lake house, there is a cell tower and most of "downtown." The new bands may be just the ticket once equipment is available...
There are the "telezapper" products that may help, but they are kinda lame. I use a linux-based asterisk phone system. If your caller ID is not on the (mysql based) white list, you need to navigate the menu. Numbers I dial are automatically added to the white list, and I also have a web-based management tool for it.
:-)
There is also a Telemarketer Torture script for asterisk someone came up with...
I agree with this. The older (pre 2.0) gnomes had TONS of configuration options that just went missing in later releases. At first, I thought it was just a matter of not having everything migrated to "the new way", but then several more releases went by and the problem gets worse, not better.
As a long time Gnome fan, maybe KDE is worth another look.
I just need one that tels me which waitress is mine... Is it just me or do they all look alike???
Try that in the "real world" and you will find that your application vendors will not support that kind of configuration. You also find that the performance of many of these apps are so freekin bad that they NEED their own box. Case in point: Intraspect (now Vignette BCS.)
Yep, we see it. We see the clear sign that you know nothing about computers.