I voted Republican and generally support them, and they won. But it still feels like "we" lost the election.
You don't say? Imagine that, voting Republican and wondering why the people you put in office are ruining the country. Sorry to gloat, but you're right in the sense that both the demopublicans and republicrats are screwing us.
Re:Not mentioning tac is not a dealbreaker
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Data Crunching
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· Score: 2, Informative
Not installable by you, of course. But not installable?
Haha, yeah, I don't even know how to go to SunFreeware or Blastwave and download a copy of GNU textutils in Solaris package format. You can think that if you want to, but in the enterprise world, every software package I want to install has to be approved by about 3 levels of management. They want to know what it does, why we need it, how much it costs, and who else will know how to maintain it after I leave the company. The chance of providing them a list of all the GNU utilities necessary to compile your single average open-source app and getting approval for that is close to nil. Forget Perl modules and CPAN. These are real-world systems that might handle lots of real-world money, and they don't necessarily trust code that's been written by anyone on them.
Anyway, I'm just (hopefully) educating people on some of the problems that a real-world sysadmin runs into on a daily basis.
Not mentioning tac is not a dealbreaker
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Data Crunching
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't fault the author for not mentioning tac. It is part of the GNU textutils package, and although it might be standard on every Linux distro, it's most likely not in ANY enterprise Unix. I just checked my Sun boxes and it's not installed there, except for the ones that I've installed GNU textutils on.
I really wish a lot of Open Source developers would stop assuming that all of us have every GNU utility ever invented on our system. I can't tell you how difficult it is to get the average GNU autoconf program to compile correctly on Solaris or any flavor of enterprise Unix, simply because most authors assume they're writing platform-independent code, without realizing that GNU's M4 is different from System V M4. Also, differences between lex, flex, tar, and GNU tar abound. Please, for the love of god, don't assume that the tools you know and love on your Linux box at home are available or even installable on enterprise kit at work. Most company policies prevent the installation of these type of tools.
How about I respect the 30 year old, hard working, responsible father of two instead of the 40 year old dead-beat-dad guy who doesn't pay his bills and often mises work because he's two hung over.
How about I withhold my respect for you until you learn the proper use of the word "two" (hint, it's a number). Respect is often earned, not blindly given.
A "true" virtual server allows a cluster to be treated as a single machine, from the outside. However, the problem with LVS - and similar technologies - is that they don't do this very well. You often have a single entry point, which means that communication suffers from the bottleneck.
You are correct. I fail to see what the big deal about this "Linux Virtual Server" is. First of all, it's a terribly chosen name. It seems to imply that you're running some type of "beowulf"-like cluster across multiple physical boxes. That couldn't be further from the truth.
This looks like a poor attempt to imitate layer 3 switching using a Linux box. Basically, the same thing that F5 BigIPs and Cisco LocalDirector boxes have been doing for years now, but with a single point of failure so that when your one load balancer goes down or gets bandwidth saturated, every service on your network crashes hard.
Bzzt... Thanks for playing, please come again.
If you're running a layer 3 switch like this to spread web content requests among multiple Apache servers, you better have an active/active or active/passive failover node because it will eventually fail, and when it does, you've just eliminated 90% of the benefit that a layer-3 switch provides: Providing a single service with multiple physical servers in order to eliminate single points of failure.
Of course the people who are most dead weight at this point (after several RIFs) are the ones who have the best entrenched fiefdoms. While I can wish that the next RIF will be the one that axes the idiots, I'm tired of holding my breath for it.
This is very true... History has proven those that get ahead are those that are best at taking advantage of others. It's not likely they'll be removed now. Far more likely that they would have other more competent people RIFed instead to protect their fiefdom from smart people that might question why they have the positions they do.
In order to get 1600x1200, I would have had to buy at least a 20". And judging from the current prices at NewEgg, that's at least $600.
You should have kept an eye out for the Dell deals. I got a pair of beautiful Dell 2001FP 20" LCDs, with 1600x1200 and 16ms response time, for something like $350 each. You just have to watch for coupon codes.
The first - what - 16,000 RIFs didn't seem to return them to profit, but you're sure just 1,000 more will do it, huh?
If you cut the people with the highest salaries that are dead-weight and basically worthless (tell me how a manager of 4 people provides a value to a company), yeah, it would make a difference.
We're talking people with $200k-300k salaries. That's not chump change.
Thank the fucking lord for those pissy users and overzealous lawyers.
It's incredible to see the Slashdot doublespeak in such blatant terms... It's a lawsuit against Apple so it's bad... It's the evil lawyers taking down a poor helpless BIG CORPORATION that DEFRAUDED CONSUMERS... wait a minute... I'm conflicted... This is Slashdot so corporations are bad... but Apple is good... but corporations are bad... but Apple is good..... AAAAHHHHH!!!!
From TFA: For months, agents had been watching their every move through a clandestine gateway into their Web site, shadowcrew.com.
I read a much more interesting version of this story somewhere else. I can't find the link right now, but it explained more fully how they really caught them. This sentence above just glosses over it.
Apparently, they did this:
They got to one of the members of shadowcrew and convinced them to work with them. This guy then proceeded to go onto the shadowcrew IRC channel and told everyone that he had setup a new encrypted gateway VPN type channel that would allow them to connect to the shadowcrew servers in a "more secure" fashion. He convinced everyone to go through this proxy. Little did they know, the proxy was actually an FBI server that was monitoring and recording all traffic that passed through it.
This just goes to show, no matter how smart you are, the best hacks are social engineering hacks, not technical.
They should have been smart and used Tor instead, then they probably wouldn't have been caught.
I'm glad they got caught though. These guys were losers of the worst kind.
They did not handle the shift to smaller, faster x86 based servers. They did not handle the shift to open source enterprise software, even though much of it was written in their very own Java language.
I think this is an accurate assessment. When Linux and Open Source started to become a real market force, there were a lot of geeks and engineers within Sun that were very pro-Linux. We could see that Linux was the future. Then, there were management types that only saw Linux in the same close-minded view that Microsoft does, as a competitor that should be crushed. The problem is that although there are pockets within Sun that are very pro open source, they get drowned out by the groupthink that permeates from the top down. The groupthink that says "Linux bad, closed source good..."
It has gotten to the point where if you're a Sun employee, it could be dangerous to your career to be too much pro-Linux. For example, I had workers on my team snicker at me and say comments like "kid's OS" whenever I'd discuss something about Linux.
Think of it like this: If you're a Microsoft employee, when you're sitting around with your co-workers at lunch, are you going to tell them you spent the weekend at home setting up an Asterisk server running Linux? Not if you value your job you're not.
This culture permeates the company, and stifles innovation.
This is how I would fix Sun:
- If you manage a team of less than 10 people, you're out, period. There are many middle-managers that only have 4-5 direct reports and pull in 6 digit income. They came on-board during the dot-com boom and play political games to ensure they never get laid off. They would be the first to go. I'm sorry, I don't care how good you are, if your only job is to sit around and tell 4 or 5 people "work harder", you're not needed. - Fire Scott Mcnealy. Really, I don't see how he's lasted this long. - Get new executive level management that has a clue.
I think the first solution alone would probably cut 1000 head count and bring Sun to profitability immediately.
Anyway, what do I know, I'm just a former SSE that worked for a Sun partner.
I do like system administration on Sun though. I also like Linux. There's no reason those two platforms can't co-exist. The right tool for the job is what I always say...
And even some non-former employees see the same thing. I hope that all the pie in the sky being sold about this acquisition internally is right, but I'm not holding my breath either.
What I remember from my few years at Sun was that the management team was really good at blowing smoke up your ass and making you think that Sun was going to turn around. Every quarter you'd have to sit through some meeting where management would literally almost brainwash you into thinking that Sun was the center of the universe and that soon we would take over the entire computer industry. The thing that was scary was that despite all of the negative earnings and missed sales goals, they were really good at it, and after a while of working there you start to have the same type of groupthink and sheltered worldview that management has.
The fact of the matter is that Sun, at one point in time, had great people in a position where they could accomplish a lot. Nowadays, middle management actively sabotages anything remotely possible of success simply because they cannot tolerate the thought that an engineering team might create a technology that could save the company.
What you have now in Sun is typical of a lot of companies: Management wants to drive innovation through marketing and dictating to engineers what to create. We all know as engineers and geeks that this never works. True innovation does not come from the top down, it comes from the bottom up. Think Bill Joy and BSD Unix. These were not started because some team of unemployable middle managers decided that the industry needed an open operating system that anyone could write software for. These were started because a brilliant engineer had a vision and was given the right amount of time and freedom to create that vision in reality.
The sooner Sun tanks and all of the engineers regroup into garages and really start inventing again, the better, for all of us.
When will Firefox implement a graphical representation of the history for the user?
Thumbnails of where the user has been, linked in an easy to follow graphical manner. It would make finding sites of interest (where one has forgotten where they found them) so much easier.
Google Desktop search already does this. It stores thumbnails of the webpages you visit, and when searching through the browser history, it will display the thumbnails along with each search result. Although they are too small to read the text, many times I can remember a website I visited just by the blurry look of a JPEG thumbnail.
It's amazing how our brains can remember images so much better than text.
A friend at work suggested melatonin, which I now take each night about a half hour before I want to be asleep.
The problem with using melatonin is that melatonin is a hormone that is your brain's way of telling itself that you need to sleep. When you begin supplementing any hormone with an outside source of that hormone, your brain will start producing less of this hormone naturally. This inevitably leads to a hormonal imbalance, especially if you stop taking the melatonin. You might not feel any adverse effects now, but if you take it for an extended period of time, then try to quit, you'll probably have a tough time sleeping.
With something like eDirectory or AD almost every server is a writable master rather than hub or consumer, which I what I would understand to be true multi-master.
Ahh.. I see the difference now. Thanks for the explanation. I had no idea that Novell's eDirectory was so capable. If Sun's wasn't free for under 200,000 entries, we would probably switch.
re: multi-master - like the SprintPCS guy said a few posts over - prone to failure and database corruption, utterly useless in an enterprise deployment.
What the hell is with you OpenLDAP fans that want to spread baseless claims about Netscape Directory? In the real world, Fortune 500 CEOs do NOT trust some long-haired GNU/Hippy with deploying their 1+ million entry DIT on some homemade OpenLDAP framework. They want a supported and trustworthy enterprise product.
Name me one company that is using OpenLDAP with over a million entries. Just one. Can't do it? I could name over 20 that are using NDS or Sun's version of NDS with over a million. Not only that, if you went through the fortune 500, you'd probably find that at least half of them use these products.
What made Innosoft more advanced was its capability for several masters (it's not true multi - master in the sense of eDirectory from Novell or Active directory but that is no bad thing).
You are somewhat misinformed. Sun's latest incarnation of the Sun Java System Directory Server (that's what they're calling it now), fully supports 4-way multi-master replication. It even supports it over WAN and slower links by queueing changes up and transferring them in batches, rather than one at a time.
How difficult would it be to host these trackers in China or any other country that the neo-cons in Washington don't have against the wall?
Try The Pirate Bay... They seem to be located within a country that doesn't much care for US copyright laws. They also regularly post hilarious replies to legal takedown notices they receive...
Is it too much to ask that MS, who has significantly greater development resources, try to improve the performance of their OS?
No, but Microsoft's business model is entirely based on selling more PCs. That's why they don't care about bloat, and most likely encourage a corporate culture of bloat.
Think about it, Dell charged a Windows tax on every computer sold. Try and buy a consumer PC from them without Windows and you'll see what I mean. It's in Microsoft's best interest to make every version of Windows require an entirely new computer, because then their customers will have to buy a whole new license, and not just an upgrade.
Not only that, I really think this is why MS has waited so long to solve the spyware problem. They could have solved it a long time ago, but the fact of the matter is that most people don't know how to deal with it, and they might even buy a new computer just to get rid of all the spyware that keeps coming back, so they'll pay another Windows tax.
If Apple were a monopoly, they could use this same business practice, but I would hope they'd be a little less evil.
1) They can't use a private key they made up because it's checked against the public key held at the registrar.
You have some interesting ideas (that have probably been thought of before, but interesting still), yet I believe this point is where it falls apart.
The spammers know that such a system is vulnerable to DOS attacks and they will flood it with Winzombies (TM) until it goes down hard. The problem is the key checking/signature comparison requires a central key signature database that needs to be globally accessible and available 100% of the time. Think DNS root servers, but instead of handing out tiny 64-byte A records over UDP, they're handing out 512-byte public-keys over AES-256 OpenSSL tunnels... Or worse yet, they're doing the key hash in another thread and return an ACK or NACK if they signature matches the private key. Either way, you've got a big CPU overhead type of calculation. The spammers know this and they will tell their zombies to send 10,000 bad authentications a second from random IPs spread across 3-4 continents, just to chew up your CPU time and effectively Slashdot your email server (don't laugh, they've done it to a lot of the RBLs). Not pretty...
Hold on a second... these problems can likely be solved by more intelligent software. Take this for example:
Think about the average small to medium sized business with about 200 employees. Chances are, if you expand those 200 employees "web of trust" to include all legitimate business contacts, both inside and outside the company, that they correspond with at least twice via email, you're talking a max of about 25K-50K (rough guess) contacts. (I'm just guessing that most people have between 100-200 contacts in their address book, or in their email history... obviously some have a LOT more, but a lot are much less than that.)
If the public keys or key signatures could be cached on local CMTP mail exchangers, then theoretically within a month or two the average corporate email server would have 90% hit rates on the cache, and would only have to download a centrally managed key revocation list once a day or so. It would be difficult for them to Slashdot every mail relay on the planet...
The problem is really getting admins to change... It seems like everyone absolutely HATES installing new software on their servers nowadays... Hell, most admins are so paranoid that they think anything, even the tiniest 100 line GPL perl script will bring their server to it's knees, so good luck getting them to ditch sendmail/postfix/exim/Exchange and move to a system that requires a dedicated several GB for disk caching of signature hashes...
A good way to combat a software or even a hardware keylogger is use the mouse to type in letters in random positions.
A better way is to use the Windows On-Screen Keyboard. (Start Menu, Programs, Accessories, Accessibility) Click on the letters and type in your password that way. Of course you are now vulnerable to shoulder-surfing attacks, and if they installed a screen capture program that takes pictures every few seconds, you might be screwed as well.
If you can, reboot with Knoppix, verify that there are no keyboard loggers attached to the back of the machine, and you should be safe.
Also, regarding the anonymous web-surfing/email thing:
1. Get a shell account that allows SSH access. 2. Install Squid. I found that even if you are a regular user without root privileges, you can compile squid with the --prefix=/home/username/squid option and it will install it into your home directory instead of into/usr/local/bin. Also, non-root users can open ports higher than 1024, so if you're using the default port of 3128, you should be fine. 3. Disable all disk caching in squid, just in case they hack your shell account and you don't want them to look at your proxy cache. 4. Put Squid in a cron job that checks to see if it is running first, and launches it if it isn't. This will make sure it starts back up if the admin reboots the box. 5. SSH into the box and forward port 3128 to it: ssh -L3128:localhost:3128 username@hostname. 6. Set your browser proxy to 127.0.0.1 port 3128. 7. Enjoy encrypted communications.
Oh, I should mention that you want to make sure the server you are running your proxy on is not located in the same country (duh!). Of course the traffic is not encrypted once it reaches proxy server and goes out like normal port 80 traffic from there.
As far as secure email goes: Use Hushmail. You can get a free account without giving them any personal information, and they use 2048-bit PGP encryption. Make sure all of your fellow dissidents are using Hushmail as well, because it takes care of key exchange for you. Also, the admins at Hushmail claim that even if they are given a subpoena, they have no way of decrypting your email messages because they don't have your private key, but I'm not sure if I believe them because the private key has to be somewhere in order for you to read the message.
Their figures estimate that of all the people seeing Star Wars, approx. half of them are employed full-time. They also assume that those people will take both Thursday and Friday off work, just to see the movie...
I mean this is Star Wars and all, but how many people with full-time jobs have to take a 4-day weekend just to see a movie? Get real...
The New York Post has no redeeming qualities, and shouldn't even be considered news. More like "news for idiots, stuff that's overhyped"...
I consider the New York Post the journalistic equivelant of a good troll... Hey, wait a minute, damn it... now they've got me feeding the troll as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I voted Republican and generally support them, and they won. But it still feels like "we" lost the election.
You don't say? Imagine that, voting Republican and wondering why the people you put in office are ruining the country. Sorry to gloat, but you're right in the sense that both the demopublicans and republicrats are screwing us.
Not installable by you, of course. But not installable?
Haha, yeah, I don't even know how to go to SunFreeware or Blastwave and download a copy of GNU textutils in Solaris package format. You can think that if you want to, but in the enterprise world, every software package I want to install has to be approved by about 3 levels of management. They want to know what it does, why we need it, how much it costs, and who else will know how to maintain it after I leave the company. The chance of providing them a list of all the GNU utilities necessary to compile your single average open-source app and getting approval for that is close to nil. Forget Perl modules and CPAN. These are real-world systems that might handle lots of real-world money, and they don't necessarily trust code that's been written by anyone on them.
Anyway, I'm just (hopefully) educating people on some of the problems that a real-world sysadmin runs into on a daily basis.
I don't fault the author for not mentioning tac. It is part of the GNU textutils package, and although it might be standard on every Linux distro, it's most likely not in ANY enterprise Unix. I just checked my Sun boxes and it's not installed there, except for the ones that I've installed GNU textutils on.
I really wish a lot of Open Source developers would stop assuming that all of us have every GNU utility ever invented on our system. I can't tell you how difficult it is to get the average GNU autoconf program to compile correctly on Solaris or any flavor of enterprise Unix, simply because most authors assume they're writing platform-independent code, without realizing that GNU's M4 is different from System V M4. Also, differences between lex, flex, tar, and GNU tar abound. Please, for the love of god, don't assume that the tools you know and love on your Linux box at home are available or even installable on enterprise kit at work. Most company policies prevent the installation of these type of tools.
It's quite possible that Macs use a capacitor sub-clock to produce a more accurate (but less precise) signal.
Interesting comment, but how exactly does something become more accurate and less precise at the same time?
How about I respect the 30 year old, hard working, responsible father of two instead of the 40 year old dead-beat-dad guy who doesn't pay his bills and often mises work because he's two hung over.
How about I withhold my respect for you until you learn the proper use of the word "two" (hint, it's a number). Respect is often earned, not blindly given.
A "true" virtual server allows a cluster to be treated as a single machine, from the outside. However, the problem with LVS - and similar technologies - is that they don't do this very well. You often have a single entry point, which means that communication suffers from the bottleneck.
You are correct. I fail to see what the big deal about this "Linux Virtual Server" is. First of all, it's a terribly chosen name. It seems to imply that you're running some type of "beowulf"-like cluster across multiple physical boxes. That couldn't be further from the truth.
This looks like a poor attempt to imitate layer 3 switching using a Linux box. Basically, the same thing that F5 BigIPs and Cisco LocalDirector boxes have been doing for years now, but with a single point of failure so that when your one load balancer goes down or gets bandwidth saturated, every service on your network crashes hard.
Bzzt... Thanks for playing, please come again.
If you're running a layer 3 switch like this to spread web content requests among multiple Apache servers, you better have an active/active or active/passive failover node because it will eventually fail, and when it does, you've just eliminated 90% of the benefit that a layer-3 switch provides: Providing a single service with multiple physical servers in order to eliminate single points of failure.
And who do they hire to read the tcpdump captured Slashdot postings of the people they hired to read the outgoing emails?
Of course the people who are most dead weight at this point (after several RIFs) are the ones who have the best entrenched fiefdoms. While I can wish that the next RIF will be the one that axes the idiots, I'm tired of holding my breath for it.
This is very true... History has proven those that get ahead are those that are best at taking advantage of others. It's not likely they'll be removed now. Far more likely that they would have other more competent people RIFed instead to protect their fiefdom from smart people that might question why they have the positions they do.
In order to get 1600x1200, I would have had to buy at least a 20". And judging from the current prices at NewEgg, that's at least $600.
You should have kept an eye out for the Dell deals. I got a pair of beautiful Dell 2001FP 20" LCDs, with 1600x1200 and 16ms response time, for something like $350 each. You just have to watch for coupon codes.
A USB port does not equal expandability.
Umm... Actually, yes it does.
The first - what - 16,000 RIFs didn't seem to return them to profit, but you're sure just 1,000 more will do it, huh?
If you cut the people with the highest salaries that are dead-weight and basically worthless (tell me how a manager of 4 people provides a value to a company), yeah, it would make a difference.
We're talking people with $200k-300k salaries. That's not chump change.
Thank the fucking lord for those pissy users and overzealous lawyers.
It's incredible to see the Slashdot doublespeak in such blatant terms... It's a lawsuit against Apple so it's bad... It's the evil lawyers taking down a poor helpless BIG CORPORATION that DEFRAUDED CONSUMERS... wait a minute... I'm conflicted... This is Slashdot so corporations are bad... but Apple is good... but corporations are bad... but Apple is good..... AAAAHHHHH!!!!
[throws self from top floor window of building]
ERROR: VALUE SYSTEM CONFLICT.... SELF TERMINATED.
From TFA: For months, agents had been watching their every move through a clandestine gateway into their Web site, shadowcrew.com.
I read a much more interesting version of this story somewhere else. I can't find the link right now, but it explained more fully how they really caught them. This sentence above just glosses over it.
Apparently, they did this:
They got to one of the members of shadowcrew and convinced them to work with them. This guy then proceeded to go onto the shadowcrew IRC channel and told everyone that he had setup a new encrypted gateway VPN type channel that would allow them to connect to the shadowcrew servers in a "more secure" fashion. He convinced everyone to go through this proxy. Little did they know, the proxy was actually an FBI server that was monitoring and recording all traffic that passed through it.
This just goes to show, no matter how smart you are, the best hacks are social engineering hacks, not technical.
They should have been smart and used Tor instead, then they probably wouldn't have been caught.
I'm glad they got caught though. These guys were losers of the worst kind.
They did not handle the shift to smaller, faster x86 based servers. They did not handle the shift to open source enterprise software, even though much of it was written in their very own Java language.
I think this is an accurate assessment. When Linux and Open Source started to become a real market force, there were a lot of geeks and engineers within Sun that were very pro-Linux. We could see that Linux was the future. Then, there were management types that only saw Linux in the same close-minded view that Microsoft does, as a competitor that should be crushed. The problem is that although there are pockets within Sun that are very pro open source, they get drowned out by the groupthink that permeates from the top down. The groupthink that says "Linux bad, closed source good..."
It has gotten to the point where if you're a Sun employee, it could be dangerous to your career to be too much pro-Linux. For example, I had workers on my team snicker at me and say comments like "kid's OS" whenever I'd discuss something about Linux.
Think of it like this: If you're a Microsoft employee, when you're sitting around with your co-workers at lunch, are you going to tell them you spent the weekend at home setting up an Asterisk server running Linux? Not if you value your job you're not.
This culture permeates the company, and stifles innovation.
This is how I would fix Sun:
- If you manage a team of less than 10 people, you're out, period. There are many middle-managers that only have 4-5 direct reports and pull in 6 digit income. They came on-board during the dot-com boom and play political games to ensure they never get laid off. They would be the first to go. I'm sorry, I don't care how good you are, if your only job is to sit around and tell 4 or 5 people "work harder", you're not needed.
- Fire Scott Mcnealy. Really, I don't see how he's lasted this long.
- Get new executive level management that has a clue.
I think the first solution alone would probably cut 1000 head count and bring Sun to profitability immediately.
Anyway, what do I know, I'm just a former SSE that worked for a Sun partner.
I do like system administration on Sun though. I also like Linux. There's no reason those two platforms can't co-exist. The right tool for the job is what I always say...
And even some non-former employees see the same thing. I hope that all the pie in the sky being sold about this acquisition internally is right, but I'm not holding my breath either.
What I remember from my few years at Sun was that the management team was really good at blowing smoke up your ass and making you think that Sun was going to turn around. Every quarter you'd have to sit through some meeting where management would literally almost brainwash you into thinking that Sun was the center of the universe and that soon we would take over the entire computer industry. The thing that was scary was that despite all of the negative earnings and missed sales goals, they were really good at it, and after a while of working there you start to have the same type of groupthink and sheltered worldview that management has.
The fact of the matter is that Sun, at one point in time, had great people in a position where they could accomplish a lot. Nowadays, middle management actively sabotages anything remotely possible of success simply because they cannot tolerate the thought that an engineering team might create a technology that could save the company.
What you have now in Sun is typical of a lot of companies: Management wants to drive innovation through marketing and dictating to engineers what to create. We all know as engineers and geeks that this never works. True innovation does not come from the top down, it comes from the bottom up. Think Bill Joy and BSD Unix. These were not started because some team of unemployable middle managers decided that the industry needed an open operating system that anyone could write software for. These were started because a brilliant engineer had a vision and was given the right amount of time and freedom to create that vision in reality.
The sooner Sun tanks and all of the engineers regroup into garages and really start inventing again, the better, for all of us.
When will Firefox implement a graphical representation of the history for the user?
Thumbnails of where the user has been, linked in an easy to follow graphical manner. It would make finding sites of interest (where one has forgotten where they found them) so much easier.
Google Desktop search already does this. It stores thumbnails of the webpages you visit, and when searching through the browser history, it will display the thumbnails along with each search result. Although they are too small to read the text, many times I can remember a website I visited just by the blurry look of a JPEG thumbnail.
It's amazing how our brains can remember images so much better than text.
A friend at work suggested melatonin, which I now take each night about a half hour before I want to be asleep.
The problem with using melatonin is that melatonin is a hormone that is your brain's way of telling itself that you need to sleep. When you begin supplementing any hormone with an outside source of that hormone, your brain will start producing less of this hormone naturally. This inevitably leads to a hormonal imbalance, especially if you stop taking the melatonin. You might not feel any adverse effects now, but if you take it for an extended period of time, then try to quit, you'll probably have a tough time sleeping.
With something like eDirectory or AD almost every server is a writable master rather than hub or consumer, which I what I would understand to be true multi-master.
Ahh.. I see the difference now. Thanks for the explanation. I had no idea that Novell's eDirectory was so capable. If Sun's wasn't free for under 200,000 entries, we would probably switch.
re: multi-master - like the SprintPCS guy said a few posts over - prone to failure and database corruption, utterly useless in an enterprise deployment.
What the hell is with you OpenLDAP fans that want to spread baseless claims about Netscape Directory? In the real world, Fortune 500 CEOs do NOT trust some long-haired GNU/Hippy with deploying their 1+ million entry DIT on some homemade OpenLDAP framework. They want a supported and trustworthy enterprise product.
Name me one company that is using OpenLDAP with over a million entries. Just one. Can't do it? I could name over 20 that are using NDS or Sun's version of NDS with over a million. Not only that, if you went through the fortune 500, you'd probably find that at least half of them use these products.
What made Innosoft more advanced was its capability for several masters (it's not true multi - master in the sense of eDirectory from Novell or Active directory but that is no bad thing).
You are somewhat misinformed. Sun's latest incarnation of the Sun Java System Directory Server (that's what they're calling it now), fully supports 4-way multi-master replication. It even supports it over WAN and slower links by queueing changes up and transferring them in batches, rather than one at a time.
How difficult would it be to host these trackers in China or any other country that the neo-cons in Washington don't have against the wall?
Try The Pirate Bay... They seem to be located within a country that doesn't much care for US copyright laws. They also regularly post hilarious replies to legal takedown notices they receive...
Is it too much to ask that MS, who has significantly greater development resources, try to improve the performance of their OS?
No, but Microsoft's business model is entirely based on selling more PCs. That's why they don't care about bloat, and most likely encourage a corporate culture of bloat.
Think about it, Dell charged a Windows tax on every computer sold. Try and buy a consumer PC from them without Windows and you'll see what I mean. It's in Microsoft's best interest to make every version of Windows require an entirely new computer, because then their customers will have to buy a whole new license, and not just an upgrade.
Not only that, I really think this is why MS has waited so long to solve the spyware problem. They could have solved it a long time ago, but the fact of the matter is that most people don't know how to deal with it, and they might even buy a new computer just to get rid of all the spyware that keeps coming back, so they'll pay another Windows tax.
If Apple were a monopoly, they could use this same business practice, but I would hope they'd be a little less evil.
1) They can't use a private key they made up because it's checked against the public key held at the registrar.
You have some interesting ideas (that have probably been thought of before, but interesting still), yet I believe this point is where it falls apart.
The spammers know that such a system is vulnerable to DOS attacks and they will flood it with Winzombies (TM) until it goes down hard. The problem is the key checking/signature comparison requires a central key signature database that needs to be globally accessible and available 100% of the time. Think DNS root servers, but instead of handing out tiny 64-byte A records over UDP, they're handing out 512-byte public-keys over AES-256 OpenSSL tunnels... Or worse yet, they're doing the key hash in another thread and return an ACK or NACK if they signature matches the private key. Either way, you've got a big CPU overhead type of calculation. The spammers know this and they will tell their zombies to send 10,000 bad authentications a second from random IPs spread across 3-4 continents, just to chew up your CPU time and effectively Slashdot your email server (don't laugh, they've done it to a lot of the RBLs). Not pretty...
Hold on a second... these problems can likely be solved by more intelligent software.
Take this for example:
Think about the average small to medium sized business with about 200 employees. Chances are, if you expand those 200 employees "web of trust" to include all legitimate business contacts, both inside and outside the company, that they correspond with at least twice via email, you're talking a max of about 25K-50K (rough guess) contacts. (I'm just guessing that most people have between 100-200 contacts in their address book, or in their email history... obviously some have a LOT more, but a lot are much less than that.)
If the public keys or key signatures could be cached on local CMTP mail exchangers, then theoretically within a month or two the average corporate email server would have 90% hit rates on the cache, and would only have to download a centrally managed key revocation list once a day or so. It would be difficult for them to Slashdot every mail relay on the planet...
The problem is really getting admins to change... It seems like everyone absolutely HATES installing new software on their servers nowadays... Hell, most admins are so paranoid that they think anything, even the tiniest 100 line GPL perl script will bring their server to it's knees, so good luck getting them to ditch sendmail/postfix/exim/Exchange and move to a system that requires a dedicated several GB for disk caching of signature hashes...
A good way to combat a software or even a hardware keylogger is use the mouse to type in letters in random positions.
/usr/local/bin. Also, non-root users can open ports higher than 1024, so if you're using the default port of 3128, you should be fine.
A better way is to use the Windows On-Screen Keyboard. (Start Menu, Programs, Accessories, Accessibility) Click on the letters and type in your password that way. Of course you are now vulnerable to shoulder-surfing attacks, and if they installed a screen capture program that takes pictures every few seconds, you might be screwed as well.
If you can, reboot with Knoppix, verify that there are no keyboard loggers attached to the back of the machine, and you should be safe.
Also, regarding the anonymous web-surfing/email thing:
1. Get a shell account that allows SSH access.
2. Install Squid. I found that even if you are a regular user without root privileges, you can compile squid with the --prefix=/home/username/squid option and it will install it into your home directory instead of into
3. Disable all disk caching in squid, just in case they hack your shell account and you don't want them to look at your proxy cache.
4. Put Squid in a cron job that checks to see if it is running first, and launches it if it isn't. This will make sure it starts back up if the admin reboots the box.
5. SSH into the box and forward port 3128 to it: ssh -L3128:localhost:3128 username@hostname.
6. Set your browser proxy to 127.0.0.1 port 3128.
7. Enjoy encrypted communications.
Oh, I should mention that you want to make sure the server you are running your proxy on is not located in the same country (duh!). Of course the traffic is not encrypted once it reaches proxy server and goes out like normal port 80 traffic from there.
As far as secure email goes: Use Hushmail. You can get a free account without giving them any personal information, and they use 2048-bit PGP encryption. Make sure all of your fellow dissidents are using Hushmail as well, because it takes care of key exchange for you. Also, the admins at Hushmail claim that even if they are given a subpoena, they have no way of decrypting your email messages because they don't have your private key, but I'm not sure if I believe them because the private key has to be somewhere in order for you to read the message.
Their figures estimate that of all the people seeing Star Wars, approx. half of them are employed full-time. They also assume that those people will take both Thursday and Friday off work, just to see the movie...
I mean this is Star Wars and all, but how many people with full-time jobs have to take a 4-day weekend just to see a movie? Get real...
The New York Post has no redeeming qualities, and shouldn't even be considered news. More like "news for idiots, stuff that's overhyped"...
I consider the New York Post the journalistic equivelant of a good troll... Hey, wait a minute, damn it... now they've got me feeding the troll as well.