...You probably don't know enough about how
you are going to use your system.
Also, why on earth do you want so many partitions?
If each was going to be on a different drive, it
would make sense to break them up. However, you
write that it's all going to be on a single 20
gig drive.
On my personal systems, given how cheap disk
space is now, I only have two partitions. One
is root with two gig of space. Everything goes
here except personal files. The other is/home
where everything else goes. On a single-user
system that has little in the way of new software
after the initial install, this works great.
(Assuming you correctly rotate logs and such.)
On production nodes, it is never that simple.
The first thing you have to do is determine what
partitions are static and which are dynamic. For
example,/usr and/sbin are hardly ever going to
change. Install them tight. On the other hand,/dbhome/oracle/data will get larger by the day.
Make sure you have enough room out there for
your dynamic partitions.
Of course, since you only have one drive, you
may want to take the easy way out. Why not have
one and only one partition: root. If you will
never fill the full 20 gig and these are
workstations and not servers, why have the headache? (I suggest these are workstations
because X is being installed and no one in their
right mind would bog down a server with X. Am I
right in thinking that these are development
boxes of some sort?)
I know I will get flamed for the above
suggestion. Mostly from the clueless, of course,
but there will also be some smart people out
there who will find me insane. I hope those
gurus will think twice before posting.
When you get right down to it, on a user's
workstation with a single drive and no plans
for expansion of the box's role, why wouldn't
you keep everything in/root?
The only thing I can come up with is backups
but 20-gig is small potatoes so I can't imagine
that's much of a concern. Especially if the
backups are incremental. (ADSM/TSM rocks!)
Your moral delimma can be solved by visiting the Dr. Laura web site. She is the expert in moral delimmas. (Having had many herself. {grin})
If it were me, I'd document everything out the wazoo and then offer myself as an expert witness to the author. Depending on how much the author thinks he can make through legal action, you might even get paid for your testimony.
Of course, while negotiations are still ongoing, don't worry about it. Only after the deal has been made and your company is still in violation would I blow the whistle.
I can't imagine you really know what's going on in the back room of negotiations.
For example, let's set 'mode_conspiracy = 1' for a moment.
Your company has used this guy's code illegally. Your company can't afford to pay this guy what he is asking. That is a lose-lose situation.
But, your company has a business insurance policy that covers stuff like this (many do). Your company goes to the programmer and says, off the record, 'we can't afford to pay you but if you sue us after "reasonable negotiations", we can get our insurance company to settle out of court; you get paid, nothing comes out of our pocket and we get to use your code as part of the settlement'. This ranks a win-win. (Sure, the insurance company does lose but who cares about them, right?)
You can never really know what's going on in the background of stuff like this. Before you go and shoot yourself in the foot, make sure you have a total understanding of the situation.
InitZero
(I can't leave this topic, I'm afraid, without a obligatory stab at the hypocrisy of Slashdot's visitors. Stealing music is good. Stealing code is bad. {shakes head})
From your description, it sounds as though the content is plain text. Thus, I would keep it in generic ASCII.
As for the search interface, I'd use the whatever the operating system provides. For Windows, that would be Start->Find-Files which will allow for text-based searching. On *nix, you could use grep. I'm not sure what the Mac choice would be.
The less dense and more format neutral information is, the more likely it is to be useable in the future.
Pretend I'm an ISP with 100 ports. Right now, I turn over calls on an average of 27 minutes.
Why do people hang up? Among other reasons, they have only one phone line and are waiting for a call. They go offline so they don't tie up their only phone line.
Now let's pretend that I've gone V.92. Those people who are waiting for calls don't go offline to wait. They stay online. When the call comes in, instead of going offline, they flash over and take the call. In the meantime, the ISP's port isn't released to be made available for other users.
After the V.92 upgrade, ISPs will see their connection times go up. Instead of seeing average calls of 27 minutes, the ISP starts seeing call lengths of 42 minutes.
At 27 minutes a call, a port can serve 53 calls a day. At 42 minutes, you can only take 34 calls a day.
The longer the average connect time, the more port an ISP needs. Ports cost money. No one wants to invest money in analog modem ports when they could be investing in DSL or wireless infrastructure.
A simple modem flashing will fix all the modems up with no problem.
The.02 upgrade will be relatively simple and, hopefully, cheap for ISPs. I don't disagree with you on that. My point is that port usage will go up and ISPs will have to spend money on hardware to keep the current level of availability.
I'm surprised the ISPs aren't already jumping on it due to features like "quicker handshaking, and call-waiting/modem-on-hold capabilities" which can only benefit their existing customers.
V.92 is hated by ISPs. The main goal of a non-metered ISP is to get as many people dial-in and dial-out as quickly as possible. ISPs don't want their ports tied up while people are answering calls from Grandmother.
ISPs hate sending money on dial-up hardware that will be obsolete in a handful of years. While better than 85% of the United States still use analog modems, that percentage is fixing to drop quickly over the next five years. No ISP is going to want to spend capital facing that return on their investment.
Corporate customers, however, might benefit from the V.92 standard. Industry wants people to dial-in quickly, grab their email, upload a spreadshet and then hang up as quickly. Since many companies have toll-free dial-ups, the 10 to 20 seconds that can be saved on V.92 training is very worthwhile.
Customers and Corporations may want V.92 but you won't see a push from the ISPs. They want to focus their energy on DSL not analog modems.
I doubt a bunch of Napster users who stop buying CDs is going to hurt RIAA. In fact, it could be a very good thing for the industry.
What's the first thing these people do when they buy a CD? Of course, the go home, RIP it and put it up on the net. Duh.
Thus, I suspect that a boycott will keep new music from showing up on the web through other (gnutella) channels.
If we really want to stick it to The Man, we need to go out and buy every popular CD in the local music shop (certainly not Amazon since they are very The_Man-like) and put it online. Once the popular stuff is online, we need to head for the more obscure tunes. And we need to mirror it across the world so no one can shut us down.
Only then will we have true freedom. Are you with me?
InitZero
(The best part of this post is that the sarcasm will be missed by so many and that the flames will come from both sides. I love hypocricy!)
You'll be wasting time and money if you attempt to make the box silent.
The newspaper I work for supports the operation of a local cable station next door through a co-branding agreement of some sort. The bottom line is that I deal with a bunch of TV equipment. (And, worse, TV people.)
We were faced with a similar problem. Our solution was to put a closet between the audio studios and put the PCs in the closet. Through the wall, we run the keyboard, mouse and monitor cables. Not only don't you have sound problems if you keep the computers in a closet, you also don't have the related heat problems.
Even if you don't have a dedicated systems closet right next to the studio, with a good keyboard extender, you should be able to get at least 25 feet between the user and the PC. While good cables ain't cheap, they are certainly less expensive than many of the other hairbrained schemes I've read.
Another possibility is a good laptop. We've found that the are much more quiet than desktops. So quiet, in fact, they are below our noise floor. A generic IBM ThinkPad 600E at our installation is studio safe.
I believe in using free tools when they are better (cost, performance, shape, color, smell, etc.) than commercial tools.
In terms of high availability, the free tools don't come close to the commercial tools. I've used Veritas on Sun for many years and for the last two years, I've been using IBM's HACMP. I have evaluated three Linux tools for HA and only one worked and it didn't even work well.
If you've spent the money to buy Sparc and Oracle, you probably aren't working out of your basement. Don't close the checkbook now. If you need HA, buy HA.
Spending the money won't put your company out of business. Not having a high availability solution just might.
The ethics and consistency of this group (or lack thereof) amazes me. The vast majority of folks on Slashdot have no stealing music from artists but seem a bit squeamish when it comes to code.
When musical intellectual property is discuessed, the answer is that it's okay to steal it because that's the way it should be done and the music companies are living in the dark. It's RIAA's fault we're stealing music.
Yet, when it comes to source code, we wring our hands and postulate about how we can convince the source's owner that the code should be opened. Why? Shouldn't we take the same track as we did with the music? Isn't it their falut that the code is closed and isn't it our obligation to steal the source and distribute it far and wide?
I say that if the intern has access to the source code the the drivers, he should put it up on gnutella or a semi-anonymous web page and link it from Slashdot. That'll teach 'em.
Why should corporate privacy agreements be any more binding than music copyrights?
I've worked at a number of major market newspapers and the policy has been the same at all of them.
We won't do anything without a subpoena. We will fight all subpoenas even if the request is harmless just to be consistent.
Once in court, we will only testify to things we put in print. We will not, under any circumstances, turn over reporter's notes or unpublished photographs. Folks I know have gone to jail for contempt.
Journalists protecting sources have repeatedly been protected by the court system and that is how it should be. If subjects knew that everything they said could be turned over to the police, no one would talk to reporters. Thus, the courts have found that in order to have a free press, it is necessary for journalists to have the same sort of confidentiality protection that doctors and priests have.
At a time when journalists are taking hits for their ethics, I'm glad to see Penenburg putting his job on the line for the Right Thing.
why is the Cat 5 Ethernet running to my office is any more vulnerable than the Cat 5 Telco which is copper for 1.5 miles to the CO?
Minor nit, first. Your telco isn't running CAT5. It's probably CAT3 if anything.
TO answer your question: grounding.
The phone company doesn't care if everything in your house gets fried. Thus, if you walk to the demarc, you'll probably see a three-foot aluminum pole in the ground. (Copper is too expensive.)
The phone company does care that their 5ESS (or whatever switch they got) is protected. The central office is grounded to bedrock. As I explained in my earlier message, that's what the electric company does. That's the only way you can hope to protect your investment.
So, you're right. Wire in the ground is equally likely to be hit. The only difference is that the phone company, with a multi-million dollar investment to protect, is better protected that your 56k modem and PC behind an APC box.
Couldn't one just have good quality surge protectors on both ends, ie APC, etc?
One of my friends is an airline pilot and a ham radio operator. Given his obscene pilot's salary, he has collected $250,000 or so worth of radio gear.
When he installed his 120-foot commercial grade tower, he looked into lightening protection. Did I mention that Florida is the lightening capitol of the world?
The local utility (Florida Power and Light) gave him the most detailed and helpful advice. Namely, unless you run your grounding rod to bedrock (which is what the local utility does with its poles), you can't even pretend that you could take a direct hit.
The $7.95, three-foot copper rods you get from radio shack do two things for you. First, they drain whatever charge you have in the structure so that it is electrically neutral. That means the structure is less likely to attract lightening. Second, they give you a false sense of security. The fact of the matter is, a three foot rod going into sand (as is the case here) or even good soil can't dissipate the energy from a direct lightening strike.
Same goes for your surge protector. Cheap ones will protect you to 500 or so volts. More expensive ones will protect you to ten times that. None will protect your computer from a direct lightening strike which we know from seeing Back to the Future carries 1.21 gigawatts of electricity.
So, to answer the question directly, no, good surge protectors won't save you. Neither will gas lightening traps though that's better than nothing, I guess. (I've never use them on ethernet.)
As I said before, wireless or fiber are the only real options if you want to directly link the two homes at high speed. If less speed is needed, VPN over DSL would be a good alternative. Just stay away from copper.
Putting copper on poles is a horrible idea. Sticking it in the ground isn't much better. One lightening strike and you've fried both ends of the connection.
My company built its new office building right next to the old one. For several months, we were working out of both. As such, we had to drag the phones and network between buildings. Initially, we were going to pull a 600-pair cable between the building for the phones. (A big fsking cable, by the way.)
After a couple hours of talking it over and hearing horror stories from our telecom guy, we went with fiber at nearly double the cost. Living in Florida, the lightening capitol of the world, it made sense.
If it were me, I'd go wireless. Using 3COM AirConnect, you can get 11mbps at 300 feet and less at more. With fancy ears, you can get even more range.
Of course, if you don't go wireless, think about fiber in the groud encased in interduct. That will be more expensive but is far better than copper.
Your best bet may be generic ADSL with a VPN though I doubt that would be nearly as satisfying to your geek urges.
First, let me say that LS has his heart in the right place. Giving back to the community, at least in my mind, is a responsibility.
Folks such as myself believe that computers are a necessity. I don't believe that I could live anything approaching a happy live without email.
That said, not a mile from my home is a place where people who regularly go without food sleep. I drive by that homeless shelter every day on the way to work.
The lives of those who visit the homeless shelter can not be improved by programming or high speed internet access.
The kids who go to several of the high schools in my district can't pass elementary level math and science tests. These kids have don't need perl lessons, they need basic, how-do-I-balance-my-checkbook math.
I highly recommend each person find a meaningful cause. Mine is Habitat for Humanity. It is my choice because at the end of the day, I can see progress. I once did a Thanksgiving at a soup kitchen. It was depressing. I knew that tomorrow the same people would be here. All I had to show for the day was empty bowls. I didn't fix a problem, I was helping a person get though one day.
After a day with Habitat, there are walls. Next week, there will be a roof. A few months and there's a house and a family. Years from now, I can drive by that house and point it out to my kid as something I did to make the world a better place.
With soup or even a nice piece of code, what have I left for the next generation to see? Little, I believe.
On the selfish side of the street, Habitat also gives me the opportunity to get some exercise. That's something I wouldn't get if I were using my computer skills for a charitable organization. Also, in a couple years, I plan to build my own house. Having worked with Habitat, I've learned skills that will save me money down the road. My working with Habitat has been very symbiotic.
Everyone should get out there and give back to the community. But, before you pigeonhole yourself into thinking your only skill is computer-related, ask yourself if there is anything else you can provide to the community that might be better utilized. I think you'll find hard labor benefits the community more than any computer project you can hack together (probably on company time {grin}).
gnut> find anything and everything CURRENT RESPONSES ----------------- 1) anything and everything.html 216.100.51.42:6345 size:2.83K ref:234946611 speed:10000 gnut> find nothing at all CURRENT RESPONSES ----------------- 1) nothing at all.html 216.100.51.42:6345 size:2.83K ref:117638272 speed:10000
I figured that an ambitious person had hacked gnutella in order to promote the web site so that he'd get some extra cash. I sent email to the the owner of 216.100.51.42 and they promptly shut off the user's connection. I also sent email to cybergirlsex.com in hopes that they wouldn't pay the user 'tella' for the referrals. Spam shouldn't pay no matter how it is done, right?
Ever since I sent the email message to the domain admin for the porn site, my name and server address has been showing up in each and every gnutella response. Cause and effect (and a bit more) leads me to believe that the porn site was 'tella' and they are not happy that I've cut into their revenue stream.
With a bit of investigative work I was able to tie the user who is spamming gnutella with the user who admins the porn site and more than two dozen other domains.
I've got the guy booted off a number of services in the past few days but that isn't much help (though it does make me feel a bit better). It's like playing wack the mole; hit him in one place and he pops up again elsewhere. I'm getting hundreds of email messages from people either looking for child porn or wanting me dead for supplying child porn. (Of note, of course, I don't have any child porn so stop asking.)
I've contacted the FBI's computer crimes division and they are far more interested in the folks emailing me looking for kiddie porn than they are in getting rid of the slime ball spamming my email address. At least the kiddie porn angle got their attention or I imagine this wouldn't have even made their radar.
So, what can I do? I'm already filtering my email so that I don't have to read through hoards of email. (Did I mention that he has also signed me up to dozens of mailing lists?) What's next? While tracking and smacking the first day was exciting, today it's a bit of a drag.
Any good ideas will return my eternal gratitude. (Any especially nasty ideas and I'll give you the guy's email address. {grin})
I've never seen anybody become emotionally attatched to a database platform the way one would a great car or a computer.
Warning: Offtopic.
Oracle people are as rabid as they come. If you put a Microsoft SQL Server guy in a room with an Oracle dude and a SyBase person for the purposes of discussing the relative merits of one database over the other, none would come out alive.
Databases are often as personal as programming languages. People get attached.
They'd have to: a) trace down everyone serving those copyrighted files, using nothing but their IP. b) sue each and every one of them.
Just as you don't have to catch every fish in the sea to keep from going home hungry, you need not catch every violator.
How many times have you seen a police officier stop one speeder out of a hundred? 'But, but', you stammer, 'what about all the other speeders? You didn't ticket them.'.
The goal of law enforcement isn't to keep every law from being broken all the time, only to catch enough violators that society doesn't fall apart. Cops deter. That's their job.
I'm all for copyright owners going after those who steal their product. If someone steals my computer, I'm going to go after that person. Same goes for my intellectual propertly. (Granted, the former is probably worth more than the latter.)
It works fairly well, but I've only used it up to around 15 gigs.
I've got 90 drives and just over 970 gig of data under the AIX's logical volume manager. It is rock solid and a dream when dealing with with that much storage.
My company is pretty evenly split between Sun and IBM (though we're phasing out Sun as we upgrade) right now. I've used the semi-Sun product Veritas to work with the 1.1 TB we have running under Sun. While I'll be the first to conceed that the Veritas product looks pretty and for a novice might be easier to use, I don't feel it is as sturdy a product as AIX's LVM.
The downside to LVM is that it's utilitarian. Whereas Veritas has a pretty GUI that turns drives icons different colors depending on their state, LVM is text-based even when running under the GUI smit interface. That could be one of the reasons I prefer LVM.
Over the years, I've moved more and more stuff off AIX and Solaris and it has made sense. One of the prime reasons I haven't moved more is that Linux didn't have Oracle, a JFS or a good tool for managing large amounts of data. Oracle fell. JFS fell. Now I see LVM on the horizon.
If Linux keeps progressing at this rate, I'm going to have to start putting my data where my mouth is. There is soon to be no more 'if only Linux had {hesitation}, I'd move {service} and cut our costs by {huge figure}'. My {hesitations} are just about gone.
I don't see any damages and this would fall under slander if there was a crime here but I don't see one.
If I call you an uninformed monkey buttocks to your face with no one else in the room, that's rude but not slander. Since I'm sure the background check company or the potential employer didn't send out a press release announcing that she was a felon, there is no slander.
As with a tree falling in the woods, if there is no one around to hear it, the crash isn't slander.
Even if either company had published in the local newspaper 'we have done a full backgound check on Ms. Job Candidate and it indicates that you are a wanted felon', she would probably have little grounds to sue. Truth is the prime defense to libel.
If the National Rag prints 'Commander Taco sexually molests nano-monkeys', they are in for a beating. (Assuming, of course, that Mr. Taco doesn't sexually molest nano-monkeys. (I, by the way, feel confident in making that assumption.))
However, if the National Rag prints 'Commander Taco's butler of nine years says the geek sexually molests nano-monkeys', that's okay and isn't libel so long as the Rag doesn't know it to be false. And, even then, given that Mr. Taco is rather famous, probably would not be libel.
she can claim a week's worth of wages, plus damages
Once again, I don't see any damages. The felony report was only given to the employer and not the public. If the only thing keeping her from the job was the bad report, she might have grounds for a week of pay but I doubt it. What does her contract say?
The data isn't lost, you just have to be online long enough to hit the host that has it. If the government would just run gnutella for a few days, they'd have that classified data back in no time. Not to mention some sweet Jenna Jameson!
You should never have security logs the machine those logs secure. While I find the printer idea pretty darn cool, syslogd directed to another box would be fine, too.
Assuming, of course, that machine was secure.
I worked at a company where the most secured system in the entire building wasn't the firewall, mainframe or the accouting system. It was the syslog box.
The only service the box was running was syslogd. It allowed no telnet access and all ports except 514 were closed into and out of that system. In order to physically touch the machine, you had to break a seal on the box (literally, a locked plywood box with a fan in the back) to get in. (Remember, seals are not locks and locks are not seals.)
Our position was that you couldn't keep people from doing bad things but that if someone did a bad thing, we wanted to be able to hunt said person down and render vengeance not heard of in thousands of years.
Of course, not even this system was fool-proof given UDP and that the network had to be up. But nothing is perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, why on earth do you want so many partitions? If each was going to be on a different drive, it would make sense to break them up. However, you write that it's all going to be on a single 20 gig drive.
On my personal systems, given how cheap disk space is now, I only have two partitions. One is root with two gig of space. Everything goes here except personal files. The other is /home
where everything else goes. On a single-user
system that has little in the way of new software
after the initial install, this works great.
(Assuming you correctly rotate logs and such.)
On production nodes, it is never that simple. The first thing you have to do is determine what partitions are static and which are dynamic. For example, /usr and /sbin are hardly ever going to
change. Install them tight. On the other hand, /dbhome/oracle/data will get larger by the day.
Make sure you have enough room out there for
your dynamic partitions.
Of course, since you only have one drive, you may want to take the easy way out. Why not have one and only one partition: root. If you will never fill the full 20 gig and these are workstations and not servers, why have the headache? (I suggest these are workstations because X is being installed and no one in their right mind would bog down a server with X. Am I right in thinking that these are development boxes of some sort?)
I know I will get flamed for the above suggestion. Mostly from the clueless, of course, but there will also be some smart people out there who will find me insane. I hope those gurus will think twice before posting.
When you get right down to it, on a user's workstation with a single drive and no plans for expansion of the box's role, why wouldn't you keep everything in /root?
The only thing I can come up with is backups but 20-gig is small potatoes so I can't imagine that's much of a concern. Especially if the backups are incremental. (ADSM/TSM rocks!)
InitZero
Your moral delimma can be solved by visiting the Dr. Laura web site. She is the expert in moral delimmas. (Having had many herself. {grin})
If it were me, I'd document everything out the wazoo and then offer myself as an expert witness to the author. Depending on how much the author thinks he can make through legal action, you might even get paid for your testimony.
Of course, while negotiations are still ongoing, don't worry about it. Only after the deal has been made and your company is still in violation would I blow the whistle.
I can't imagine you really know what's going on in the back room of negotiations.
For example, let's set 'mode_conspiracy = 1' for a moment.
Your company has used this guy's code illegally. Your company can't afford to pay this guy what he is asking. That is a lose-lose situation.
But, your company has a business insurance policy that covers stuff like this (many do). Your company goes to the programmer and says, off the record, 'we can't afford to pay you but if you sue us after "reasonable negotiations", we can get our insurance company to settle out of court; you get paid, nothing comes out of our pocket and we get to use your code as part of the settlement'. This ranks a win-win. (Sure, the insurance company does lose but who cares about them, right?)
You can never really know what's going on in the background of stuff like this. Before you go and shoot yourself in the foot, make sure you have a total understanding of the situation.
InitZero
(I can't leave this topic, I'm afraid, without a obligatory stab at the hypocrisy of Slashdot's visitors. Stealing music is good. Stealing code is bad. {shakes head})
From your description, it sounds as though the content is plain text. Thus, I would keep it in generic ASCII.
As for the search interface, I'd use the whatever the operating system provides. For Windows, that would be Start->Find-Files which will allow for text-based searching. On *nix, you could use grep. I'm not sure what the Mac choice would be.
The less dense and more format neutral information is, the more likely it is to be useable in the future.
Keep it simple.
InitZero
Why would ISP's hate it?
Pretend I'm an ISP with 100 ports. Right now, I turn over calls on an average of 27 minutes.
Why do people hang up? Among other reasons, they have only one phone line and are waiting for a call. They go offline so they don't tie up their only phone line.
Now let's pretend that I've gone V.92. Those people who are waiting for calls don't go offline to wait. They stay online. When the call comes in, instead of going offline, they flash over and take the call. In the meantime, the ISP's port isn't released to be made available for other users.
After the V.92 upgrade, ISPs will see their connection times go up. Instead of seeing average calls of 27 minutes, the ISP starts seeing call lengths of 42 minutes.
At 27 minutes a call, a port can serve 53 calls a day. At 42 minutes, you can only take 34 calls a day.
The longer the average connect time, the more port an ISP needs. Ports cost money. No one wants to invest money in analog modem ports when they could be investing in DSL or wireless infrastructure.
A simple modem flashing will fix all the modems up with no problem.
The .02 upgrade will be relatively simple and, hopefully, cheap for ISPs. I don't disagree with you on that. My point is that port usage will go up and ISPs will have to spend money on hardware to keep the current level of availability.
InitZero
I'm surprised the ISPs aren't already jumping on it due to features like "quicker handshaking, and call-waiting/modem-on-hold capabilities" which can only benefit their existing customers.
V.92 is hated by ISPs. The main goal of a non-metered ISP is to get as many people dial-in and dial-out as quickly as possible. ISPs don't want their ports tied up while people are answering calls from Grandmother.
ISPs hate sending money on dial-up hardware that will be obsolete in a handful of years. While better than 85% of the United States still use analog modems, that percentage is fixing to drop quickly over the next five years. No ISP is going to want to spend capital facing that return on their investment.
Corporate customers, however, might benefit from the V.92 standard. Industry wants people to dial-in quickly, grab their email, upload a spreadshet and then hang up as quickly. Since many companies have toll-free dial-ups, the 10 to 20 seconds that can be saved on V.92 training is very worthwhile.
Customers and Corporations may want V.92 but you won't see a push from the ISPs. They want to focus their energy on DSL not analog modems.
InitZero
Now you arn't going to get any flames because you spelled it out for all the idiots out there.
Sorry. I'm new at this trolling thing. I guess I should have mentioned hot taco pants and Commander Portman Grits, huh?
InitZero
I doubt a bunch of Napster users who stop buying CDs is going to hurt RIAA. In fact, it could be a very good thing for the industry.
What's the first thing these people do when they buy a CD? Of course, the go home, RIP it and put it up on the net. Duh.
Thus, I suspect that a boycott will keep new music from showing up on the web through other (gnutella) channels.
If we really want to stick it to The Man, we need to go out and buy every popular CD in the local music shop (certainly not Amazon since they are very The_Man-like) and put it online. Once the popular stuff is online, we need to head for the more obscure tunes. And we need to mirror it across the world so no one can shut us down.
Only then will we have true freedom. Are you with me?
InitZero
(The best part of this post is that the sarcasm will be missed by so many and that the flames will come from both sides. I love hypocricy!)
his story on masturbation
{blush}
You don't happen to have that link, do you?
It's not for me. It's for a friend.
InitZero
You'll be wasting time and money if you attempt to make the box silent.
The newspaper I work for supports the operation of a local cable station next door through a co-branding agreement of some sort. The bottom line is that I deal with a bunch of TV equipment. (And, worse, TV people.)
We were faced with a similar problem. Our solution was to put a closet between the audio studios and put the PCs in the closet. Through the wall, we run the keyboard, mouse and monitor cables. Not only don't you have sound problems if you keep the computers in a closet, you also don't have the related heat problems.
Even if you don't have a dedicated systems closet right next to the studio, with a good keyboard extender, you should be able to get at least 25 feet between the user and the PC. While good cables ain't cheap, they are certainly less expensive than many of the other hairbrained schemes I've read.
Another possibility is a good laptop. We've found that the are much more quiet than desktops. So quiet, in fact, they are below our noise floor. A generic IBM ThinkPad 600E at our installation is studio safe.
InitZero
I believe in using free tools when they are better (cost, performance, shape, color, smell, etc.) than commercial tools.
In terms of high availability, the free tools don't come close to the commercial tools. I've used Veritas on Sun for many years and for the last two years, I've been using IBM's HACMP. I have evaluated three Linux tools for HA and only one worked and it didn't even work well.
If you've spent the money to buy Sparc and Oracle, you probably aren't working out of your basement. Don't close the checkbook now. If you need HA, buy HA.
Spending the money won't put your company out of business. Not having a high availability solution just might.
InitZero
Yes, this is a flame bait IP rant.
The ethics and consistency of this group (or lack thereof) amazes me. The vast majority of folks on Slashdot have no stealing music from artists but seem a bit squeamish when it comes to code.
When musical intellectual property is discuessed, the answer is that it's okay to steal it because that's the way it should be done and the music companies are living in the dark. It's RIAA's fault we're stealing music.
Yet, when it comes to source code, we wring our hands and postulate about how we can convince the source's owner that the code should be opened. Why? Shouldn't we take the same track as we did with the music? Isn't it their falut that the code is closed and isn't it our obligation to steal the source and distribute it far and wide?
I say that if the intern has access to the source code the the drivers, he should put it up on gnutella or a semi-anonymous web page and link it from Slashdot. That'll teach 'em.
Why should corporate privacy agreements be any more binding than music copyrights?
InitZero
I've worked at a number of major market newspapers and the policy has been the same at all of them.
We won't do anything without a subpoena. We will fight all subpoenas even if the request is harmless just to be consistent.
Once in court, we will only testify to things we put in print. We will not, under any circumstances, turn over reporter's notes or unpublished photographs. Folks I know have gone to jail for contempt.
Journalists protecting sources have repeatedly been protected by the court system and that is how it should be. If subjects knew that everything they said could be turned over to the police, no one would talk to reporters. Thus, the courts have found that in order to have a free press, it is necessary for journalists to have the same sort of confidentiality protection that doctors and priests have.
At a time when journalists are taking hits for their ethics, I'm glad to see Penenburg putting his job on the line for the Right Thing.
InitZero
why is the Cat 5 Ethernet running to my office is any more vulnerable than the Cat 5 Telco which is copper for 1.5 miles to the CO?
Minor nit, first. Your telco isn't running CAT5. It's probably CAT3 if anything.
TO answer your question: grounding.
The phone company doesn't care if everything in your house gets fried. Thus, if you walk to the demarc, you'll probably see a three-foot aluminum pole in the ground. (Copper is too expensive.)
The phone company does care that their 5ESS (or whatever switch they got) is protected. The central office is grounded to bedrock. As I explained in my earlier message, that's what the electric company does. That's the only way you can hope to protect your investment.
So, you're right. Wire in the ground is equally likely to be hit. The only difference is that the phone company, with a multi-million dollar investment to protect, is better protected that your 56k modem and PC behind an APC box.
InitZero
Couldn't one just have good quality surge protectors on both ends, ie APC, etc?
One of my friends is an airline pilot and a ham radio operator. Given his obscene pilot's salary, he has collected $250,000 or so worth of radio gear.
When he installed his 120-foot commercial grade tower, he looked into lightening protection. Did I mention that Florida is the lightening capitol of the world?
The local utility (Florida Power and Light) gave him the most detailed and helpful advice. Namely, unless you run your grounding rod to bedrock (which is what the local utility does with its poles), you can't even pretend that you could take a direct hit.
The $7.95, three-foot copper rods you get from radio shack do two things for you. First, they drain whatever charge you have in the structure so that it is electrically neutral. That means the structure is less likely to attract lightening. Second, they give you a false sense of security. The fact of the matter is, a three foot rod going into sand (as is the case here) or even good soil can't dissipate the energy from a direct lightening strike.
Same goes for your surge protector. Cheap ones will protect you to 500 or so volts. More expensive ones will protect you to ten times that. None will protect your computer from a direct lightening strike which we know from seeing Back to the Future carries 1.21 gigawatts of electricity.
So, to answer the question directly, no, good surge protectors won't save you. Neither will gas lightening traps though that's better than nothing, I guess. (I've never use them on ethernet.)
As I said before, wireless or fiber are the only real options if you want to directly link the two homes at high speed. If less speed is needed, VPN over DSL would be a good alternative. Just stay away from copper.
InitZero
Putting copper on poles is a horrible idea. Sticking it in the ground isn't much better. One lightening strike and you've fried both ends of the connection.
My company built its new office building right next to the old one. For several months, we were working out of both. As such, we had to drag the phones and network between buildings. Initially, we were going to pull a 600-pair cable between the building for the phones. (A big fsking cable, by the way.)
After a couple hours of talking it over and hearing horror stories from our telecom guy, we went with fiber at nearly double the cost. Living in Florida, the lightening capitol of the world, it made sense.
If it were me, I'd go wireless. Using 3COM AirConnect, you can get 11mbps at 300 feet and less at more. With fancy ears, you can get even more range.
Of course, if you don't go wireless, think about fiber in the groud encased in interduct. That will be more expensive but is far better than copper.
Your best bet may be generic ADSL with a VPN though I doubt that would be nearly as satisfying to your geek urges.
InitZero
First, let me say that LS has his heart in the right place. Giving back to the community, at least in my mind, is a responsibility.
Folks such as myself believe that computers are a necessity. I don't believe that I could live anything approaching a happy live without email.
That said, not a mile from my home is a place where people who regularly go without food sleep. I drive by that homeless shelter every day on the way to work.
The lives of those who visit the homeless shelter can not be improved by programming or high speed internet access.
The kids who go to several of the high schools in my district can't pass elementary level math and science tests. These kids have don't need perl lessons, they need basic, how-do-I-balance-my-checkbook math.
I highly recommend each person find a meaningful cause. Mine is Habitat for Humanity. It is my choice because at the end of the day, I can see progress. I once did a Thanksgiving at a soup kitchen. It was depressing. I knew that tomorrow the same people would be here. All I had to show for the day was empty bowls. I didn't fix a problem, I was helping a person get though one day.
After a day with Habitat, there are walls. Next week, there will be a roof. A few months and there's a house and a family. Years from now, I can drive by that house and point it out to my kid as something I did to make the world a better place.
With soup or even a nice piece of code, what have I left for the next generation to see? Little, I believe.
On the selfish side of the street, Habitat also gives me the opportunity to get some exercise. That's something I wouldn't get if I were using my computer skills for a charitable organization. Also, in a couple years, I plan to build my own house. Having worked with Habitat, I've learned skills that will save me money down the road. My working with Habitat has been very symbiotic.
Everyone should get out there and give back to the community. But, before you pigeonhole yourself into thinking your only skill is computer-related, ask yourself if there is anything else you can provide to the community that might be better utilized. I think you'll find hard labor benefits the community more than any computer project you can hack together (probably on company time {grin}).
InitZero
(I sure wish Slashdot would allow the PRE tag.)
Matt
It would NOT be fun.
Since June 5, I've been the person of which you speak.
If you have done a gnutella (or clone) search in the past few days, you probably have seen my name...
gnut> find anything CURRENT RESPONSES ----------------- 1) email matt@steinhoff.net for kiddie porn and anything 216.10.33.21:6345 size:80.854M ref:84279680 speed:10000It all started when I noticed that every query I submitted returned an html file. In that html file was a link to http://www.cybergirlsex.com/raw cash/click.cgi?tella...
gnut> find anything and everything CURRENT RESPONSES ----------------- 1) anything and everything.html 216.100.51.42:6345 size:2.83K ref:234946611 speed:10000 gnut> find nothing at all CURRENT RESPONSES ----------------- 1) nothing at all.html 216.100.51.42:6345 size:2.83K ref:117638272 speed:10000I figured that an ambitious person had hacked gnutella in order to promote the web site so that he'd get some extra cash. I sent email to the the owner of 216.100.51.42 and they promptly shut off the user's connection. I also sent email to cybergirlsex.com in hopes that they wouldn't pay the user 'tella' for the referrals. Spam shouldn't pay no matter how it is done, right?
Ever since I sent the email message to the domain admin for the porn site, my name and server address has been showing up in each and every gnutella response. Cause and effect (and a bit more) leads me to believe that the porn site was 'tella' and they are not happy that I've cut into their revenue stream.
With a bit of investigative work I was able to tie the user who is spamming gnutella with the user who admins the porn site and more than two dozen other domains.
I've got the guy booted off a number of services in the past few days but that isn't much help (though it does make me feel a bit better). It's like playing wack the mole; hit him in one place and he pops up again elsewhere. I'm getting hundreds of email messages from people either looking for child porn or wanting me dead for supplying child porn. (Of note, of course, I don't have any child porn so stop asking.)
I've contacted the FBI's computer crimes division and they are far more interested in the folks emailing me looking for kiddie porn than they are in getting rid of the slime ball spamming my email address. At least the kiddie porn angle got their attention or I imagine this wouldn't have even made their radar.
So, what can I do? I'm already filtering my email so that I don't have to read through hoards of email. (Did I mention that he has also signed me up to dozens of mailing lists?) What's next? While tracking and smacking the first day was exciting, today it's a bit of a drag.
Any good ideas will return my eternal gratitude. (Any especially nasty ideas and I'll give you the guy's email address. {grin})
Matt Steinhoff
(I had posted this as an 'Ask Slashdot' a few days ago and, of course, Slashdot would rather post Anime Moves on DVD.)
I've never seen anybody become emotionally attatched to a database platform the way one would a great car or a computer.
Warning: Offtopic.
Oracle people are as rabid as they come. If you put a Microsoft SQL Server guy in a room with an Oracle dude and a SyBase person for the purposes of discussing the relative merits of one database over the other, none would come out alive.
Databases are often as personal as programming languages. People get attached.
InitZero
They'd have to: a) trace down everyone serving those copyrighted files, using nothing but their IP. b) sue each and every one of them.
Just as you don't have to catch every fish in the sea to keep from going home hungry, you need not catch every violator.
How many times have you seen a police officier stop one speeder out of a hundred? 'But, but', you stammer, 'what about all the other speeders? You didn't ticket them.'.
The goal of law enforcement isn't to keep every law from being broken all the time, only to catch enough violators that society doesn't fall apart. Cops deter. That's their job.
I'm all for copyright owners going after those who steal their product. If someone steals my computer, I'm going to go after that person. Same goes for my intellectual propertly. (Granted, the former is probably worth more than the latter.)
InitZero
It works fairly well, but I've only used it up to around 15 gigs.
I've got 90 drives and just over 970 gig of data under the AIX's logical volume manager. It is rock solid and a dream when dealing with with that much storage.
My company is pretty evenly split between Sun and IBM (though we're phasing out Sun as we upgrade) right now. I've used the semi-Sun product Veritas to work with the 1.1 TB we have running under Sun. While I'll be the first to conceed that the Veritas product looks pretty and for a novice might be easier to use, I don't feel it is as sturdy a product as AIX's LVM.
The downside to LVM is that it's utilitarian. Whereas Veritas has a pretty GUI that turns drives icons different colors depending on their state, LVM is text-based even when running under the GUI smit interface. That could be one of the reasons I prefer LVM.
Over the years, I've moved more and more stuff off AIX and Solaris and it has made sense. One of the prime reasons I haven't moved more is that Linux didn't have Oracle, a JFS or a good tool for managing large amounts of data. Oracle fell. JFS fell. Now I see LVM on the horizon.
If Linux keeps progressing at this rate, I'm going to have to start putting my data where my mouth is. There is soon to be no more 'if only Linux had {hesitation}, I'd move {service} and cut our costs by {huge figure}'. My {hesitations} are just about gone.
InitZero
Couldn't this been seen as libel in a way?
I don't see any damages and this would fall under slander if there was a crime here but I don't see one.
If I call you an uninformed monkey buttocks to your face with no one else in the room, that's rude but not slander. Since I'm sure the background check company or the potential employer didn't send out a press release announcing that she was a felon, there is no slander.
As with a tree falling in the woods, if there is no one around to hear it, the crash isn't slander.
Even if either company had published in the local newspaper 'we have done a full backgound check on Ms. Job Candidate and it indicates that you are a wanted felon', she would probably have little grounds to sue. Truth is the prime defense to libel.
If the National Rag prints 'Commander Taco sexually molests nano-monkeys', they are in for a beating. (Assuming, of course, that Mr. Taco doesn't sexually molest nano-monkeys. (I, by the way, feel confident in making that assumption.))
However, if the National Rag prints 'Commander Taco's butler of nine years says the geek sexually molests nano-monkeys', that's okay and isn't libel so long as the Rag doesn't know it to be false. And, even then, given that Mr. Taco is rather famous, probably would not be libel.
she can claim a week's worth of wages, plus damages
Once again, I don't see any damages. The felony report was only given to the employer and not the public. If the only thing keeping her from the job was the bad report, she might have grounds for a week of pay but I doubt it. What does her contract say?
InitZero
[Courtney Love] has a lot of experience under her belt.
Um... Er... Well... Uh, huh-huh.
Was that a compliment or are you saying she puts out a lot? Either way, I think she'd take well your words.
InitZero
The data isn't lost, you just have to be online long enough to hit the host that has it. If the government would just run gnutella for a few days, they'd have that classified data back in no time. Not to mention some sweet Jenna Jameson!
InitZero
You should never have security logs the machine those logs secure. While I find the printer idea pretty darn cool, syslogd directed to another box would be fine, too.
Assuming, of course, that machine was secure.
I worked at a company where the most secured system in the entire building wasn't the firewall, mainframe or the accouting system. It was the syslog box.
The only service the box was running was syslogd. It allowed no telnet access and all ports except 514 were closed into and out of that system. In order to physically touch the machine, you had to break a seal on the box (literally, a locked plywood box with a fan in the back) to get in. (Remember, seals are not locks and locks are not seals.)
Our position was that you couldn't keep people from doing bad things but that if someone did a bad thing, we wanted to be able to hunt said person down and render vengeance not heard of in thousands of years.
Of course, not even this system was fool-proof given UDP and that the network had to be up. But nothing is perfect.
Dot matrix printers rock.
InitZero