As I indicated in my initial post, IBM's newer machines don't allow you to change the IPL level from software. Not through mpcfg. Not through diag. Not through smit.
The only way to adjust the IPL is by visiting the box and touching the control panel. Worse yet, the IPL change only affects the next boot and you can only change the IPL when the machine is down cold.
This is hardly useful.
I would like to be able to disable the long IPL in cases where I've shut the machine down cleanly and just want a reboot. Were the machine to die hard, I can understand why a longer IPL would be needed. Or, on an off-hours boot, a longer diag might be nice.
But, for generic reboots, the boxes should boot in much less time.
I administer many RS/6000s (S70s, H70s, S7a, etc.), several of them clustered. As a matter of fact, I've never been able to boot one to just the operating system in under 20 minutes.
Most of the time, the IPL takes 35 minutes to an hour for the S7*s. Even with a fast IPL (which can no longer be done by software but requires touching the box (are you listening IBM?)), I'm gazing upon least 25 minutes.
My Sun Enterprise servers can be booted in under six minutes. Every time.
That said, I'd take AIX over any other operating system on the planet for a high-end server. Linux is great for unclustered single-service-per-box applications or many light services on a single box but, for 'real' work, AIX on RS/6000 is the way to go.
As for AIX's JFS, it is amazing. Seven years, several disasters and not a single bit lost. Coupled with AIX's logical volume manager (LVM) and SMIT, well, there just isn't a better place to be.
Init 'I Ain't Paid By IBM But I Would Carry Their Child' Zero
Don't let technology blind you to the fact that this is a simply copyright violation.
I was Managing Editor of my college newspaper. We distributed a few thousand copies of the newspaper for free every week. That didn't change the fact that all the information in the paper was copyrighted.
Should someone have taken the content of our newspaper and republished it, I would have had our lawyer on the war path. Just because the newspaper is distributed for free does not mean that you can do anything you want with the content.
Fast forward to the television programs in question.
Yes, the television stations are sending the signal out for free. But, that content is copyrighted and therefore protected. One can't just take that content and do with it as he pleases.
It all comes down something my father told me years ago. "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one." If you create the content you can do whatever the heck you want with it. But you can't steal someone else's content for your personal advantage.
Probably because you spend more time online than interacting with her. Probably because you are both immature. Probably because you have given her reason not to trust you. Probably because you get email from sexxxy69@aol.com on a regular basis.
She snooped through my computer and broke into my email 'cause
...you're a lousy sys admin and don't feel that strong passwords and encryption are necessary. Let's just hope that you get better at such 'trivial' tasks before you get a job protecting my online credit card transactions.
Well you can imagine that if you start looking for evidence, you're bound to come up with something.
I believe that both Bill Clinton and Bill Gates used that same logic in their recent court battles. We can't help you unless you first admit that you have a problem.
As much as I love her, I don't, won't, and refuse to share email, passwords, websites I read, and whatever's on my computer. Am I paranoid or overboard?
Yes.
Love -- real love -- is stronger than root.
Am I the only one here who thinks this guy's problem has nothing to do with technology, passwords or even nerds? The guy obviously is trying to hid something. (And doing it poorly, I might add.) The girl obviously has reasons to suspect that the guy is doing something behind her back. And she's a psychotic bitch for breaking into his stuff. But, once again, this has nothing to do with anything technology-related.
This tale of woe could just have easily been 'My shack-up honey used a hair pin to break into my foot locker where she found letters from old girlfriends and a stack of crusty Playboys. She has violated my privacy and I'm going to dump her. Yeah, I knew that she had asked me to throw away the letters and Playboys (and I agreed) but that's beside the point. The point is that I got caught red-handed. No! Er, I mean the point is that my privacy was violated.
I don't have anything to hide,
You ever notice how those with something to hide are always the ones with something to hide? ('I am not a crook.'; 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman.'; 'IE is just a browser.'; etc.)
Has anything similar happened to you?
No. I wouldn't get involved with a snoop nor would I give anyone I love the boot over root.
Do you think there's something wrong with NOT sharing email and passwords?"
I think there's something wrong with any personal relationship that requires trust through verification. However, your situation has nothing to do with email or passwords and until you come to understand that, you will never be able to have a happy, healthy interpersonal relationship.
or, have people drink it before they go swim at night, so people can see each other/to help a lifegaurd see people who are drowning
In the 1970s when my family got its pool, there was a chemical you could buy and add to your pool that would turn purple if anyone urinated in the pool. The idea being that folks wouldn't pee in the pool if they knew they'd be caught.
My parent's never bought the additive because they were afraid that their friends would compete to see who could create the longest purple stream.
Init-"I Am So Offtopic It Hurts"-Zero
(PS: Instead of the chemical, we bought a sign that said 'we don't swim in your toilet, please don't piss in our pool'. {shakes head} The 70's. Gotta love 'em.)
They probably should have known this, but it appears their lawyers are a bunch of fuck-ups.
That ain't nice. Give 'em a break.
All of Microsoft's good lawyers are busy playing with Judge Jackson. Bill probably saw a television commercial featuring one of Seattle's finest, talked him out of chasing ambulances and hired him to write the contract. It was an honest mistake.
(I just wish I was in CA or OR instead of FL.)
I love for one of the Slashdot crew to call Best Buy and see how their sales figures yesterday. I wouldn't be surprised if they did better yesterday than in the pre-Christmas rush.
InitZero
Newspapers Are -- More Often Than Not -- Right
on
China Banning Win2k
·
· Score: 1
Except that newspapers never admit any mistakes. They just never mention it again.
Disclaimer: I got my first newspaper job at age 12 and have worked at four newspapers in three different chains over the last 15 or so years. (Oh, yeah, this post is also very much off-topic.)
That out of the way, newspapers admit mistakes just about every day. In 1999 alone, we published 388 corrections according to our inhouse story database. That's up from 321 in 1998.
Factual corrections are almost always run. Spelling or grammer errors are never reported unless the error made the story inaccurate.
A mid-sized daily newspaper generates around one meg of ASCII text a day. According to wc, yesterday's newspaper was 152,965 words. Those words were generated in fewer than 24 hours for the most part. I would bet that those 152k words had fewer errors than a novel of the same size.
The fact of the matter is, for writing history on the fly against tight deadlines and often harsh conditions (have you ever had to attend a county sewage meeting?), newspapers are far more accurate than they have any right to be.
Granted, when we screw up on A1, we will likely stick the correction at the bottom of A3. But, the correction is published.
So, in summary, be glad you live in a country that has a free press and give us a break because we are right far more often than we are wrong. Who could ask for more?
InitZero
Re: Chinese Government doesn't necessarily agree
on
China Banning Win2k
·
· Score: 1
Officials at several government ministries said they were unaware of such a policy.
The story is posted by a Chinese newspaper, and we all know how informed our own media is...
And the government has any better an idea as to what is going on? Right.
In China, more or less, the newspaper is run by the government. Since this story isn't that outlandish, I'd say the truth factor has got to be pretty high.
This is off topic but I'm ticked-off and will post this anyway.
I read the story and then took the link to Kurtz's rant. From there I saw a link that made my blood run cold.
You see, Mr. Kurtz didn't write 'Brent's Thirteen Facts of Email you Should Know' though he does take credit for doing so . Not only does he take credit for the thirteen facts he has applied his copyright to it lest someone steal it from him.
The real author is my friend Erynn. She sent the message on August 31, 1998 in an effort to save Bernard's life. Since then, the message has turned into a rather popular forward.
And, yet, folks who know they didn't write it continue to take credit for the content. How do they think they can get away with that?
The bigger question to come out of this Slashdot article is not whether or not technical support comics are funny but is Kurtz going to come clean about where he got the email facts.
First of all, this isn't a major security hole. All it does is allow someone to send email as you. While that would cause you or me to totally flip out, that's not a big concern to most people and certainly not to those who use WebTV.
My office has 1,200 users each with Windows NT and Outlook. I can tell you that fewer than 20 of those lock their workstation or logout at lunch. Anyone can use their mail client to send nasty messages. Does anyone care? No.
Which brings me to my grandmother. She's 78 and very open minded. She, however, didn't get a VCR till 1996. She was not and is not a candidate for a computer.
My grandmother got a WebTV for Christmas of 1998. She uses it twice a day (morning and night) to exchange email with her children and grandchildren.
It used to be that she got pictures of the family three or four times a year. Now, if I take digital pictures of a weekend BBQ, I can send them to her and she can see how the great-grandkids are growing.
Some will argue that a PC could have been configured just as simply as the WebTV. Yeah, you may be right. But for under $400, she was on the web in under an hour. And when she needs support, she calls WebTV and not me.
You won't find all of that in a PC-based solution that my grandmother would be happy with.
Re: Laptops should not be treated like desktops...
on
Laptop Pentium IIIs
·
· Score: 1
Laptops should not be treated like desktops...
A laptop is my desktop.
Computing power is cheaper than bandwidth. Until that changes, I want the most powerful laptop I can afford.
I've got a 400mHz IBM Thinkpad 600E with all the bells and whistles. It docks into a wonderful base station which gives me access to a 21" monitor and an ergo keyboard. When docked, it might as well be a desktop.
When undocked, I've got all the power of a desktop but in an easy to carry package. But most importantly, I've got the bulk of my data close (seven gig of it anyway). And that, my friends, is why laptops rock.
If I could trade CPU cycles for bandwidth, I would. The best laptop I ever owned was a Tandy 100. It was light, ran on double-A batteries and was more reliable than a tank (the 100 still boots, unlike the four laptops I've since owned).
At the time I was using the TRS-80, bandwidth was less expensive than power or storage so it made sense to use the 100 as a dumb terminal to the data center.
Times have changed. Now bandwidth is much more expensive than CPU cycles and disk space. So it makes sense to keep the data close.
Should the pendulum swing back the other direction, I suspect I'll be working from a Palm Pilot.
The 3Com box has an ISDN input, four ethernet ports, two analog phone jacks (so you can use the ISDN for voice, too), a DHCP server and is configured using a web browser. And more!
The box plugged in, did a self-diagnostic and was ready to go. It took fewer than 15 minutes to configure it to dial my office and my ISP. The web interface is great.
It dials on demand. Since it interfaces with your Linux box over the net, there is nothing to configure (I assume you already have TCP/IP working). I've got two linux boxes and an NT box hooked into mine. If you are dialing into a 3Com system (or something compatible), it'll do hardware data compression and a few other nifty features (light traffic over the D channel (DNS, etc.) so as to connect time (ie: money) on the B channels).
The list price is just under $400 which may seem a bit high compared to a $250 ISDN modem. I assure you, however, it's the quickest, easiest and most reliable way to get ISDN up and working.
Disclaimer: I don't have anything to do with 3Com, I just really like this product.
Since he paid for the domain registration, wouldnt he have a final say on the domain? If he refuses to accept any payment microsoft made ($35), wouldnt he be the owner of this domain?
In a word, no.
If I sent one month's payment to the company that holds the paper on your car|house, that doesn't change the fact that you hold the title to your car|home.
If anyone blatently violated GPL, they wouldn't live long enough to go to court. Raving hoards of Ms. Portman-lusting Slashdotters would find the violater and FIRST POST the person to death (if you know what I mean -- and I think you do), ending the event in the ultimate punishment: hot grits down his pants.
While not nearly as painful as having to play with lawyers, it is certainly much more quick and decisive.
Get an external electrical box. You know, the kind you'd hang on the outside of your house. They are waterproof and have all the cable ins and outs that you would ever need. Since they are sold in high-volume, they are less expensive than something built to milspec or specifically designed for computers.
Of course, the electrical boxes probably won't hold a generic PC without a bit of modification. Since the box will be headless and without floppy drives, keyboard, etc., you're probably better off just mounting the motherboard in the unit on its own.
That said, your greatest concern is going to be lightening, not water. If you wire the boxes with copper, you're making it an easy run from the mast to the wiring closet. For external applications, you *MUST* use fiber as it does not conduct electricity. (This, of couse, assumes that you don't want to fry your networking hardware. If you're okay with that, copper works great and is less expensive.)
Note: This will be an off-topic rant about Y2K insanity. Please ignore the contents of this post.
To be asking the question 'uh, what about that Y2K thing?' just 13 or so days from The Day, seems silly. If you haven't testing and retested by now, your best bet is to bend over and kiss your buttocks goodbye.
At my company, we have been doing testing and fixes for years. Since November, every change must be approved through the corporate headquarters. (The changes must be approved by the C*Os and their lawyers, not actually by people who know anything about computers.)
I had a perl CGI script that I needed to update. We have put a new system online and it used to be called "TEST" on the daily reports. Now that it was in production it was to be called "R5" for Release Five...
Original code snippit... $R5Name="TEST" ;
Updated code snippit... $R5Name="R5" ;
To make that change required three pages of paperwork describing the change, a test plan to make sure this change worked and a backout plan should this fail. It took a week and a half to get the change approved.
Somewhere between your 'uh, Y2K?' at T-minus 13 and counting and my piles of paperwork, there's probably a Happy Place.
To somewhat answer your question, you should test your Open Source systems in the same fashion you should have tested your closed source systems. Just because something is GPL doesn't mean that it somehow magically will work on January 1, 2000.
Further, just because someone else says that an application or operating system is Y2K compliant doesn't mean it has been checked or that it will work. If you haven't tested the system yourself, assume that it won't work. Heck, I have systems that I have checked myself extensively and I wouldn't bet my job on it let alone my life.
Conclusion: Stop wasting your time asking Slashdot if your systems are compliant and start doing some testing.
InitZero
Re: "absolutely untrue" is absolute nonsense
on
Suing the Spammers
·
· Score: 1
and very basic economics reveals that spam raises prices.
Spammers abuse other people's private property, raise the costs of everyone's Internet access,
That is absolutely untrue.
I'm paying less now for an ISP account than I ever had in the past. ($12 a month today compared to $54 a month in 1993.) If you take inflation into account, I bet you won't find anyone paying more for internet access today than they were five or ten years ago.
We all hate spam but the fact of the matter is, the consumer isn't being charged more because of spam. If consumers did see their costs go up as they got spam, I trust we would have stronger anti-spam laws.
InitZero
Re: Scanners -- Digimarc Respects robots.txt
on
IDs in Color Copies
·
· Score: 1
One of Digimarc's services they offer is you pay them some money and they report any use of your image they found on the web. By keeping an eye on my logs, I've noticed their crawlers perusing my server several times. Thoughall of the images on my site are mine (MINE MINE MINE!), I still don't like this idea.
I had the same problem. My web site has several hundred pictures (all mine) and it was common to have Digimarc transfer serveral hundred meg over the course of a week. Since I pay for bandwidth, this was a Bad Thing. I contacted Digimarc and was pleased with their answer. As with all good search engines, they respect the Robot Exclusion Standard. If you tell them not to index your site, they won't. Of course, that's good for me. If I was paying for the Digimarc service, however, I'd be very upset. The logical end would be that if I had was stealing graphics, I'd simply ask the Digimarc robot not to visit. I'm not sure if Digimarc's customers have every thought about that. I'm sure Digimarc has but, of course, they aren't going to say it too loudly. Even if Digimarc didn't respect robots.txt, you could always block them at the http or tcp/ip level.
This is a denial of service attack. Plain and simple. 'Duh!', you say, 'and for a good cause.' I won't debate the merits of the World Trade Organization. That's for you to decide. I will, however, point out that this is a Really Bad Thing to do. In the good old days, a sit-in only affected the business you were targetting. This affects all of us who use the net. When colored folks sat down in a diner and refused the leave, the diner was the only business that was affected. When nutballs (er, concerned citizens) start a denial of service attack against the WTO's web page, that not only affects the WTO but also the usefulness of the entire net. That is wrong and short sighted. It will also have a meaningless effect on the conference. The news media love to shoot video of folks standing outside a building with signs. Can you see the nightly news doing a bar graph showing ping times to the WTO web site before, during and after the protest? I can't.
In the meantime, don't slow down my net connection.
Y2K has been blown out of proportion by geeks such as myself (and probably you, too) who wanted more toys, more attention, more respect, chicks and we saw this as a way to get it. Sure, there are real Y2K issues but you're don't have to worry about your bank account, planes falling out of the sky or milk being stamped with an expiration date of February 14, 1900. It just ain't going to happen. The Y2K Situation... It ain't a bug. Even in the 1960s and 1970s when the programs were written, everyone in the industry with half a brain knew that there would be problems as the millennium came if the code was not changed. Programmers and management just didn't care because disk space and computer memory was very expensive and no one anticipated that the programs would last 10, 20 or even 30 years in some cases. That we have a Y2K problem is a testament to how rock-solid computers were built then and how good the early programmers were. Most people upgrade their desktop computer every three years and their software every one or two. These mainframes have been running basically the same hardware and software since Nixon was in office and Godfather was on the big screen. Don't you think that the folks who wrote such reliable software have the skills to update their applications to support four-digit numbers? I do. (I'm currently administrating a mainframe that was bought by my company before I was even born.)
The Y2K Panic... The computer geek stereotype isn't totally inaccurate. Those of us in information systems don't get much attention in a business environment. Corporately-speaking, we are often under- funded and over-worked. Part of that is our own fault because when computer geeks rise to management they are as shy at the boardroom table as they were at the school dance. The other part of the problem is that it's not easy to understand what it is we do. It's easy to understand a fleet of trucks or a building. Not many people can grasp bytes, mHz and that millions of electrons are traveling close to the speed of light through sand just to store data on fancy rust (no kidding). When the information system manager tried to get money and time out of upper-management in the mid-1990's to fix the Y2K issues, management didn't get it. It was seen as an issue that could wait and was a lot less important than getting onto the internet or buying some new trucks. Besides, it was going to be expensive and would show no return on investment. It was just dull maintenance. How can you put a positive spin on that for the shareholders?
(
I'm not making this up. Carol was my former boss...
> Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 17:09:13 -0500 > From: Carol Carpenter > To: Matt Steinhoff > Subject: Re: Outstanding Issues > > At 05:03 PM 2/19/98 -0500, you wrote: > > Which reminds me, we are schedueled for a Brite Year 2000 > > software upgrade sometime this quarter. > > Year 2000 upgrade, in 1998? I don't get. > > Carol
)
So what's a geek to do? We know that if the Y2K issues aren't addressed, heads are going to roll and it won't be the heads of the people who wouldn't release the purse strings, it'll be us. It's at this point that we start concocting disaster scenarios. Planes will fall out of the sky. Banks will lose your money. The stock market will crash. Life as we know it will cease to exist. Management started to take notice. Geeks were getting budgets that would allow the problems to be fixed. Then world dynamics changed thanks the to internet. Geeks who couldn't get chicks in high school were escorting supermodels to the Oscars and making billions of dollar. And my grandmother got a computer for Christmas. And the Y2K problem snowballed because the Unwashed Masses thought they knew something about computers. Computers were on the brain and us geeks milked it for all that it was worth. Folks started throwing money at us and we gained respect thanks to Y2K and the boost Y2K got from the internet rush. We became addicted to the fame and fortune. We kept cranking out horror stories. The telecommuniation system will shut down. The power grid will shut down. Nuclear weapons will launch all on their own. Pop culture then began to endorse the Y2K end-of-the-world panic and the snowball got even bigger. Cottage industries started to spring up. Do you have your three-month supply of food and generator? Advertising agencies start to use the Y2K hook (see Nike). It's at this point we geeks begin to see what we started and wanted to put the cat back in the bag. We tell folks that it's not a big deal, that most systems are already fixed or close to being fixed. We let folks know about the safeguards we have in effect. We remind people that everything is backed-up to several places including good old fashioned paper. Worst case, we tell you, it may take a few days or weeks to find all the glitches that we missed come January 1. Minor stuff. Nothing to freak out about. But, of course, it's too late. Folks have already started hoarding their bread. Radio talk show hosts are already whipping the Unwashed Masses into a frenzy. And you know what the irony of this entire situation is? It could have been prevented. If Joy had just gone to Prom with me instead of that low-life football player, I would have more self-esteem and would not have incited a world-wide, society-ending panic.
Conclusion... Don't worry. We've got the situation under control.
Y2K Side note... To the folks who think that buying gold is a good idea in order to ride-out the financial turmoil of the next few years, get real. Why is gold valuable? - people like it for jewelry, a luxury item - it's the conductive metal used in most computers and other high-tech electrical stuff What do you suppose will happen if society as we know it ends, the power grid fails and there is a nuclear holocaust? I'll give you a hint. Gold will be devalued. Who is going to be wearing gold when they have to raise their own food and struggle for the most basic of human needs? And if computers caused the near-extinction of mankind, do you think there will be much cause for the highly-conductive metal? If you want to have a negotiable substance after the apocalypse, start stock-piling gasoline. Folks will still need to get around, power their generators and harvest their crops.
InitZero
Re:...but why? -- Radio Transmitter. Right.
on
MP3 Jukebox That Rox
·
· Score: 1
i DO however like the FM transmitter feature.
Nice idea. But you will be disappointed. It is ultra-low power. You might get 50 to 100 feet out of it. If you are very lucky. Most of the time you get less. Old wireless microphones used to use FM transmitters. You can pick up a transmitter at RadioShack for $12 that'll do the same thing.
I'm with you on the price, however. For $1,200, the item's list price, you could put mucho very a lot of disk space (and them some) in a box you already own.
When was the last time anyone ate up four gig of memory? Or even two?
I've got an IBM RS/6000 S7A with four-gig of RAM and 12 processors serving a multi-gig Oracle database accessed by 300-400 users all day long. It doesn't use four gig of memory. (It uses about two-thirds but most of that is cache.)
What do you plan on running under Linux that would justify 32 gig of memory, let alone 64 gig?
And where are you going to find a motherboard and chipset that supports 64 gig?
Yes, it would be nice if Linux would support gobs of memory. But, from a practicle standpoint, what's the point?
(Yes, I realize that Bill Gates got in trouble for making similar statements (ie: 640k).)
I was in our scummy local place and I actually saw a PC being marketed as a 500 Mhz, and down the tag a bit it said "Clock Speed Increased for Maximum Performance". It made me sick
I don't see the problem. A computer store over-clocked a PC to squeeze out every little bit of speed. Further, it labled the product as having had its clock speed increased.
Had the computer store not let the consumer know that the chip had been over-clocked, I can see why the dealer might be walking the line. But there was full disclosure.
Light overclocking is a relatively safe way of getting a few more cycles out of your processor. Don't flame a store just because they overclock.
Slashdot Mirror
As I indicated in my initial post, IBM's newer machines don't allow you to change the IPL level from software. Not through mpcfg. Not through diag. Not through smit.
The only way to adjust the IPL is by visiting the box and touching the control panel. Worse yet, the IPL change only affects the next boot and you can only change the IPL when the machine is down cold.
This is hardly useful.
I would like to be able to disable the long IPL in cases where I've shut the machine down cleanly and just want a reboot. Were the machine to die hard, I can understand why a longer IPL would be needed. Or, on an off-hours boot, a longer diag might be nice.
But, for generic reboots, the boxes should boot in much less time.
InitZero
I administer many RS/6000s (S70s, H70s, S7a, etc.), several of them clustered. As a matter of fact, I've never been able to boot one to just the operating system in under 20 minutes.
Most of the time, the IPL takes 35 minutes to an hour for the S7*s. Even with a fast IPL (which can no longer be done by software but requires touching the box (are you listening IBM?)), I'm gazing upon least 25 minutes.
My Sun Enterprise servers can be booted in under six minutes. Every time.
That said, I'd take AIX over any other operating system on the planet for a high-end server. Linux is great for unclustered single-service-per-box applications or many light services on a single box but, for 'real' work, AIX on RS/6000 is the way to go.
As for AIX's JFS, it is amazing. Seven years, several disasters and not a single bit lost. Coupled with AIX's logical volume manager (LVM) and SMIT, well, there just isn't a better place to be.
Init 'I Ain't Paid By IBM But I Would Carry Their Child' Zero
Don't let technology blind you to the fact that this is a simply copyright violation.
I was Managing Editor of my college newspaper. We distributed a few thousand copies of the newspaper for free every week. That didn't change the fact that all the information in the paper was copyrighted.
Should someone have taken the content of our newspaper and republished it, I would have had our lawyer on the war path. Just because the newspaper is distributed for free does not mean that you can do anything you want with the content.
Fast forward to the television programs in question.
Yes, the television stations are sending the signal out for free. But, that content is copyrighted and therefore protected. One can't just take that content and do with it as he pleases.
It all comes down something my father told me years ago. "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one." If you create the content you can do whatever the heck you want with it. But you can't steal someone else's content for your personal advantage.
Duh.
Init "Steal My Content and Die" Zero
"Due to recent events with my live-in girlfriend,
<Dr. Laura>Shack-up honey.<Dr. Laura>
she is very unhappy and untrustful of me. Why?
Probably because you spend more time online than interacting with her. Probably because you are both immature. Probably because you have given her reason not to trust you. Probably because you get email from sexxxy69@aol.com on a regular basis.
She snooped through my computer and broke into my email 'cause
...you're a lousy sys admin and don't feel that strong passwords and encryption are necessary. Let's just hope that you get better at such 'trivial' tasks before you get a job protecting my online credit card transactions.
Well you can imagine that if you start looking for evidence, you're bound to come up with something.
I believe that both Bill Clinton and Bill Gates used that same logic in their recent court battles. We can't help you unless you first admit that you have a problem.
As much as I love her, I don't, won't, and refuse to share email, passwords, websites I read, and whatever's on my computer. Am I paranoid or overboard?
Yes.
Love -- real love -- is stronger than root.
Am I the only one here who thinks this guy's problem has nothing to do with technology, passwords or even nerds? The guy obviously is trying to hid something. (And doing it poorly, I might add.) The girl obviously has reasons to suspect that the guy is doing something behind her back. And she's a psychotic bitch for breaking into his stuff. But, once again, this has nothing to do with anything technology-related.
This tale of woe could just have easily been 'My shack-up honey used a hair pin to break into my foot locker where she found letters from old girlfriends and a stack of crusty Playboys. She has violated my privacy and I'm going to dump her. Yeah, I knew that she had asked me to throw away the letters and Playboys (and I agreed) but that's beside the point. The point is that I got caught red-handed. No! Er, I mean the point is that my privacy was violated.
I don't have anything to hide,
You ever notice how those with something to hide are always the ones with something to hide? ('I am not a crook.'; 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman.'; 'IE is just a browser.'; etc.)
Has anything similar happened to you?
No. I wouldn't get involved with a snoop nor would I give anyone I love the boot over root.
Do you think there's something wrong with NOT sharing email and passwords?"
I think there's something wrong with any personal relationship that requires trust through verification. However, your situation has nothing to do with email or passwords and until you come to understand that, you will never be able to have a happy, healthy interpersonal relationship.
Init 'soon-to-be-married' Zero
In the 1970s when my family got its pool, there was a chemical you could buy and add to your pool that would turn purple if anyone urinated in the pool. The idea being that folks wouldn't pee in the pool if they knew they'd be caught.
My parent's never bought the additive because they were afraid that their friends would compete to see who could create the longest purple stream.
Init-"I Am So Offtopic It Hurts"-Zero
(PS: Instead of the chemical, we bought a sign that said 'we don't swim in your toilet, please don't piss in our pool'. {shakes head} The 70's. Gotta love 'em.)
That ain't nice. Give 'em a break.
All of Microsoft's good lawyers are busy playing with Judge Jackson. Bill probably saw a television commercial featuring one of Seattle's finest, talked him out of chasing ambulances and hired him to write the contract. It was an honest mistake.
(I just wish I was in CA or OR instead of FL.)
I love for one of the Slashdot crew to call Best Buy and see how their sales figures yesterday. I wouldn't be surprised if they did better yesterday than in the pre-Christmas rush.
InitZero
Disclaimer: I got my first newspaper job at age 12 and have worked at four newspapers in three different chains over the last 15 or so years. (Oh, yeah, this post is also very much off-topic.)
That out of the way, newspapers admit mistakes just about every day. In 1999 alone, we published 388 corrections according to our inhouse story database. That's up from 321 in 1998.
Factual corrections are almost always run. Spelling or grammer errors are never reported unless the error made the story inaccurate.
A mid-sized daily newspaper generates around one meg of ASCII text a day. According to wc, yesterday's newspaper was 152,965 words. Those words were generated in fewer than 24 hours for the most part. I would bet that those 152k words had fewer errors than a novel of the same size.
The fact of the matter is, for writing history on the fly against tight deadlines and often harsh conditions (have you ever had to attend a county sewage meeting?), newspapers are far more accurate than they have any right to be.
Granted, when we screw up on A1, we will likely stick the correction at the bottom of A3. But, the correction is published.
So, in summary, be glad you live in a country that has a free press and give us a break because we are right far more often than we are wrong. Who could ask for more?
InitZero
Officials at several government ministries said they were unaware of such a policy.
The story is posted by a Chinese newspaper, and we all know how informed our own media is...
And the government has any better an idea as to what is going on? Right.
In China, more or less, the newspaper is run by the government. Since this story isn't that outlandish, I'd say the truth factor has got to be pretty high.
InitZero
This is off topic but I'm ticked-off and will post this anyway.
I read the story and then took the link to Kurtz's rant. From there I saw a link that made my blood run cold.
You see, Mr. Kurtz didn't write 'Brent's Thirteen Facts of Email you Should Know' though he does take credit for doing so . Not only does he take credit for the thirteen facts he has applied his copyright to it lest someone steal it from him.
The real author is my friend Erynn. She sent the message on August 31, 1998 in an effort to save Bernard's life. Since then, the message has turned into a rather popular forward.
And, yet, folks who know they didn't write it continue to take credit for the content. How do they think they can get away with that?
The bigger question to come out of this Slashdot article is not whether or not technical support comics are funny but is Kurtz going to come clean about where he got the email facts.
InitZero
First of all, this isn't a major security hole. All it does is allow someone to send email as you. While that would cause you or me to totally flip out, that's not a big concern to most people and certainly not to those who use WebTV.
My office has 1,200 users each with Windows NT and Outlook. I can tell you that fewer than 20 of those lock their workstation or logout at lunch. Anyone can use their mail client to send nasty messages. Does anyone care? No.
Which brings me to my grandmother. She's 78 and very open minded. She, however, didn't get a VCR till 1996. She was not and is not a candidate for a computer.
My grandmother got a WebTV for Christmas of 1998. She uses it twice a day (morning and night) to exchange email with her children and grandchildren.
It used to be that she got pictures of the family three or four times a year. Now, if I take digital pictures of a weekend BBQ, I can send them to her and she can see how the great-grandkids are growing.
Some will argue that a PC could have been configured just as simply as the WebTV. Yeah, you may be right. But for under $400, she was on the web in under an hour. And when she needs support, she calls WebTV and not me.
You won't find all of that in a PC-based solution that my grandmother would be happy with.
InitZero
...when does Y2K end?
InitZero
A laptop is my desktop.
Computing power is cheaper than bandwidth. Until that changes, I want the most powerful laptop I can afford.
I've got a 400mHz IBM Thinkpad 600E with all the bells and whistles. It docks into a wonderful base station which gives me access to a 21" monitor and an ergo keyboard. When docked, it might as well be a desktop.
When undocked, I've got all the power of a desktop but in an easy to carry package. But most importantly, I've got the bulk of my data close (seven gig of it anyway). And that, my friends, is why laptops rock.
If I could trade CPU cycles for bandwidth, I would. The best laptop I ever owned was a Tandy 100. It was light, ran on double-A batteries and was more reliable than a tank (the 100 still boots, unlike the four laptops I've since owned).
At the time I was using the TRS-80, bandwidth was less expensive than power or storage so it made sense to use the 100 as a dumb terminal to the data center.
Times have changed. Now bandwidth is much more expensive than CPU cycles and disk space. So it makes sense to keep the data close.
Should the pendulum swing back the other direction, I suspect I'll be working from a Palm Pilot.
InitZero
I don't know how well Linux supports the various ISDN modems out there. I do know that I didn't want to find out.
Even in this day and age of ISDN maturity, it is still pretty darn complicated compared to POTS and a well-supported 56kbps modem.
Having said that, four months ago, I got ISDN to my home. The smartest move I made was getting a 3Com OfficeConnect ISDN LAN Modem.
The 3Com box has an ISDN input, four ethernet ports, two analog phone jacks (so you can use the ISDN for voice, too), a DHCP server and is configured using a web browser. And more!
The box plugged in, did a self-diagnostic and was ready to go. It took fewer than 15 minutes to configure it to dial my office and my ISP. The web interface is great.
It dials on demand. Since it interfaces with your Linux box over the net, there is nothing to configure (I assume you already have TCP/IP working). I've got two linux boxes and an NT box hooked into mine. If you are dialing into a 3Com system (or something compatible), it'll do hardware data compression and a few other nifty features (light traffic over the D channel (DNS, etc.) so as to connect time (ie: money) on the B channels).
The list price is just under $400 which may seem a bit high compared to a $250 ISDN modem. I assure you, however, it's the quickest, easiest and most reliable way to get ISDN up and working.
Disclaimer: I don't have anything to do with 3Com, I just really like this product.
InitZero
In a word, no.
If I sent one month's payment to the company that holds the paper on your car|house, that doesn't change the fact that you hold the title to your car|home.
InitZero
If anyone blatently violated GPL, they wouldn't live long enough to go to court. Raving hoards of Ms. Portman-lusting Slashdotters would find the violater and FIRST POST the person to death (if you know what I mean -- and I think you do), ending the event in the ultimate punishment: hot grits down his pants.
While not nearly as painful as having to play with lawyers, it is certainly much more quick and decisive.
InitZero
Get an external electrical box. You know, the kind you'd hang on the outside of your house. They are waterproof and have all the cable ins and outs that you would ever need. Since they are sold in high-volume, they are less expensive than something built to milspec or specifically designed for computers.
Of course, the electrical boxes probably won't hold a generic PC without a bit of modification. Since the box will be headless and without floppy drives, keyboard, etc., you're probably better off just mounting the motherboard in the unit on its own.
That said, your greatest concern is going to be lightening, not water. If you wire the boxes with copper, you're making it an easy run from the mast to the wiring closet. For external applications, you *MUST* use fiber as it does not conduct electricity. (This, of couse, assumes that you don't want to fry your networking hardware. If you're okay with that, copper works great and is less expensive.)
InitZero
Note: This will be an off-topic rant about Y2K insanity. Please ignore the contents of this post.
To be asking the question 'uh, what about that Y2K thing?' just 13 or so days from The Day, seems silly. If you haven't testing and retested by now, your best bet is to bend over and kiss your buttocks goodbye.
At my company, we have been doing testing and fixes for years. Since November, every change must be approved through the corporate headquarters. (The changes must be approved by the C*Os and their lawyers, not actually by people who know anything about computers.)
I had a perl CGI script that I needed to update. We have put a new system online and it used to be called "TEST" on the daily reports. Now that it was in production it was to be called "R5" for Release Five...
Original code snippit...$R5Name="TEST" ;
Updated code snippit...
$R5Name="R5" ;
To make that change required three pages of paperwork describing the change, a test plan to make sure this change worked and a backout plan should this fail. It took a week and a half to get the change approved.
Somewhere between your 'uh, Y2K?' at T-minus 13 and counting and my piles of paperwork, there's probably a Happy Place.
To somewhat answer your question, you should test your Open Source systems in the same fashion you should have tested your closed source systems. Just because something is GPL doesn't mean that it somehow magically will work on January 1, 2000.
Further, just because someone else says that an application or operating system is Y2K compliant doesn't mean it has been checked or that it will work. If you haven't tested the system yourself, assume that it won't work. Heck, I have systems that I have checked myself extensively and I wouldn't bet my job on it let alone my life.
Conclusion: Stop wasting your time asking Slashdot if your systems are compliant and start doing some testing.
InitZero
Basic economics do not apply to the net.
(Yet.)
InitZero
That is absolutely untrue.
I'm paying less now for an ISP account than I ever had in the past. ($12 a month today compared to $54 a month in 1993.) If you take inflation into account, I bet you won't find anyone paying more for internet access today than they were five or ten years ago.
We all hate spam but the fact of the matter is, the consumer isn't being charged more because of spam. If consumers did see their costs go up as they got spam, I trust we would have stronger anti-spam laws.
InitZero
I had the same problem. My web site has several hundred pictures (all mine) and it was common to have Digimarc transfer serveral hundred meg over the course of a week. Since I pay for bandwidth, this was a Bad Thing. I contacted Digimarc and was pleased with their answer. As with all good search engines, they respect the Robot Exclusion Standard. If you tell them not to index your site, they won't. Of course, that's good for me. If I was paying for the Digimarc service, however, I'd be very upset. The logical end would be that if I had was stealing graphics, I'd simply ask the Digimarc robot not to visit. I'm not sure if Digimarc's customers have every thought about that. I'm sure Digimarc has but, of course, they aren't going to say it too loudly. Even if Digimarc didn't respect robots.txt, you could always block them at the http or tcp/ip level.
InitZero
This is a denial of service attack. Plain and simple.
'Duh!', you say, 'and for a good cause.'
I won't debate the merits of the World Trade Organization. That's for you to decide.
I will, however, point out that this is a Really Bad Thing to do. In the good old days, a sit-in only affected the business you were targetting. This affects all of us who use the net.
When colored folks sat down in a diner and refused the leave, the diner was the only business that was affected.
When nutballs (er, concerned citizens) start a denial of service attack against the WTO's web page, that not only affects the WTO but also the usefulness of the entire net.
That is wrong and short sighted. It will also have a meaningless effect on the conference.
The news media love to shoot video of folks standing outside a building with signs. Can you see the nightly news doing a bar graph showing ping times to the WTO web site before, during and after the protest?
I can't.
In the meantime, don't slow down my net connection.
InitZero
Y2K has been blown out of proportion by geeks such as myself (and probably you, too) who wanted more toys, more attention, more respect, chicks and we saw this as a way to get it.
Sure, there are real Y2K issues but you're don't have to worry about your bank account, planes falling out of the sky or milk being stamped with an expiration date of February 14, 1900.
It just ain't going to happen.
The Y2K Situation...
It ain't a bug.
Even in the 1960s and 1970s when the programs were written, everyone in the industry with half a brain knew that there would be problems as the millennium came if the code was not changed.
Programmers and management just didn't care because disk space and computer memory was very expensive and no one anticipated that the programs would last 10, 20 or even 30 years in some cases.
That we have a Y2K problem is a testament to how rock-solid computers were built then and how good the early programmers were. Most people upgrade their desktop computer every three years and their software every one or two. These mainframes have been running basically the same hardware and software since Nixon was in office and Godfather was on the big screen.
Don't you think that the folks who wrote such reliable software have the skills to update their applications to support four-digit numbers? I do.
(I'm currently administrating a mainframe that was bought by my company before I was even born.)
The Y2K Panic...
The computer geek stereotype isn't totally inaccurate.
Those of us in information systems don't get much attention in a business environment. Corporately-speaking, we are often under- funded and over-worked.
Part of that is our own fault because when computer geeks rise to management they are as shy at the boardroom table as they were at the school dance. The other part of the problem is that it's not easy to understand what it is we do. It's easy to understand a fleet of trucks or a building. Not many people can grasp bytes, mHz and that millions of electrons are traveling close to the speed of light through sand just to store data on fancy rust (no kidding).
When the information system manager tried to get money and time out of upper-management in the mid-1990's to fix the Y2K issues, management didn't get it. It was seen as an issue that could wait and was a lot less important than getting onto the internet or buying some new trucks. Besides, it was going to be expensive and would show no return on investment. It was just dull maintenance.
How can you put a positive spin on that for the shareholders?
(
I'm not making this up. Carol was my former boss...
> Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 17:09:13 -0500
> From: Carol Carpenter
> To: Matt Steinhoff
> Subject: Re: Outstanding Issues
>
> At 05:03 PM 2/19/98 -0500, you wrote:
> > Which reminds me, we are schedueled for a Brite Year 2000
> > software upgrade sometime this quarter.
>
> Year 2000 upgrade, in 1998? I don't get.
>
> Carol
)
So what's a geek to do? We know that if the Y2K issues aren't addressed, heads are going to roll and it won't be the heads of the people who wouldn't release the purse strings, it'll be us.
It's at this point that we start concocting disaster scenarios. Planes will fall out of the sky. Banks will lose your money. The stock market will crash. Life as we know it will cease to exist.
Management started to take notice. Geeks were getting budgets that would allow the problems to be fixed.
Then world dynamics changed thanks the to internet. Geeks who couldn't get chicks in high school were escorting supermodels to the Oscars and making billions of dollar. And my grandmother got a computer for Christmas.
And the Y2K problem snowballed because the Unwashed Masses thought they knew something about computers. Computers were on the brain and us geeks milked it for all that it was worth.
Folks started throwing money at us and we gained respect thanks to Y2K and the boost Y2K got from the internet rush.
We became addicted to the fame and fortune. We kept cranking out horror stories. The telecommuniation system will shut down. The power grid will shut down. Nuclear weapons will launch all on their own.
Pop culture then began to endorse the Y2K end-of-the-world panic and the snowball got even bigger.
Cottage industries started to spring up. Do you have your three-month supply of food and generator? Advertising agencies start to use the Y2K hook (see Nike).
It's at this point we geeks begin to see what we started and wanted to put the cat back in the bag. We tell folks that it's not a big deal, that most systems are already fixed or close to being fixed. We let folks know about the safeguards we have in effect. We remind people that everything is backed-up to several places including good old fashioned paper.
Worst case, we tell you, it may take a few days or weeks to find all the glitches that we missed come January 1. Minor stuff. Nothing to freak out about.
But, of course, it's too late. Folks have already started hoarding their bread. Radio talk show hosts are already whipping the Unwashed Masses into a frenzy.
And you know what the irony of this entire situation is?
It could have been prevented. If Joy had just gone to Prom with me instead of that low-life football player, I would have more self-esteem and would not have incited a world-wide, society-ending panic.
Conclusion...
Don't worry. We've got the situation under control.
Y2K Side note...
To the folks who think that buying gold is a good idea in order to ride-out the financial turmoil of the next few years, get real.
Why is gold valuable?
- people like it for jewelry, a luxury item
- it's the conductive metal used in most computers and other high-tech electrical stuff
What do you suppose will happen if society as we know it ends, the power grid fails and there is a nuclear holocaust?
I'll give you a hint. Gold will be devalued.
Who is going to be wearing gold when they have to raise their own food and struggle for the most basic of human needs? And if computers caused the near-extinction of mankind, do you think there will be much cause for the highly-conductive metal?
If you want to have a negotiable substance after the apocalypse, start stock-piling gasoline. Folks will still need to get around, power their generators and harvest their crops.
InitZero
Nice idea. But you will be disappointed. It is ultra-low power. You might get 50 to 100 feet out of it. If you are very lucky. Most of the time you get less. Old wireless microphones used to use FM transmitters. You can pick up a transmitter at RadioShack for $12 that'll do the same thing.
I'm with you on the price, however. For $1,200, the item's list price, you could put mucho very a lot of disk space (and them some) in a box you already own.
InitZero
I mean, really?
When was the last time anyone ate up four gig of memory? Or even two?
I've got an IBM RS/6000 S7A with four-gig of RAM and 12 processors serving a multi-gig Oracle database accessed by 300-400 users all day long. It doesn't use four gig of memory. (It uses about two-thirds but most of that is cache.)
What do you plan on running under Linux that would justify 32 gig of memory, let alone 64 gig?
And where are you going to find a motherboard and chipset that supports 64 gig?
Yes, it would be nice if Linux would support gobs of memory. But, from a practicle standpoint, what's the point?
(Yes, I realize that Bill Gates got in trouble for making similar statements (ie: 640k).)
InitZero
I don't see the problem. A computer store over-clocked a PC to squeeze out every little bit of speed. Further, it labled the product as having had its clock speed increased.
Had the computer store not let the consumer know that the chip had been over-clocked, I can see why the dealer might be walking the line. But there was full disclosure.
Light overclocking is a relatively safe way of getting a few more cycles out of your processor. Don't flame a store just because they overclock.
InitZero