I enjoy so called "open ended games" for a few minutes to a few hours, after that I feel that it is a waste of time.
All respect to Rockstar, the game is kickass, I just cannot help it but it leaves me all the time with the game unfinished and me bored to hell of it.
What I find interesting is that the type of games you mention above strike me as incredibly boring! I don't feel like I'm getting anything done, more like just trying to run a race fast enough.
It gets boring very quickly. But, with the "open ended" games, I get the feeling like I can do whatever I want. If I want to break into an airport and steal a plane and fly around, I can. Or, drive a car, or swim across the ocean, or go look for shellfish, or whatever.
Typical gameplay might go something like this:
I do missions for a while, and get bored. Then, I grab a bike, and try to see how much money I can get for an "insane stunt bonus". After a while of that, I drive the bike into a lake, and start mowing down cops just to see what kind of gun I can get. Then, I buy a house and save game to shed the wanted level. (wouldn't it be neat to be able to mix/match Sims2 with GTA?) Do a mission or two. Grab a boat and do some jumps. Then, be a cab driver and try to get 5 people delivered before having to bail the cab. Etc.
If I could do this multi-player, it would just so rock. Also, it'd be way cool if the map could be edited. Can you imagine how lost you'd get if you could make buildings with arbitrary graphics, sorta like the WAD or PUD files of old?
But, whatever you do, don't give me a boring, linear, mono-topic game where I just run around and shoot people. Ayugh!
Here's the major problem I see here. For the FBI to wiretap, they must have probable cause and a warrant.
Uh, remember the (so-called) PATRIOT act? All that law enforcement needs to do is claim that you might be a terrorist and wiretap laws go out the window. Along with them, your privacy. They don't need to substantiate their "might be a terrorist" in any way, nor do they have to make that claim before doing the wiretap.
It's just fucking hideous. Terrorists attack, and the US Govt immediately turns around and hands our defeat to the terrorists. If the terrorists want to attack our freedoms, then they have already had some pretty major successes!
(and this is one of those few times where a little swearing is very appropriate)
I'm very weary of articles, especially on boingboing.net, that pitch Mario Bros. as the original videogame. You all should be making fan art of Yar's Revenge, Pitfall and River Raid.
And I'm very weary of people that pitch games like Yar's Revenge, Pitfall, and River Raid as the original videogame. You all should be making fan art of Pong and Tunnel Adventure!
In broad outlines, and incrementally, Google seems to be replacing the need for a centralized computer/filestore with an ubiquitous web fileservice.
Uh, Hello? This is 1997 calling for webDAV, are you there? Don't forget that WebDAV has been around since at LEAST the mid-1990s.
We have a webdav/ssl file repository used in our company. It runs Apache, mod_dav, and openssl, authentication handled by.htaccess files. It's quite secure, offers excellent performance, is highly reliable, and is natively supported by any major OS, and makes backups a SNAP.
Oh, and I'm never handing over my private business accounting data to google. No siree.
Drivers are fun too on M$.. I've played the game so don't try your Jedi mind tricks on me. I quit M$ because of the constant HELL and the constant bleeding to death through my wallet.
And this is probably the biggest irony for Windows users - after years of saying "it just works" with Windows, the Linux camp gets easier and easier every year, while the Windows camp gets more and more painful - viruses, worms, trojans, driver hell, etc. Ever notice that you can usually bring a Linux system completely up to date, including all software installed with a single command, eg: "yum -y update" and a single reboot, while a Windows system takes DOZENS of boots?
The lines have crossed, IMHO. Recently, we had a server go out. Motherboard and PS fried. HDD was ok, though. So, we ran to a local computer store, bought a generic cheezeball P4, threw the HDD in, and booted up.
The total time sorting out the drivers amounted to pressing "Enter" maybe 10 times. All the network settings were migrated to the "new" network adapter, the new Video card, etc. were all recognized, the system booted up, and the mail relay was back up!
Total downtime (including running to said local computer store) was about 1.5 hours. Hard to beat that with *ANY* flavor of Windows...
PS: My claim to fame is an original working copy of MS Windows 1.00. Yay.
I think the biggest prolbem with municipal WiFi is the inability to share bandwidth well. I mean, the guy next door to me will download movies off the internet all day, because it's free. And that means I lose out.
Not necessarily. While there may be an aggregate bandwidth of 6 Mbps, it's pretty easy to throttle bandwidth so that each recipient gets an equal, or perhaps a maximum amount of bandwidth.
I'd suggest breaking down muni service to two levels:
1) Free for all, anonymous. 128 Kbps without questions, except maybe a click-thru "I agree not to do bad stuff" web page, like I've seen often in hotels.
2) Extra speed - pay $$$. Requires a credentialled VPN, or PPPOE or similar. This is for the guy who wants to down/up load GB of stuff every day. (Like me, with 1.5 Mbps DSL, averaging about 40-50 GB of traffic per month, almost none of this is porn/mp3/warez - yes, GBYTES)
I have actually done this - a copy of Fedora will not allow even root to delete some files due to the secure linux part of it. It left be baffled at the time. Booted it with knoppix and nuked it from orbit, it was the only way to be sure. But it is possible.
FYI: When using the SELinux extensions, pay attention to `setenforce`. EG:
Consequently, I don't think it will be a question of whether or not we will be using Vista but merely how Microsoft will have managed to improve upon the mostly unimproveable experience of Windows XP. If they compete with anything, it will be their own success.
Uh, you're kidding, right?
Right?
I spent 4 hours yesterday helping a techno-neophyte (but good friend from high school) get his wireless card to work with my wifi hotspot. A frustrating afternoon, where we discovered that
1) Windows Update, run manually, didn't work because of some ActiveX error that repeated attempts to fix did nothing and never could be made to work.
2) Windows Update, run "automatically" in the background, resulted in updates that wouldn't install, and there was no indication as to why.
3) The wireless card, when connected, with all the settings for DHCP and so on set correctly, still wouldn't update the routing table when "connected".
4) Windows Antispyware, AdAware, and McAffee Virus scanner all came up clean.
5) He'd used the system very little, and spent $1,500 on it about a year ago, and was pretty upset when *nothing* seemed to work. (as I would be, if we were talking about a TV, stereo system, or similar appliance in the same price range)
There were many more - this is just what I remember.
1) How about making sure that Windows Vista... works?
2) How about making the "Administrator" account - an actual administrator account? I've *never* gotten a "permission denied" error, when doing something as root on a Linux system. WTF??!?
3) How about making Windows Update work without stupid, insecure, bug-prone ActiveX hacks (which you are supposed to disable?!?) ???
4) How about (re?)designing Windows so that the entire "Documents and Settings" folder can be copied, thus retaining all Outlook/Outlook express settings and data without having to do stupid import stuff? It's way retarded that you can't just copy over the "Documents and Settings" folder and have *any* confidence of having effectively grabbed all the users' data..
I'm sure you'll see plenty more in the replies to this post...
Cripes the Ukranian dating site scams have been around for over 5 years now. I remember a friend getting sucked in on that at work paying for "fees" and then paying for "english lessons" for the girl he really liked.
I saw one, once. Just for giggles (I'm happily married, thank you!) I posted the cheesiest, mostest disgusting-est picture of a fat, naked guy at his computer I could find, posting the most incredibly wimpy-ass, total-loser responses to the questions, at a throwaway email address.
And, every day or so, I'd get this (obviously) totally bogus email from a "hot chick" who just was utterly turned on by my picture. I got quite a few laughs out of the reponses! Damn funny, some of them!
Over time, though, they got more and more porn-ish, "I'm so wet for you" crap and I threw away the throwaway address...
young, great looking, hard bodied male/female who is rich and has gobs of cash to spend on *you* is probably NOT for real.
Boy, you must have a low opinion of the people who frequent this place!
I got an email like that just yesterday! She was hot, she was great-looking, and she wanted to spend gobs of cash on ME. Of course, she's my wife, I provide the "gobs of cash", and we're going on a trip to the coast leaving tonight, but...
Whatever. It can happen. I mean it. Slashdotters, don't let disparaging slobs like the parent get you down! Cool, good-looking geek-chics ARE out there!
"Part 2", the "what MS is doing to stop Linux" part, points out obvious facts (can't buy Linux computers in major retailers), asks why, and then postulates no decent answers. We should all ask, why does it suggest no decent answers? Is it perhaps because the most likely answer, that retail stores would lose money selling Linux systems due to higher difficulty of making the sale, higher support costs, higher return rates, and lower volume? Or is it perhaps because there is a global conspiracy that stores take against profitable actions?
But, you imply that the choice is one *or* the other. Why not both?
Am I a bit overweight because I don't excercise enough, or because I eat too much? Well, the true answer is: both.
Due to a lack of a unified UI, lack of driver support, lack of commercially available software, the cost of supporting a Linux install *is* higher when supporting the average Joe.
Also, Microsoft does everything it can to ensure that it gets sold on every computer sold by any of the major companies, making it further unprofitable.
Is it any wonder that the "big boys" don't want to install Linux? For most people, it's "fringe" software on the desktop, best used by propeller-heads, (like myself) on servers and "big iron" or in special "embedded" systems.
A funny story: A friend of mine was telling me all about wanting Windows on their computer 'cause it was "easier to use" and that he'd never have a Linux computer. I pointed to his Dish Network 522 DVR, and let him know: he's already got one...
If someone's going to do a new application, it's much more likely to be a Windows application.
I disagree. Look further up the food chain - if somebody's going to do a new application, it's much more likely to be in an environment where the OS is irrelevant.
Who wants to limit their marketplace to the Windows desktop, when there are so many mobile devices out there now?
Or, put it like this: What OMFG killer appz have you seen in the last 5-10 years that have been Windows only? Games are moving to gaming consoles, Word Processing is moving with surprising rapidity to OpenDocument, and most all the new cool stuff (Google, Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon, etc) is web-based! (or, at least, is open-protocol)
If someone's going to offer technical support services, they're much more likely to focus on Windows support.
Hmmm. Partly because it needs so *much* support just to stay functional? Obviously, that's where the money is...
Why doesn't SBC/Earthlink/Comcast/Sprint/whomever roll out IPv6 to their "consumer" DSL customers? I know that IPv6 capable systems can "see" all IPv4 addresses, it's just not true the other way. And, by using an IPv6 address, they'd make it more difficult to set up a server, right? That's what they want anyway, right?
. As a USER, what I really care about is overall performance of a kernel.
Ok, so as a USER, why would you care about MySQL? Because as a SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR, what I really care about is stability and easy of administration. Once performance reaches "good enough", I could give a shit about improved performance. Hardware is cheap, a $5,000 1U MP system can blast down just about anything I'm going to care about.
But, I want it to work today, tomorrow, next week, and next year. I want to reboot when I plan to (doing a kernel update, for instance) and only then. It had better be stable, and shouldn't be all that noticable in my day-to-day schedule. Doing updates had better not involve a half-day compiling, because downtime is !@#!@ expensive.
But, performance? Can you name a SINGLE INSTANCE where you chose your O/S based on some performance graph? Unless your technology depends on Windows (I feel for you if it does) any of the *nixes out there are "good enough" to do just about anything up to the very high end. (Linux/BSD/Solaris/AIX/OSX/etc) Even at the very high end, it's unlikely the choosing the "worst" OS will cost more than switching to the "best" OS!
In the end, it really doesn't matter all that much. Pick what you like, and roll with it. Performance is way down the totem pole, pay attention to stability, security, licensing, and compatability with your specific needs. Then, worry abouut performance!
Anyone else remember when they were making 486 boards with fake L2 cache? Yes, FAKE CACHE
Some years ago, I owned a retail computer store - about 5 employees, you know the dig. Anyway, I sold tons of PC-Chips MB571 motherboards. They used socket 7, so anything fom Pentium-75 up thru AMD K6-2 450 was supported. They were incredibly reliable - I had maybe 3% bad - and made a good, cheap upgrade board for people's computers.
It was common for me to take a used 486, slap in a 571 MB, upgrade the RAM, and sell it as a "refurbished" computer. Funny enough, I had the LEAST problems with Windows and drivers with those boards, too.
But then, they "upgraded" to the 571 LMR, and it was horrid. Bad driver problems, flakey, crashed alot, etc. That was one of several bad turns that led to me selling out and going into full-time Linux and freelance software engineering as a consultant. (Where I continue to this day quite happily!)
Anyway, I can see that it's quite possible that PC-Chips deserves a bad rap, and make no mistake - they aren't a "high end" board manufacturer, but to this day I have 4 systems running on PC-Chips motherboards, two of them production servers, with great uptimes, decent performance, and good reliability, and two others have been working daily for years!
If the community decides MySQL is now the work of the devil
I could care less about "the community" - but I decided long ago that MySQL wasn't worth it. I've been using/promoting PostgreSQL for years, and have written some rather large projects (EG: 100+ tables, millions of records) with it very, very happily.
Advantages of Postgres:
1) Many, many MANY features in common with "enterprise" database products,
2) Open License lets you do pretty much anything you like, commercial or free.
3) Good documentation
4) Very solid - in 6 years of use, I've only had a problem ONCE with postgres on a machine with bad memory.
5) Helpful community support.
6) Comes pre-installed with most server-based distros. EG: RedHat
MySQL's advantages
1) Sounds good as part of "LAMP"
2) Uses "easier" administration, EG: "connect DBNAME" instead of the more terse "\c DBNAME". (but requires more typing)
3) Licensed under the GPL. (which restricts your use in any commercial product you distribute)
4) Fewer features means there's less to learn (???)
I switched to PG years ago, and I've never looked back.
I'm sorry, but did you just use the words "UNIX" and "it just works" in the same sentence? With a straight face?
He sure did. He was justified, too. I have a Fedora Core 3 Laptop. It just works. Sure, there's some typing here and there - but when given the appropriate commands, it does what I ask.
Contrasting that to a Windows computer, with all those worms, trojans, security bugs, and the like... I'm sorry, but I expect computers to stay online, with public IP addresses, 24x7 for months/years at a time with minimal fuss. Windows can't do that with a private NATd IP address without some SERIOUS cobbling!
Don't confuse speed of setup with reliability. It IS more difficult to set up a Linux system than a Windows system. (though that has improved DRAMATICALLY over the past 5-10 years) But, once running, a Unix system will do it 24x7 for years on end with nary a burp.
There's no comparison. If you aren't "up to" the task of learning out the system works enough to get Unix up and running, be perfectly happy with the subpar performance you'll see day in, day out.
It's not that the marketroids are using terms engineers can't understand. It's that they are making up fancy words to describe trivial matters which do not need a term.
And, you're a schmuck or blissfully naive if you don't think that tech people haven't done the same. (Queue up "muffler bearing" jokes here) Oh, and it's the JOB of a marketroid to take whatever you've got to sell, and make it "sexy" so that people buy it. Don't whine at them for that, they are helping you eat. Get used to it.
People==people==people. The only difference is the method. I've caught so many "tech" people spouting so much utter shiat it's not funny. And, they don't like it when you call their crap. Ever try asking a tech weenie what exactly a "firewall blocker" is? How about a "sequence stasis"? I have had to deal with similar many times, and the result can involved raised voices, and fragile egos.
When they aren't making shiat up, marketroids use words like "paradign shift" much like we use "abstraction layer" or "software stack". They have meanings. They aren't exact. They are still very relevant.
It makes my skin crawl to hear words like "solution stack", not only because I don't know what the heck it means, but also because it doesn't mean anything. It's a fuzzy complicated way of saying, "a bunch of related software products that you'll find useful in your company"
OK, so take a "bunch of related software products" such as, Oh, perhaps Javascript and XML, with a SQL backend. It's commonly called "AJAX" - what would you call that except a "solution stack"?
Or, perhaps, uh, Linux, Apache, maybe MySQL/Postgresql, and PHP? Commonly called "LAMP", this would qualify as a "solution stack", perhaps?
Oh, that phrase "solution stack" (or its close cousin, "software stack") doesn't mean anything to you? Just because you don't know the meaning of a word doesn't mean it has no meaning. What I find funny is that engineers are often accused of speaking in "engineer speak" or "tech speak" by the marketroids, because those !@#@$!@ engineers so often say things that have no meaning!
Learn the words, and what they mean, and you'll find an amazing amount of wisdom you were previously denying yourself.
Come up with a SIP standard device that uses my existing Wi-fi access point and can support multiple access point profiles and then you will have something.
Really? So why haven't you done it yourself?
Really! I'm not kidding!
If it's a "killer idea" and you are serious about that, you can becomee quite wealthy by making it a reality! But, since you aren't doing it, either
1) You are already independently wealthy and are too lazy to bother, or
2) (more likely) you are too chicken-sh!t to actually do it.
3) (most likely) you are talking out your arse.
Sad, because, if you are right, not only would you become wealthy, people would get better service for less $$, and that would improve the quality of life for all.
No matter which way you look at it, it's YOU that's the letdown. Why don't you get off your arse and make your idea a reality? You don't have the "connections"? Well, how do you think anybody else gets them?
The T1 line at a place I admin got saturated once with upstream traffic. Took a bit of poking.
Turns out:
1) It was a script that infected a vulnerability in a well-known image manipulation system written in perl CGI.
2) User never got root, and didn't seem to care.
3) System was participating in a botnet of about 200 systems, (if I remember this correctly) all managed via an IRC chat.
4) All the exploits were downloaded from a web server located somewhere in Brazil. Telnets that happened were also from another IP address in Brazil. Home address? dunno. abuse@thebrazillianisp.com was notified of everything, but no reply was ever received.
Here's how it all happened:
1) The exploit used a vuln that allows the attacker to run wget, download a hacked telnetd, and then open a telnetd on a high port. Telnet to the port and get a shell account on the system as user "nobody".
2) This telnet shell was used to load in an IRC client, also written in perl. This was fairly easy to detect because the IRC client was very inefficient, and used almost 50% of the CPU resources, even when it wasn't doing much. "top" showed this thing like a flashing red light.
3) I logged into the IRC chatroom with a username similar to the machine-generated hostnames, and watched for a while. He'd issue a command (I think it was "lookat [ip address]" and then all the machines would ping flood whatever the address was.
I cleared everything out of the system, got rid of the scripts (after squirreling away a copy, just in case) and upgraded the CGI image manager with a newer version that wasn't vulnerable. I haven't seen/heard from "senior brasillia" ever since.
But, take 1.5 Mb*200=300 Mb, and that'd take out most small-mid sized servers handily. My best connection is about 70 Mb upstream!
Slashdot Mirror
I enjoy so called "open ended games" for a few minutes to a few hours, after that I feel that it is a waste of time.
All respect to Rockstar, the game is kickass, I just cannot help it but it leaves me all the time with the game unfinished and me bored to hell of it.
What I find interesting is that the type of games you mention above strike me as incredibly boring! I don't feel like I'm getting anything done, more like just trying to run a race fast enough.
It gets boring very quickly. But, with the "open ended" games, I get the feeling like I can do whatever I want. If I want to break into an airport and steal a plane and fly around, I can. Or, drive a car, or swim across the ocean, or go look for shellfish, or whatever.
Typical gameplay might go something like this:
I do missions for a while, and get bored. Then, I grab a bike, and try to see how much money I can get for an "insane stunt bonus". After a while of that, I drive the bike into a lake, and start mowing down cops just to see what kind of gun I can get. Then, I buy a house and save game to shed the wanted level. (wouldn't it be neat to be able to mix/match Sims2 with GTA?) Do a mission or two. Grab a boat and do some jumps. Then, be a cab driver and try to get 5 people delivered before having to bail the cab. Etc.
If I could do this multi-player, it would just so rock. Also, it'd be way cool if the map could be edited. Can you imagine how lost you'd get if you could make buildings with arbitrary graphics, sorta like the WAD or PUD files of old?
But, whatever you do, don't give me a boring, linear, mono-topic game where I just run around and shoot people. Ayugh!
Here's the major problem I see here. For the FBI to wiretap, they must have probable cause and a warrant.
Uh, remember the (so-called) PATRIOT act? All that law enforcement needs to do is claim that you might be a terrorist and wiretap laws go out the window. Along with them, your privacy. They don't need to substantiate their "might be a terrorist" in any way, nor do they have to make that claim before doing the wiretap.
It's just fucking hideous. Terrorists attack, and the US Govt immediately turns around and hands our defeat to the terrorists. If the terrorists want to attack our freedoms, then they have already had some pretty major successes!
(and this is one of those few times where a little swearing is very appropriate)
I'm very weary of articles, especially on boingboing.net, that pitch Mario Bros. as the original videogame. You all should be making fan art of Yar's Revenge, Pitfall and River Raid.
And I'm very weary of people that pitch games like Yar's Revenge, Pitfall, and River Raid as the original videogame. You all should be making fan art of Pong and Tunnel Adventure!
That's just sad... that video card now has more clockspeed and more memory than my own main computer.
Curious thought - the human brain has about 50% of its mass devoted to processing sight and patterns in images... Sounds about right, doesn't it?
In broad outlines, and incrementally, Google seems to be replacing the need for a centralized computer/filestore with an ubiquitous web fileservice.
.htaccess files. It's quite secure, offers excellent performance, is highly reliable, and is natively supported by any major OS, and makes backups a SNAP.
Uh, Hello? This is 1997 calling for webDAV, are you there? Don't forget that WebDAV has been around since at LEAST the mid-1990s.
We have a webdav/ssl file repository used in our company. It runs Apache, mod_dav, and openssl, authentication handled by
Oh, and I'm never handing over my private business accounting data to google. No siree.
Drivers are fun too on M$.. I've played the game so don't try your Jedi mind tricks on me. I quit M$ because of the constant HELL and the constant bleeding to death through my wallet.
And this is probably the biggest irony for Windows users - after years of saying "it just works" with Windows, the Linux camp gets easier and easier every year, while the Windows camp gets more and more painful - viruses, worms, trojans, driver hell, etc. Ever notice that you can usually bring a Linux system completely up to date, including all software installed with a single command, eg: "yum -y update" and a single reboot, while a Windows system takes DOZENS of boots?
The lines have crossed, IMHO. Recently, we had a server go out. Motherboard and PS fried. HDD was ok, though. So, we ran to a local computer store, bought a generic cheezeball P4, threw the HDD in, and booted up.
The total time sorting out the drivers amounted to pressing "Enter" maybe 10 times. All the network settings were migrated to the "new" network adapter, the new Video card, etc. were all recognized, the system booted up, and the mail relay was back up!
Total downtime (including running to said local computer store) was about 1.5 hours. Hard to beat that with *ANY* flavor of Windows...
PS: My claim to fame is an original working copy of MS Windows 1.00. Yay.
I think the biggest prolbem with municipal WiFi is the inability to share bandwidth well. I mean, the guy next door to me will download movies off the internet all day, because it's free. And that means I lose out.
Not necessarily. While there may be an aggregate bandwidth of 6 Mbps, it's pretty easy to throttle bandwidth so that each recipient gets an equal, or perhaps a maximum amount of bandwidth.
I'd suggest breaking down muni service to two levels:
1) Free for all, anonymous. 128 Kbps without questions, except maybe a click-thru "I agree not to do bad stuff" web page, like I've seen often in hotels.
2) Extra speed - pay $$$. Requires a credentialled VPN, or PPPOE or similar. This is for the guy who wants to down/up load GB of stuff every day. (Like me, with 1.5 Mbps DSL, averaging about 40-50 GB of traffic per month, almost none of this is porn/mp3/warez - yes, GBYTES)
FYI: When using the SELinux extensions, pay attention to `setenforce`. EG:
Consequently, I don't think it will be a question of whether or not we will be using Vista but merely how Microsoft will have managed to improve upon the mostly unimproveable experience of Windows XP. If they compete with anything, it will be their own success.
... works?
Uh, you're kidding, right?
Right?
I spent 4 hours yesterday helping a techno-neophyte (but good friend from high school) get his wireless card to work with my wifi hotspot. A frustrating afternoon, where we discovered that
1) Windows Update, run manually, didn't work because of some ActiveX error that repeated attempts to fix did nothing and never could be made to work.
2) Windows Update, run "automatically" in the background, resulted in updates that wouldn't install, and there was no indication as to why.
3) The wireless card, when connected, with all the settings for DHCP and so on set correctly, still wouldn't update the routing table when "connected".
4) Windows Antispyware, AdAware, and McAffee Virus scanner all came up clean.
5) He'd used the system very little, and spent $1,500 on it about a year ago, and was pretty upset when *nothing* seemed to work. (as I would be, if we were talking about a TV, stereo system, or similar appliance in the same price range)
There were many more - this is just what I remember.
1) How about making sure that Windows Vista
2) How about making the "Administrator" account - an actual administrator account? I've *never* gotten a "permission denied" error, when doing something as root on a Linux system. WTF??!?
3) How about making Windows Update work without stupid, insecure, bug-prone ActiveX hacks (which you are supposed to disable?!?) ???
4) How about (re?)designing Windows so that the entire "Documents and Settings" folder can be copied, thus retaining all Outlook/Outlook express settings and data without having to do stupid import stuff? It's way retarded that you can't just copy over the "Documents and Settings" folder and have *any* confidence of having effectively grabbed all the users' data..
I'm sure you'll see plenty more in the replies to this post...
Cripes the Ukranian dating site scams have been around for over 5 years now. I remember a friend getting sucked in on that at work paying for "fees" and then paying for "english lessons" for the girl he really liked.
I saw one, once. Just for giggles (I'm happily married, thank you!) I posted the cheesiest, mostest disgusting-est picture of a fat, naked guy at his computer I could find, posting the most incredibly wimpy-ass, total-loser responses to the questions, at a throwaway email address.
And, every day or so, I'd get this (obviously) totally bogus email from a "hot chick" who just was utterly turned on by my picture. I got quite a few laughs out of the reponses! Damn funny, some of them!
Over time, though, they got more and more porn-ish, "I'm so wet for you" crap and I threw away the throwaway address...
young, great looking, hard bodied male/female who is rich and has gobs of cash to spend on *you* is probably NOT for real.
Boy, you must have a low opinion of the people who frequent this place!
I got an email like that just yesterday! She was hot, she was great-looking, and she wanted to spend gobs of cash on ME. Of course, she's my wife, I provide the "gobs of cash", and we're going on a trip to the coast leaving tonight, but...
Whatever. It can happen. I mean it. Slashdotters, don't let disparaging slobs like the parent get you down! Cool, good-looking geek-chics ARE out there!
"Part 2", the "what MS is doing to stop Linux" part, points out obvious facts (can't buy Linux computers in major retailers), asks why, and then postulates no decent answers. We should all ask, why does it suggest no decent answers? Is it perhaps because the most likely answer, that retail stores would lose money selling Linux systems due to higher difficulty of making the sale, higher support costs, higher return rates, and lower volume? Or is it perhaps because there is a global conspiracy that stores take against profitable actions?
But, you imply that the choice is one *or* the other. Why not both?
Am I a bit overweight because I don't excercise enough, or because I eat too much? Well, the true answer is: both.
Due to a lack of a unified UI, lack of driver support, lack of commercially available software, the cost of supporting a Linux install *is* higher when supporting the average Joe.
Also, Microsoft does everything it can to ensure that it gets sold on every computer sold by any of the major companies, making it further unprofitable.
Is it any wonder that the "big boys" don't want to install Linux? For most people, it's "fringe" software on the desktop, best used by propeller-heads, (like myself) on servers and "big iron" or in special "embedded" systems.
A funny story: A friend of mine was telling me all about wanting Windows on their computer 'cause it was "easier to use" and that he'd never have a Linux computer. I pointed to his Dish Network 522 DVR, and let him know: he's already got one...
(Ahem)
Want to get ALL updates for a particular install?Or, just want to install package foo?Maybe you want to get rid of foo?Maybe you want to install package foo from source?(All the dependencies for source package foo are now tracked by yum)
Yeah. Real friggen hard... I'm able to keep my servers patched and updated for a monthly investment of about 10 minutes each... No kidding...Things "breaking" is just very, very rare. (I can only think of one time it happened with privsep in ssh, and that was easily fixed)
If someone's going to do a new application, it's much more likely to be a Windows application.
I disagree. Look further up the food chain - if somebody's going to do a new application, it's much more likely to be in an environment where the OS is irrelevant.
Who wants to limit their marketplace to the Windows desktop, when there are so many mobile devices out there now?
Or, put it like this: What OMFG killer appz have you seen in the last 5-10 years that have been Windows only? Games are moving to gaming consoles, Word Processing is moving with surprising rapidity to OpenDocument, and most all the new cool stuff (Google, Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon, etc) is web-based! (or, at least, is open-protocol)
If someone's going to offer technical support services, they're much more likely to focus on Windows support.
Hmmm. Partly because it needs so *much* support just to stay functional? Obviously, that's where the money is...
Why doesn't SBC/Earthlink/Comcast/Sprint/whomever roll out IPv6 to their "consumer" DSL customers? I know that IPv6 capable systems can "see" all IPv4 addresses, it's just not true the other way. And, by using an IPv6 address, they'd make it more difficult to set up a server, right? That's what they want anyway, right?
Really, why not? Is there something I'm missing?
. As a USER, what I really care about is overall performance of a kernel.
Ok, so as a USER, why would you care about MySQL? Because as a SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR, what I really care about is stability and easy of administration. Once performance reaches "good enough", I could give a shit about improved performance. Hardware is cheap, a $5,000 1U MP system can blast down just about anything I'm going to care about.
But, I want it to work today, tomorrow, next week, and next year. I want to reboot when I plan to (doing a kernel update, for instance) and only then. It had better be stable, and shouldn't be all that noticable in my day-to-day schedule. Doing updates had better not involve a half-day compiling, because downtime is !@#!@ expensive.
But, performance? Can you name a SINGLE INSTANCE where you chose your O/S based on some performance graph? Unless your technology depends on Windows (I feel for you if it does) any of the *nixes out there are "good enough" to do just about anything up to the very high end. (Linux/BSD/Solaris/AIX/OSX/etc) Even at the very high end, it's unlikely the choosing the "worst" OS will cost more than switching to the "best" OS!
In the end, it really doesn't matter all that much. Pick what you like, and roll with it. Performance is way down the totem pole, pay attention to stability, security, licensing, and compatability with your specific needs. Then, worry abouut performance!
Anyone else remember when they were making 486 boards with fake L2 cache? Yes, FAKE CACHE
Some years ago, I owned a retail computer store - about 5 employees, you know the dig. Anyway, I sold tons of PC-Chips MB571 motherboards. They used socket 7, so anything fom Pentium-75 up thru AMD K6-2 450 was supported. They were incredibly reliable - I had maybe 3% bad - and made a good, cheap upgrade board for people's computers.
It was common for me to take a used 486, slap in a 571 MB, upgrade the RAM, and sell it as a "refurbished" computer. Funny enough, I had the LEAST problems with Windows and drivers with those boards, too.
But then, they "upgraded" to the 571 LMR, and it was horrid. Bad driver problems, flakey, crashed alot, etc. That was one of several bad turns that led to me selling out and going into full-time Linux and freelance software engineering as a consultant. (Where I continue to this day quite happily!)
Anyway, I can see that it's quite possible that PC-Chips deserves a bad rap, and make no mistake - they aren't a "high end" board manufacturer, but to this day I have 4 systems running on PC-Chips motherboards, two of them production servers, with great uptimes, decent performance, and good reliability, and two others have been working daily for years!
If the community decides MySQL is now the work of the devil
I could care less about "the community" - but I decided long ago that MySQL wasn't worth it. I've been using/promoting PostgreSQL for years, and have written some rather large projects (EG: 100+ tables, millions of records) with it very, very happily.
Advantages of Postgres:
1) Many, many MANY features in common with "enterprise" database products,
2) Open License lets you do pretty much anything you like, commercial or free.
3) Good documentation
4) Very solid - in 6 years of use, I've only had a problem ONCE with postgres on a machine with bad memory.
5) Helpful community support.
6) Comes pre-installed with most server-based distros. EG: RedHat
MySQL's advantages
1) Sounds good as part of "LAMP"
2) Uses "easier" administration, EG: "connect DBNAME" instead of the more terse "\c DBNAME". (but requires more typing)
3) Licensed under the GPL. (which restricts your use in any commercial product you distribute)
4) Fewer features means there's less to learn (???)
I switched to PG years ago, and I've never looked back.
I'm sorry, but did you just use the words "UNIX" and "it just works" in the same sentence? With a straight face?
He sure did. He was justified, too. I have a Fedora Core 3 Laptop. It just works. Sure, there's some typing here and there - but when given the appropriate commands, it does what I ask.
Contrasting that to a Windows computer, with all those worms, trojans, security bugs, and the like... I'm sorry, but I expect computers to stay online, with public IP addresses, 24x7 for months/years at a time with minimal fuss. Windows can't do that with a private NATd IP address without some SERIOUS cobbling!
Don't confuse speed of setup with reliability. It IS more difficult to set up a Linux system than a Windows system. (though that has improved DRAMATICALLY over the past 5-10 years) But, once running, a Unix system will do it 24x7 for years on end with nary a burp.
There's no comparison. If you aren't "up to" the task of learning out the system works enough to get Unix up and running, be perfectly happy with the subpar performance you'll see day in, day out.
Phe! I haven't got time to make up rhymes! It's just absurd, you stupid turd!
My name is Anonymous Coward.
You killed my post.
Prepare to die.
Oh, come ON! Everybody knows that this should be a haiku!
Anonymous Coward
My post is dead, you killed it
Be Prepared to DIE!
It's not that the marketroids are using terms engineers can't understand. It's that they are making up fancy words to describe trivial matters which do not need a term.
And, you're a schmuck or blissfully naive if you don't think that tech people haven't done the same. (Queue up "muffler bearing" jokes here) Oh, and it's the JOB of a marketroid to take whatever you've got to sell, and make it "sexy" so that people buy it. Don't whine at them for that, they are helping you eat. Get used to it.
People==people==people. The only difference is the method. I've caught so many "tech" people spouting so much utter shiat it's not funny. And, they don't like it when you call their crap. Ever try asking a tech weenie what exactly a "firewall blocker" is? How about a "sequence stasis"? I have had to deal with similar many times, and the result can involved raised voices, and fragile egos.
When they aren't making shiat up, marketroids use words like "paradign shift" much like we use "abstraction layer" or "software stack". They have meanings. They aren't exact. They are still very relevant.
It makes my skin crawl to hear words like "solution stack", not only because I don't know what the heck it means, but also because it doesn't mean anything. It's a fuzzy complicated way of saying, "a bunch of related software products that you'll find useful in your company"
OK, so take a "bunch of related software products" such as, Oh, perhaps Javascript and XML, with a SQL backend. It's commonly called "AJAX" - what would you call that except a "solution stack"?
Or, perhaps, uh, Linux, Apache, maybe MySQL/Postgresql, and PHP? Commonly called "LAMP", this would qualify as a "solution stack", perhaps?
Oh, that phrase "solution stack" (or its close cousin, "software stack") doesn't mean anything to you? Just because you don't know the meaning of a word doesn't mean it has no meaning. What I find funny is that engineers are often accused of speaking in "engineer speak" or "tech speak" by the marketroids, because those !@#@$!@ engineers so often say things that have no meaning!
Learn the words, and what they mean, and you'll find an amazing amount of wisdom you were previously denying yourself.
Come up with a SIP standard device that uses my existing Wi-fi access point and can support multiple access point profiles and then you will have something.
Really? So why haven't you done it yourself?
Really! I'm not kidding!
If it's a "killer idea" and you are serious about that, you can becomee quite wealthy by making it a reality! But, since you aren't doing it, either
1) You are already independently wealthy and are too lazy to bother, or
2) (more likely) you are too chicken-sh!t to actually do it.
3) (most likely) you are talking out your arse.
Sad, because, if you are right, not only would you become wealthy, people would get better service for less $$, and that would improve the quality of life for all.
No matter which way you look at it, it's YOU that's the letdown. Why don't you get off your arse and make your idea a reality? You don't have the "connections"? Well, how do you think anybody else gets them?
The T1 line at a place I admin got saturated once with upstream traffic. Took a bit of poking.
Turns out:
1) It was a script that infected a vulnerability in a well-known image manipulation system written in perl CGI.
2) User never got root, and didn't seem to care.
3) System was participating in a botnet of about 200 systems, (if I remember this correctly) all managed via an IRC chat.
4) All the exploits were downloaded from a web server located somewhere in Brazil. Telnets that happened were also from another IP address in Brazil. Home address? dunno. abuse@thebrazillianisp.com was notified of everything, but no reply was ever received.
Here's how it all happened:
1) The exploit used a vuln that allows the attacker to run wget, download a hacked telnetd, and then open a telnetd on a high port. Telnet to the port and get a shell account on the system as user "nobody".
2) This telnet shell was used to load in an IRC client, also written in perl. This was fairly easy to detect because the IRC client was very inefficient, and used almost 50% of the CPU resources, even when it wasn't doing much. "top" showed this thing like a flashing red light.
3) I logged into the IRC chatroom with a username similar to the machine-generated hostnames, and watched for a while. He'd issue a command (I think it was "lookat [ip address]" and then all the machines would ping flood whatever the address was.
I cleared everything out of the system, got rid of the scripts (after squirreling away a copy, just in case) and upgraded the CGI image manager with a newer version that wasn't vulnerable. I haven't seen/heard from "senior brasillia" ever since.
But, take 1.5 Mb*200=300 Mb, and that'd take out most small-mid sized servers handily. My best connection is about 70 Mb upstream!