nowadays, a mac lab can be administered in the same fashion as a lab of NC's. Since iMacs and b/w G3's can both be netbooted, a mac lab can be outfitted with iMacs (you can buy older ones real cheap), and a decent os X server box. Then configure a single boot disk for all the imacs, and all those software problems go away. I have yet to play with the "netboot" capablities of the new macs yet, but in a computer lab environment, it's got to be a godsend. -earl
It's about time compaq does something for linux. I'm pretty tired of them simply resting on the laurels of digital engineers. I think this can have a very positive effect for fence-sitting would be linux users. Its even less work than vmware for people who want to try out linux. Of course compaq has a long way to go if they want to be able to claim they are supporting linux to the degree that sgi and ibm have been. of course if digital were still alive, they'd have the crown. long live dec. -earl
sure, when they do something you detest, you say tou'll short the stock. But since they're doing what you want them to _right now_, are have you bought stock?? Or are you just another whiny hypocrite... -earl
I remember reading somewhere in the last six months or so that lots of domain names were intentionally reserved when DNS was started. For example all the one letter names are reserved, and they also decided to hold traditionally offensive words as well. Later on, names like there were given to organizations like naacp to allow them to protect against their use. The problem is that you're likely to see people register plurals, and variants of offensive words anyway, so not much is solved. (as if domain names were the real problem anyway;) -earl
looks like they're gonna need an upgrade. That thing is slashdotted already. I think they've underestimated how many folks are interested in packetstorm.
this is exctly why I registered my domain with register.com, NSI is a fscking horrible company. I never get mail from register.com, nevermind spam. Also, I've found that register.com's web interface to domain administration is *far* bettter than the e-mail crap that NSI has set up for their domain admin process. Not to say that register.com is perfect, I've had my problems, but NSI is orders of magnitude worse. -earl
if you're concerned about sega having a basckdoor to your dreamcast, why don't you just intercept it's internet connection and see what gets sent on port 23? You can set up a ppp server on your linux box, and then have it get to the internet through there. Just use tcpdump, and you're golden. I suspect if sega had some kind of backdoor access to it, the auth would be based on serial #. Since they probably never expect 99.999% of dc owners to try to access their DC via telnet, but they know crackers will do scans and find em eventually, they'd want to make sure that somebody getting one username:passward pair wouldn't then have access to every dreamcast box. So when you connect to their equivalent of battle.net, you tell them your ip, and your serial # and then they use the predetermined username:pass for your box to do whatever it is they wanted to do. Not too tricky. You may even get to see the "arcane" commands they've programmed into the thing. -earl
well i think that it's clearly too early and the supposed details are way too sketchy to really get a clear idea of what's going on here. I'm not sayig Apple's 'innocent here, but it sounds more like a big pile of confusion rather than Apple simply trying to fuck over the upgrade makers. Obviously it's possible for them to make cars that work even in the patched macs, there's "rumors" that xlr8 has a g4 card nearly ready to go. I don't think it's evil for apple to use a minor stall tactic to keep the clonemakers from beating them to the punch by months. OTOH, of they tried to _prevent_ them from bringing upgrade cards to market, thats another story altogether. -earl
It is a good idea, however, it has a negative loophole. Since the/. oldtimers (and many moderators) are going to view messages at +1, so a new user who'se posts are put in as 0, may not have their posts read by moderators, thus decreasing their chances of moving up the strata. As I said, it _is_ a good idea however, it is dependent on the moderators reading discussions with a 0 score. -earl
exactly, she's the "responsible" adult. If watching his namesake die week after week is traumatic for the kid... don't let him watch it anymore you fscking idiot!
I'm not defending apple here, but Intel is far from guilty in this arena. Anyone heard of slot1, slot 7, slot foo? They changed it so that people couldn't just stick an AMD or Cyrix into their old machine to make it a much faster machine. They crippled the x86 upgrade market to make more $$$. If apple does the same thing, then that makes the just as guilty. moral of the story : companies _will_ do whatever they feel is necessary to survive. period
BTW, my stupid winmodem won't work with linux. I love all these wonderful "innovations" in the x86 market.
That's the best part about the G4. It fully supports multiprocessing. The G3 (and 603) are in the desktop/laptop series of PowerPC chips. The G4 (and 604) are in the workstation/server series. These puppies will do SMP like no G3 ever could. With IBM's open board designs, I wouldn't be suprised to see multiprocessor G4 and 604 systems for linux servers in the next 6-8 months. There's been sporadic discussion on/. over the last year covering the PowerPC multiprocessor issues. You might want to note that Apple did sell multiprocessor 604 boxen a few years ago, and they even wrote special semi-SMP drivers for MacOS. Now that they've got OS X on the verge of shipment (~6 months) and OS X server available today, I can guarantee that they'll release an SMP G4 Server box. SMP G4 workstations wil probably have to wait till shortly after the release of OS X. There are definitely good things to come from apple on this front.
if that's your philosophy, why don't you just change your minimum threshold to be 1. That way you won't see stoopid posts by AC's. I prefer to read the AC postings because every once and a while an AC had something useful to say. -earl
i can't imagine they expect their box to stay unhacked for more than a day. maybe they're just puttig it out there to see what kind of attacks the l33t hakorz are usinbg these days. -earl
you could also take a look at tcp-int for cheap long distance faxing. you ship your fax via e-mail to a fax machine that can deliver your fax with a local call. Otherwise, I've heard hylafax is a real good solution as well. -earl
i think alot of folks are not readingthe whole article. It does state clearly that AOL releases this info when presented with a subpoena. It would be suicide for AOL to not do this. Also, why are so many crying about AOL and privacy? They act as if the gov't can't already:
tap your phone line
intercept your e-mail
get your financial records
interrogate your employerput you under direct surveillance, etc
for those of you who are complaining about AOL's disclosure policy: If you're really worried about privacy, then those are things you probably ought to addres first. AOL has far less information about you than... phone companies, banks, or your employer. I think it makes sense for AOL to comply with the law. If you have a problem with the info that they're providing _legally_ to law enforcement, take issue with the laws, not with AOL. -earl
well, before you rush to judgement and say "amazon has so many more books", consider that fatbrain is strictly computer|science|business books. No Oprah books, no cat in the hat, no Stephen King. When you think about it, the fatbrain model actually fits better with the UNIX philosophy of "small tools, working together". Amozon has taken the opposite tack of "one big fat tool for everything". Sorta sounds like windows dosen't it? Of course, only you can decide which is best for you, but I prefer to assemble a collection of specialized tools(websites) that handle all the tasks I need.
well, now there's a second big linux player on alpha. I hope this is the beginning of a move towards platform independence(neutrality?) for linux distros. When you can choose a mainstream linux distro for your sparc/ppc/alpha as well as your x86 box, then I think the distro makers will have moved linux up to the next level. Making a "shrink wrapped" linux distro that can run on nearly any machine would be a signifigant contribution to the community.
Now that they've brought installs up to a level where mere mortals can handle it, and built some intelligent sys-admin tools, the distro makers are presented with several new challenges:
multiplatform distro (Redhat was first? with RH-alpha)
mid-large server versions for serious servers
development on better smp/clustering (kernel & apps)
stablize linux desktop/workstation environments (ala gnome/kde) assist efforts to develop quality drivers for USB/Firewire/3D-Video-Cards to linux. hw vendors might be more cooperative with a "corporate partner" that they have with the myriad of kernel hackers that have developed the code so far.
It's good to see debian making progress in an area that I consider critical for the distro makers to address. On a separate but related note, I think I'm going to make my next linux box debian instead of using redhat again. I'm disapointed with the 6.x release, and debian's been getting good (peer) reviews on/. lately. -earl
Well, I thought about it, and Word is not the best, and text is not the best. So what is?? It's obvious, but not so obvious. HTML, it's small, it's versatile, it's universally read/write, and it's free. I got tired of having a copy of my resume on disk, but not being able to edit it until I got to a mac or pc. Now I can edit my resume in vi, emacs, word, bbedit, or even with a magnet. Nobody claims thay can't read it. Nobody whines that they can't print it, It's on my web page, it's in my notebook. It's the perfect format. I can attatch it to e-mails, I can make it _the_ e-mail. It doesn't get much better than that. So when some idiot claims they can't read your resume, tell them to open it with netscape, and hang up.:-) After all if the guy at the other end of line doesn't know how to use a web browser, do you realy want to work for em?? Just my $.02 -earl
actually, no OSX does not have BSD at it's core. It's core is the Mach Microkernel. On top of this, sits both the NeXT environment, and the BSD environment. What's happening in this situation is worse than just crashing BSD, because it's crashing apache, which is crashing BSD, which in turn is crashing the Mach subsystem. Like somebody said, the BSD port is most likely at fault since it is the only code in this scenario that has access to the whole machine (to be able to crash Mach). I'm sure Apple will get to the bottom of this pretty quikly since it's a pretty big show stopper. -earl
Well to clarify a bit, what's at the other end of all your ADSL "modems" is basically an ATM switch. So it's true that you can't see anybody else's unicast traffic on your line, although you may see some broadcast traffic from users on the same subnet(it's the nature of IP). For cable, you're probably going to be able to see other people's traffic, but from the info I got from my cable company (Media General in Fairfax, VA), the roadrunner service that they're about to offer encrypts the traffic from your "modem" back to their offices, and that way neighbors can't effectively spy on each other. but that's only how it happens on my block. Other providers may not be so intelligent. -earl
It's one thing to sell products based on linux, it's another all together to run your business on it. Generally it makes more sense to go to NT from OS/2 _right now_ since there's an easier transition between the two. Also you can probably run all the same server/client apps from os/2 on NT, and for user desktops, you'ld require less training. In the long term however, I'm confident that Linux will fill these app holes as both a client and a server. Also starting a new computing environment, you could easily go with linux today. It's just when you're dealing with legacy PC apps that you'll probably have NT be the stronger canidate. Of course you're gonna lose out on stability and scalability with NT, but frankly, you still can't run alot of wintel type apps on linux _today_. Next year... well that's another story. -earl
Well, there's another NT app that I can run on linux instead. I've never actually run Domino, and that's simply because I'd need an NT server to run it. I've always wanted to start it up and see what it can do, looks like we'll all get a chance pretty soon. -earl
1st off, the word modem has gone from being a technical abbreviaton of "modulate-demodulate", to a generic marteking term that means "the box you use to connect your computer to the internet". So that's the first thing to understand.
2nd, with all digital technologies like xDSL, and ISDN, you get much higher data rates because you never have to convert the signal. POTS, ISDN and xDSL all use the same 2 wires, but with various encoding methods, and consequentially different equipment both at your end, and at the telco end. The biggest reason why DSL is so much faster than ISDN is because the xDSL spec has shorter distance limits that ISDN does. It's pretty similar to the distance restrictions of Gigabit/Fast/Ethernet.
The reason that you hear lots of people complain abot the FCC and 56K, is not that they want to restrict bandwidth, but that they have a limit on how much power you can send across phone lines. Because of this restriction, the tricks that the 56K modems use to get above 33.6 can't be maximized on "crystal clear" phone lines. You'ld be hard pressed to find a line where it mattered anyway, but that's another issue.
56K modems are a pretty neat trick, and most people I know do have 56K. I decided about two years ago to just hold out for one of the current multi-migabit technologies. I'd spent too much already on 14.4, 28.8 and 33.6 to spend a dime on any new modem. I pondered ISDN for a while, but it is _so_ much money. I just can't justify that monthly bill.
Slashdot Mirror
nowadays, a mac lab can be administered in the same fashion as a lab of NC's. Since iMacs and b/w G3's can both be netbooted, a mac lab can be outfitted with iMacs (you can buy older ones real cheap), and a decent os X server box. Then configure a single boot disk for all the imacs, and all those software problems go away. I have yet to play with the "netboot" capablities of the new macs yet, but in a computer lab environment, it's got to be a godsend.
-earl
It's about time compaq does something for linux. I'm pretty tired of them simply resting on the laurels of digital engineers. I think this can have a very positive effect for fence-sitting would be linux users. Its even less work than vmware for people who want to try out linux. Of course compaq has a long way to go if they want to be able to claim they are supporting linux to the degree that sgi and ibm have been. of course if digital were still alive, they'd have the crown. long live dec.
-earl
sure,
when they do something you detest, you say tou'll short the stock. But since they're doing what you want them to _right now_, are have you bought stock?? Or are you just another whiny hypocrite...
-earl
I remember reading somewhere in the last six months or so that lots of domain names were intentionally reserved when DNS was started. For example all the one letter names are reserved, and they also decided to hold traditionally offensive words as well. Later on, names like there were given to organizations like naacp to allow them to protect against their use. The problem is that you're likely to see people register plurals, and variants of offensive words anyway, so not much is solved. (as if domain names were the real problem anyway ;)
-earl
looks like they're gonna need an upgrade. That thing is slashdotted already. I think they've underestimated how many folks are interested in packetstorm.
this is exctly why I registered my domain with register.com, NSI is a fscking horrible company. I never get mail from register.com, nevermind spam. Also, I've found that register.com's web interface to domain administration is *far* bettter than the e-mail crap that NSI has set up for their domain admin process. Not to say that register.com is perfect, I've had my problems, but NSI is orders of magnitude worse.
-earl
if you're concerned about sega having a basckdoor to your dreamcast, why don't you just intercept it's internet connection and see what gets sent on port 23? You can set up a ppp server on your linux box, and then have it get to the internet through there. Just use tcpdump, and you're golden. I suspect if sega had some kind of backdoor access to it, the auth would be based on serial #.
Since they probably never expect 99.999% of dc owners to try to access their DC via telnet, but they know crackers will do scans and find em eventually, they'd want to make sure that somebody getting one username:passward pair wouldn't then have access to every dreamcast box. So when you connect to their equivalent of battle.net, you tell them your ip, and your serial # and then they use the predetermined username:pass for your box to do whatever it is they wanted to do. Not too tricky. You may even get to see the "arcane" commands they've programmed into the thing.
-earl
well i think that it's clearly too early and the supposed details are way too sketchy to really get a clear idea of what's going on here. I'm not sayig Apple's 'innocent here, but it sounds more like a big pile of confusion rather than Apple simply trying to fuck over the upgrade makers. Obviously it's possible for them to make cars that work even in the patched macs, there's "rumors" that xlr8 has a g4 card nearly ready to go. I don't think it's evil for apple to use a minor stall tactic to keep the clonemakers from beating them to the punch by months. OTOH, of they tried to _prevent_ them from bringing upgrade cards to market, thats another story altogether.
-earl
It is a good idea, however, it has a negative loophole. Since the /. oldtimers (and many moderators) are going to view messages at +1, so a new user who'se posts are put in as 0, may not have their posts read by moderators, thus decreasing their chances of moving up the strata. As I said, it _is_ a good idea however, it is dependent on the moderators reading discussions with a 0 score.
-earl
she's the "responsible" adult. If watching his namesake die week after week is traumatic for the kid
I.Q. is irrelevant. Common sense is the key.
I'm not defending apple here, but Intel is far from guilty in this arena. Anyone heard of slot1, slot 7, slot foo? They changed it so that people couldn't just stick an AMD or Cyrix into their old machine to make it a much faster machine. They crippled the x86 upgrade market to make more $$$. If apple does the same thing, then that makes the just as guilty.
moral of the story : companies _will_ do whatever they feel is necessary to survive. period
BTW, my stupid winmodem won't work with linux. I love all these wonderful "innovations" in the x86 market.
You might want to note that Apple did sell multiprocessor 604 boxen a few years ago, and they even wrote special semi-SMP drivers for MacOS. Now that they've got OS X on the verge of shipment (~6 months) and OS X server available today, I can guarantee that they'll release an SMP G4 Server box. SMP G4 workstations wil probably have to wait till shortly after the release of OS X.
There are definitely good things to come from apple on this front.
-earl
if that's your philosophy, why don't you just change your minimum threshold to be 1. That way you won't see stoopid posts by AC's. I prefer to read the AC postings because every once and a while an AC had something useful to say.
-earl
i can't imagine they expect their box to stay unhacked for more than a day. maybe they're just puttig it out there to see what kind of attacks the l33t hakorz are usinbg these days.
-earl
you could also take a look at tcp-int for cheap long distance faxing. you ship your fax via e-mail to a fax machine that can deliver your fax with a local call. Otherwise, I've heard hylafax is a real good solution as well.
-earl
- tap your phone line
- intercept your e-mail
- get your financial records
- interrogate your employerput you under direct surveillance, etc
for those of you who are complaining about AOL's disclosure policy:If you're really worried about privacy, then those are things you probably ought to addres first. AOL has far less information about you than
I think it makes sense for AOL to comply with the law. If you have a problem with the info that they're providing _legally_ to law enforcement, take issue with the laws, not with AOL.
-earl
the ssh family of commands is designed as a drop-in-replacement for the r* family commands. If you use ssh, you can still do this.
-earl
before you rush to judgement and say "amazon has so many more books", consider that fatbrain is strictly computer|science|business books. No Oprah books, no cat in the hat, no Stephen King. When you think about it, the fatbrain model actually fits better with the UNIX philosophy of "small tools, working together". Amozon has taken the opposite tack of "one big fat tool for everything". Sorta sounds like windows dosen't it?
Of course, only you can decide which is best for you, but I prefer to assemble a collection of specialized tools(websites) that handle all the tasks I need.
-earl
Now that they've brought installs up to a level where mere mortals can handle it, and built some intelligent sys-admin tools, the distro makers are presented with several new challenges:
- multiplatform distro (Redhat was first? with RH-alpha)
- mid-large server versions for serious servers
- development on better smp/clustering (kernel & apps)
- stablize linux desktop/workstation environments (ala gnome/kde)
It's good to see debian making progress in an area that I consider critical for the distro makers to address. On a separate but related note, I think I'm going to make my next linux box debian instead of using redhat again. I'm disapointed with the 6.x release, and debian's been getting good (peer) reviews onassist efforts to develop quality drivers for USB/Firewire/3D-Video-Cards to linux. hw vendors might be more cooperative with a "corporate partner" that they have with the myriad of kernel hackers that have developed the code so far.
-earl
Well, :-)
I thought about it, and Word is not the best, and text is not the best. So what is?? It's obvious, but not so obvious. HTML, it's small, it's versatile, it's universally read/write, and it's free. I got tired of having a copy of my resume on disk, but not being able to edit it until I got to a mac or pc. Now I can edit my resume in vi, emacs, word, bbedit, or even with a magnet. Nobody claims thay can't read it. Nobody whines that they can't print it, It's on my web page, it's in my notebook. It's the perfect format. I can attatch it to e-mails, I can make it _the_ e-mail. It doesn't get much better than that.
So when some idiot claims they can't read your resume, tell them to open it with netscape, and hang up.
After all if the guy at the other end of line doesn't know how to use a web browser, do you realy want to work for em??
Just my $.02
-earl
actually, no OSX does not have BSD at it's core.
It's core is the Mach Microkernel. On top of this, sits both the NeXT environment, and the BSD environment. What's happening in this situation is worse than just crashing BSD, because it's crashing apache, which is crashing BSD, which in turn is crashing the Mach subsystem. Like somebody said, the BSD port is most likely at fault since it is the only code in this scenario that has access to the whole machine (to be able to crash Mach). I'm sure Apple will get to the bottom of this pretty quikly since it's a pretty big show stopper.
-earl
Well to clarify a bit, what's at the other end of all your ADSL "modems" is basically an ATM switch. So it's true that you can't see anybody else's unicast traffic on your line, although you may see some broadcast traffic from users on the same subnet(it's the nature of IP).
For cable, you're probably going to be able to see other people's traffic, but from the info I got from my cable company (Media General in Fairfax, VA), the roadrunner service that they're about to offer encrypts the traffic from your "modem" back to their offices, and that way neighbors can't effectively spy on each other.
but that's only how it happens on my block. Other providers may not be so intelligent.
-earl
It's one thing to sell products based on linux, it's another all together to run your business on it. Generally it makes more sense to go to NT from OS/2 _right now_ since there's an easier transition between the two. Also you can probably run all the same server/client apps from os/2 on NT, and for user desktops, you'ld require less training. In the long term however, I'm confident that Linux will fill these app holes as both a client and a server. Also starting a new computing environment, you could easily go with linux today. It's just when you're dealing with legacy PC apps that you'll probably have NT be the stronger canidate.
Of course you're gonna lose out on stability and scalability with NT, but frankly, you still can't run alot of wintel type apps on linux _today_. Next year... well that's another story.
-earl
Well, there's another NT app that I can run on linux instead. I've never actually run Domino, and that's simply because I'd need an NT server to run it. I've always wanted to start it up and see what it can do, looks like we'll all get a chance pretty soon.
-earl
2nd, with all digital technologies like xDSL, and ISDN, you get much higher data rates because you never have to convert the signal. POTS, ISDN and xDSL all use the same 2 wires, but with various encoding methods, and consequentially different equipment both at your end, and at the telco end. The biggest reason why DSL is so much faster than ISDN is because the xDSL spec has shorter distance limits that ISDN does. It's pretty similar to the distance restrictions of Gigabit/Fast/Ethernet.
The reason that you hear lots of people complain abot the FCC and 56K, is not that they want to restrict bandwidth, but that they have a limit on how much power you can send across phone lines. Because of this restriction, the tricks that the 56K modems use to get above 33.6 can't be maximized on "crystal clear" phone lines. You'ld be hard pressed to find a line where it mattered anyway, but that's another issue.
56K modems are a pretty neat trick, and most people I know do have 56K. I decided about two years ago to just hold out for one of the current multi-migabit technologies. I'd spent too much already on 14.4, 28.8 and 33.6 to spend a dime on any new modem. I pondered ISDN for a while, but it is _so_ much money. I just can't justify that monthly bill.
here ends the lesson...
-earl