I wrote a journal entry on my experiences in installing it.
Just the important details:
The game itself and the Linux installer consider the disc labeled "Disc One" to be the "Play Disc" and the discs labeled "Disc Two" and "Disc Three" to be "Disc One" and "Disc Two" respectively.
The Linux installer isn't mentioned clearly on anything that I found, but is on "Disc Three" in the root directory and is called "linux_installer.sh."
I'd suggest copying the install script to a local filesystem and then executing it because the script will try and unmount your CD-ROM drive and then re-mount it. (I think it uses/mnt/cdrom as the mount-point - ensure you use the appropriate CD-ROM device for the fstab entry for/mnt/cdrom!)
The post wasn't really meant to be taken that seriously.
Tough.
Anyway, most of the computers I've used had an option in the BIOS for changing POST behavior when a keyboard error is encountered. It's usually called "Halt on error:" and has the options "All" and "All but keyboard". Others call it "On keyboard error: [Halt/Continue]". It's been that way for quite a while - I think the computer I got in 1999 had that option. I have a computer sitting right next to me without a keyboard and it booted up just fine. (Which suprised me, since I thought it was set to halt on no keyboard. That and it frequently has minor problems such as "CMOS battery not making sufficient contact", "Video card no longer in contact with slot", "Memory bus cannot recall having memory", "CPU fell out",...)
Uh, yeah, but portage takes quite a while to emerge rsync to "download the complete list of updates," so to speak. Of course, in Portage's case, you're not just downloading something like "package name|current version", you're downloading scripts that allow portage to download the software, apply any patches, and then configure and build the software. Downloading the entire portage tree takes a fair amount of time, since there are currently 3673
packages in portage.
Once you have the portage tree downloaded, then portage doesn't explicitly send information about what software you have installed, other than the information that can be obtained from watching what updated tarballs are downloaded. (Basically, it's possible to get a really good guess of what a Gentoo box has installed if you can get the server logs from the main mirror.)
Basically, I think that MS made a technical decision that it was better to have the client say "I have this" than for the server to dump a complete list of "Current versions are this" to the client. They also want tag individuals update clients so that when User ID {12345678-9ABC-DEF0-1234-123456789ABC} attempts and fails to install an update 120 times in a row, they only count that as one client that cannot install an update. They can then determine that raw failed attempts may be 10235, but only 528 users couldn't install the patch but were very persistant in failing. And then they can concentrate on the patch that 10,245,349 individual people couldn't install.
I don't believe there was an malice intended (yet), and that people are simply overreacting.
If MS was explicitly denying security patches to people with Mozilla installed, I might be more worried. For the time being, this doesn't seem like MS trying to screw their users. Although MS has proven that they are quite willing to do so in the future, with measures that don't seem overly threatening originally.
I've already got two systems hubbed to the network (primary Windows desktop, secondary Linux server), and I haven't had the need to network the laptop into the mix yet. Mainly because I can unplug the uplink on my hub, plug in the laptop, assign it an IP address (it's amazing how many times I've assigned it the same IP address as my main box, even though I should know better), and then download the files I need.
Since I'm on 3rd floor in Founders, I can't get (reliable) wireless access from up here. On good nights, I occasionally find myself signing onto IM from my room when doing misc crap on the laptop. Usually there's no signal, or it's so bad as to be unusable. (But good enough to repeatedly toggle between "connected" and "unconnected" in the systray.)
I'm debating whether or not I recognize you from your pictures. I'm not sure, so I'll play it safe and guess no. Damnit, you got a better/. UID than me! *hmph*
They have a separate "roaming" setup for laptops I didn't bother explaining. (I'm posting this from a laptop using the wireless network while in the campus center. Guess the college:))
You still need your MAC to sign up for a "roaming" IP. Once it's been activated, plugging your laptop into any of the ports around campus will get you onto the network. Wireless has the added step of downloading the WEP key over HTTPS.
I believe that a roaming IP can be used in the dorm rooms, but you may need to sign up separately for that as well. I dunno, since I'm using wireless and can't plug the 802.11b card into the ethernet port...
Or, if you were a sys-admin at the overly-anal college I go to, you would require the MAC address at signup time, which would then be tied to an individual port in an individual room. Using an unregistered MAC would cause the port to immediately deactivate. So once you have the MAC, you wouldn't just have the room - you'd have the individual student and could immediately deactivate just their port.
This is quite annoying to students who find out the "MAC tied to port" bit by accidently misplugging their computers into the wrong side-by-side ports after rearranging their desks. Fortunately, it was a triple, and my desk stayed where it was. Heheh.
Oh, good, so I'm not the only one who read like that. After reading the story earlier. And then coming back an hour later, and misreading the headline. Even though in theory I already knew what the headline meant...
I agree that you are within your rights to use SPEWS to block whoever you want on your own, personal, network. But I really hope you're running just a small, mostly useless, personal network that no one really cares about. If you were an ISP yourself or running the network at the company I work for, I'd be pissed.
SPEWS doesn't help anybody by blocking non-spammers. They just piss off people who just want to use the Internet without worrying about being branded a "spammer-supporter." All that blocking non-spammers is going to do is force companies to stop using SPEWS when they need to contact companies blocked by SPEWS.
Besides, how about my current situation. I'm a student on at a college, I have one choice for my Internet connection, and that's through the college network. I can pretty much guarentee that a spammer using the college network would get dropped and get several not-so-friendly visits from Netops, so I don't worry about that. However, not overly surprisingly, my college is not directly on the Internet backbone. It goes through a small ISP called "Qwest" - maybe you've heard of them?
I know my home town has, Qwest interrupted phone service for many hours - twice - two years ago or so. Nobody's quite as happy as a police chief with 911 out of service. Of course, cutting service was quite an accomplishment, since the phone service was (and is) provided by Verizon. But never underestimate Qwest's contractors who were laying fiber, and couldn't be bothered to be careful to not cut Verizon's lines in the same area. Twice.
Er, anyway, seeing as Qwest provides the connection to the rest of the Internet, if a spammer caused SPEWS to block off network blocks that include the spammer, including blocking off access to my college, I'd be out of luck. I don't directly support Qwest - I paid a one-time fee to gain access to the larger network. So now, I can't e-mail SPEWS users or in some cases even send to their networks at all. What would SPEWS supporters tell me to do? Move to another ISP.
I can't. As part of the terms for living in the dorms, I must use the college's network. Besides, the college network has a 44MBit/s pipe, why would I want to go get dialup? So I'm stuck waiting for someone else to kick off a spammer. From the praise I've heard people give to Qwest, I could be waiting a while...
Or if I head home, I use (my father's) Verizon DSL for internet access. If Verizon is slow to kick a spammer, and I get blocked at home, do you really expect my Dad to spend $150 to switch to digital cable and get new e-mail addresses? That's ridiculous. Why should I change ISPs to help you remove one spammer who's spamming through someones Windows box who checked off all the software they could install - including IIS (which includes an SMTP server)?
It's completely impractical to expect me to change ISPs to "send a message" to a ISP hosting a spammer. However, said spammer has no problems getting another ISP or even just another IP address, and continues sending spam.
So now what - SPEWS has potentially cost many individuals a total of a few thousand dollars, without getting rid of the spammer, and without really sending a message to the ISP (since most people are likely to be oblivious to the blocking). Maybe SPEWS managed to get a manager to yell at his network guys to "make the mother-loving server accept mail from our largest client's home account now!!!"
This seems a lot like the "shoot them all and let God sort 'em out" policies of yore...
That's weird - I'm using the mouse gestures package from Optimoz, and the "open link in new tab" gesture works fine. But trying to do it in the popup menu doesn't. Huh...
Actually, attempting to click on the links period doesn't seem to work. I wonder if this is considered to be a "security feature" due to some scripting bug?
Romeo may have been 20-something (although most of the resources I can find list him closer to 16) - but Juliet was most definately 13. In Act I, scene II, her father mentions that "[s]he hath not seen the change of fourteen years" - clearly establishing her age to be at most 13. But no older.
Romeo's age does not appear to be established in the text, but is generally believed to be near that of Juliet, around 15-16 years old.
Somehow, a child porn site becomes hosted on Geocities. Geocities, with the thousands of other sites hosted there, doesn't notice it before someone is PA does.
Shocked, the user immediately informs their ISP to correct the issue. The ISP duely blocks off all Geocities pages, as required by law, and at the same time sends off an e-mail to Yahoo (Geocities's owner). By the time someone at Yahoo finally receives the e-mail, Geocities has been blocked for the entire weekend.
It seems to me that without knowing how exactly this law is supposed to work, it may not be giving hosting companies a fair chance to react.
Of course, what's child porn here may be perfectly legal elsewhere. After all, Romeo was only about 16 and Juliet was "not yet 14" when they met... Of course, Shakespeare reduced Juliet's age from the original source story. She was originally 16...
Which brings up another scenario - some foreign site which contains "barely legal teens" has pictures of naked 16 year-olds on it. PA deems this "child porn," and when contacted the host laughs at them and says "it's legal here!" The other sites hosted on the server suffer as a result...
I don't think he meant that the OS itself had crashed. Windows XP changes the old Windows behavior of logging the crash to Watson (or whatever it was called - when it said "Windows is writing an error log") to instead allow the user "Submit a Bug Report." So when he reports that "Windows XP" is sending a bug report, I doubt he means that the OS crashed. Instead, one of the component programs (like Media Player, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express,...) crashed and is "submitting a bug report."
I doubt he has to reboot 3-10 times a week - rather some Windows "component" crashes 3-10 times a week, and indicates that it's submitting a bug report. Finding something that crashes Internet Explorer 3-10 times a week is probably not that difficult a task - assuming you visit sites with sufficiently complex JavaScript, or that require sufficiently crappy ActiveX controls.
First of all, the interview is about seven years old, so think in terms of the newly released Windows 95. Those statistics are quite old, and since then I think that Bill at the very least has had to change his view of the importance of bugs in MS software over the past few years...
Secondly, I'll bet from looking purely at support calls, he's correct. How many people are you aware of that are willing to spend money to be told "yep, that's a bug"? When Word just disappears altogether, how many people think "hmm - I'll call MS and tell them about it" and instead just throw up their hands in dismay, mutter... something, reboot, and try again? Not that this is anything against your post - yeah, MS software is known to be buggy. But I'll bet that the metrics Bill was talking about were correct - and completely misleading.
However, what Bill was really trying to do was argue that when Microsoft releases a new version of one of their products (Word was the example given), they are not releasing a for-pay patch. They are releasing software that contains more and better features! At least, that's his argument. The whole point of his argument was not that MS software does not contain bugs - is what that new releases aren't just expensive patches.
You might have had a better childhood. Or you (now it's plural, as you can plainly see) had better childhoods.
grr... people and their non-traumatic childhood...
Wait-a-minute... I was never pushed into a locker a got along with pretty much everyone in my school, and I was a Boy Scout! Actually, one of the most popular people in my school was both in the band, the school play, and made Eagle rank as a Boy Scout. And this is a public school. Hmm... actually, I can't think of anyone who was routinely picked on heavily for being a "nerd." I mean, in elementary school, yeah, people were juvenile. But by highschool? Most of the people just ignored those they didn't get along with. No shoving people in lockers. Removing locker hinges, yes...
OK, so I'll let you out now.
(It's a joke. Welcome to the posting populace >:))
My favorite obsecure bit in Office Space is the computers they use, which I interpret as being an in-joke for actual computer users. It's a strange hybrid between Unix, Windows, and Mac all in one. He copies files onto the disk in A:/ from C:/path/to/whatever, using a UI that is clearly Mac-based.
I don't interpret this as "people not knowing what they're doing" but instead as people purposely mixing everything that know in order to create a system that is a mix of real systems without being a real system:)
How about this?
It's the first thing I found off Google (yeah, it's an MS-Windows based security system, I'm not endorsing it or anything).
A lot of companies use magnetic swipe cards that are very similar to credit cards for their physical security system. I know that they have a writer where I work - I broke my card, and watched them write the new badge before handing it back to me. Although since they've switched over to the cool RFID thingies... so now instead of swiping it and checking to see if the LED is blinking, I get to wave the card madly in front of the LED, and then back so I can see if it's blinking, then again because it didn't f#!@ing work, and again... why can't it BEEP or light up one of the TWO OTHER LEDS ON THE PANNEL once it's accepted the card?!
Er, anyway, try looking for "magstripe writers" or "magstripe security" on Google and you might find better links. They aren't common and are expensive, but it's possible to get one. (Although most small buisnesses just get the cards pre-written, and assign the IDs off the cards to the people given the badges. Break or lose your badge? They reset your ID to the new ID for your new card. But it is possible to get the writers.)
Wonder why you have a 21% interest fee while you can borrow at around 5-6% at the bank?
I could have sworn it was because the bank usually loaned me the money on condition of collatoral (ie, if I don't pay my car loan, I don't keep my car), where as the credit card company just loans me the money on faith that I'll pay them back eventually. Hence I pay around 14% interest on my credit card and about 6% on my car loan - through the same bank (er, federal credit union).
Likewise, when most people "borrow" from the bank, what they're really doing is mortaging their house - so the house acts as collateral for the loan. Looking at the rates table I'm looking at, loans without collateral go from 13%-16%, whereas loans with collateral go from 3%-11% (depending on the depreciation of the collateral among other things).
Of course, I may be wrong, but that's the way I understand it - credit card companies are taking a larger risk in loaning out money than most bank loans are. Hense the rates are higher.
That's not to say that the credit card technology doesn't suck right now, but...
How about this - you are saying that it is justifiable for terrorists to kill civilians because the country they happen to be in supports something they disagree with. Spam may be a large problem (although it's easy to block for me, since most of it is in Chinese for some reason), but that does not justify harming people who just happen to have the misfortune of being near a spammer.
I'm just going to make this point: blocking non-spammers will only hurt SPEWS in the long-run, as its current effectiveness is based on the majority of people using it. As people find that they either have to turn to some other source than SPEWS or accept that occasionally people they must communicate with cannot send them email without a whitelist, they will not think "yay, we're helping to eliminate spammers!" and instead think "Goddamned broken SPEWS thing accidently blocking valid people - remove it!"
Eventually, SPEWS will have caused enough problems that no one (except a small core of vigilantes on their own servers) will use it. And then it will have no power over the vast majority of spammers. SPEWS would be more effective if it only blocked spammers and many people used it - it could help make spam an ineffective method of contacting people. Force the cost of spamming up, not the cost of happening to use an ISP that hosts a spammer. All you're going to do is create things like this, and force people against you. SPEWS does not help the cause by being a vigilante and trying to force people who have no buisness with the spammer to take action against their ISP.
Besides - which is easier: getting the ISP to drop the spammers acount, or telling people who want to communicate with you to stop using SPEWS? The path of least resistance is likely to be followed... which may include "ok, we'll just ignore the bozos using SPEWS."
"Yes, your honor, the bomb did kill 158 innocent civilians. But it also killed the two terrorists!"
Come on - is it really your fault if you accidently find yourself "a customer of an ISP harboring a spammer?" Do you deserve to be punished too? Do you really think that blocking the entire netblock of people who may be using the service because they have no other choice is really a good method to stop spammers?
I doubt many people blocked due to a single spammer are going to think "oh, well, I may not be able to send e-mail to my most important client - but at least while I'm losing thousands of dollars, I know I'm helping to fight spam!" Most, I'd bet, would just call up the offending receiver and complain that they're getting bounce messages when they try and send e-mail and that the receivers should fix their mail servers as soon as possible.
So, I guess if costing a few hundred people a hundred bucks to move to another service is "helping to reduce spam," it's a cost that they should be glad to pay...
If you want to use SPEWS for your own personal webserver, then go ahead. If you expect anyone doing any buisness with e-mail to use it regardless of the risks of blocking important e-mail, then you're out of your mind. If you think that blocking entire netblocks is going to encourage companies to use SPEWS, then you're insane. If you think harming many to bring justice to a few in the group is morally just, then I must question your morals.
(I suppose a better analogy would be "Yeah, the gas may have put hundreds of innocent civilians into the hospital for a month, but it also put the three-man scam out of operation!" in that people that are blocked by SPEWS can become unblocked, and hence are only "wounded." It's still harming many to eliminate a few.)
I just checked - Mozilla is currently using 44MB on my system, with two mailboxes open, and one window with six tabs in it (one being this reply and another being the post I'm replying to).
For a pointless comparision, "explorer.exe" currently is using 61MB. I have no idea why the tast that draws the desktop and the "Windows Explorer" window needs 61MB.
So yeah, I'd say that 80MB is possible. I think Mozilla (1.2.1 in my case) usually uses between 40MB and 50MB for my daily browsing needs. 80MB is a little on the rediculous side unless some massively huge document was openned. I've managed to get Mozilla up around 300MB+ by (accidentily) openning massive XML documents. (Keep in mind that these are like 100MB XML documents, and somewhere before it gets to 300MB I kill the process. And yes, when building a DOM tree, there really is like a 3x times memory overhead for XML. Go SAX!)
Block boxes can be your friend - but there are issues with them from time to time. One of the most annoying things I never knew about Java is because of the black box that is the java.lang.String class. It turns out that String.substring(...) creates a new String object that keeps a reference to the entire original sequence of characters that made up the original String object. In other words, if I had a 1024-character long string, and wanted only 5 characters from it, I would end up with a String object that presented through its black box just those 5 characters but maintained internally all 1024 characters.
There's a way around it. Doing new String(string.substring(0,5)) allocates a new String that only contains the five required characters. But the documentation for the black box warns against doing that: "Unless an explicit copy of [the original string] is needed, use of this constructor is unnecessary since Strings are immutable."
Well, yes, they are - but using the constructor can also be required to get around the fact that the entire array of original characters is maintained.
As it turns out, this is a "speed hack" (ie, only one array of characters is maintained at any given time - a new array for the substring is not allocated, and the original is used). However, this implementation assumes that everyone using the black box is also going to need the parent string or is going to dereference both full string and substring (and hence allow to be gced) at about the same time, preventing memory and time from being wasted on the substring.
Unfortunately, I had written a program that read in a list of strings, keeping certain substrings and throwing out the rest - or so I thought. (Think "comments" in the text file - they would removed, the remaining characters would be kept.) This meant I was wasting quite a bit of space by the end of the run due to characters that were no longer accessible being kept around indefinately since the "substring" objects kept a reference to the array of characters for the full string. Fixing it requires doing the new String(string) thing, which as it turns out does allocate a new buffer and is there expressly for that purpose (if you read the source code).
My point is this - black boxes can be dangerous. A black box is a very useful abstraction - assuming that important details about implementation side effects are documented. In the given example, the Java developers implement an algorithm that is useful in many cases - but there are those cases where it would be useful not to use such an implementation.
I think that the idea of "black boxes" are important, but that a developer also has to be aware that something happens in the black box and be prepared to learn about it if the need arises. Likewise, when creating a black box, care should be taken to either fully specify what a given implementation does and that there are no side effects to the environment (like maintaining a 1024-element array and only allowing access to 5 elements). There are pitfalls - and both users of black boxes and designers must ensure that such issues are addressed.
(Especially because if the next String blackbox "fixes" the issue above, my code will start doing a useless extra step to get around the problems in the implementation I saw of the black box...)
Likewise, Super Mario Bros. 2 as released in Japan was very similar to Super Mario Bros. - it used similar sprites, and had almost exactly the same gameplay physics. The game was "too hard" for American audiences, apparently, so it was never released. Instead Doki Doki Panic was altered to become the American Super Mario Bros. 2.
And I still think that SMB3 is the best Super Mario game - ever! Seriously - I never really liked Super Mario World, or any of the other Marios since.
I'm a sen - oh, right, er, junior - at WPI (year off, not that many NRs - yet), so I'd go ask Sean O'Conner down at NetOps or ask the people at the CCC. They're friendly people, as long as you're not being a dipshit and doing something like, oh, I don't know, installing keyloggers, and would probably be more than happy to tell you the stories about people being morons. (Although probably without specific names. Just the events.)
I actually haven't heard anything about this, but I'm going to preemptively blaim Dabion (his screen name), since he claimed he could do it.:) I've also met people who've claimed to have compromized root on the CCC machines, and read everyone's e-mails. Generally, it's not worth trying to be "1337" with the WPI network or computer systems -- you're probably going to get caught eventually, and the NetOps and CCC staff are more than happy to turn people in, resulting in penalties can be as severe as being expelled. (Not to mention whatever laws were broken...)
Why do you need it to be "boot-time writable?" You can basically boot a Linux CD-RW and have it boot to a RAM disk and then unmount the CD-ROM drive, allowing you to write to the CD-RW, and to the "file system" you're using.
Of course, this assumes that the machine has enough memory for this. I wonder how small you could get that? I'm thinking you might be able to write to a CD-RW using as little as 16MB, depending on how the boot process works (ie, figures out the modules needed and loads them before unmounting the CD-RW).
There's also a bootable Compact Flash reader. Compact Flash cards are rewritable, standard, and far more expensive than CD-Rs ($80 for a 128MB card...), but the 8MB ones are fairly cheap and might be useful. There are bootable CF IDE drives available. It costs $60, but allows booting off CF cards, which are fairly standard. You can get USB and PCMCIA cards that can read them as well, and several of the newer PDAs also have adapters that allow them to be used.
Mind you, I think that the 88mm CD-Rs are the perfect "bootable" replacement for floppies. The Gentoo LiveCD makes for perfect "rescue" CDs for almost all Linux distros, and the stage-1 Live CD fits on an 88mm CD-R.
Slashdot Mirror
Just the important details:
The game itself and the Linux installer consider the disc labeled "Disc One" to be the "Play Disc" and the discs labeled "Disc Two" and "Disc Three" to be "Disc One" and "Disc Two" respectively. The Linux installer isn't mentioned clearly on anything that I found, but is on "Disc Three" in the root directory and is called "linux_installer.sh."
I'd suggest copying the install script to a local filesystem and then executing it because the script will try and unmount your CD-ROM drive and then re-mount it. (I think it uses /mnt/cdrom as the mount-point - ensure you use the appropriate CD-ROM device for the fstab entry for /mnt/cdrom!)
Tough.
Anyway, most of the computers I've used had an option in the BIOS for changing POST behavior when a keyboard error is encountered. It's usually called "Halt on error:" and has the options "All" and "All but keyboard". Others call it "On keyboard error: [Halt/Continue]". It's been that way for quite a while - I think the computer I got in 1999 had that option. I have a computer sitting right next to me without a keyboard and it booted up just fine. (Which suprised me, since I thought it was set to halt on no keyboard. That and it frequently has minor problems such as "CMOS battery not making sufficient contact", "Video card no longer in contact with slot", "Memory bus cannot recall having memory", "CPU fell out", ...)
Once you have the portage tree downloaded, then portage doesn't explicitly send information about what software you have installed, other than the information that can be obtained from watching what updated tarballs are downloaded. (Basically, it's possible to get a really good guess of what a Gentoo box has installed if you can get the server logs from the main mirror.)
Basically, I think that MS made a technical decision that it was better to have the client say "I have this" than for the server to dump a complete list of "Current versions are this" to the client. They also want tag individuals update clients so that when User ID {12345678-9ABC-DEF0-1234-123456789ABC} attempts and fails to install an update 120 times in a row, they only count that as one client that cannot install an update. They can then determine that raw failed attempts may be 10235, but only 528 users couldn't install the patch but were very persistant in failing. And then they can concentrate on the patch that 10,245,349 individual people couldn't install.
I don't believe there was an malice intended (yet), and that people are simply overreacting. If MS was explicitly denying security patches to people with Mozilla installed, I might be more worried. For the time being, this doesn't seem like MS trying to screw their users. Although MS has proven that they are quite willing to do so in the future, with measures that don't seem overly threatening originally.
I've already got two systems hubbed to the network (primary Windows desktop, secondary Linux server), and I haven't had the need to network the laptop into the mix yet. Mainly because I can unplug the uplink on my hub, plug in the laptop, assign it an IP address (it's amazing how many times I've assigned it the same IP address as my main box, even though I should know better), and then download the files I need.
Since I'm on 3rd floor in Founders, I can't get (reliable) wireless access from up here. On good nights, I occasionally find myself signing onto IM from my room when doing misc crap on the laptop. Usually there's no signal, or it's so bad as to be unusable. (But good enough to repeatedly toggle between "connected" and "unconnected" in the systray.)
I'm debating whether or not I recognize you from your pictures. I'm not sure, so I'll play it safe and guess no. Damnit, you got a better /. UID than me! *hmph*
You still need your MAC to sign up for a "roaming" IP. Once it's been activated, plugging your laptop into any of the ports around campus will get you onto the network. Wireless has the added step of downloading the WEP key over HTTPS.
I believe that a roaming IP can be used in the dorm rooms, but you may need to sign up separately for that as well. I dunno, since I'm using wireless and can't plug the 802.11b card into the ethernet port...
This is quite annoying to students who find out the "MAC tied to port" bit by accidently misplugging their computers into the wrong side-by-side ports after rearranging their desks. Fortunately, it was a triple, and my desk stayed where it was. Heheh.
*sigh*
SPEWS doesn't help anybody by blocking non-spammers. They just piss off people who just want to use the Internet without worrying about being branded a "spammer-supporter." All that blocking non-spammers is going to do is force companies to stop using SPEWS when they need to contact companies blocked by SPEWS.
Besides, how about my current situation. I'm a student on at a college, I have one choice for my Internet connection, and that's through the college network. I can pretty much guarentee that a spammer using the college network would get dropped and get several not-so-friendly visits from Netops, so I don't worry about that. However, not overly surprisingly, my college is not directly on the Internet backbone. It goes through a small ISP called "Qwest" - maybe you've heard of them?
I know my home town has, Qwest interrupted phone service for many hours - twice - two years ago or so. Nobody's quite as happy as a police chief with 911 out of service. Of course, cutting service was quite an accomplishment, since the phone service was (and is) provided by Verizon. But never underestimate Qwest's contractors who were laying fiber, and couldn't be bothered to be careful to not cut Verizon's lines in the same area. Twice.
Er, anyway, seeing as Qwest provides the connection to the rest of the Internet, if a spammer caused SPEWS to block off network blocks that include the spammer, including blocking off access to my college, I'd be out of luck. I don't directly support Qwest - I paid a one-time fee to gain access to the larger network. So now, I can't e-mail SPEWS users or in some cases even send to their networks at all. What would SPEWS supporters tell me to do? Move to another ISP.
I can't. As part of the terms for living in the dorms, I must use the college's network. Besides, the college network has a 44MBit/s pipe, why would I want to go get dialup? So I'm stuck waiting for someone else to kick off a spammer. From the praise I've heard people give to Qwest, I could be waiting a while...
Or if I head home, I use (my father's) Verizon DSL for internet access. If Verizon is slow to kick a spammer, and I get blocked at home, do you really expect my Dad to spend $150 to switch to digital cable and get new e-mail addresses? That's ridiculous. Why should I change ISPs to help you remove one spammer who's spamming through someones Windows box who checked off all the software they could install - including IIS (which includes an SMTP server)?
It's completely impractical to expect me to change ISPs to "send a message" to a ISP hosting a spammer. However, said spammer has no problems getting another ISP or even just another IP address, and continues sending spam.
So now what - SPEWS has potentially cost many individuals a total of a few thousand dollars, without getting rid of the spammer, and without really sending a message to the ISP (since most people are likely to be oblivious to the blocking). Maybe SPEWS managed to get a manager to yell at his network guys to "make the mother-loving server accept mail from our largest client's home account now!!!"
This seems a lot like the "shoot them all and let God sort 'em out" policies of yore...
Actually, attempting to click on the links period doesn't seem to work. I wonder if this is considered to be a "security feature" due to some scripting bug?
Romeo's age does not appear to be established in the text, but is generally believed to be near that of Juliet, around 15-16 years old.
Somehow, a child porn site becomes hosted on Geocities. Geocities, with the thousands of other sites hosted there, doesn't notice it before someone is PA does.
Shocked, the user immediately informs their ISP to correct the issue. The ISP duely blocks off all Geocities pages, as required by law, and at the same time sends off an e-mail to Yahoo (Geocities's owner). By the time someone at Yahoo finally receives the e-mail, Geocities has been blocked for the entire weekend.
It seems to me that without knowing how exactly this law is supposed to work, it may not be giving hosting companies a fair chance to react.
Of course, what's child porn here may be perfectly legal elsewhere. After all, Romeo was only about 16 and Juliet was "not yet 14" when they met... Of course, Shakespeare reduced Juliet's age from the original source story. She was originally 16...
Which brings up another scenario - some foreign site which contains "barely legal teens" has pictures of naked 16 year-olds on it. PA deems this "child porn," and when contacted the host laughs at them and says "it's legal here!" The other sites hosted on the server suffer as a result...
I doubt he has to reboot 3-10 times a week - rather some Windows "component" crashes 3-10 times a week, and indicates that it's submitting a bug report. Finding something that crashes Internet Explorer 3-10 times a week is probably not that difficult a task - assuming you visit sites with sufficiently complex JavaScript, or that require sufficiently crappy ActiveX controls.
Secondly, I'll bet from looking purely at support calls, he's correct. How many people are you aware of that are willing to spend money to be told "yep, that's a bug"? When Word just disappears altogether, how many people think "hmm - I'll call MS and tell them about it" and instead just throw up their hands in dismay, mutter ... something, reboot, and try again? Not that this is anything against your post - yeah, MS software is known to be buggy. But I'll bet that the metrics Bill was talking about were correct - and completely misleading.
However, what Bill was really trying to do was argue that when Microsoft releases a new version of one of their products (Word was the example given), they are not releasing a for-pay patch. They are releasing software that contains more and better features! At least, that's his argument. The whole point of his argument was not that MS software does not contain bugs - is what that new releases aren't just expensive patches.
Whether you agree or not...
*shove*
You might have had a better childhood. Or you (now it's plural, as you can plainly see) had better childhoods.
grr... people and their non-traumatic childhood...
Wait-a-minute... I was never pushed into a locker a got along with pretty much everyone in my school, and I was a Boy Scout! Actually, one of the most popular people in my school was both in the band, the school play, and made Eagle rank as a Boy Scout. And this is a public school. Hmm... actually, I can't think of anyone who was routinely picked on heavily for being a "nerd." I mean, in elementary school, yeah, people were juvenile. But by highschool? Most of the people just ignored those they didn't get along with. No shoving people in lockers. Removing locker hinges, yes...
OK, so I'll let you out now.
(It's a joke. Welcome to the posting populace >:))
I don't interpret this as "people not knowing what they're doing" but instead as people purposely mixing everything that know in order to create a system that is a mix of real systems without being a real system :)
A lot of companies use magnetic swipe cards that are very similar to credit cards for their physical security system. I know that they have a writer where I work - I broke my card, and watched them write the new badge before handing it back to me. Although since they've switched over to the cool RFID thingies... so now instead of swiping it and checking to see if the LED is blinking, I get to wave the card madly in front of the LED, and then back so I can see if it's blinking, then again because it didn't f#!@ing work, and again... why can't it BEEP or light up one of the TWO OTHER LEDS ON THE PANNEL once it's accepted the card?!
Er, anyway, try looking for "magstripe writers" or "magstripe security" on Google and you might find better links. They aren't common and are expensive, but it's possible to get one. (Although most small buisnesses just get the cards pre-written, and assign the IDs off the cards to the people given the badges. Break or lose your badge? They reset your ID to the new ID for your new card. But it is possible to get the writers.)
I could have sworn it was because the bank usually loaned me the money on condition of collatoral (ie, if I don't pay my car loan, I don't keep my car), where as the credit card company just loans me the money on faith that I'll pay them back eventually. Hence I pay around 14% interest on my credit card and about 6% on my car loan - through the same bank (er, federal credit union).
Likewise, when most people "borrow" from the bank, what they're really doing is mortaging their house - so the house acts as collateral for the loan. Looking at the rates table I'm looking at, loans without collateral go from 13%-16%, whereas loans with collateral go from 3%-11% (depending on the depreciation of the collateral among other things).
Of course, I may be wrong, but that's the way I understand it - credit card companies are taking a larger risk in loaning out money than most bank loans are. Hense the rates are higher.
That's not to say that the credit card technology doesn't suck right now, but...
I'm just going to make this point: blocking non-spammers will only hurt SPEWS in the long-run, as its current effectiveness is based on the majority of people using it. As people find that they either have to turn to some other source than SPEWS or accept that occasionally people they must communicate with cannot send them email without a whitelist, they will not think "yay, we're helping to eliminate spammers!" and instead think "Goddamned broken SPEWS thing accidently blocking valid people - remove it!"
Eventually, SPEWS will have caused enough problems that no one (except a small core of vigilantes on their own servers) will use it. And then it will have no power over the vast majority of spammers. SPEWS would be more effective if it only blocked spammers and many people used it - it could help make spam an ineffective method of contacting people. Force the cost of spamming up, not the cost of happening to use an ISP that hosts a spammer. All you're going to do is create things like this, and force people against you. SPEWS does not help the cause by being a vigilante and trying to force people who have no buisness with the spammer to take action against their ISP.
Besides - which is easier: getting the ISP to drop the spammers acount, or telling people who want to communicate with you to stop using SPEWS? The path of least resistance is likely to be followed... which may include "ok, we'll just ignore the bozos using SPEWS."
Come on - is it really your fault if you accidently find yourself "a customer of an ISP harboring a spammer?" Do you deserve to be punished too? Do you really think that blocking the entire netblock of people who may be using the service because they have no other choice is really a good method to stop spammers?
I doubt many people blocked due to a single spammer are going to think "oh, well, I may not be able to send e-mail to my most important client - but at least while I'm losing thousands of dollars, I know I'm helping to fight spam!" Most, I'd bet, would just call up the offending receiver and complain that they're getting bounce messages when they try and send e-mail and that the receivers should fix their mail servers as soon as possible.
So, I guess if costing a few hundred people a hundred bucks to move to another service is "helping to reduce spam," it's a cost that they should be glad to pay...
If you want to use SPEWS for your own personal webserver, then go ahead. If you expect anyone doing any buisness with e-mail to use it regardless of the risks of blocking important e-mail, then you're out of your mind. If you think that blocking entire netblocks is going to encourage companies to use SPEWS, then you're insane. If you think harming many to bring justice to a few in the group is morally just, then I must question your morals.
(I suppose a better analogy would be "Yeah, the gas may have put hundreds of innocent civilians into the hospital for a month, but it also put the three-man scam out of operation!" in that people that are blocked by SPEWS can become unblocked, and hence are only "wounded." It's still harming many to eliminate a few.)
For a pointless comparision, "explorer.exe" currently is using 61MB. I have no idea why the tast that draws the desktop and the "Windows Explorer" window needs 61MB.
So yeah, I'd say that 80MB is possible. I think Mozilla (1.2.1 in my case) usually uses between 40MB and 50MB for my daily browsing needs. 80MB is a little on the rediculous side unless some massively huge document was openned. I've managed to get Mozilla up around 300MB+ by (accidentily) openning massive XML documents. (Keep in mind that these are like 100MB XML documents, and somewhere before it gets to 300MB I kill the process. And yes, when building a DOM tree, there really is like a 3x times memory overhead for XML. Go SAX!)
There's a way around it. Doing new String(string.substring(0,5)) allocates a new String that only contains the five required characters. But the documentation for the black box warns against doing that: "Unless an explicit copy of [the original string] is needed, use of this constructor is unnecessary since Strings are immutable."
Well, yes, they are - but using the constructor can also be required to get around the fact that the entire array of original characters is maintained.
As it turns out, this is a "speed hack" (ie, only one array of characters is maintained at any given time - a new array for the substring is not allocated, and the original is used). However, this implementation assumes that everyone using the black box is also going to need the parent string or is going to dereference both full string and substring (and hence allow to be gced) at about the same time, preventing memory and time from being wasted on the substring.
Unfortunately, I had written a program that read in a list of strings, keeping certain substrings and throwing out the rest - or so I thought. (Think "comments" in the text file - they would removed, the remaining characters would be kept.) This meant I was wasting quite a bit of space by the end of the run due to characters that were no longer accessible being kept around indefinately since the "substring" objects kept a reference to the array of characters for the full string. Fixing it requires doing the new String(string) thing, which as it turns out does allocate a new buffer and is there expressly for that purpose (if you read the source code).
My point is this - black boxes can be dangerous. A black box is a very useful abstraction - assuming that important details about implementation side effects are documented. In the given example, the Java developers implement an algorithm that is useful in many cases - but there are those cases where it would be useful not to use such an implementation.
I think that the idea of "black boxes" are important, but that a developer also has to be aware that something happens in the black box and be prepared to learn about it if the need arises. Likewise, when creating a black box, care should be taken to either fully specify what a given implementation does and that there are no side effects to the environment (like maintaining a 1024-element array and only allowing access to 5 elements). There are pitfalls - and both users of black boxes and designers must ensure that such issues are addressed.
(Especially because if the next String blackbox "fixes" the issue above, my code will start doing a useless extra step to get around the problems in the implementation I saw of the black box...)
Likewise, Super Mario Bros. 2 as released in Japan was very similar to Super Mario Bros. - it used similar sprites, and had almost exactly the same gameplay physics. The game was "too hard" for American audiences, apparently, so it was never released. Instead Doki Doki Panic was altered to become the American Super Mario Bros. 2.
And I still think that SMB3 is the best Super Mario game - ever! Seriously - I never really liked Super Mario World, or any of the other Marios since.
I actually haven't heard anything about this, but I'm going to preemptively blaim Dabion (his screen name), since he claimed he could do it. :) I've also met people who've claimed to have compromized root on the CCC machines, and read everyone's e-mails. Generally, it's not worth trying to be "1337" with the WPI network or computer systems -- you're probably going to get caught eventually, and the NetOps and CCC staff are more than happy to turn people in, resulting in penalties can be as severe as being expelled. (Not to mention whatever laws were broken...)
Have you seen American TV? We seem to be proud of it :)
Of course, this assumes that the machine has enough memory for this. I wonder how small you could get that? I'm thinking you might be able to write to a CD-RW using as little as 16MB, depending on how the boot process works (ie, figures out the modules needed and loads them before unmounting the CD-RW).
There's also a bootable Compact Flash reader. Compact Flash cards are rewritable, standard, and far more expensive than CD-Rs ($80 for a 128MB card...), but the 8MB ones are fairly cheap and might be useful. There are bootable CF IDE drives available. It costs $60, but allows booting off CF cards, which are fairly standard. You can get USB and PCMCIA cards that can read them as well, and several of the newer PDAs also have adapters that allow them to be used.
Mind you, I think that the 88mm CD-Rs are the perfect "bootable" replacement for floppies. The Gentoo LiveCD makes for perfect "rescue" CDs for almost all Linux distros, and the stage-1 Live CD fits on an 88mm CD-R.