My two favourite (summer) outdoor activities are rollerblading and paintball.
Personally, I put my laptop into a backpack carrying case, strap on some blades and go. At about the half-way point on my normal path, there's a coffee shop with outdoor tables... buy a coffee/Pepsi/fruit juice/whatever, sit at a table and pull out the laptop. Code for a bit (or whatever computing endeavor tickles your fancy that day). When you're done, pack up the laptop again and go home. Total time is usually a few hours by the time you're done, and you can actually get some work done while you're at it, if you're so inclined.
Paintball, naturally, is a blast. This is the time that you get back at people who blasted you in Quake... and it's much more... painful... for them.:)
The problem with this, of course, is that your would have to track down each and every infringement. With the number of silly patents out there, this might become your full-time job.
"Evaluations of variety on KaZaA vs. reported users"
First off, I'd like to see these evaluations and check them for at least the basis of scientific or mathematical theory. Secondly, you have to remember that 70% of people out there all listen to the same shitty music (N'Sync, Britney, J.Lo, etcetera ad nauseam), so evaluating purely content is bound to generate a large margin of error.
I'm not debating that the statistics *might* be skewed; any company who allows spyware to be bundled with their product is questionable, but I don't doubt that the user base is well over a million at any given point.
Blockquoth the parent: "but I wouldn't be suprised if it was in the 50,000 - 100,000 range. KaZaA is probably at a similar level"
Whoa... you're missing at least an order of magnitude there. On KaZaA (stripped of the spyware, of course.:) ), I regularly see 1.4 million users online. In fact, as I write this, KaZaA is reporting 1,650,044 users online, sharing 1,703,008GB.
I agree with your reasoning re: the economy, but the marketroids probably thought it too expensive to actually do research into the matter... plus, it provides "proof" (haha) that P2P is evil, hence securing such legislation as the DMCA and SSSCA (or whatever it's called this week).
"It's the type of attack I've never understood: it doesn't gain the attacker anything (unlike rooting a box), it's nothing but being a hoodlum."
Why do punks spray-paint "JoE wUz HerE" on warehouses? That doesn't gain them anything, either. Likewise, I don't understand their motives. As THHGTtG says, "there [is] always a significant number of people in the Galaxy who [are] not in their right minds."
Maybe it's the recognition they get (the likelyhood is that people who launch successful (D)DoS attacks are bragging about it on IRC 5 minutes later), or maybe they do it for kicks. Either way, this is more of a social/behavioural problem than a technological one. So long as there is a group (no matter how small) who think that bringing down sites is cool, DDoS attacks will persist.
"how is using that bandwidth anything at all like tearing up your apartment" It's the fact that you're essentially renting both that is relevant. When you rent something, you aren't given 100% control over what you can do with the item you're renting.
"You can rent a car. You can't destroy it, but you can drive it." How is this any different than being allowed to reside in a apartment, but not tear it up?
"What, they are just now finding out it isn't cheap? Did their providers suddenly try to screw them over with new rates too?" Well, as far as the rate their provider is charging, I don't know... it may have gone up, or it may have not. The point I was trying to make is that a much higher proportion of users are generating more traffic... a few examples are that infernal IncrediMail (HTML-ized email with a whole pile of "wonderful" backgrounds that require >5KB at *least*, usually more like >10+KB, instead of plain ol' text email which are typically <1KB), more people streaming audio, video, etc. There is a much greater presence of Flash animations on the than there was before. Etcetera, ad nauseam. All of these things take bandwidth. For one user, it might not seem like much. But when everyone and their dog are using it... it adds up.
Before, the cost of the occasional warez puppy (you know, the guy down the street who was downloading the latest appz, gamez, pr0n 24/7) or other high-bandwidth user was basically absorbed by the ISP. The rest of their subscribers were more likely to surf a litte, read their email and get off... a few megs per session at most. Now that everyone's using P2P programs, surfing web pages that have more and more graphic content, etc, it's harder to "average" bandwidth usage and cost accordingly... hence this new model. High-bandwidth users pay more, and your grandmother can check her email for that base price.
"I can look at those new terms, say "That's a crock of shit!" and go find something else" Yup, you can. But what do you think will happen when a significant proportion of the high-bandwidth users move to provider X, who offers unlimited bandwidth?? Suddenly, that provider has ALL the high-bandwidth users and find that their pricing plan no longer covers costs. So guess what? Either their prices go up dramatically, or they move to a system like this.
"You can rent a car.... There are plans that charge you milleage, and there are plans that don't." And this new system is like a car rental agency that offers unlimited mileage suddenly dropping that feature, and instead giving you 3,000 miles free and then you pay $X/mi after that. 3,000 miles would be enough for your "average" trip, but for those trips that exceed that average, well, you have a pay a little extra. A company changing policies is not unheard of; why should it be any different for an ISP?
"Yes, they can change their terms of service when they realize the old plan was stupid. But why on earth should I feel the least bit sorry for sucking up all the bandwidth I can while the old plan is in place? I payed for it, I'm damn well using it sans apology." Nothing wrong with that; hell, I'm guilty as charged. My DSL provider allows unlimited bandwidth, and by Tux, I use it. All I'm saying is that I understand their point. If MY ISP were to suddenly change policies to one similar to this, I would take a good look at the new terms and decide from there whether to move ISPs, pay the surcharge every month, or change my downloading habits.
"for the time I "rent it" for $40/month, I'll do the hell I want with it."
Key word: 'rent'. If you rent an apartment, are you free to do whatever the hell you want? Are you free to bash in all the walls, rip up the floor and detonate pyrotechnics? Not usually.
You'll either end up losing your security deposit, or you'll end up in court if the damage is severe enough. The rental fee provides specific services (ie. permission to reside in the apartment, perhaps also usage of electricity, natural gas, etc), but it does not give you free reign. You want to do that, BUY it outright. Your fast food analogy is off the mark since you have PURCHASED, and essentially "own" the food. Not so with an apartment or your ISP's network.
"follow the terms of the terms of service" And if their terms of service state that they will provide X gigabytes of download bandwidth, with a surcharge of $Y/GB after that? It's in the terms of service, which, by the way, usually includes a clause stating that they are allowed to change it at any time, usually with 30 days notice.
Bandwidth isn't cheap, and companies are finding this out very quickly, particularly with all the new whiz-bang "multimedia content" being pushed over our pipes (streaming video, online gaming, what-have-you).
"Windows 98 would automatically halt after 49 days? See, Microsoft really IS ahead of the security."
Umm, in order for this 'security' to be effective for Windows 98, wounldn't it have to crash in about 20 minutes? I mean, that IS the maximum security-life expectancy of one of those machines, isn't it??? Then again, back then everyone was on dial-up...
As an alternative to your idea, the article stated that the software will be automatically "updated" to allow new features... once the data starts flowing, I wonder how hard it would be to, ah, "submit a patch".:)
There's a very simple solution to this problem: Imagine your 'dream box', then tell management you need that.
"Yes, Mr. CEO, we need a system with 16-way SMP, 64GB RAM, 2 or 3 TB hard drive space... actually, make that solid state storage... we need the speed. It'll also need 10 gigabit Ethernet. Oh, and don't forget my GeForce 4. What? Yeah, we need an GF4 to play Qua... to render those architectural drawings quickly. .... I, did I say we needed ONE of these systems? Sorry... I meant THREE."
1) Read front page religiously. Note any cool hacks, or other interesting headlines. 2) Wait 2 days. 3) Submit news with same information but different headline. 4) Karma += 5; 5) Goto 1;
Indeed, because 'almost winter' == 'hunting season'.:)
That's the season where we show all these people that are saying "Who cares if the magnetic pole is moving? We have GPS!" how much a GPS is REALLY worth. Ever try getting a reading from a swamp?:)
"cleaning up Windows systems"... "repairing Windows installations"
What's wrong with using a Linux bootdisk to do `rm -fr *.*` ? Or, better, `for owtype in zero random zero urandom; do dd if="/dev/$owtype" of=/dev/hda1 bs=16k; done` ??? That cleans up Windows partitions, uh, really well.:)
Seriously, thanks for the tip though. I've bookmarked the page in case my trusty Mandrake boot CD is insufficient (?!?) for a given repair problem.
Just took a quick look at Gentoo's site... and I must say that it looks pretty damned cool. I'm definitely going to keep an eye on that thing and give it a go when it hits 1.0-stable.
"they're aiming for those expert users who just want the core programs and libraries, and will build their own system from there."
That's what I'm gonna do.:) I have an old 540MB hard drive kicking around... gonna swap that with the 2.6GB drive that's currently in my firewall/router machine, then rebuild the box from scratch on the 540MB drive using the minimal install option... then install SSH and all the other stuff I need, then put the firewall back into production. Last time I built it, I used Mandrake 8.0 and managed to trim that down to about 150MB... this time around it'll be even smaller, hopefully.:)
I have a feeling I'm really going to like the minimal install option... Now it'll be very easy to do Linux From Scratch, because you won't need an existing Linux installation to do it!
Man... goes to show how long it's been since I really played with DOS...;(
Maybe that one time it would have gone faster (since I had to run home to grab my Mandrake CD), but since I carry my Mandrake disk around with me all the time now, it's faster to just boot off CD than to create a Winblows boot disk.
Plus people think you're a computer god when you boot up Linux.:)
'sides... it just goes to show how shitty M$ operating systems are... the fact that the DOS included in Win98/ME needs a helper application for proper (modern) disk access is lame.
Indeed. Ever try deleting about 2 gigs of stuff using pure MS-DOS mode?
I recently had to wipe out a virus that had lodged itself in the C:\_RESTORE directory of someone's WinME install. Of course, Windows won't let you touch these "critical" files, so I booted to DOS mode... del *.*... wait 15 minutes... and it's still not getting anywhere very fast. Put coat on, tell customer I'll be back in 10 minutes.
Come back with Linux Mandrake 8.0 CD#1, insert, reboot, type 'rescue' at LILO prompt, mount/dev/hda1/mnt, cd/mnt/_rescue, rm -fr *. 30 seconds later everything's wiped. Reboot WinME, full virus scan, all clean. Problem solved.:)
The Mandrake rescue feature is much more useful than just restoring a broken LILO or whatever. I now carry that CD around with my tech kit.:)
"This spring, Microsoft will unveil technology that allows Windows users to receive automatic updates each time a bug fix is available."
Oh, yes, PLEASE patch production servers automatically. I can't wait. With M$' history of their patches breaking otherwise-working machines, I can't wait to see this.
Naturally, any half-assed sysadmin would disable this, but that kinda takes the whole point out, right?
Chalk up one more for M$' "Useless Bug^H^H^HFeatures".
What cave are YOU living in? THERE ALREADY IS! The current levy (a.k.a. "tax") is somewhere around $0.25/CD-R.
Don't doubt that this law WILL pass... we're talking about politicians, after all. On the upside, they're essentially making it legal to pirate music, since you're already paying for it.
They are measuring capacities as 1GB == 1,000MB. If you go back and read the PDF from the last time this story was posted (yesterday or the day before), it explicitly says in there that the levy is $0.021/MB, then in the next paragraph says $21/GB, so they must be using 1GB == 1,000MB, or somebody's on really good crack (not unfathomable, considering we're talking about politicians).
Actually, there was on article on/. the other day about this whole thing... this particular story is just one small excerpt out of the whole peice of legislation.
Under the new laws, levies on CD media will go up to $0.59 (from the current $0.25 (I think)), and ALL media in MP3 players will be levied $0.021/MB, or $21/GB (yeah, they're ignoring the whole base-2 thing, apparently). Flash cards and other removable media is levied too, so there's no way around it.
"does anyone know the command to flush the swap partition"
Hmm... couldn't you just
swapoff/dev/hda1 && swapon/dev/hda1 ??? Make sure you select the right partition, obviously, but wouldn't that work? Any reason why not?
Slashdot Mirror
My two favourite (summer) outdoor activities are rollerblading and paintball.
:)
Personally, I put my laptop into a backpack carrying case, strap on some blades and go. At about the half-way point on my normal path, there's a coffee shop with outdoor tables... buy a coffee/Pepsi/fruit juice/whatever, sit at a table and pull out the laptop. Code for a bit (or whatever computing endeavor tickles your fancy that day). When you're done, pack up the laptop again and go home. Total time is usually a few hours by the time you're done, and you can actually get some work done while you're at it, if you're so inclined.
Paintball, naturally, is a blast. This is the time that you get back at people who blasted you in Quake... and it's much more... painful... for them.
- Jester
The problem with this, of course, is that your would have to track down each and every infringement. With the number of silly patents out there, this might become your full-time job.
Agreed... I've been playing SEIV for like 4 weeks straight... ;)
"Evaluations of variety on KaZaA vs. reported users"
First off, I'd like to see these evaluations and check them for at least the basis of scientific or mathematical theory. Secondly, you have to remember that 70% of people out there all listen to the same shitty music (N'Sync, Britney, J.Lo, etcetera ad nauseam), so evaluating purely content is bound to generate a large margin of error.
I'm not debating that the statistics *might* be skewed; any company who allows spyware to be bundled with their product is questionable, but I don't doubt that the user base is well over a million at any given point.
- Jester
Blockquoth the parent: "but I wouldn't be suprised if it was in the 50,000 - 100,000 range. KaZaA is probably at a similar level"
:) ), I regularly see 1.4 million users online. In fact, as I write this, KaZaA is reporting 1,650,044 users online, sharing 1,703,008GB.
Whoa... you're missing at least an order of magnitude there. On KaZaA (stripped of the spyware, of course.
I agree with your reasoning re: the economy, but the marketroids probably thought it too expensive to actually do research into the matter... plus, it provides "proof" (haha) that P2P is evil, hence securing such legislation as the DMCA and SSSCA (or whatever it's called this week).
- Jester
"able to stay fresh for over 3 years"
I'm assuming the term "fresh" is used only relative to the current rations, and not to, say, fresh pizza?
"It's the type of attack I've never understood: it doesn't gain the attacker anything (unlike rooting a box), it's nothing but being a hoodlum."
Why do punks spray-paint "JoE wUz HerE" on warehouses? That doesn't gain them anything, either. Likewise, I don't understand their motives. As THHGTtG says, "there [is] always a significant number of people in the Galaxy who [are] not in their right minds."
Maybe it's the recognition they get (the likelyhood is that people who launch successful (D)DoS attacks are bragging about it on IRC 5 minutes later), or maybe they do it for kicks. Either way, this is more of a social/behavioural problem than a technological one. So long as there is a group (no matter how small) who think that bringing down sites is cool, DDoS attacks will persist.
- Jester
"how is using that bandwidth anything at all like tearing up your apartment"
... There are plans that charge you milleage, and there are plans that don't."
It's the fact that you're essentially renting both that is relevant. When you rent something, you aren't given 100% control over what you can do with the item you're renting.
"You can rent a car. You can't destroy it, but you can drive it."
How is this any different than being allowed to reside in a apartment, but not tear it up?
"What, they are just now finding out it isn't cheap? Did their providers suddenly try to screw them over with new rates too?"
Well, as far as the rate their provider is charging, I don't know... it may have gone up, or it may have not. The point I was trying to make is that a much higher proportion of users are generating more traffic... a few examples are that infernal IncrediMail (HTML-ized email with a whole pile of "wonderful" backgrounds that require >5KB at *least*, usually more like >10+KB, instead of plain ol' text email which are typically <1KB), more people streaming audio, video, etc. There is a much greater presence of Flash animations on the than there was before. Etcetera, ad nauseam. All of these things take bandwidth. For one user, it might not seem like much. But when everyone and their dog are using it... it adds up.
Before, the cost of the occasional warez puppy (you know, the guy down the street who was downloading the latest appz, gamez, pr0n 24/7) or other high-bandwidth user was basically absorbed by the ISP. The rest of their subscribers were more likely to surf a litte, read their email and get off... a few megs per session at most. Now that everyone's using P2P programs, surfing web pages that have more and more graphic content, etc, it's harder to "average" bandwidth usage and cost accordingly... hence this new model. High-bandwidth users pay more, and your grandmother can check her email for that base price.
"I can look at those new terms, say "That's a crock of shit!" and go find something else"
Yup, you can. But what do you think will happen when a significant proportion of the high-bandwidth users move to provider X, who offers unlimited bandwidth?? Suddenly, that provider has ALL the high-bandwidth users and find that their pricing plan no longer covers costs. So guess what? Either their prices go up dramatically, or they move to a system like this.
"You can rent a car.
And this new system is like a car rental agency that offers unlimited mileage suddenly dropping that feature, and instead giving you 3,000 miles free and then you pay $X/mi after that. 3,000 miles would be enough for your "average" trip, but for those trips that exceed that average, well, you have a pay a little extra. A company changing policies is not unheard of; why should it be any different for an ISP?
"Yes, they can change their terms of service when they realize the old plan was stupid. But why on earth should I feel the least bit sorry for sucking up all the bandwidth I can while the old plan is in place? I payed for it, I'm damn well using it sans apology."
Nothing wrong with that; hell, I'm guilty as charged. My DSL provider allows unlimited bandwidth, and by Tux, I use it. All I'm saying is that I understand their point. If MY ISP were to suddenly change policies to one similar to this, I would take a good look at the new terms and decide from there whether to move ISPs, pay the surcharge every month, or change my downloading habits.
- Jester
"for the time I "rent it" for $40/month, I'll do the hell I want with it."
Key word: 'rent'. If you rent an apartment, are you free to do whatever the hell you want? Are you free to bash in all the walls, rip up the floor and detonate pyrotechnics? Not usually.
You'll either end up losing your security deposit, or you'll end up in court if the damage is severe enough. The rental fee provides specific services (ie. permission to reside in the apartment, perhaps also usage of electricity, natural gas, etc), but it does not give you free reign. You want to do that, BUY it outright. Your fast food analogy is off the mark since you have PURCHASED, and essentially "own" the food. Not so with an apartment or your ISP's network.
"follow the terms of the terms of service"
And if their terms of service state that they will provide X gigabytes of download bandwidth, with a surcharge of $Y/GB after that? It's in the terms of service, which, by the way, usually includes a clause stating that they are allowed to change it at any time, usually with 30 days notice.
Bandwidth isn't cheap, and companies are finding this out very quickly, particularly with all the new whiz-bang "multimedia content" being pushed over our pipes (streaming video, online gaming, what-have-you).
- Jester
"Windows 98 would automatically halt after 49 days? See, Microsoft really IS ahead of the security."
Umm, in order for this 'security' to be effective for Windows 98, wounldn't it have to crash in about 20 minutes? I mean, that IS the maximum security-life expectancy of one of those machines, isn't it??? Then again, back then everyone was on dial-up...
"Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control of air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?"
:)
I see someone else actually read the Java EULA?
I found that section (among others) to be rather hilarious.
As an alternative to your idea, the article stated that the software will be automatically "updated" to allow new features... once the data starts flowing, I wonder how hard it would be to, ah, "submit a patch". :)
:)
I'll _finally_ have my beowulf cluster.
- Jester
There's a very simple solution to this problem: Imagine your 'dream box', then tell management you need that.
"Yes, Mr. CEO, we need a system with 16-way SMP, 64GB RAM, 2 or 3 TB hard drive space... actually, make that solid state storage... we need the speed. It'll also need 10 gigabit Ethernet. Oh, and don't forget my GeForce 4. What? Yeah, we need an GF4 to play Qua... to render those architectural drawings quickly.
....
I, did I say we needed ONE of these systems? Sorry... I meant THREE."
=)
1) Read front page religiously. Note any cool hacks, or other interesting headlines.
2) Wait 2 days.
3) Submit news with same information but different headline.
4) Karma += 5;
5) Goto 1;
Indeed, because 'almost winter' == 'hunting season'. :)
:)
That's the season where we show all these people that are saying "Who cares if the magnetic pole is moving? We have GPS!" how much a GPS is REALLY worth. Ever try getting a reading from a swamp?
- Jester
"cleaning up Windows systems" ... "repairing Windows installations"
:)
What's wrong with using a Linux bootdisk to do `rm -fr *.*` ? Or, better, `for owtype in zero random zero urandom; do dd if="/dev/$owtype" of=/dev/hda1 bs=16k; done` ??? That cleans up Windows partitions, uh, really well.
Seriously, thanks for the tip though. I've bookmarked the page in case my trusty Mandrake boot CD is insufficient (?!?) for a given repair problem.
Just took a quick look at Gentoo's site... and I must say that it looks pretty damned cool. I'm definitely going to keep an eye on that thing and give it a go when it hits 1.0-stable.
Thanks for the info!
"they're aiming for those expert users who just want the core programs and libraries, and will build their own system from there."
:) I have an old 540MB hard drive kicking around... gonna swap that with the 2.6GB drive that's currently in my firewall/router machine, then rebuild the box from scratch on the 540MB drive using the minimal install option... then install SSH and all the other stuff I need, then put the firewall back into production. Last time I built it, I used Mandrake 8.0 and managed to trim that down to about 150MB... this time around it'll be even smaller, hopefully. :)
That's what I'm gonna do.
I have a feeling I'm really going to like the minimal install option... Now it'll be very easy to do Linux From Scratch, because you won't need an existing Linux installation to do it!
Man... goes to show how long it's been since I really played with DOS... ;(
:)
Maybe that one time it would have gone faster (since I had to run home to grab my Mandrake CD), but since I carry my Mandrake disk around with me all the time now, it's faster to just boot off CD than to create a Winblows boot disk.
Plus people think you're a computer god when you boot up Linux.
'sides... it just goes to show how shitty M$ operating systems are... the fact that the DOS included in Win98/ME needs a helper application for proper (modern) disk access is lame.
Indeed. Ever try deleting about 2 gigs of stuff using pure MS-DOS mode?
/dev/hda1 /mnt, cd /mnt/_rescue, rm -fr *. 30 seconds later everything's wiped. Reboot WinME, full virus scan, all clean. Problem solved. :)
:)
I recently had to wipe out a virus that had lodged itself in the C:\_RESTORE directory of someone's WinME install. Of course, Windows won't let you touch these "critical" files, so I booted to DOS mode... del *.*... wait 15 minutes... and it's still not getting anywhere very fast. Put coat on, tell customer I'll be back in 10 minutes.
Come back with Linux Mandrake 8.0 CD#1, insert, reboot, type 'rescue' at LILO prompt, mount
The Mandrake rescue feature is much more useful than just restoring a broken LILO or whatever. I now carry that CD around with my tech kit.
My favourite quote from the article:
"This spring, Microsoft will unveil technology that allows Windows users to receive automatic updates each time a bug fix is available."
Oh, yes, PLEASE patch production servers automatically. I can't wait. With M$' history of their patches breaking otherwise-working machines, I can't wait to see this.
Naturally, any half-assed sysadmin would disable this, but that kinda takes the whole point out, right?
Chalk up one more for M$' "Useless Bug^H^H^HFeatures".
"There will be no tax on recordable media"
What cave are YOU living in? THERE ALREADY IS!
The current levy (a.k.a. "tax") is somewhere around $0.25/CD-R.
Don't doubt that this law WILL pass... we're talking about politicians, after all.
On the upside, they're essentially making it legal to pirate music, since you're already paying for it.
They are measuring capacities as 1GB == 1,000MB. If you go back and read the PDF from the last time this story was posted (yesterday or the day before), it explicitly says in there that the levy is $0.021/MB, then in the next paragraph says $21/GB, so they must be using 1GB == 1,000MB, or somebody's on really good crack (not unfathomable, considering we're talking about politicians).
Actually, there was on article on /. the other day about this whole thing... this particular story is just one small excerpt out of the whole peice of legislation.
:(
Under the new laws, levies on CD media will go up to $0.59 (from the current $0.25 (I think)), and ALL media in MP3 players will be levied $0.021/MB, or $21/GB (yeah, they're ignoring the whole base-2 thing, apparently). Flash cards and other removable media is levied too, so there's no way around it.
I live in Canada, and this sucks.
"does anyone know the command to flush the swap partition"
/dev/hda1 && swapon /dev/hda1
Hmm... couldn't you just
swapoff
??? Make sure you select the right partition, obviously, but wouldn't that work? Any reason why not?