I was about to edit my home page to put in a link to them (saucy me!) when I got a phone call.
"Don't even think about it," said a sinister voice.
"Who is this?" I asked, frightened.
"Never mind," said the man. "Just think of how it would be a shame to find some management consultants in your cubicle when you show up at work tomorrow, shaking their heads sadly and holding out a cardboard box with your possessions."
Okay, now I'm pretty sure you're trolling. My fault.
the files came from a "co-worker" -
meaning that their IT department was simply not doing their job.
And how, exactly, is that relevant to the usefulness or otherwise of thsi product?
b)How are they useful for us? I haven't seen any reason yet.
I don't find PhotoShop useful either; makes you wonder why Adobe even bothers, doesn't it?
being easier to use (supposedly) doesn't
make this "technology" better than a traditional HTTP server (or a
free service), a service or server that's itself easier to use would
fill this role.
Sigh...what the hell do you think this program is trying to do? As quoted above, easy-to-use was a big goal here.
I still do believe that the solution to this is not bypassing
it, but teaching them to use bloody FTP....Its the 21st century, pointing and clicking should be a required skill.
Care to explain the contradiction, or, again, is it my fault for feeding the trolls? I should be able to write packets by hand, too, but I can't. There are lots of tools that we all depend on to make things easier, from point-'n'-click programs to keyboards (real men use punch cards, I'm sure). FWIW, I agree w/your first sentence -- but I also know how hard that would be, and how many people simply wouldn't be interested. As I said before, this is for them.
I could just as easily have said "well, I don't know how to run
Apache, so this userve thing sure saved my ass!"
That's exactly the point. Did you read the whole paper at all, or just count on the rest of us to fill you in?
"Another challenge, which cannot be underestimated, is keeping the
system simple...[Free web hosting sites] require technical
expertise, such knowledge of FTP, not held by a typical web user."
For you or me, this is an absurd idea: not know FTP? C'mon! But try working on a helpdesk some time. I do, for a small ISP and webhosting company, and believe me it's really like that. It never ceases to amaze me how many people just don't know that "the Innernet" is more than Explorer and Outlook Express (or IE, OE and Front Page, if they've got a weg site). This program is for them (but useful for the rest of us too).
The other way that uServ helped in this particular situation was the not-having-to-use-email-to-send-100Mb-attachments part. I deal w/enough people who can't understand why a) they can't pick up their email because someone sent them a 5Mb attachment (remember, these are dialup users) or b) they're mad because we won't let them send attachments bigger than 5Mb. The last thing you want is for the company's email to be held up for half an hour because there's a 100Mb attachment coming through. Again, for the ordinary user, not you or I, this is the perfect solution.
Overall, I'm impressed -- this sounds wonderful. The only thing that I can see being a bottleneck to widespread adoption, by people like my dad on dialup, is the need for a subdomain: that's something that definitely requires a techie to set up, and to get a group going. That said, maybe this is something ISPs could offer as an additional service: userv.isp.net. Given limited bandwidth over dialup, this wouldn't be great as an always-on service, but it would be a great way, as the authors suggest, to share pix or similarly large files: "You can pick them up from 7 'til 9 tonight."
I came across an ad recently for a commercial system that worked in a similar way; they had a bunch of different pop accounts set up to catch spam, and then created signatures of those messages in real time. You subscribe to their service, and you get an updated list every . Can't remember the name of the company, but I do remember them saying that new spam messages were typically sent out to clients w/in 15 minutes.
One question about this system that I hope the poster (or someone else using this system) will answer: what's it like on server load? Right now, at the ISP I work at, we're using procmail to filter for spam (check the graphs here: http://selenium.dowco.com/spam/spam.html). It's a good way of doing things, but there are some shortcomings: basically, since it runs on our mailserver, I can't run all the body searches I want; in fact, we had to cut out body searches recently because the load was getting too high and/or email was taking too long to get through. There's some workarounds that I haven't got around to putting in yet (body scanning only when 3k in size, etc), but you can see my point. Anyone?
Love the summary...I'm a reasonably experienced Linux user (first install: Slackware in late '97), and a reasonably experienced Debian user (about a year and a half now), and I've had nearly exactly the same problem you describe. I went to install something -- actually, I think it was Gimp 1.2, which at the time had just come out -- and that was a mess. Took forever to compile latest GTK+ (since Debian didn't have the version Gimp required) and in the end it didn't work. Tried apt-get removing GTK+, and it took out, like, everything, or a close approximation of it. Went for a reinstall. I've done that a couple times.
You've had some bad luck, but isn't that how we all learn? (Hint from experience: stick to -unstable, or stick to -stable. Don't switch between the two.) Anyhow, give it another try; I'd hate to see you fall at the first (admittedly not the first, and pretty major) hurdle. And try Slackware.
Hm...these are always interesting, and I do like keeping up w/the Jones' -- but I'm nto a kernel hacker, and I don't know, for the most part, what they're talking about. Can anyone give some insight about what these changes mean for ordinary users? Not something like "Better, Stronger, Faster", but "this kernel call is used by GnomeFoo for reading your mail and sending it to Linus. It's now 2.5 times faster and encrypted."
Or is that not a good question -- is there, maybe, no way to dump this stuff down w/o getting to cliches like "Better, Stronger, Faster"?
I work on the helpdesk of a mid-sized ISP, and we use FreeBSD for just about everything. A while back I was going through three-year-old modem logs looking for records of someone dialing in (billing dispute): grep for the UID, piped to awk to add up the time online, convert it to hours and print it out, piped to sendmail to mail it to the billing dept (Hi Mary!). Suddenly it struck me just how powerful this all was: one (relatively) small tool piped into another, using simple plain ol' text.
You can't do that with in WIMP environments, God bless 'em (how do you script a mouse movement?). You can't do that without a lot of people all sharing their work. You can't do that, in other words, without Unix. I was this close to dashing off a fan letter to Thompson and Ritchie before I stopped myself (I'm sure they've heard it before). Yes, I know Unix is a lot more than T&R, but it was either that or spam everyone who'd ever written a utility.
Anyhow...just a note, if they're maybe reading this, to say thanks very much. Like I read somewhere else and promptly ripped off:
I think someone should stop MIT...they're obviously trying to set up a live version of Impossible Mission. Remember,
it's all fun and games until someone gets ionized.
I agree...fascinating read. I kind of started when I realized that he's the same age as me and married like me...I had this image of 15-year-old Wesley, and the leap was a strange one. I think I'd have a seizure or something if I ever saw him with a beard...
Neat stuff. Wil, I'm definitely going to check out your website...any chance of you sending an AynCard to Patrick Stewart?:-)
I wish I'd known about this earlier. I've been trying to install Win98, Solaris, Linux and FreeBSD on one 40gb hard drive, following installation instructions I found in this month's SysAdmin magazine. The trouble came afterward: the Solaris partition was past cyl. 1023, so LILO couldn't boot it. And I couldn't figure out how to get Grub to boot a Solaris partition; the usual rootnoverify() and chainloader +1() didn't work. Sez here that XOSL supports Solaris; very nice. But after my sixth re-install of Debian and FreeBSD, I'm getting a little sick of it all...
Amen to that, brother...last year after fucking up LILO for the nth time, I grabbed GRUB and installed it. Wonderful! Amazing! Can't recommend it enough! One of the cool things: you can tell GRUB to hide drives when certain operating systems are booted. What point, you ask? Well, I've finally got a dual-boot Linux/Windows machine with Windows NOT on the first hard drive, in the first partition. Go for GRUB, people. And one hint: if you're using Debian (like me) and you get "invalid device errors" when trying to install to the hard drive, get the latest version. I'm not sure if there's a.deb for 0.90 in -unstable; I just went to the source and got it there.
I'm with you on this. I've got a crappy boombox in the corner I use to listen to CDs, and a set of no-brand speakers on my computer I use to listen to MP3s. I could get a lot better equipment for both purposes, absolutely, and there's times when I think that'd be a good idea. Someone w/a good stereo system (let alone anything truly amazing) could blow me out of the water, as far as the quality of the reproduction of sound goes.
But you know what? I don't care. I've got other things to spend my time on. If you want to care, by all means go ahead -- I don't mean this as *any* kind of slam on what turns folks' cranks. It's just not for me, is all. And so I think that the choice between Ogg and MP3 is not something I'm going to be able to tell the difference between.
I got about half of that. No, less than half. I love Perl, but
I'm not at all sophisticated in my understanding of it. I mainly use it for mangling text (I have a serious fixation on this, and I love Perl for the built-in text mangling)
and for quick scripting. I start to frown when figuring out the difference between list and scalar contexts; when you start to talk about
operator overloading, or references to slices of arrays of references to hashes, my eyes glaze over.
I want to understand this, I really do, but I just don't. Sorry, Larry and Damien, I tried...
Amen to that, sister...whenever I back up, I back up/home and/etc (I use Debian, so I also throw in a list of installed debs rather than back up/usr or/usr/local); I can't imagine
switching distros w/o/etc too.
Slashdot Mirror
"Don't even think about it," said a sinister voice.
"Who is this?" I asked, frightened.
"Never mind," said the man. "Just think of how it would be a shame to find some management consultants in your cubicle when you show up at work tomorrow, shaking their heads sadly and holding out a cardboard box with your possessions."
the files came from a "co-worker" - meaning that their IT department was simply not doing their job.
And how, exactly, is that relevant to the usefulness or otherwise of thsi product?
b)How are they useful for us? I haven't seen any reason yet.
I don't find PhotoShop useful either; makes you wonder why Adobe even bothers, doesn't it?
being easier to use (supposedly) doesn't make this "technology" better than a traditional HTTP server (or a free service), a service or server that's itself easier to use would fill this role.
Sigh...what the hell do you think this program is trying to do? As quoted above, easy-to-use was a big goal here.
I still do believe that the solution to this is not bypassing it, but teaching them to use bloody FTP....Its the 21st century, pointing and clicking should be a required skill.
Care to explain the contradiction, or, again, is it my fault for feeding the trolls? I should be able to write packets by hand, too, but I can't. There are lots of tools that we all depend on to make things easier, from point-'n'-click programs to keyboards (real men use punch cards, I'm sure). FWIW, I agree w/your first sentence -- but I also know how hard that would be, and how many people simply wouldn't be interested. As I said before, this is for them.
That's exactly the point. Did you read the whole paper at all, or just count on the rest of us to fill you in?
"Another challenge, which cannot be underestimated, is keeping the system simple...[Free web hosting sites] require technical expertise, such knowledge of FTP, not held by a typical web user."
For you or me, this is an absurd idea: not know FTP? C'mon! But try working on a helpdesk some time. I do, for a small ISP and webhosting company, and believe me it's really like that. It never ceases to amaze me how many people just don't know that "the Innernet" is more than Explorer and Outlook Express (or IE, OE and Front Page, if they've got a weg site). This program is for them (but useful for the rest of us too).
The other way that uServ helped in this particular situation was the not-having-to-use-email-to-send-100Mb-attachments part. I deal w/enough people who can't understand why a) they can't pick up their email because someone sent them a 5Mb attachment (remember, these are dialup users) or b) they're mad because we won't let them send attachments bigger than 5Mb. The last thing you want is for the company's email to be held up for half an hour because there's a 100Mb attachment coming through. Again, for the ordinary user, not you or I, this is the perfect solution.
Overall, I'm impressed -- this sounds wonderful. The only thing that I can see being a bottleneck to widespread adoption, by people like my dad on dialup, is the need for a subdomain: that's something that definitely requires a techie to set up, and to get a group going. That said, maybe this is something ISPs could offer as an additional service: userv.isp.net. Given limited bandwidth over dialup, this wouldn't be great as an always-on service, but it would be a great way, as the authors suggest, to share pix or similarly large files: "You can pick them up from 7 'til 9 tonight."
One question about this system that I hope the poster (or someone else using this system) will answer: what's it like on server load? Right now, at the ISP I work at, we're using procmail to filter for spam (check the graphs here: http://selenium.dowco.com/spam/spam.html). It's a good way of doing things, but there are some shortcomings: basically, since it runs on our mailserver, I can't run all the body searches I want; in fact, we had to cut out body searches recently because the load was getting too high and/or email was taking too long to get through. There's some workarounds that I haven't got around to putting in yet (body scanning only when 3k in size, etc), but you can see my point. Anyone?
I am now blessing your keyboard...
http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/yesiwill/index .html
http://detritus/projects/yesiwill
Let's see how well they survive a slashdotting.
You've had some bad luck, but isn't that how we all learn? (Hint from experience: stick to -unstable, or stick to -stable. Don't switch between the two.) Anyhow, give it another try; I'd hate to see you fall at the first (admittedly not the first, and pretty major) hurdle. And try Slackware.
Just found this, x weeks later...hilarious, both the comment and the .sig. My hat is off to you, sir or madam.
LOL...oh god, that's funny.
Excellent...thanks so much, this is exactly what I was looking for. And yeah, how do those kernel guys do it?
Or is that not a good question -- is there, maybe, no way to dump this stuff down w/o getting to cliches like "Better, Stronger, Faster"?
You can't do that with in WIMP environments, God bless 'em (how do you script a mouse movement?). You can't do that without a lot of people all sharing their work. You can't do that, in other words, without Unix. I was this close to dashing off a fan letter to Thompson and Ritchie before I stopped myself (I'm sure they've heard it before). Yes, I know Unix is a lot more than T&R, but it was either that or spam everyone who'd ever written a utility.
Anyhow...just a note, if they're maybe reading this, to say thanks very much. Like I read somewhere else and promptly ripped off:
Unix soit qui mal y pense.
I think someone should stop MIT...they're obviously trying to set up a live version of Impossible Mission. Remember, it's all fun and games until someone gets ionized.
Neat stuff. Wil, I'm definitely going to check out your website...any chance of you sending an AynCard to Patrick Stewart? :-)
I wish I'd known about this earlier. I've been trying to install Win98, Solaris, Linux and FreeBSD on one 40gb hard drive, following installation instructions I found in this month's SysAdmin magazine. The trouble came afterward: the Solaris partition was past cyl. 1023, so LILO couldn't boot it. And I couldn't figure out how to get Grub to boot a Solaris partition; the usual rootnoverify() and chainloader +1() didn't work. Sez here that XOSL supports Solaris; very nice. But after my sixth re-install of Debian and FreeBSD, I'm getting a little sick of it all...
Go, GRUB, go!
Beautiful! Many thanks. I am now blessing your hard drive...
Can't get through to The Register. Can someone post a summary, or sacrifice their own server by setting up a mirror? :-)
"The preponderance of history is against them in this case, but light bends when it gets near Microsoft," said Kay.
But you know what? I don't care. I've got other things to spend my time on. If you want to care, by all means go ahead -- I don't mean this as *any* kind of slam on what turns folks' cranks. It's just not for me, is all. And so I think that the choice between Ogg and MP3 is not something I'm going to be able to tell the difference between.
I want to understand this, I really do, but I just don't. Sorry, Larry and Damien, I tried...
Sez the cost was $210k US w/o cabling...why the qualification? What *would* cabling for 225-odd boxen cost?
Amen to that, sister...whenever I back up, I back up /home and /etc (I use Debian, so I also throw in a list of installed debs rather than back up /usr or /usr/local); I can't imagine
switching distros w/o /etc too.