You didn't get what I said.
If mail-merge is important to YOU, in your work, you should put that into your evaluation of products. But it's not "important" in some world-encompassing sense, and definitely not essential. To quote your own words, "you are projecting your needs into the Rest of World".
When I mail-merge, I use GNU awk, because it is faster and much easier than any built-in mail merge in any word processor I've tried in the last twenty years. I don't need automatic section numbering, either, really - it's just something nice to have - **exactly** the same as the automatic butt-wiper!
I started to write some more, then suddenly realized you're a troll. Dig, I am antique; I've never even bothered learn how to use a spell-checker.
--Charlie
Suprisingly enough, the only essential function for a word processor is to produce readable, reproducible output.
Everything else is a frill - like power windows on a car, "features" as you call them are essentially non-essential functions.
There are an infinite number of potential features. For example, my word processor could activate a mechanical arm to wipe my butt when I get off the toilet - what a timesaver!! Obviously, nobody will ever buy an office suite again that doesn't have this incredibly useful feature.
The things you are saying are "essential features" that "DO matter" are those things you are used to using. Most of them are available in StarOffice, but you are not sufficiently experienced in SO to understand the different methods used to achieve the same ends.
So, maybe you should choose your tools on their cost-effectiveness - an evaluation that should include reliability, maintainability, as well as any other factors unique to your goals - rather than just the features you've become addicted to. If you don't care about cost, or efficiency, you don't need a word processor, you need a ghostwriter/secretary.
I'm not saying KDE is right for you (maybe you really need Professional Write) but the "features features features" mantra by itself means little.
--Charlie
When I built my first Internet node, the web did not yet exist, and one of the amazing things about the Internet was how friendly it was to the blind.
Now, with some computer experts estimating that over 50% of the Internet is incomprehensible to braille interfaces, and most computer operating systems devolving to caveman interfaces ("point at the pretty pictures and grunt") we seem to be ready to take the next step - disenfranchising the merely color-blind.
I realize that colorforth is not inherently discriminatory, in that there are a great many other languages that can be used to do the same work. The web is also not inherently discriminatory, because it does not force site designers to design pages as stupidly as, for example, Hewlett-Packard.
Would you care to comment on the situation, speaking as a tool designer? How would you feel if a talented programmer were unable to get a job due to a requirement for colored sight?
--Charlie
I'm still using an original PC case myself...
on
Neat IBM 5150 Case Mod
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The original PC case had only five slots, so I ditched the bottom half years ago and installed an XT chassis with the full eight. This was about the same time I upgraded to a 386.
I kept the original top half, though, so my case still looks like an original type A, which is what it started out as.
The CD-ROM drive I put in it was a salvaged junker; it had a stripped gear which I rebuilt and now it works fine. But, while I had it apart, I spray-painted the faceplate and tray black to match the floppies.
Currently it houses an ATX motherboard with an AMD chip, two IDE drives, a 3.5 floppy, and a CD-ROM. I just got rid of the last 5.25 floppy when I put in the 30 GB drive... I'm thinking about putting it back now and losing the older IDE drive.
Despite what somebody else's post said, I've never had any problem with slot spacing. In fact, the AGP video card fits into the eighth slot perfectly, which is very convenient. And I salvaged a huge fan that fits exactly into the existing faceplate behind the slots (I haven't modified the front of the case in any way) so I don't require a blowhole. It's also convenient that my modern high-watt ATX power supply is so much smaller than the original 63.5 watt model... otherwise I wouldn't have enough airspace to cool the hotter modern chips.
The only real problem is that I've hacked out so much metal over the years (as I've gone through half a dozen motherboards) that the bottom part of the case has very little structural integrity left. If you pick it up without the top shell on, it bends from the weight of the drives. I added a steel bar taken from an old lamp across the top but that hasn't helped much.
My server, incidentally, is in a Honeywell DPS6 case. I find this highly amusing since I run linux on it... the gigantic case is nice for all my salvaged hard drives, and of course the UPS batteries.
./
Two hours north of you, the DuPont company is still dismantling itself. Their "excessed equipment" sales can be pretty great... although me and my buddies already picked through all the PC and mac stuff, you can still get old VAXen on occasion, and gigantic industrial robots.
The only problem is you never know what is going to be there until you get there.
And it's kind of disturbing how fast the more exotic animal-torturing equipment sells... I think the direct nerve stimulation devices lasted about 48 hours.
--Charlie
/.
One of the few science fiction / fantasy authors who studied history, and a member of the Society for Creative Anacronism. The SCA is a sport combat group (one of several such organizations active in the US) with a somewhat unrealistic medieval-themed stick fighting system (plastic & aluminum armor & shields are both legal in most kingdoms, which is anacronistic if not creative).
Poul wrote a historical fiction about Harald Hardraada, as well as many fantasies and science fiction stories with a medieval theme.
Since most geeks read science fiction, and some geeks frequent slashdot, it's not suprising that many of the denizens of this forum consider your question stupid and trollish.
--Charlie
I didn't see any mention of which graves were robbed to get all these skulls, but I have a suspicion....
In the early 1800s Samuel George Morton built a huge and famous collection of skulls. These skulls were garnered by his correspondents (Morton being an eminent naturalist of the day) from all over the world, but according to this site were mostly native american.
One of the previous posters was decrying the way some tribes object to the pillaging of their graveyards - in Morton's day, similar objections were made to the way the Indians resisted having their heads chopped off. Benighted savages, how dare they resist the progress of science!
A retired friend of mine was once the curator of the Morton skull collection (aka "the American Golgotha"). Originally housed at the Academy of Natural Sciences, it has since been moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where it still comprises over a thousand skulls despite an unknown amount of pilfering.
Everybody's got a theory of where the Amerinds came from; but Morton went a bit beyond that. He used his skulls to prove that middle-aged caucasian males (which, oddly enough, was a group containing Samuel Morton) were the pinnacle of evolution - the smartest, most bestest people of all!
The debunking of Morton's conclusions was completed by Stephen Gould, in his essay "The Mismeasure of Man". I highly recommend Gould's early works, incidentally, although his recent stuff is tedious.
Morton's infamously flawed racial ladder of intelligence, based on his measurements of humans skulls, were a part of the justification for Nazism and many other racist movements. Even today there are those who insist that measuring skulls can give meaningful insights to guide current events. I think the measurements, and especially the conclusions drawn from them, say more about the researchers than they do about the objects measured.
If you are really into the interpretation of dimensions of crania, you must visit the phrenology website.
--Charlie
/.
Well, it's hard to tell if this is a fake article or not. Stale beer might foster growth of beneficial organisms, I dunno.
On the other claw, everyone thought it was OK to use wood preserved with copper arsenate (that's the greenish pressure-treated stuff, highly toxic to bugs and you really shouldn't be breathing that sawdust) on docks and piers. The arsenic leaches out so slowly that it distributes itself harmlessly in the bottom mud, right?
Wrong. The mud-dwelling annelids (them's worms to us country folk) concentrate the arsenic compounds in their gullets until they reach a certain level of toxicity, then they barf it up into the current - killing anything that just happens to be passing and measurably contaminating the waterflow.
Doesn't particularly bother the worms in the long run, but now we've got steadily increasing arsenic in America's waterways that isn't going to get better anytime soon - the worms have got a couple decades worth of arsenic to puke up yet.
Now do you understand the furor over arsenic levels in water? Ol' Dubya ain't as stupid as he looks. Those lumber companys have invested a lot in the pressure-treat process, and they make some very tasty campaign contributions.
--Charlie
/.
When NT came out, it was supposed to be based on code stolen from the VMS system, which has truly phenomenal stability - equaled only by a few linux kernels. The advertising, and the legions of MS-shills in userland (who at that time were gunning for OS/2) gleefully proclaimed that NT was stable enough for the enterprise.
I tested NT extensively and found that 3.51 was basically stable enough for user desktops - it crashed about as often as a Macintosh. But the computer press behaved exactly as they do today in regards to W2K - "It's uncrashable! Rock-solid! No more BSOD!" ranted the pundits.
When 4.0 shipped, suddenly the previously "rock solid" NT 3.51 was not a stable platform - you had to upgrade to 4.0 to get the exact same empty promises and gleeful raving. My tests showed no phenomenal improvement, however.
So, perhaps W2K is really stable and wonderful and all that nice warm fuzzy stuff. But, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice - shame on me. I won't be buying W2K because I have known working alternatives from sources that have not abused my trust.
--Charlie
PS - HP (vendors of the unbelievably horrible HP-UX) were advertising Windows NT using the word uncrashable only a year ago. Just now a quick search on Google turned up numerous instances of this egregiously fraudulent claim... are W2k's promises likely to be any different?
--CTB
No, you are right, as far as you've gone. If you use a single password (or single key, or single passphrase) to secure multiple systems then you multiply the damage incurred if a that password (or whatever) is compromised.
There is no real way around this, but often this is an acceptable risk. For example, I use the same password on K5 and slashdot, a different one for all my named user accounts, and several machines at work share a root password. All my machines at home have the same root (not the same as any mentioned above, though) password.
This works because I don't care if anyone else pretends to be me on K5 or/. and my named user accounts don't have any fancified privileges. The boxes that share root passwords are physically set up so that anyone who gains root on one can easily do so on the others, anyway (NFS sucks, may I say here?).
So, manage your exposure as required by your circumstances. Remember keystroke loggers catch ALL passwords, and the only truly secure box is powered down in a locked room.
--Charlie
/.
I read the man pages for each release of OpenSSH as they came out. And eventually, with the help of several articles found on Google, I figured out how to do SSH V2 passwordless login and file transfer.
The most recent release of the OpenSSH docs is much better than previous, and I recommend everyone upgrade their packages. And much kudos to the OpenSSH team - they are fixing the docs, and the software is truly great.
But you won't understand everything you need to from the man pages unless you already grok rsh, rlogin, rcp, bind & name resolution, etc. The man pages are for people who are replacing insecure protocols, and who already understand them... not for people starting from a blank slate. Newbies should read this article, and the next one when it comes out, and Jay Beale's stuff too.
--Charlie
***note VERSION ONE of SSH is NO GOOD you may as well use RLOGIN. And you should not allow rhosts files on your systems for any reason.***
I know this is off-topic, but I am getting really tired of people's completely fake "Big Lie".sigs propagating through SlashDot.
The phrase "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs",, which you credit to Jefferson, is usually attributed to Karl Marx as translated from his Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875 (source: Brooks Spencer, 1997). Spencer notes "It is curious that the first [phrase] closely parallels a phrase from Saint-Simon, the second one from Fourier and both, from phrases from Babeuf." I find it interesting that in the consitution of the People's Republic of China this is transmogrified to 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.' (source: Article 6, PRC constitution, 1982).
Now, in reality, Marx cribbed this wholesale from a Frenchman who said it in the 1700s. For penance, you may search out the original quote - I couldn't find it on the web anywhere.
NOT JEFFERSON!!! And don't believe most of the Ben Franklin and Adolf Hitler quotes you see on Slashdot either, they are generally fakes.
--Charlie
Cool, code gurus dig Zelazny!
on
Lord of Light
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· Score: 1
It was really cool to find out that Mudge's favorite book is Jack of Shadows; now it seems Jeremy Allison's fave may be Lord of Light!
Two of my all-time favorites, also, incidentally. I recommend Creatures of Light and Darkness to those unfazed by the mythic imagery of LOL, and This Immortal (aka Call Me Conrad) to those who found the philosophy a bit daunting.
Jeremy, I agree that the review is a spoiler. I liked being suprised by Nirriti's motives.
--Charlie
"Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen."
--Marduk, in Zelazny's "Creatures of Light and Darkness"
10) Do not play games.
9) if you can't follow rule 10, don't play non-aerobic games.
8) if you fail to observe rules 9 and 10, don't play drinking games.
7) if you blow off rules 8-10, don't play computer games.
6) OK, well, don't play any Sid Meier games.
5) at least don't play first-person shooters!
4) don't have a job or social life.
3) don't even consider having children.
2) don't read any Jon Katz articles
1) DON'T IRC (it causes hairy palms anyway).
Last time I tried it... I think milestone 18 was the Mozilla build, Galeon 0.8.3ish? It was quite a while ago, on one of my Red Hat systems. Earlier I tried a build somebody did using some sort of Xwindows-MSwindows thingy, like cygwin/wingtk, but I honestly don't remember where I got it. I scanned it pretty hard for virii, I remember, so it probably didn't come from the Galeon site... it was even more broken than the linux version (which was massively unstable at the time) and I couldn't get it to do anything but crash.
But I do plan to try it again (under linux at least). It'll have to wait until after defcon, though, because we're decomissioning an IBM mainframe right now and it's a wee bit busy around here:^).
--Charlie
ORBS is free speech, spam is theft
on
ORBS Forks
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· Score: 2
I run several mailservers. I need them to be at least profit-neutral, preferably profitable.
Why? So I can keep running them. I don't get government grants, and I have a spouse & kiddies to support. If I am to continue to contribute to the Internet community, I must not only survive, I must be able to pay for my links.
Spam, generated with the help of people who insist on open relays, finds my users and clogs their mailboxes. They (the users) no longer receive optimum value from time spent interfacing with my mailservers. This in turn impacts profitability.
State-supported academics and wealthy ideologues can rant as they please, but stifling the right of anti-spam zealots to list open relays is pure censorship - the suppression of someone's right to speak out. In contrast, spam is the theft of disk space and bandwidth - and whenever I try one of those "opt out" things the spam load noticeably INCREASES, incidentally.
Open Relay blacklists let me continue to feed my family while doing work that helps the Internet as a whole. Spam eats my time and other resources and robs the Internet of any potential fruit of those lost resources. My preference should be obvious.
--Charlie
PS- All the things the open relay advocates claim they need to do can be accomplished without the use of open relays. Except spamming and mailbombing.
I hate the idea of having newsgroups and Email integrated into the browser, I want fast tools that do a single job well.
But the last two versions of Galeon I tried (using both linux & MSwindows) were so hideously unstable I couldn't really use them.
That said, I hope Galeon eventually triumphs. I will keep checking in regularly!
-Charlie
The primary reason to prefer linux over traditional unices (for me, as a sysadmin and user) is the clean separation of configuration files from the binaries they control and the data those binaries use.
By this I refer to the way one can simply back up the/etc directory structure and capture the entire configuration of most linux distros, without getting anything else. This is extremely useful. Similar tricks can be played with/var on nameservers and DHCP servers.
Traditional unices (the most egregious example being that hideous train-wreck of a Unix, HP-UX) scatter configuration files and binaries willy-nilly across the file systems, every program having its own unique hidey-hole. People steeped in Unix lore become inured to this, and start to think it is desireable because they are used to it. [Reality Check - BINARIES SHOULD NOT BE IN/etc AND rc FILES SHOULD NOT BE IN/sbin! - If that isn't obvious to you, you need a long vacation.]
The LSB specifies the use of FHS 2.2 which seems to be a more elegant version of the old linux file system standard. The FHS standard specs an/opt directory for the installation of major 3rd party applications - that is, the kind of applications that you dedicate a server to, like databases or digital data aquisition systems.
The problem is, the majority of the application vendors ram their code in any old place they want, and then their apps don't run without those specific locations. Symbolic links are the best compromise you can usually get, without forking off your own source base, and sometimes even that won't work. Then, to make matters worse, they often require specific versions of various libraries - usually obsolete and/or insecure ones, in my experience.
So, the major distributors may get off their asses and implement LSB eventually, which will be a Good Thing [TM] and will mean finally getting real total compliance with FHS, but application servers will still be wonky as soon as a big app (like tina or datastage - blech!) is installed. The LSB will supposedly address this by marketplace adjustment and app vendors without clues will fail commercially. I personally am not convinced this will happen seeing how Solaris and the patently inferior HP-UX still command market share today. Commericial needs require applications which require systems, and not the other way 'round.
Me, I'll be happy when the ancient cruft like/etc/exports (I have a link named/etc/nfs.conf on the few machines where I am forced to run insecure crap like NFS and NIS) falls by the wayside. Until then no *nix standard can be both widely used and internally self-consistent.
--Charlie
Eric Dennis (Spothead Lex Animata) says the secret to happiness is lowered expectations.
There've been a fair number of old VAX (P-VAX and C-VAX) as well as early Alpha systems showing up at the DuPont Surplus Asset sales lately.
For those that don't know, DuPont (Uncle Dupie to Delaware residents) is a 200 year old zaibatsu operating mostly out of Wilmington, DE, USA. The DuPont family, that started it, is both famous and infamous for their benevolent works, war profiteering, and involvement with GM and Standard Oil. The company (as opposed to the family) is famous for inefficiency and pollution.
DuPont suffers from severe beaurocratitis and consequently has been dismembering itself and selling off the pieces for the last half-dozen years. You can get old Alphas for $100 when they have them, currently there is an HSC and a VAX 8500 processor sitting around... plus some specialized equipment for torturing small animals (no, sadly I am not kidding).
NT is at least as poor a bet as VMS. You will have no problem supporting your current Alpha-based VMS systems for many years to come, and since Microsoft is officially on a 2-4 year upgade cycle (and changing their license terms to force you into the upgrades, see many previous/. articles) it won't cost you any more than the NT treadmill.
I know of at least two VAX/VMS systems still in heavy daily use running VMS 5 (yes, they both survived Y2K without patches or problems despite the doomsayers). How many NT 3.51 systems (which is not really a fair comparison anyway since VMS 6 predates NT 3.51) are still in use? How many of them go five years without rebooting?
Start converting to linux now; take your time, and all things will converge nicely for you in five years or less. Don't bother with NT, it's just another proprietary rat-hole.
--Charlie
PS:
I admin VMS, linux, and NT, incidentally (among others) for a living.
--CTB
All large networks have a means of shoveling out system patches, upgrades, etc. For example, in a MSquishy or Novell network the login processes make the client run a script which the system admin specifies. I use these scripts to hack the registries of WinBlows boxes to make them less insecure, and to identify rogue boxes that lusers set up without loading minimum patch sets.
If you don't have this, you are either a wimpy little network (less than 1000 nodes for sure) or in a situation of impending doom as entropy grinds your systems into chaos.
So, the system admin shovels out a set of public keys, and an ssh daemon, and now he can run find remotely on you. If you can't afford ssh daemons that run on your OS, get linux ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H I mean write a beentsy little TSR that listens on a weird port and runs whatever find facility your OS uses. Pretty trivial really. You can half-assedly secure it by changing the keys daily, and you should block the port used on edge routers, but really, this is nothing compared to the stuff admins do on large networks as a matter of course.
Our chief network admin guy (not me, any more, hooray!) thinks it's a slow week if he hasn't edited files or registries on at least 400 PCs...
--Charlie
/.
I learned to program because I needed more photon torpedos than the Star Trek game gave out. You know, the ancient one with the square grid of dots?
Learned about the limits of precision of variables, too, when I figured out why I could only have 32767 ptorps at a time.
Taught myself BASIC on a Wang System 2200 at age 14 (and I can still RTFM today).
--Charlie
It looks to me (from some of the memos brought into evidence at the DOJ.vs. MicroSoft anti-trust suit) like Microsoft's employees are generally crude and impolite, as well as being fond of violent metaphors ("let's cut off their air supply" and "we're going to kill [insert competitor name here]"). Not that it's unusual for computer geeks to have poor social skills;^).
Mundie will probably be ready and willing to deal with the types of questions people are posting here (yes, I understand you're just venting, the real questions are on the O'Reilly site) so let's use a little akido on him and be nice.
He'll come in all combative and we'll show the world how reasonable and well-spoken we are. You can't buy publicity like that. Well, OK, you can, but it's out of Tim O'Reilly's price range.
--Charlie
It's more effective to fight fire with water. Yes, I know this sounds weird coming from me, but consider it strategy.
Cookie Pal from Kookaburra Software
on
Web Bug Detector
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· Score: 2
KookaBurra Software sells a product called "Cookie Pal" that allows you to filter cookies and responses to cookies in real time. Extremely configurable, shareware, inexpensive, works on MSWindows operating systems.
It can work with Netscape and Explorer simultaneously. I've been using it on my windows boxen for years quite happily.
--Charlie
Use this thread to recommend similar products
on
Web Bug Detector
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· Score: 2
There are various recommendations scattered througout this discussion for webwasher, adsoff, etc. It's hard to find 'em all.
Reply to this message with the product name in your subject line and put a link in the body if you've got one.
Persons wishing to add information about specific products can then reply to those messages.
--Charlie
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't get what I said.
If mail-merge is important to YOU, in your work, you should put that into your evaluation of products. But it's not "important" in some world-encompassing sense, and definitely not essential. To quote your own words, "you are projecting your needs into the Rest of World".
When I mail-merge, I use GNU awk, because it is faster and much easier than any built-in mail merge in any word processor I've tried in the last twenty years. I don't need automatic section numbering, either, really - it's just something nice to have - **exactly** the same as the automatic butt-wiper!
I started to write some more, then suddenly realized you're a troll. Dig, I am antique; I've never even bothered learn how to use a spell-checker.
--Charlie
Suprisingly enough, the only essential function for a word processor is to produce readable, reproducible output.
Everything else is a frill - like power windows on a car, "features" as you call them are essentially non-essential functions.
There are an infinite number of potential features. For example, my word processor could activate a mechanical arm to wipe my butt when I get off the toilet - what a timesaver!! Obviously, nobody will ever buy an office suite again that doesn't have this incredibly useful feature.
The things you are saying are "essential features" that "DO matter" are those things you are used to using. Most of them are available in StarOffice, but you are not sufficiently experienced in SO to understand the different methods used to achieve the same ends.
So, maybe you should choose your tools on their cost-effectiveness - an evaluation that should include reliability, maintainability, as well as any other factors unique to your goals - rather than just the features you've become addicted to. If you don't care about cost, or efficiency, you don't need a word processor, you need a ghostwriter/secretary.
I'm not saying KDE is right for you (maybe you really need Professional Write) but the "features features features" mantra by itself means little.
--Charlie
When I built my first Internet node, the web did not yet exist, and one of the amazing things about the Internet was how friendly it was to the blind.
Now, with some computer experts estimating that over 50% of the Internet is incomprehensible to braille interfaces, and most computer operating systems devolving to caveman interfaces ("point at the pretty pictures and grunt") we seem to be ready to take the next step - disenfranchising the merely color-blind.
I realize that colorforth is not inherently discriminatory, in that there are a great many other languages that can be used to do the same work. The web is also not inherently discriminatory, because it does not force site designers to design pages as stupidly as, for example, Hewlett-Packard.
Would you care to comment on the situation, speaking as a tool designer? How would you feel if a talented programmer were unable to get a job due to a requirement for colored sight?
--Charlie
The original PC case had only five slots, so I ditched the bottom half years ago and installed an XT chassis with the full eight. This was about the same time I upgraded to a 386.
I kept the original top half, though, so my case still looks like an original type A, which is what it started out as.
The CD-ROM drive I put in it was a salvaged junker; it had a stripped gear which I rebuilt and now it works fine. But, while I had it apart, I spray-painted the faceplate and tray black to match the floppies.
Currently it houses an ATX motherboard with an AMD chip, two IDE drives, a 3.5 floppy, and a CD-ROM. I just got rid of the last 5.25 floppy when I put in the 30 GB drive... I'm thinking about putting it back now and losing the older IDE drive.
Despite what somebody else's post said, I've never had any problem with slot spacing. In fact, the AGP video card fits into the eighth slot perfectly, which is very convenient. And I salvaged a huge fan that fits exactly into the existing faceplate behind the slots (I haven't modified the front of the case in any way) so I don't require a blowhole. It's also convenient that my modern high-watt ATX power supply is so much smaller than the original 63.5 watt model... otherwise I wouldn't have enough airspace to cool the hotter modern chips.
The only real problem is that I've hacked out so much metal over the years (as I've gone through half a dozen motherboards) that the bottom part of the case has very little structural integrity left. If you pick it up without the top shell on, it bends from the weight of the drives. I added a steel bar taken from an old lamp across the top but that hasn't helped much.
My server, incidentally, is in a Honeywell DPS6 case. I find this highly amusing since I run linux on it... the gigantic case is nice for all my salvaged hard drives, and of course the UPS batteries.
--Charlie
./
Two hours north of you, the DuPont company is still dismantling itself. Their "excessed equipment" sales can be pretty great... although me and my buddies already picked through all the PC and mac stuff, you can still get old VAXen on occasion, and gigantic industrial robots.
The only problem is you never know what is going to be there until you get there.
And it's kind of disturbing how fast the more exotic animal-torturing equipment sells... I think the direct nerve stimulation devices lasted about 48 hours.
--Charlie
/.
One of the few science fiction / fantasy authors who studied history, and a member of the Society for Creative Anacronism. The SCA is a sport combat group (one of several such organizations active in the US) with a somewhat unrealistic medieval-themed stick fighting system (plastic & aluminum armor & shields are both legal in most kingdoms, which is anacronistic if not creative).
Poul wrote a historical fiction about Harald Hardraada, as well as many fantasies and science fiction stories with a medieval theme.
Since most geeks read science fiction, and some geeks frequent slashdot, it's not suprising that many of the denizens of this forum consider your question stupid and trollish.
--Charlie
I didn't see any mention of which graves were robbed to get all these skulls, but I have a suspicion....
In the early 1800s Samuel George Morton built a huge and famous collection of skulls. These skulls were garnered by his correspondents (Morton being an eminent naturalist of the day) from all over the world, but according to this site were mostly native american.
One of the previous posters was decrying the way some tribes object to the pillaging of their graveyards - in Morton's day, similar objections were made to the way the Indians resisted having their heads chopped off. Benighted savages, how dare they resist the progress of science!
A retired friend of mine was once the curator of the Morton skull collection (aka "the American Golgotha"). Originally housed at the Academy of Natural Sciences, it has since been moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where it still comprises over a thousand skulls despite an unknown amount of pilfering.
Everybody's got a theory of where the Amerinds came from; but Morton went a bit beyond that. He used his skulls to prove that middle-aged caucasian males (which, oddly enough, was a group containing Samuel Morton) were the pinnacle of evolution - the smartest, most bestest people of all!
The debunking of Morton's conclusions was completed by Stephen Gould, in his essay "The Mismeasure of Man". I highly recommend Gould's early works, incidentally, although his recent stuff is tedious.
Morton's infamously flawed racial ladder of intelligence, based on his measurements of humans skulls, were a part of the justification for Nazism and many other racist movements. Even today there are those who insist that measuring skulls can give meaningful insights to guide current events. I think the measurements, and especially the conclusions drawn from them, say more about the researchers than they do about the objects measured.
If you are really into the interpretation of dimensions of crania, you must visit the phrenology website.
--Charlie
/.
Well, it's hard to tell if this is a fake article or not. Stale beer might foster growth of beneficial organisms, I dunno.
On the other claw, everyone thought it was OK to use wood preserved with copper arsenate (that's the greenish pressure-treated stuff, highly toxic to bugs and you really shouldn't be breathing that sawdust) on docks and piers. The arsenic leaches out so slowly that it distributes itself harmlessly in the bottom mud, right?
Wrong. The mud-dwelling annelids (them's worms to us country folk) concentrate the arsenic compounds in their gullets until they reach a certain level of toxicity, then they barf it up into the current - killing anything that just happens to be passing and measurably contaminating the waterflow.
Doesn't particularly bother the worms in the long run, but now we've got steadily increasing arsenic in America's waterways that isn't going to get better anytime soon - the worms have got a couple decades worth of arsenic to puke up yet.
Now do you understand the furor over arsenic levels in water? Ol' Dubya ain't as stupid as he looks. Those lumber companys have invested a lot in the pressure-treat process, and they make some very tasty campaign contributions.
--Charlie
/.
When NT came out, it was supposed to be based on code stolen from the VMS system, which has truly phenomenal stability - equaled only by a few linux kernels. The advertising, and the legions of MS-shills in userland (who at that time were gunning for OS/2) gleefully proclaimed that NT was stable enough for the enterprise.
I tested NT extensively and found that 3.51 was basically stable enough for user desktops - it crashed about as often as a Macintosh. But the computer press behaved exactly as they do today in regards to W2K - "It's uncrashable! Rock-solid! No more BSOD!" ranted the pundits.
When 4.0 shipped, suddenly the previously "rock solid" NT 3.51 was not a stable platform - you had to upgrade to 4.0 to get the exact same empty promises and gleeful raving. My tests showed no phenomenal improvement, however.
So, perhaps W2K is really stable and wonderful and all that nice warm fuzzy stuff. But, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice - shame on me. I won't be buying W2K because I have known working alternatives from sources that have not abused my trust.
--Charlie
PS - HP (vendors of the unbelievably horrible HP-UX) were advertising Windows NT using the word uncrashable only a year ago. Just now a quick search on Google turned up numerous instances of this egregiously fraudulent claim... are W2k's promises likely to be any different?
--CTB
No, you are right, as far as you've gone. If you use a single password (or single key, or single passphrase) to secure multiple systems then you multiply the damage incurred if a that password (or whatever) is compromised. /. and my named user accounts don't have any fancified privileges. The boxes that share root passwords are physically set up so that anyone who gains root on one can easily do so on the others, anyway (NFS sucks, may I say here?).
There is no real way around this, but often this is an acceptable risk. For example, I use the same password on K5 and slashdot, a different one for all my named user accounts, and several machines at work share a root password. All my machines at home have the same root (not the same as any mentioned above, though) password.
This works because I don't care if anyone else pretends to be me on K5 or
So, manage your exposure as required by your circumstances. Remember keystroke loggers catch ALL passwords, and the only truly secure box is powered down in a locked room.
--Charlie
/.
I read the man pages for each release of OpenSSH as they came out. And eventually, with the help of several articles found on Google, I figured out how to do SSH V2 passwordless login and file transfer.
The most recent release of the OpenSSH docs is much better than previous, and I recommend everyone upgrade their packages. And much kudos to the OpenSSH team - they are fixing the docs, and the software is truly great.
But you won't understand everything you need to from the man pages unless you already grok rsh, rlogin, rcp, bind & name resolution, etc. The man pages are for people who are replacing insecure protocols, and who already understand them... not for people starting from a blank slate. Newbies should read this article, and the next one when it comes out, and Jay Beale's stuff too.
--Charlie
***note VERSION ONE of SSH is NO GOOD you may as well use RLOGIN. And you should not allow rhosts files on your systems for any reason.***
I know this is off-topic, but I am getting really tired of people's completely fake "Big Lie" .sigs propagating through SlashDot.
The phrase "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs",, which you credit to Jefferson, is usually attributed to Karl Marx as translated from his Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875 (source: Brooks Spencer, 1997). Spencer notes "It is curious that the first [phrase] closely parallels a phrase from Saint-Simon, the second one from Fourier and both, from phrases from Babeuf." I find it interesting that in the consitution of the People's Republic of China this is transmogrified to 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.' (source: Article 6, PRC constitution, 1982).
Now, in reality, Marx cribbed this wholesale from a Frenchman who said it in the 1700s. For penance, you may search out the original quote - I couldn't find it on the web anywhere.
NOT JEFFERSON!!! And don't believe most of the Ben Franklin and Adolf Hitler quotes you see on Slashdot either, they are generally fakes.
--Charlie
It was really cool to find out that Mudge's favorite book is Jack of Shadows; now it seems Jeremy Allison's fave may be Lord of Light!
Two of my all-time favorites, also, incidentally. I recommend Creatures of Light and Darkness to those unfazed by the mythic imagery of LOL, and This Immortal (aka Call Me Conrad) to those who found the philosophy a bit daunting.
Jeremy, I agree that the review is a spoiler. I liked being suprised by Nirriti's motives.
--Charlie
"Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen."
--Marduk, in Zelazny's "Creatures of Light and Darkness"
10) Do not play games.
9) if you can't follow rule 10, don't play non-aerobic games.
8) if you fail to observe rules 9 and 10, don't play drinking games.
7) if you blow off rules 8-10, don't play computer games.
6) OK, well, don't play any Sid Meier games.
5) at least don't play first-person shooters!
4) don't have a job or social life.
3) don't even consider having children.
2) don't read any Jon Katz articles
1) DON'T IRC (it causes hairy palms anyway).
--Charlie
Last time I tried it... I think milestone 18 was the Mozilla build, Galeon 0.8.3ish? It was quite a while ago, on one of my Red Hat systems. Earlier I tried a build somebody did using some sort of Xwindows-MSwindows thingy, like cygwin/wingtk, but I honestly don't remember where I got it. I scanned it pretty hard for virii, I remember, so it probably didn't come from the Galeon site... it was even more broken than the linux version (which was massively unstable at the time) and I couldn't get it to do anything but crash. :^).
But I do plan to try it again (under linux at least). It'll have to wait until after defcon, though, because we're decomissioning an IBM mainframe right now and it's a wee bit busy around here
--Charlie
I run several mailservers. I need them to be at least profit-neutral, preferably profitable.
Why? So I can keep running them. I don't get government grants, and I have a spouse & kiddies to support. If I am to continue to contribute to the Internet community, I must not only survive, I must be able to pay for my links.
Spam, generated with the help of people who insist on open relays, finds my users and clogs their mailboxes. They (the users) no longer receive optimum value from time spent interfacing with my mailservers. This in turn impacts profitability.
State-supported academics and wealthy ideologues can rant as they please, but stifling the right of anti-spam zealots to list open relays is pure censorship - the suppression of someone's right to speak out. In contrast, spam is the theft of disk space and bandwidth - and whenever I try one of those "opt out" things the spam load noticeably INCREASES, incidentally.
Open Relay blacklists let me continue to feed my family while doing work that helps the Internet as a whole. Spam eats my time and other resources and robs the Internet of any potential fruit of those lost resources. My preference should be obvious.
--Charlie
PS- All the things the open relay advocates claim they need to do can be accomplished without the use of open relays. Except spamming and mailbombing.
I hate the idea of having newsgroups and Email integrated into the browser, I want fast tools that do a single job well.
But the last two versions of Galeon I tried (using both linux & MSwindows) were so hideously unstable I couldn't really use them.
That said, I hope Galeon eventually triumphs. I will keep checking in regularly!
-Charlie
The primary reason to prefer linux over traditional unices (for me, as a sysadmin and user) is the clean separation of configuration files from the binaries they control and the data those binaries use. /etc directory structure and capture the entire configuration of most linux distros, without getting anything else. This is extremely useful. Similar tricks can be played with /var on nameservers and DHCP servers.
/etc AND rc FILES SHOULD NOT BE IN /sbin! - If that isn't obvious to you, you need a long vacation.]
/opt directory for the installation of major 3rd party applications - that is, the kind of applications that you dedicate a server to, like databases or digital data aquisition systems.
/etc/exports (I have a link named /etc/nfs.conf on the few machines where I am forced to run insecure crap like NFS and NIS) falls by the wayside. Until then no *nix standard can be both widely used and internally self-consistent.
By this I refer to the way one can simply back up the
Traditional unices (the most egregious example being that hideous train-wreck of a Unix, HP-UX) scatter configuration files and binaries willy-nilly across the file systems, every program having its own unique hidey-hole. People steeped in Unix lore become inured to this, and start to think it is desireable because they are used to it. [Reality Check - BINARIES SHOULD NOT BE IN
The LSB specifies the use of FHS 2.2 which seems to be a more elegant version of the old linux file system standard. The FHS standard specs an
The problem is, the majority of the application vendors ram their code in any old place they want, and then their apps don't run without those specific locations. Symbolic links are the best compromise you can usually get, without forking off your own source base, and sometimes even that won't work. Then, to make matters worse, they often require specific versions of various libraries - usually obsolete and/or insecure ones, in my experience.
So, the major distributors may get off their asses and implement LSB eventually, which will be a Good Thing [TM] and will mean finally getting real total compliance with FHS, but application servers will still be wonky as soon as a big app (like tina or datastage - blech!) is installed. The LSB will supposedly address this by marketplace adjustment and app vendors without clues will fail commercially. I personally am not convinced this will happen seeing how Solaris and the patently inferior HP-UX still command market share today. Commericial needs require applications which require systems, and not the other way 'round.
Me, I'll be happy when the ancient cruft like
--Charlie
Eric Dennis (Spothead Lex Animata) says the secret to happiness is lowered expectations.
There've been a fair number of old VAX (P-VAX and C-VAX) as well as early Alpha systems showing up at the DuPont Surplus Asset sales lately.
For those that don't know, DuPont (Uncle Dupie to Delaware residents) is a 200 year old zaibatsu operating mostly out of Wilmington, DE, USA. The DuPont family, that started it, is both famous and infamous for their benevolent works, war profiteering, and involvement with GM and Standard Oil. The company (as opposed to the family) is famous for inefficiency and pollution.
DuPont suffers from severe beaurocratitis and consequently has been dismembering itself and selling off the pieces for the last half-dozen years. You can get old Alphas for $100 when they have them, currently there is an HSC and a VAX 8500 processor sitting around... plus some specialized equipment for torturing small animals (no, sadly I am not kidding).
Happy trashing.
--Charlie
NT is at least as poor a bet as VMS. You will have no problem supporting your current Alpha-based VMS systems for many years to come, and since Microsoft is officially on a 2-4 year upgade cycle (and changing their license terms to force you into the upgrades, see many previous /. articles) it won't cost you any more than the NT treadmill.
I know of at least two VAX/VMS systems still in heavy daily use running VMS 5 (yes, they both survived Y2K without patches or problems despite the doomsayers). How many NT 3.51 systems (which is not really a fair comparison anyway since VMS 6 predates NT 3.51) are still in use? How many of them go five years without rebooting?
Start converting to linux now; take your time, and all things will converge nicely for you in five years or less. Don't bother with NT, it's just another proprietary rat-hole.
--Charlie
PS:
I admin VMS, linux, and NT, incidentally (among others) for a living.
--CTB
OK, dig:
All large networks have a means of shoveling out system patches, upgrades, etc. For example, in a MSquishy or Novell network the login processes make the client run a script which the system admin specifies. I use these scripts to hack the registries of WinBlows boxes to make them less insecure, and to identify rogue boxes that lusers set up without loading minimum patch sets.
If you don't have this, you are either a wimpy little network (less than 1000 nodes for sure) or in a situation of impending doom as entropy grinds your systems into chaos.
So, the system admin shovels out a set of public keys, and an ssh daemon, and now he can run find remotely on you. If you can't afford ssh daemons that run on your OS, get linux ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H I mean write a beentsy little TSR that listens on a weird port and runs whatever find facility your OS uses. Pretty trivial really. You can half-assedly secure it by changing the keys daily, and you should block the port used on edge routers, but really, this is nothing compared to the stuff admins do on large networks as a matter of course.
Our chief network admin guy (not me, any more, hooray!) thinks it's a slow week if he hasn't edited files or registries on at least 400 PCs...
--Charlie
/.
I learned to program because I needed more photon torpedos than the Star Trek game gave out. You know, the ancient one with the square grid of dots?
Learned about the limits of precision of variables, too, when I figured out why I could only have 32767 ptorps at a time.
Taught myself BASIC on a Wang System 2200 at age 14 (and I can still RTFM today).
--Charlie
It looks to me (from some of the memos brought into evidence at the DOJ .vs. MicroSoft anti-trust suit) like Microsoft's employees are generally crude and impolite, as well as being fond of violent metaphors ("let's cut off their air supply" and "we're going to kill [insert competitor name here]"). Not that it's unusual for computer geeks to have poor social skills ;^).
Mundie will probably be ready and willing to deal with the types of questions people are posting here (yes, I understand you're just venting, the real questions are on the O'Reilly site) so let's use a little akido on him and be nice.
He'll come in all combative and we'll show the world how reasonable and well-spoken we are. You can't buy publicity like that. Well, OK, you can, but it's out of Tim O'Reilly's price range.
--Charlie
It's more effective to fight fire with water. Yes, I know this sounds weird coming from me, but consider it strategy.
KookaBurra Software sells a product called "Cookie Pal" that allows you to filter cookies and responses to cookies in real time. Extremely configurable, shareware, inexpensive, works on MSWindows operating systems.
It can work with Netscape and Explorer simultaneously. I've been using it on my windows boxen for years quite happily.
--Charlie
There are various recommendations scattered througout this discussion for webwasher, adsoff, etc. It's hard to find 'em all.
Reply to this message with the product name in your subject line and put a link in the body if you've got one.
Persons wishing to add information about specific products can then reply to those messages. --Charlie