I think you are confusing what MIDI can do the MIDI encoded crap you hear on websites.
Find any keyboardist with even a modest rig and ask how he or she connects all their equipment. MIDI is the industry standard that lets me control a rack of keyboards with my guitar synth(or this Palm device, assuming its really MIDI.)
Classical music done with a wicked (MIDI-fied) rig: Dig up Emerson, Lake and Powell and listen to Mars, the God of War. Even better, compare that with Holtz' original version. I kid you not, Emerson actually improved on the original score.
thanks, I think I'll check it out. My decision to use OpenBSD was highly influenced by the "secure by default" ethos of Theo & crew, and the fact that its been years since the last OpenBSD box has been rooted. So for me the Linux vs. OpenBSD discussion is kinda moot, but I'm sure I'll enjoy it anyway.
I'm giving up MS Proxy Server in favor of a real firewall, and I've decided to use OpenBSD.
Can anyone recommend a good firewall book for OpenBSD? In particular, I've got the O'reilly book, Building Internet Firewalls, and I was considering Building Linux and OpenBSD firewalls, from Wiley.
I've had to administer an AIX box for the last few years. I know there are a lot of posts about already existing LVM's, but the AIX LVM works really well and its stable.
If they do this, I hope they give Linux the tools to make the LVM usable. Particularly the mksysb command(can be configured to back up your root volume) and especially smit.
Smit is about the best sysadmin tool I've ever used. Its much better than linuxconf IMO. I know the purists out there think "a real sysadmin always uses the command line", however what smit gives you is the command line, in a convenient menu form. Rather than wading through the man page, you basically have a menu that comprises each command line option with a description of what it means. You can also hit F6 at any time to see the command you are about to execute. Which also makes it a great tool to learn Unix.
Its time to reclaim the prize of the worlds tallest building, and I say it should be a big geek project with legos.
We had the worlds tallest building for many years, first with the Empire State Building, then with Sears Tower. But now, with Millennium Tower in Japan, Nina Tower in HongKong, and Petronas Tower in Malaysia, we are way behind.
Time to reclaim the title of "worlds biggest" and further the rise of geeks to America's adored elite:)
I can't remember the last time I got this excited about a piece of software. First, from the sounds of things, they want this to be a big distributed program like DNS. I imagine they would like to see every ISP run this.
This deals with such a wide array of computer sabotage that its utterly amazing. Everything from breakins to virii to DDOS's can be successfully combated by this. Its exactly what the net needs.
What would really be cool of course if the source was released(drool). But maybe that will happen since from the article it sounds like they want to see their program widely distributed.
I originally bought Mandrake 6.5. When I upgraded to 7, I tried to find just the update on Mandrake's site but could not. So I ended up buying a whole new set of CD's. I would have rather just downloaded the new stuff and installed that, even if it was more complicated, just to avoid having to push 600 MB of files around.
I took another look at Mandrake's site now, and in their download area, it clearly states You must at least download the "Mandrake/" and "images/" trees from the "7.0/" directory. It's about 600 Mb.
Why are huge downloads necessary if you are just upgrading? Do I have to get on a bunch of mailing lists to figure out what is new and hunt down those files myself?
Its a nice system, but they should make it easier to keep current.
not needed - existing practices good enough.
on
A Matter Of Trust?
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· Score: 2
I work for an online bookstore, so I've had to deal with this stuff. I don't see why a photo ID is necessary. The only time my company has ever requested an ID is in cases like academic software, where a student ID is required by the software company.
Standard CC transactions already let you map a number to the owner and his or her home address. That's all that should be needed. The only possible thing that could happen if you have things set up right is that a person could use a stolen credit card and send whatever product to a different shipping(as opposed to billing) address. But even there the criminal is exposing himself to getting caught, and so that's not likely to happen.
We have been victim of fraud, but so far, after many thousands of orders, its either been on returns(no credit card solution is going to help there) or from people shipping items to PO Boxes. We had to stop shipping to PO Boxes because these cannot be traced to an address, and certain people would try to steal things that way.
Of a far greater to concern to these people should be protecting the credit card information in their database. I imagine it was quite damaging to the companies that stored database info on their webserver and then were subsequently cracked.
The only thing I can see this useful for is marketing and thats where our companies differ. My company stongly supports privacy and would never share customer information.
I don't go to msnbc.com for information about Microsoft, and I wouldn't go to algore2000.com for information about Al Gore. There is too much potential for misleading, one-sided information.
However, if Al Gore(or any other politician) set up a moderated forum like this one, I would be far more likely to visit.
What do you think of the idea of using the slashcode as a basis for an interactive political site?
Visual Perl and Visual Python will be part of Visual Studio 7. Interesting because development tools are one of the good things MS makes. It would be interesting to see the color coding, drop-down object members, tree views of classes and functions, online help, and debugging applied to Perl. I wonder who will do the better job.
Have you tried KDevelop? It's a little basic still, but it organizes your files, does your makefiles for you, and color-codes your code. Its designed to work with gcc/g++. It also supports qt, so you have cross-platform support for GUI's. Runs under KDE or Gnome.
To be fair, you can use VB and take parts of the IE browser and use them in your own application. Its just a different development model, instead of having the source, you have an API to the IE components. This is how AOL builds its browser and also is the basis of many of the kid-safe browsers. Windows only, of course.
I prefer the open source model myself, but if you need a custom browser in 5 minutes using VB/IE components is a good way to go.
Not only does MIT hold the copyright to the name kerberos(which should preclude any legal action by MS) but...
They have also given themselves a way to ensure interoperability among all versions of kerberos!
From RFC 1510:
In order to ensure the interoperability of realms, it is necessary to define a minimal configuration which must be supported by all implementations. This minimal configuration is subject to change as technology does. For example, if at some later date it is discovered that one of the required encryption or checksum algorithms is not secure, it will be replaced.
Microsoft seems to really have worked itself into a pickle. On one hand, they have woven kerberos so tightly in with Active Directory that it would take a major overhaul to make it compatible with other versions of kerberos, even if they decided that was the smart(customer-saving) thing to do. On the other hand, according to their technet page interoperability is their top IT goal. MIT could press them on this, take away their right to call the software kerberos, or insist that MS publish the extension to qualify for the interoperability rule.
I'm starting to wonder what the people at Microsoft in charge of this stuff are thinking. Clearly they have a weak legal case, at best. They have got to be in damage control mode right now, both on the public image front, and for the folks at MIT and the IETF who are undoubtedly pissed at MS.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me that this letter was a result of someone on the legal team seeing the post and acting on it without consulting management. I bet Microsoft would love to just drop this and hope everyone forgets about it.
Go to the Microsoft web site and search for "slashdot"(I did this to see if they had their side of the kerberos story posted on their site.) Click on the first story that comes up and search the page for "slashdot".
If you'd rather not follow the link, the paragraph reads as follows:
"Understand that I love technology and I love to keep up with technology, including ones that are alternatives to Microsoft. I check sites like Slashdot every day. I find the postings out there to be very thought provoking, and they cause me to think about balancing our entire solution. I am also fortunate to have so many customers who are willing to tell me what they think we should be doing and what operating systems and Web servers we should be using. But at the end of the day, our customers have given us a responsibility, and we are accountable for the technologies on which their businesses depend. We must have solutions that work-not just cool technology, but ones that really work-and we found those through Microsoft."
So, obviously, MS wants you to think their way is better than listening to some/. poster for a balanced opinion. I don't think this article is going to change their minds. However I do like the tactic of taking the high road, as Chaney has done.
Let's say a combination of AI, robotics, and asteroid mining makes open-source hardware projects realistic to the point where its just as easy and cheap to create your own fusion-powered sattelite as it is to, say, come up with a Linux distro.
Then, someone comes along, and creates an open source web-controlled nuclear-powered death bot. Only a totally international, mirrored site set up with good encryption so users could be totally anonymous. In other words, a web site that was not subject to any government that could be used to kill someone.
Something like that is still a few years down the road, thankfully.
Design a search engine which learns and emulates the searching patterns of a user
Google already works this way - past user click-throughs on keywords act as a "vote" for a particular site.
However, your other comment about using AI to determine the quality of a site is right on. Another application using AI to make a better search engines is expanding the number of categories a site can fit into. Yahoo might only be able to maintain 5000 categories by hand, but a good AI program might be able to handle hundreds of thousands or millions of categories. Then we could possibly "drill down" to the information we needed.
I'm not sure if I agree that the intelligent shopping cart is a dumb idea. Imagine a site like mysimon that compared millions of products from thousands of stores. Then, instead of making you do all the work of signing up and purchasing from each store, the program could use a single shopping cart, and negotiate the sale from each of the stores that had the best prices, using the same user information. Perhaps not groundbreaking AI, but it would be very useful.
Inprise doesn't need them. They have the perfect Windows-killer already. With Star Office being free and already the best tool we have for converting Office documents, Corel doesn't have much to offer the Linux community.
A really good RAD tool with integrated database tools such as kylix would go a long way to make Linux be used more in the corporate world. Its no coincidence that Windows didn't really take off until there was Visual Basic to ease application development.
With a good RAD tool available, applications for Linux will skyrocket. The more applications there are the more people will switch to Linux. When more companies start using Linux, people will realize they don't necessarily need Windows and Office to do their day to day tasks. This is a Good Thing(tm).
Hopefully when Inprise and Trolltech release kylix they will do the smart(Windows-killing) thing and release it under the GPL.
>> Authentication is such a small, small part of the Windows 2000 Professional/Server relationship. Without Windows 2000 Server and Active Directory, you lose a HUGE amount of corporate managability such as Group Policies and the likes. Simply being able to authenticate to a Linux box is a fairly small bonus.
Actually, I was talking about authenticating from a Linux box. Since Linux is open source, Windows doesn't have any problem authenticating to it. However, there are lots of environments that use Unix servers and Windows desktops, and a Unix server cant use kerberos to provide authentication for accessing files from Win2K desktops.
Don't forget, Linux has LDAP, and that the most widely accepted model for networking is the internet protocols. By insisting on proprietary protocols, rather than participating in the development of standard protocols that every computer company needs to use, they are only continuing to generate bad publicity for themselves, causing more people to turn to Linux, and turning away from the Microsoft platform. Networking is technical, but its also social. Piss enough people off and watch that MS stock contiune to drop.
Don't get me wrong, Microsoft's implementation of Kerberos should allow your scenario to work but I don't think it was done this way explictly to prevent 3rd party authentication mechanisms.
Then why did they release the code in such a way as to prevent Samba from being able to make a workaround? The Samba team would write a workaround in a heartbeat if Microsoft didn't forbid this in their EULA. With this kerberos stunt, they are proving that the DOJ was right and that they really need to have their power limited. Its simply not ethical for MS to take an open source protocol and use it to deny services to open source operating systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Find any keyboardist with even a modest rig and ask how he or she connects all their equipment. MIDI is the industry standard that lets me control a rack of keyboards with my guitar synth(or this Palm device, assuming its really MIDI.)
Classical music done with a wicked (MIDI-fied) rig: Dig up Emerson, Lake and Powell and listen to Mars, the God of War. Even better, compare that with Holtz' original version. I kid you not, Emerson actually improved on the original score.
Therefore, it can interface with any other MIDI device.
thanks, I think I'll check it out. My decision to use OpenBSD was highly influenced by the "secure by default" ethos of Theo & crew, and the fact that its been years since the last OpenBSD box has been rooted. So for me the Linux vs. OpenBSD discussion is kinda moot, but I'm sure I'll enjoy it anyway.
Well, for me, buying the CD is pretty much a given. :) But thanks much for the info.
Can anyone recommend a good firewall book for OpenBSD? In particular, I've got the O'reilly book, Building Internet Firewalls, and I was considering Building Linux and OpenBSD firewalls, from Wiley.
Any comments or suggestions?
If they do this, I hope they give Linux the tools to make the LVM usable. Particularly the mksysb command(can be configured to back up your root volume) and especially smit.
Smit is about the best sysadmin tool I've ever used. Its much better than linuxconf IMO. I know the purists out there think "a real sysadmin always uses the command line", however what smit gives you is the command line, in a convenient menu form. Rather than wading through the man page, you basically have a menu that comprises each command line option with a description of what it means. You can also hit F6 at any time to see the command you are about to execute. Which also makes it a great tool to learn Unix.
We had the worlds tallest building for many years, first with the Empire State Building, then with Sears Tower. But now, with Millennium Tower in Japan, Nina Tower in HongKong, and Petronas Tower in Malaysia, we are way behind.
Time to reclaim the title of "worlds biggest" and further the rise of geeks to America's adored elite :)
can be found here. These guys are somewhat more sophisticated than your average script kiddie.
This deals with such a wide array of computer sabotage that its utterly amazing. Everything from breakins to virii to DDOS's can be successfully combated by this. Its exactly what the net needs.
What would really be cool of course if the source was released(drool). But maybe that will happen since from the article it sounds like they want to see their program widely distributed.
A hypocrat would therefore be a person in a position of power in a hypocritial organization. Like a high-level Microsoft manager.
A tiny one-page site with about 5,500 hits total, and its standing up to the slashdot effect just fine!
But seriously, this is a great idea. I would love to try this.
I took another look at Mandrake's site now, and in their download area, it clearly states You must at least download the "Mandrake/" and "images/" trees from the "7.0/" directory. It's about 600 Mb.
Why are huge downloads necessary if you are just upgrading? Do I have to get on a bunch of mailing lists to figure out what is new and hunt down those files myself?
Its a nice system, but they should make it easier to keep current.
Standard CC transactions already let you map a number to the owner and his or her home address. That's all that should be needed. The only possible thing that could happen if you have things set up right is that a person could use a stolen credit card and send whatever product to a different shipping(as opposed to billing) address. But even there the criminal is exposing himself to getting caught, and so that's not likely to happen.
We have been victim of fraud, but so far, after many thousands of orders, its either been on returns(no credit card solution is going to help there) or from people shipping items to PO Boxes. We had to stop shipping to PO Boxes because these cannot be traced to an address, and certain people would try to steal things that way.
Of a far greater to concern to these people should be protecting the credit card information in their database. I imagine it was quite damaging to the companies that stored database info on their webserver and then were subsequently cracked.
The only thing I can see this useful for is marketing and thats where our companies differ. My company stongly supports privacy and would never share customer information.
Tommy trivia: What "musical molestation" did Pinball Wizard suffer as a child, and by which relative?
A free copy of Geeks, by Jon Katz (you pay shipping) to the first person who emails me with the answer.
However, if Al Gore(or any other politician) set up a moderated forum like this one, I would be far more likely to visit.
What do you think of the idea of using the slashcode as a basis for an interactive political site?
Visual Perl and Visual Python will be part of Visual Studio 7. Interesting because development tools are one of the good things MS makes. It would be interesting to see the color coding, drop-down object members, tree views of classes and functions, online help, and debugging applied to Perl. I wonder who will do the better job.
Have you tried KDevelop? It's a little basic still, but it organizes your files, does your makefiles for you, and color-codes your code. Its designed to work with gcc/g++. It also supports qt, so you have cross-platform support for GUI's. Runs under KDE or Gnome.
I prefer the open source model myself, but if you need a custom browser in 5 minutes using VB/IE components is a good way to go.
In your opinion, what defines a 1.0 release?
They have also given themselves a way to ensure interoperability among all versions of kerberos!
From RFC 1510:
In order to ensure the interoperability of realms, it is necessary to define a minimal configuration which must be supported by all implementations. This minimal configuration is subject to change as technology does. For example, if at some later date it is discovered that one of the required encryption or checksum algorithms is not secure, it will be replaced.
Microsoft seems to really have worked itself into a pickle. On one hand, they have woven kerberos so tightly in with Active Directory that it would take a major overhaul to make it compatible with other versions of kerberos, even if they decided that was the smart(customer-saving) thing to do. On the other hand, according to their technet page interoperability is their top IT goal. MIT could press them on this, take away their right to call the software kerberos, or insist that MS publish the extension to qualify for the interoperability rule.
I'm starting to wonder what the people at Microsoft in charge of this stuff are thinking. Clearly they have a weak legal case, at best. They have got to be in damage control mode right now, both on the public image front, and for the folks at MIT and the IETF who are undoubtedly pissed at MS.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me that this letter was a result of someone on the legal team seeing the post and acting on it without consulting management. I bet Microsoft would love to just drop this and hope everyone forgets about it.
Go to the Microsoft web site and search for "slashdot"(I did this to see if they had their side of the kerberos story posted on their site.) Click on the first story that comes up and search the page for "slashdot".
If you'd rather not follow the link, the paragraph reads as follows:
"Understand that I love technology and I love to keep up with technology, including ones that are alternatives to Microsoft. I check sites like Slashdot every day. I find the postings out there to be very thought provoking, and they cause me to think about balancing our entire solution. I am also fortunate to have so many customers who are willing to tell me what they think we should be doing and what operating systems and Web servers we should be using. But at the end of the day, our customers have given us a responsibility, and we are accountable for the technologies on which their businesses depend. We must have solutions that work-not just cool technology, but ones that really work-and we found those through Microsoft."
So, obviously, MS wants you to think their way is better than listening to some /. poster for a balanced opinion. I don't think this article is going to change their minds. However I do like the tactic of taking the high road, as Chaney has done.
Let's say a combination of AI, robotics, and asteroid mining makes open-source hardware projects realistic to the point where its just as easy and cheap to create your own fusion-powered sattelite as it is to, say, come up with a Linux distro.
Then, someone comes along, and creates an open source web-controlled nuclear-powered death bot. Only a totally international, mirrored site set up with good encryption so users could be totally anonymous. In other words, a web site that was not subject to any government that could be used to kill someone.
Something like that is still a few years down the road, thankfully.
Google already works this way - past user click-throughs on keywords act as a "vote" for a particular site.
However, your other comment about using AI to determine the quality of a site is right on. Another application using AI to make a better search engines is expanding the number of categories a site can fit into. Yahoo might only be able to maintain 5000 categories by hand, but a good AI program might be able to handle hundreds of thousands or millions of categories. Then we could possibly "drill down" to the information we needed.
I'm not sure if I agree that the intelligent shopping cart is a dumb idea. Imagine a site like mysimon that compared millions of products from thousands of stores. Then, instead of making you do all the work of signing up and purchasing from each store, the program could use a single shopping cart, and negotiate the sale from each of the stores that had the best prices, using the same user information. Perhaps not groundbreaking AI, but it would be very useful.
A really good RAD tool with integrated database tools such as kylix would go a long way to make Linux be used more in the corporate world. Its no coincidence that Windows didn't really take off until there was Visual Basic to ease application development.
With a good RAD tool available, applications for Linux will skyrocket. The more applications there are the more people will switch to Linux. When more companies start using Linux, people will realize they don't necessarily need Windows and Office to do their day to day tasks. This is a Good Thing(tm).
Hopefully when Inprise and Trolltech release kylix they will do the smart(Windows-killing) thing and release it under the GPL.
Actually, I was talking about authenticating from a Linux box. Since Linux is open source, Windows doesn't have any problem authenticating to it. However, there are lots of environments that use Unix servers and Windows desktops, and a Unix server cant use kerberos to provide authentication for accessing files from Win2K desktops.
Don't forget, Linux has LDAP, and that the most widely accepted model for networking is the internet protocols. By insisting on proprietary protocols, rather than participating in the development of standard protocols that every computer company needs to use, they are only continuing to generate bad publicity for themselves, causing more people to turn to Linux, and turning away from the Microsoft platform. Networking is technical, but its also social. Piss enough people off and watch that MS stock contiune to drop.
Don't get me wrong, Microsoft's implementation of Kerberos should allow your scenario to work but I don't think it was done this way explictly to prevent 3rd party authentication mechanisms.
Then why did they release the code in such a way as to prevent Samba from being able to make a workaround? The Samba team would write a workaround in a heartbeat if Microsoft didn't forbid this in their EULA. With this kerberos stunt, they are proving that the DOJ was right and that they really need to have their power limited. Its simply not ethical for MS to take an open source protocol and use it to deny services to open source operating systems.