I dunno. I think "shrill" is perfectly acceptible, hell, even called for, when this voting machine scam has been out there for 5+ years now, and nobody has done a damn thing about it. If you care about Democracy, if you love your country, shrill is necessary, in this case.
Bzzzt! Wrong!
Being shrill implies (truth be damned) that you have no logical argument and that you are reduced to ranting. It serves only to get more agreement from people who already agree with you. I'll let you in on a little secret: Shrills of the (big-L) Liberal variety did more to get Bush elected than Karl Rove did. Elections in the US (at least for the last several decades) are decided by moderates and independants. If you are having a difficult time deciding between two points of view and one side puts forth a mature, comported presentation and the other looks like a bunch of screaming children, who will that push you towards? Hint: it's not the screaming children. The Republican edge for the last several years has been in hiding and marginalizing their nuttier supporters (not the so-called 'single-issue' voters, who are relatively rare). You don't see David Duke or Pat Robertson being put in the spotlight at the Republican National Convention, for example (they did, however, do a great job of shining it on Michael Moore).
Personally, I'm not a big fan of Bush (not that the Democrats ran anything special in '04 - the only firm position Kerry took was that he was very much in favor of being elected). I'd like to see some better counterbalance against things like the Patriot Act and brian-dead legislation for Terry Scheivo. Just about anything that annoys the Religious Right makes me smile (as long as abortion's legal, can we make it retroactive?). It makes me nuts to see the people who could do that getting into a national competition to see who can cram their feet further down their throats. In any case, Bush is enough of a screw-up that he helps counter this effect on his own, but it would be nice (and effective) to see some adult competition for the ideological high ground.
If you care about (small-D) democracy, if you love your country, and if you want to make a difference in the mind of people who don't already agree with you, being shrill is incredibly negative.
Why are the handful of people who identify problems and try to get them solved "shrill"
This is +5 Insightful?!?? They weren't referring to the whistleblowing in this piece as 'shrill', they were referring to the blogger and the blog overall. Personally, when I read this piece and checked some of the rest of his blog (always helps to find the context), I also found him a bit... shrill. That is, I find him to be one of those people from the extreme ends of the political spectrum (although it's sadly becoming more and more mainstream on both sides) that rant and scream about topics rather than discussing them in a calm and rational manner.
Even in this particular instance, the topic was written up in a rather sensationalistic manner (complete with an annoying animated GIF of an emergency vehicle light at the top). That doesn't mean the information is incorrect or not worthy of consideration, but it does make it more difficult to take it seriously as unadulterated fact when it comes from an obvious partisan with a penchant for sensationalism.
One's 'shrillness' is an entirely nonpartisan attribute, easily applied to liberals, conservatives, and those that belong to sundry other groups. Personally, I think we'd all be much better off without it.
Oh come on! You know that major solar events like this are a direct result of the Bush Administrations callous disregard for the environment! They want more global warming so that they can pass emergency measures to further reduce the Bill of Rights and enslave America! Haliburton! Haliburton!
Actually, keep in mind that the long filenames under Win9x were extremely ugly hacks grafted on to the FAT filesystem. You could say they supported long filenames, but you're really stretching the meaning of the word "support". NTFS was the first "real" support for long filenames under Windows. In fairness, though, both of these examples ignore the fact that there was long filename support in HPFS back when OS/2 was a MS/IBM joint venture. IIRC (flip a coin), this was available well before Win95.
actually, the hands over the ears part is what you and the gp-post are doing quite fine yourself....
Too funny... you couldn't possibly have proven my point more effectively. In response, yes, we do hear you. We understand you. We just have honest disagreements about the standard of proof required to alter economies and spend trillions of dollars. Whenever we ask questions, we're told that "this is too important to question" - whether this is well meaning or not, it still translates into "we can't or won't back this up." Climate scientists can't agree for more than a few decades at a time whether or not we're sending the world into an ice age or an inferno (now some are going back to the ice age scenario). Right now, nobody can predict (within the bounds of accuracy we're talking about) what the weather is going to be tomorrow where I live (San Diego - which should be one of the easiest places on earth). And I'm supposed to take some climetologist's prediction for 100 years out? Bitch, please.
Nice insightful post. Shame you'll most likely be modded into oblivion for it (I can picture the hard-core left / right putting their hands over their ears and screaming "Nya Nya Nya Nya Nya I don't hear you!"
And am I the only person that's noticed that the "balance of nature" is about as balanced as Gary Busey drunk off his ass and suffering from an inner-ear infection?
I found an interesting pop-up generating piece of malware several weeks ago that appeared to use rootkit-type techniques to hide itself. It was invisible from the process lists (including the nicer command line ones) and the filesystem. I was able to track it down and delete it (unfortunately, the machine was several hundred miles away and I was working on it remotely, otherwise I would have booted off a CD and made a copy of the little bugger), but it was a royal pain in the ass to do.
For the interested (some of the details might be slightly off because I've consumed a lot of booze between then and now, but the overall gist is correct), I found the malware by using SysInternals RegMon to find the process ID that kept replacing the registry entries that loaded it. That Process ID couldn't be killed by any of the tools I could find (because they check to see if the pid is valid before trying to terminate it, and it had stealthed itself to the point where the ID appeared to be invalid... grrr). So I used ProcMon to kill any threads associated with the pid - the process was invisible, but you could still find the threads by which libraries they were using and kill them there (use the search command). Once the threads were killed, I could overwrite the loader file (you couldn't read it, copy it, list it, etc., but it would give you an error if you tried to overwrite it while the threads were running).
Yes, they work nicely on 2K/XP/2K3 but many of them are no longer tested on NT4 and don't work properly (as I've found out the hard way) - yes some people still run that crap.
Almost every OS / filesystem has this problem (need to recover / replace your linux root password? boot off a CD and mount the / filesysten, and read or edit/etc/passwd or/etc/shadow).
You can get around this problem in Windows by encrypting files for a specific user - this is built into NTFS. As far as I know, this is only good for user-level security (no groups), and if you force-change the user's password all files encrypted for that user are lost.
Even with this, though, it pays to remember the old saw - "Boot access is root access". Good IT security always needs to remember physical security as well!
I'm sure it can be contained within the user Wine-Box (Hmmm.. sounds too much like Boxed Wine?) (yes, I know it's not a sandbox, but the Linux user permissions tend to be more sane than Windows), but ActiveX anywhere just doesn't make me feel warm 'n fuzzy.
This explains all of the random pin-misfires I'm having on my dot-matrix printer! Thank God that it's just my government protecting me from terrorists^H^H^H counterfeiters.
This is just an agenda for a conference. Are they trying to inform us or sell us seats? Is Slashdot getting a percentage? Do editors edit, or chose stories with a randomized function? Inquiring minds want to know!
Product differentiation is the key to high profit margins, and corporations know this.
<Sarcasm>
Oh please, there's plenty of differentiation! We can choose between Brittany Spears, Jessica Simpson, the Spice Girls, and the Backdoor Boys!
</Sarcasm>
Many corporations know this. The old-school content industries, however, know jack shit about business and it shows. They continue to exist solely due to their legal and lobbying acumen, combined with the rapidly evaporating inertia of their existing business model. Recordable cassettes, VHS, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs,, the Internet, Napster, etc. were all going to bring the sky crashing down on these myopians - yet in actuality all they did was make more and more money (in spite of themselves).
I tend to think that all the guys who've ever seen Thundercats would love to see who plays Cheetara and the form-fitting body suit the actress will have to wear.
[The important thing is]... that we're all available to support each other's alibis.
Alibis? I'm just upset that somebody beat me to it (can I get a rim-shot, please)! If I did it, I'd be bragging non-stop. I mean the chances of being extradited for that are somewhere between 'none' and 'none' - I can see it now, Department of Justice (or State or whoever handles this): "Gee, sorry, the request must have been accidentally deleted because it was buried in all of my fucking spam!"
And to all of the 'sanctity of life' types - he's a spammer in Russia. This is the only way he'll ever stop spamming. Ever. Under any circumstances. Yes each spam is just a small annoyance, but someone who sends out millions of small annoyances around the world every day deserves this, at least from a Karmic perspective. The only thing I'm sad about is that I'm on the other side of the world and unable to go over and piss on his grave. Although a friend of mine is in Moscow on business....
If you're not going to upgrade, then 'screw you guys, I'm going home!'
Re:Still a single point of failure
on
Basics of RAID
·
· Score: 1
Suppose you have two disks and "software assisted" motherboard RAID, Would it be better to hook them up as separate disks or as a raid then?
By all means, RAID them if you'd like - but don't trust them with anything crucial unless you really understand the recovery process. And by understand, I mean do it once or twice with a configuration you don't mind using, until you are confident you know the quirks of getting back up and running - especially with Linux (and simulate failing BOTH disks!).
Having said that, my main PC uses RAID-0 WD740 x2 (74GB 10K RPM SATA drives) for the boot disk / program storage. But I don't keep anything I would mind losing here (RAID-0 is living dangerously, even with these extremely high-quality drives - but damn is it fast). My data is all stored on an Areca SATA controller on my server (160GB x2 RAID-1 for boot/program, 300GB x4 RAID-5 (900GB net) for data.
Re:Still a single point of failure
on
Basics of RAID
·
· Score: 1
With RAID, you still have a single point of failure. Instead of it being your hard drive, it is now your RAID controller. So what is the advantage?
Since a RAID controller doesn't have moving parts, is it less likely than a hard drive to fail?
A real RAID controller (not one of those crappy software-assisted RAID controllers; eg, anything under $400 or built onto a consumer-grade motherboard) is several orders of magnitude less likely to fail than your hard drives are. And even the best hard drives - server-grade SCSI for Fibre Channel - can be beaten to death within a year under an extremely demanding load (I had one database server that killed them in 6-9 months; this was before it was feasible to throw a few dozen gigabytes of RAM in a machine to keep the indecies in cache). Some of these controllers can cost thousands of dollars, and you most likely won't have them around the house. A few good ones for SATA / PATA can be had for between $500 and $1500 (see Areca, 3Ware, LSI Logic, etc.), and only people who really value their data will have these.www
Do you need a 'real' RAID controller? The answer is simple: If you look at the price and your data is worth more than that, then the answer is 'yes'. Personally, I don't trust software-assisted RAID further than I can throw it.
My fiancee's site has between 30 - 40% FireFox uses. And she's as far away from 'typical geek' content as possible - she runs an on-line lingere boutique. It's still high even when we filter out the slashdot referrals.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the useful aspects of Group Policies are accessible through Samba. See: link
Being shrill implies (truth be damned) that you have no logical argument and that you are reduced to ranting. It serves only to get more agreement from people who already agree with you. I'll let you in on a little secret: Shrills of the (big-L) Liberal variety did more to get Bush elected than Karl Rove did. Elections in the US (at least for the last several decades) are decided by moderates and independants. If you are having a difficult time deciding between two points of view and one side puts forth a mature, comported presentation and the other looks like a bunch of screaming children, who will that push you towards? Hint: it's not the screaming children. The Republican edge for the last several years has been in hiding and marginalizing their nuttier supporters (not the so-called 'single-issue' voters, who are relatively rare). You don't see David Duke or Pat Robertson being put in the spotlight at the Republican National Convention, for example (they did, however, do a great job of shining it on Michael Moore).
Personally, I'm not a big fan of Bush (not that the Democrats ran anything special in '04 - the only firm position Kerry took was that he was very much in favor of being elected). I'd like to see some better counterbalance against things like the Patriot Act and brian-dead legislation for Terry Scheivo. Just about anything that annoys the Religious Right makes me smile (as long as abortion's legal, can we make it retroactive?). It makes me nuts to see the people who could do that getting into a national competition to see who can cram their feet further down their throats. In any case, Bush is enough of a screw-up that he helps counter this effect on his own, but it would be nice (and effective) to see some adult competition for the ideological high ground.
If you care about (small-D) democracy, if you love your country, and if you want to make a difference in the mind of people who don't already agree with you, being shrill is incredibly negative.
Even in this particular instance, the topic was written up in a rather sensationalistic manner (complete with an annoying animated GIF of an emergency vehicle light at the top). That doesn't mean the information is incorrect or not worthy of consideration, but it does make it more difficult to take it seriously as unadulterated fact when it comes from an obvious partisan with a penchant for sensationalism.
One's 'shrillness' is an entirely nonpartisan attribute, easily applied to liberals, conservatives, and those that belong to sundry other groups. Personally, I think we'd all be much better off without it.
It could have been a case of reusing a container without properly cleaning it, a practice that continutes with annoying roommates to this day!
Oh come on! You know that major solar events like this are a direct result of the Bush Administrations callous disregard for the environment! They want more global warming so that they can pass emergency measures to further reduce the Bill of Rights and enslave America! Haliburton! Haliburton!
Actually, keep in mind that the long filenames under Win9x were extremely ugly hacks grafted on to the FAT filesystem. You could say they supported long filenames, but you're really stretching the meaning of the word "support". NTFS was the first "real" support for long filenames under Windows. In fairness, though, both of these examples ignore the fact that there was long filename support in HPFS back when OS/2 was a MS/IBM joint venture. IIRC (flip a coin), this was available well before Win95.
Nice insightful post. Shame you'll most likely be modded into oblivion for it (I can picture the hard-core left / right putting their hands over their ears and screaming "Nya Nya Nya Nya Nya I don't hear you!"
And am I the only person that's noticed that the "balance of nature" is about as balanced as Gary Busey drunk off his ass and suffering from an inner-ear infection?
I found an interesting pop-up generating piece of malware several weeks ago that appeared to use rootkit-type techniques to hide itself. It was invisible from the process lists (including the nicer command line ones) and the filesystem. I was able to track it down and delete it (unfortunately, the machine was several hundred miles away and I was working on it remotely, otherwise I would have booted off a CD and made a copy of the little bugger), but it was a royal pain in the ass to do.
... grrr). So I used ProcMon to kill any threads associated with the pid - the process was invisible, but you could still find the threads by which libraries they were using and kill them there (use the search command). Once the threads were killed, I could overwrite the loader file (you couldn't read it, copy it, list it, etc., but it would give you an error if you tried to overwrite it while the threads were running).
For the interested (some of the details might be slightly off because I've consumed a lot of booze between then and now, but the overall gist is correct), I found the malware by using SysInternals RegMon to find the process ID that kept replacing the registry entries that loaded it. That Process ID couldn't be killed by any of the tools I could find (because they check to see if the pid is valid before trying to terminate it, and it had stealthed itself to the point where the ID appeared to be invalid
Yes, they work nicely on 2K/XP/2K3 but many of them are no longer tested on NT4 and don't work properly (as I've found out the hard way) - yes some people still run that crap.
Almost every OS / filesystem has this problem (need to recover / replace your linux root password? boot off a CD and mount the / filesysten, and read or edit /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow).
You can get around this problem in Windows by encrypting files for a specific user - this is built into NTFS. As far as I know, this is only good for user-level security (no groups), and if you force-change the user's password all files encrypted for that user are lost.
Even with this, though, it pays to remember the old saw - "Boot access is root access". Good IT security always needs to remember physical security as well!
I'm sure it can be contained within the user Wine-Box (Hmmm.. sounds too much like Boxed Wine?) (yes, I know it's not a sandbox, but the Linux user permissions tend to be more sane than Windows), but ActiveX anywhere just doesn't make me feel warm 'n fuzzy.
Reading the summary (and knowing what we know about e-bay), I can't help but think of it being said Professor Farnsworth:
.... zzzzzz.
"I won't rest, until we can..." *snore*
This explains all of the random pin-misfires I'm having on my dot-matrix printer! Thank God that it's just my government protecting me from terrorists^H^H^H counterfeiters.
This is just an agenda for a conference. Are they trying to inform us or sell us seats? Is Slashdot getting a percentage? Do editors edit, or chose stories with a randomized function? Inquiring minds want to know!
Actually, we already know the answer. Never mind.
Oh please, there's plenty of differentiation! We can choose between Brittany Spears, Jessica Simpson, the Spice Girls, and the Backdoor Boys!
</Sarcasm>
Many corporations know this. The old-school content industries, however, know jack shit about business and it shows. They continue to exist solely due to their legal and lobbying acumen, combined with the rapidly evaporating inertia of their existing business model. Recordable cassettes, VHS, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs,, the Internet, Napster, etc. were all going to bring the sky crashing down on these myopians - yet in actuality all they did was make more and more money (in spite of themselves).
And to all of the 'sanctity of life' types - he's a spammer in Russia. This is the only way he'll ever stop spamming. Ever. Under any circumstances. Yes each spam is just a small annoyance, but someone who sends out millions of small annoyances around the world every day deserves this, at least from a Karmic perspective. The only thing I'm sad about is that I'm on the other side of the world and unable to go over and piss on his grave. Although a friend of mine is in Moscow on business....
If you're not going to upgrade, then 'screw you guys, I'm going home!'
Having said that, my main PC uses RAID-0 WD740 x2 (74GB 10K RPM SATA drives) for the boot disk / program storage. But I don't keep anything I would mind losing here (RAID-0 is living dangerously, even with these extremely high-quality drives - but damn is it fast). My data is all stored on an Areca SATA controller on my server (160GB x2 RAID-1 for boot/program, 300GB x4 RAID-5 (900GB net) for data.
Do you need a 'real' RAID controller? The answer is simple: If you look at the price and your data is worth more than that, then the answer is 'yes'. Personally, I don't trust software-assisted RAID further than I can throw it.
Computers work? Since when?
My fiancee's site has between 30 - 40% FireFox uses. And she's as far away from 'typical geek' content as possible - she runs an on-line lingere boutique. It's still high even when we filter out the slashdot referrals.
What's the matter, Kyle, got some sand in your vagina?
</style>