I know about Slackware Linux. Want to help me in making vendors more aware of it? And I don't mean they have to go so far as to actually offer it and support it to their customers. They only need to do enough to let the system administrator be able to run the Linux distribution of choice, or even one of the free BSDs, and have a reasonable expectation of the hardware working correctly (e.g. not blame the software unless they have actual reasons to know the software is at fault).
Security needs to focus on the system administration. Most security problems can be prevented by proper SA practices, which include selecting appropriate software for the particular environment, keeping that software properly upgraded, and configuring it correctly. But it is not just the lowly system administrator; the problem includes the management overseeing the system administration as well. Management needs to not just dictate that security is a requirement, but also make the decisions that do not hinder it (for example, management should not mandate a particular software program, but rather, set requirements that need to be accomplished). And network administration is also a big part of this. Both system administration and network administration need to work closely together, or even be the very same unit (or the same person in smaller businesses or business units).
Re:disks not suitable for heavy duty applications
on
Linux On HP Blades
·
· Score: 2
Why not include decent high end 7200 RPM IDE disks in that choice lineup so you have:
cheesy 5400 RPM IDE piece of crap
decent 7200 RPM IDE drive or faster
top of the line wallet draining SCSI drive
Now there. That is what I call a slightly better choice.
Why is it that the Linux choices vendors offer is always limited to just SYSV style distributions? If they really believe choice is good, why not offer a real choice and include some different kinds of systems with that?
The FreeBSD (and other BSD) filesystem layout still fails to accomodate commercial apps. In fact the whole ports system defaults to a path (and some programs fail if you try to change things) which collides with local apps. What is important to me is to keep locally selected applications separate from locally developed applications, and BSD simply does not do this. One choice (and not the only one, but BSD doesn't have any) is to put the locally developed ones in/usr/local and the ports and commercial apps in/opt (ooh, you might have to do mkdir). Now that's not the only way to choose to do it, and I'd certainly consider a different choice, but I want to see some decision, and see PATH defaults to include that choice.
Linux suffers from so much independence of packages that they get installed anywhere. What I think really needs to happen (on BSD, too) is that every package (ports included) needs to strictly follow local policy about where to be installed (and the installer program enforce this). If I tell it to be installed in/usr/foo then it should function just fine from there, and further, if I go rename/usr/foo to/usr/bar then what is installed must continue to function just fine that way. If I replicate the tree to a new system under a different directory, and access it that way, it should work there. Part of the problem is it is not easy to do so (a program might have to find its resource files... where are they?... how will the program know from which directory it was executed so it can find the matching set of resources?).
BT is also known for harboring spammers. I've blocked their mail servers after they had their chance to correct the problem, and didn't... and got mail from their "abuse desk" which convinced me how dumb they are.
Additionally, it's common here to use English for Computer-related things like "download".
So you wouldn't use something like "untenladendaten" or is that too long even for speakers of German? It sounds kinda cool to me. Probably something we could make a song out of.
Anti-hate-speech laws, whether in Germany or Francs or the U.S., seem to be predicated on the idea that the speech itself has some sort of magical power over people's minds.
If the speech is "sanitized" by government laws and enforcement mechanisms, then people might be inclined to start thinking that what they do hear is somehow more acceptable. That is the danger when people stop deciding for themselves.
Is it not ironic that the current (not Nazi) German government is adopting some of the mechanisms that the Nazi government of the past used (and perhaps introduced) to promote their way of life and "discourage" others? Maybe they can bring back the concentration camps for the hate mongers. And the people might be inclined to accept that as long as it is just for the hate mongers.
Of course USA has problems, too. I think that if people want to be free (including being free to decide for themselves what evil ideas they want nothing to do with) from government control, they have to do so in unison throughout the world. I cannot just disregard the oppression in France or Germany just because it might not be as extreme as it has been in Afghanistan, or because there happens to also be some in the USA. To me it is consistency to speak out against it in any country (and vote against it in USA). And yes, I realize there is the risk that exercising my right to free speech can put me in violation of the law in certain places like The People's Republic of China and Saudi Arabia and subject me to arrest there even though the speech was done in America.
and as long as only hate speech and Nazi propaganda are banned, things are fine.
But once you have the mechanism in place to enforce whatever is banned, it becomes easy to do so. Let some time pass and people are comfortable with it. Now something more can be banned and it will have a little resistance but with time that settles down. Wait for some troubling times, as Germany suffered right after World War ONE, and things are ripe... and the mechanism is in place... to let the Nazis or other ill-intent groups have their way.
"Virtual host by name" where you have many sites on one IP address (encouraged by the folks who bring you fewer than 4 billion addresses) identified by a "Host:" header in HTTP/1.1 is what is stopping them. It's a whole lot easier to just change the DNS server settings (Settings > Control Panel > Network > TCP/IP (your adapter) > Properties > DNS Configuration) to use a DNS server outside the country. Those with BSD/Linux/Unix/WinNT/Win2K/WinXPpro of course can run their own DNS server.
Of course there are different ways of thinking in different countries. Gassing 6 million people is a different way of thinking. Slamming airplanes into skyscrapers with thousands of people in and around them is a different way of thinking.
Indeed it is America's different way of thinking about freedom that ensure's we get to speak about different way's of thinking. Sure, we should understand that different parts of the world are different. But they also need to understand this, too... but without freedom of speech they cannot achieve that.
In my way of thinking, though, I see these kinds of restrictions in Germany as a return to their Nazi past. While those putting in this law might not be intent on promoting the master race, those who do can certainly make use of it's uniform acceptance, should they come back to power.
This is why it is so hard to find a decent cool job. The PHBs are always looking for the lowest common denominator. And this is despite the fact that there are plenty of good people around to be had. The key to this is their inability to find. Why would a decent programmer or a decent system administrator come to work for a PHB who is so concerned with being able to replace them with any jerk scrounged up off the street in a moment's notice?
This is why my choices are C, PHP, and Java. And a little bit of machine specific assembler for a few architectures thrown in for fun. The core of my programming (I think bottom up, so my "core" is the low level parts) is done in C, and I do include some OO design in there, too. When I do need a full-fledged OO language, I go to Java. And PHP fills in the gaps to make quick web pages. I never got into C++ and now days I sure am glad I never made that mistake. I love C and I can do a whole lot in it where other people would flee. But where I need to do full OO, there are things in C that just should not be done and C++ loses its advantages so I might as well go with Java.
What you are really pointing at is bad programmers. And bad programmers abound in any language. Higher level languages just get more of them. I've seen exactly the same thing you are talking about even in C++ where programmers believed they were doing the right thing but had no objects at all, and couldn't even explain what object oriented meant. The funny thing is, when I suggested to this one guy that he might as well just code in C, his response was "but I heard C is too hard to learn". If only it were hard enough to keep him from being a programmer.
But, making money and supplanting a capitalistic machine that is designed for high proiduct turn-over, planned obsolecence, and not giving the customer what they want is the sustainable model, not selling services to free products. If you pay for the product, then you will pay for support. Get a free product, and you find out its not up to par or whatver, why pay for support, just get another free clone....
The reference to selling support for a free product is probably true. However there is a variation on this that can potentially succeed. By selling a service, not as support for some free product, but as a service in and of itself which happens to have free source tools as its foundation, you are then selling a complete solution to a business. Few businesses are going to choose Linux for the sake of having Linux. What businesses want is something that works for them, and most of them (smaller ones, anyway) want something someone else is going to take care of. So instead of selling "Support for that Linux you bought", you sell "A service to manage your office computers and network" which you've chosen Linux (or whatever) to be a part of that.
Whether spam makes money for spammers or not is irrelevant. The reason we get the hassle from them is because it is easier for them to shotgun blast a million messages for 10 responses. The reason this works is because ISPs let it work.
In cases where a spammer has their own network, I just block their network... no more spam from them. Now if their ISP helps them by giving them new addresses to get around it, then I'll block the whole ISP.
In cases where a spammer does not have their own network, their ISP should block SMTP outbound from such customers, and force them to use the ISP mail server, and include in it throttling of some kind. One way to do it is to give each dynamic address customer an outbound mail quota of say 1000 messages a month and charge them $1.95 for each message over that. That works out to $1948050.00 billable for the ISP (not like they'd ever be able to collect on it). Even if the ISP charge $0.01 per message, we're still talking $9990.00 here, which would really inhibit a spammer's ability to make money.
In practice, the ISP should simply disallow email over the quota unless the customer has agreed in writing to pay.
XML is just a formatted, human-readable export file.
Human readable?
I suppose you don't mind it when someone send you mail, and you see a bunch of tags all over the place because it's in HTML. XML is just the same kind of thing... all cluttered with tags. The computer can read XML easier and more quickly than humans. Sure it could read it even faster if it didn't have to parse all those tags. But I wouldn't call this a design intended for humans to read.
If I actually got something out of the page, then YES, I would be willing to pay $.01 per page. But if not, then NO. Too many web sites try to run you through extra pages now just to get more ad banner hits. The motivation is money. And the advertising companies let them get away with it. Would penny-per-page be any better? I think it would only make it worse. And pages will get smaller.
What about web searches that don't find what you want? What if they find a hundred times more noise than signal? And can we ensure privacy and anonymity (for those who want it) with such a system?
Ultimately, I think it would be bad because people would reduce, probably dramatically, just how much web surfing they do. I'd love to be able to support web sites that need it. But I don't think this mechanism would work for that.
Now imagine how much it would cost for Google to spider the web each month. This works out to about 200 million dollars a year which means the cost of searching goes up, too.
There's no way they have 650 employees. Their service (in terms of trying to reach someone there) sucks. So they can't be operating any big in-bound call center. What they do have running can be done by a dozen programmers and a few admins. Add in a bunch of accountants, lawyers, and VPs, and perhaps at most 100 employees.
Slashdot Mirror
I know about Slackware Linux. Want to help me in making vendors more aware of it? And I don't mean they have to go so far as to actually offer it and support it to their customers. They only need to do enough to let the system administrator be able to run the Linux distribution of choice, or even one of the free BSDs, and have a reasonable expectation of the hardware working correctly (e.g. not blame the software unless they have actual reasons to know the software is at fault).
Security needs to focus on the system administration. Most security problems can be prevented by proper SA practices, which include selecting appropriate software for the particular environment, keeping that software properly upgraded, and configuring it correctly. But it is not just the lowly system administrator; the problem includes the management overseeing the system administration as well. Management needs to not just dictate that security is a requirement, but also make the decisions that do not hinder it (for example, management should not mandate a particular software program, but rather, set requirements that need to be accomplished). And network administration is also a big part of this. Both system administration and network administration need to work closely together, or even be the very same unit (or the same person in smaller businesses or business units).
Why not include decent high end 7200 RPM IDE disks in that choice lineup so you have:
- cheesy 5400 RPM IDE piece of crap
- decent 7200 RPM IDE drive or faster
- top of the line wallet draining SCSI drive
Now there. That is what I call a slightly better choice.Why is it that the Linux choices vendors offer is always limited to just SYSV style distributions? If they really believe choice is good, why not offer a real choice and include some different kinds of systems with that?
This is not really multithreading. The correct term is multiplexing. See W. Richard Stevens' books APUE and UNP.
The FreeBSD (and other BSD) filesystem layout still fails to accomodate commercial apps. In fact the whole ports system defaults to a path (and some programs fail if you try to change things) which collides with local apps. What is important to me is to keep locally selected applications separate from locally developed applications, and BSD simply does not do this. One choice (and not the only one, but BSD doesn't have any) is to put the locally developed ones in /usr/local and the ports and commercial apps in /opt (ooh, you might have to do mkdir). Now that's not the only way to choose to do it, and I'd certainly consider a different choice, but I want to see some decision, and see PATH defaults to include that choice.
Linux suffers from so much independence of packages that they get installed anywhere. What I think really needs to happen (on BSD, too) is that every package (ports included) needs to strictly follow local policy about where to be installed (and the installer program enforce this). If I tell it to be installed in /usr/foo then it should function just fine from there, and further, if I go rename /usr/foo to /usr/bar then what is installed must continue to function just fine that way. If I replicate the tree to a new system under a different directory, and access it that way, it should work there. Part of the problem is it is not easy to do so (a program might have to find its resource files ... where are they? ... how will the program know from which directory it was executed so it can find the matching set of resources?).
BT is also known for harboring spammers. I've blocked their mail servers after they had their chance to correct the problem, and didn't ... and got mail from their "abuse desk" which convinced me how dumb they are.
So is that "Dr. Anonymous Coward, Ph.D" ?
No doubt about it. Exactly my point. Being different doesn't make it right.
So you wouldn't use something like "untenladendaten" or is that too long even for speakers of German? It sounds kinda cool to me. Probably something we could make a song out of.
Blocking DNS like that breaks a lot of things. But I wouldn't put it past them to do just that.
If the speech is "sanitized" by government laws and enforcement mechanisms, then people might be inclined to start thinking that what they do hear is somehow more acceptable. That is the danger when people stop deciding for themselves.
Is it not ironic that the current (not Nazi) German government is adopting some of the mechanisms that the Nazi government of the past used (and perhaps introduced) to promote their way of life and "discourage" others? Maybe they can bring back the concentration camps for the hate mongers. And the people might be inclined to accept that as long as it is just for the hate mongers.
Of course USA has problems, too. I think that if people want to be free (including being free to decide for themselves what evil ideas they want nothing to do with) from government control, they have to do so in unison throughout the world. I cannot just disregard the oppression in France or Germany just because it might not be as extreme as it has been in Afghanistan, or because there happens to also be some in the USA. To me it is consistency to speak out against it in any country (and vote against it in USA). And yes, I realize there is the risk that exercising my right to free speech can put me in violation of the law in certain places like The People's Republic of China and Saudi Arabia and subject me to arrest there even though the speech was done in America.
But once you have the mechanism in place to enforce whatever is banned, it becomes easy to do so. Let some time pass and people are comfortable with it. Now something more can be banned and it will have a little resistance but with time that settles down. Wait for some troubling times, as Germany suffered right after World War ONE, and things are ripe ... and the mechanism is in place ... to let the Nazis or other ill-intent groups have their way.
"Virtual host by name" where you have many sites on one IP address (encouraged by the folks who bring you fewer than 4 billion addresses) identified by a "Host:" header in HTTP/1.1 is what is stopping them. It's a whole lot easier to just change the DNS server settings (Settings > Control Panel > Network > TCP/IP (your adapter) > Properties > DNS Configuration) to use a DNS server outside the country. Those with BSD/Linux/Unix/WinNT/Win2K/WinXPpro of course can run their own DNS server.
Of course there are different ways of thinking in different countries. Gassing 6 million people is a different way of thinking. Slamming airplanes into skyscrapers with thousands of people in and around them is a different way of thinking.
Indeed it is America's different way of thinking about freedom that ensure's we get to speak about different way's of thinking. Sure, we should understand that different parts of the world are different. But they also need to understand this, too ... but without freedom of speech they cannot achieve that.
In my way of thinking, though, I see these kinds of restrictions in Germany as a return to their Nazi past. While those putting in this law might not be intent on promoting the master race, those who do can certainly make use of it's uniform acceptance, should they come back to power.
This is why it is so hard to find a decent cool job. The PHBs are always looking for the lowest common denominator. And this is despite the fact that there are plenty of good people around to be had. The key to this is their inability to find. Why would a decent programmer or a decent system administrator come to work for a PHB who is so concerned with being able to replace them with any jerk scrounged up off the street in a moment's notice?
This is why my choices are C, PHP, and Java. And a little bit of machine specific assembler for a few architectures thrown in for fun. The core of my programming (I think bottom up, so my "core" is the low level parts) is done in C, and I do include some OO design in there, too. When I do need a full-fledged OO language, I go to Java. And PHP fills in the gaps to make quick web pages. I never got into C++ and now days I sure am glad I never made that mistake. I love C and I can do a whole lot in it where other people would flee. But where I need to do full OO, there are things in C that just should not be done and C++ loses its advantages so I might as well go with Java.
What you are really pointing at is bad programmers. And bad programmers abound in any language. Higher level languages just get more of them. I've seen exactly the same thing you are talking about even in C++ where programmers believed they were doing the right thing but had no objects at all, and couldn't even explain what object oriented meant. The funny thing is, when I suggested to this one guy that he might as well just code in C, his response was "but I heard C is too hard to learn". If only it were hard enough to keep him from being a programmer.
The reference to selling support for a free product is probably true. However there is a variation on this that can potentially succeed. By selling a service, not as support for some free product, but as a service in and of itself which happens to have free source tools as its foundation, you are then selling a complete solution to a business. Few businesses are going to choose Linux for the sake of having Linux. What businesses want is something that works for them, and most of them (smaller ones, anyway) want something someone else is going to take care of. So instead of selling "Support for that Linux you bought", you sell "A service to manage your office computers and network" which you've chosen Linux (or whatever) to be a part of that.
Whether spam makes money for spammers or not is irrelevant. The reason we get the hassle from them is because it is easier for them to shotgun blast a million messages for 10 responses. The reason this works is because ISPs let it work.
In cases where a spammer has their own network, I just block their network ... no more spam from them. Now if their ISP helps them by giving them new addresses to get around it, then I'll block the whole ISP.
In cases where a spammer does not have their own network, their ISP should block SMTP outbound from such customers, and force them to use the ISP mail server, and include in it throttling of some kind. One way to do it is to give each dynamic address customer an outbound mail quota of say 1000 messages a month and charge them $1.95 for each message over that. That works out to $1948050.00 billable for the ISP (not like they'd ever be able to collect on it). Even if the ISP charge $0.01 per message, we're still talking $9990.00 here, which would really inhibit a spammer's ability to make money.
In practice, the ISP should simply disallow email over the quota unless the customer has agreed in writing to pay.
Human readable?
I suppose you don't mind it when someone send you mail, and you see a bunch of tags all over the place because it's in HTML. XML is just the same kind of thing ... all cluttered with tags. The computer can read XML easier and more quickly than humans. Sure it could read it even faster if it didn't have to parse all those tags. But I wouldn't call this a design intended for humans to read.
If I actually got something out of the page, then YES, I would be willing to pay $.01 per page. But if not, then NO. Too many web sites try to run you through extra pages now just to get more ad banner hits. The motivation is money. And the advertising companies let them get away with it. Would penny-per-page be any better? I think it would only make it worse. And pages will get smaller.
What about web searches that don't find what you want? What if they find a hundred times more noise than signal? And can we ensure privacy and anonymity (for those who want it) with such a system?
Ultimately, I think it would be bad because people would reduce, probably dramatically, just how much web surfing they do. I'd love to be able to support web sites that need it. But I don't think this mechanism would work for that.
Now imagine how much it would cost for Google to spider the web each month. This works out to about 200 million dollars a year which means the cost of searching goes up, too.
What are all those ? characters for? Did someone submit a book review written with MS Word?
There's no way they have 650 employees. Their service (in terms of trying to reach someone there) sucks. So they can't be operating any big in-bound call center. What they do have running can be done by a dozen programmers and a few admins. Add in a bunch of accountants, lawyers, and VPs, and perhaps at most 100 employees.