I don't recall that the Chinese said that every family should have a car... in fact, I think a country with 1.3 Billion people can figure that the crap really hit the fan when every family have a car. I thought it was Hitler who came with that idea, IIRC; hence Volkswagen - nothing against the company, I'm just pointing out how the name came about. The Chinese are getting more cars because the people in the coastal region can afford it, often at the expense of other Chinese in the not-so-coastal region, where agriculture remains as the source of income. Also many of the businessmen are crooked, often selling food and consumable with industrial chemicals, or illegally dumping the industrial waste into the rivers, where there just might be people downstream who drinks the river water. Sure, just hearing them talk about it means very little, but if you've been anywhere near China, especially the high-growth area, you know the pollution is causing a heck of a problem, and I am not surprised at all that they just might be serious about it.
Damn well agreed. Friend (and currently my Superior) complains that there aren't a good groupware alternative available in *nix that has at least the same set of features as Exchange. Samba already took care of the file/printer sharing and Domain control. If there's just something more reliable that can take over Exchange, and OpenOffice becomes slicker (and less sluggish last time I tried), you'd see the business people more willing to switch.
Seeing how you would be the only tech guy in your organization, you're probably going to use Windows on the machine. While you're at it you might want to get "Building Internet Firewall 2nd ed" and "Practical UNIX and Internet Security, 3rd ed", both from O'reilly, cause you'll be needing it to keep your user sane from the malware. You're going to need some kind of Anti-Virus. You can probably build cheap servers out of old PCs for now, and use some UPS to deal with power outage. Or you might want to bid on an old server on eBay and try to get a tape drive and redundant power supply if you want these features. Good luck.
If you must do this the hard way, find a directional antenna (try the pringles can, and in at least three different spots, try and find the direction of the AP... this won't rely on cutting someone's network access, and should work. If you can get the company to establish a no WLAN policy, you can then remind everyone that WLANs are not allowed, and will take appropriate measure to make it so. There are devices out there that would prevent rogue wireless stations, and probably rogue wireless APs. They're not all that sophisticated (ie a hacker can figure it's an device deliberately stopping wireless), but your point seems to prevent insiders from putting up an wireless AP.
Yeah, I picked up the APUE when I was doing an intro course in OS, and damn that book sure did help me get through it. I know the man pages are available, but the book is definitely better, and I end up lending it to a friend when he was doing the same course.
http://www.swallowtail.org/naughty-intel.html I'm going to go through this article. Looks awfully interesting. There's a line between not optimising the competition, and torpedoing the competition.
The problem isn't simply knowing how to comile the code paths for maximum performance in Intel, and taking the safe route, but in another thread it has been shown that it would deliberately not use SSE and other features that are available in AMD processors, as part of the agreement that AMD and Intel share some of these things. Why would you think AMD would be allowed to impement SSE and Intel AMD64 extensions?
Maybe I'm an uptight SOB, but Microsoft manage to make IE non-compliant enough that servers often send out HTML that doesn't render properly for compliant browsers. I thought I saw jhymn have to strip the info off a free AAC given away by iTMS, and I've tried to read PDF that's fscked up in xpdf/gpdf.... oh wait.... hardy har har
Death penalty he pondered? The death penalty has been applied on murderers, and yet we don't see murderers going away. (I'm not totally against the death penalty - proven serial murderers deserves it.) I just don't see how the death penalty would prevent script kiddies around the world from using exploits and using virii kits to make the next generation virus/worm. Besides, the real hackers who actually contributes to computing may be lumped into the crackers, and put to death. I'm not so sure whether society wants this to happen. And what to do with admins that are not diligent at all with being up to date and being patched? Should we enact the old British punishment for treason for those sysadmins - hung, drawn and quartered?
I'll grant you the benefit of the doubt that China has killed more people than Hitler in the 20th century, simply I don't, nor do I think you really do, know the true number of people killed in the last century, but this country is being more demanding and bloody imperialistic? Oh let me think for a minute.... Korea, Cuba (to some extent), Vietnam, El Salvador and a bunch of central/south American countries, Afghanistan - before you get confused, I'm talking the CIA buying AKs from collasping East European countries, have women and children carry them to the mujahideen in Afghanistan, taught them to shoot down various Russian aircraft... The American government has involved itself in many of the small wars, often indirectly, but I wouldn't say they're absolved of blame when they keep a totalitarian regime in central/south American and they start killing their own population.
And by the way, which is more sinister? Filtering, or eavesdropping and gathering information, and storing it for god knows when. Before you think I'm a conspiracy theorist, go look up ECHELON, and how they broke the Russian VERNONA. You might want to worry about stuff like that somewhere in Fort Meade or any other outposts they have before you worry about the Great Firewall
Interestingly, in Criminology there is such a thing as natural law, where the law should be based on the teachings of god. Obviously said religion teaches morality and therefore natural law is, if you will, moral law. It's goal was to enforce moral behaviour. It may be unattainable, maybe because we aren't perfect in writing out all the moral behaviour we allow/block, but the essence is there. I argue that, in contrary, moral values are not expressed in all human behaviour. How else can you explain the behaviours of Ted Bundy, or the Green River Killer, or for those who are Canadian, behaviours of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka? Let's generalize such that the organization doesn't have to make money. Then it can be easily shown that organization of people often have diminished or non-existent moral values. Angry mob, terrorists, and many fanaticism are just like this.
But I don't think necessarily grafting OSX onto linux is the right solution. Granted that I'm command line oriented, I install my programs through the command line (apt-get install pkg | emerge -a pkg | pkg_add -r pkg). But given that there are one liners, how hard is it to make a GUI to go along with installing. The point is to make application installs as easy as possible. OSX went with making the app folder look like a file, and have the user to drag it somewhere, and we can just have a package manager that the user can find the program and click to install. I don't see how the latter is that much harder than the former. Also I thought modifying the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable can cause many problems, often security related (ie. a misconfigured installer may break things, a rogue installer could make it run a trojaned library). And how exactly did he solved the application problem by turning apps into documents while existing packaging managers already group all the files in one file format (.deb,.rpm,.tar.gz) I couldn't get my head wrap around his ideas for the core library. It seems that he wants the distros to have all the library (and he's probably talking QT or GTK here) installed. The point of Linux is flexibility, and if you don't use the bloody library, don't install the bloody library. For example, I've hated the QT interface from a long time ago, and even now I don't really use any programs that uses QT, so I don't have the bloody QT library installed. App developers makes a certain library a requirement, and the package management maintainers sets up the dependency in the package such that the package system would get the library when needed. It isn't like a linux package management systems cannot remove all the files associated with a package already, so what's the worry with the libraries in/usr/lib, and force everything to be under a directory for every app installed. And really, Windows package don't put dlls in %windir%\system[32]? I call that bull. Windows package installers are no more consistent than Linux packages, and I *rarely* have to install a package using an installer from the developer. Debian may require you to use the contrib repository, but you could install realplayer, acroread, and other non-OSS package in the repository in many distro that I've used over the years. Documents - the only valid gripe that I saw is that when not in a GUI, files on the desktop seems to disappear. That's because the desktop isn't linked to/home/user (I wouldn't want that to happen because my home directory is a mess), and the resulting Desktop folder is inside one of those hidden (.something) directories. This can be solved if KDE and GNOME would agree to use the same desktop under/home/user/Desktop. Besides, I thought the article is about the end user, so why would they look for their own documents outside the GUI environment anyways? It isn't like they want to edit their word documents by hand using Vim on commandline. Desktop Environment - is it just me, or does his mockup looks awfully like GNOME 2.8 or whichever that Debian stable/Gentoo/FreeBSD 5.3 had installed? The only changes are a) the application icon is a menu, and b) the search dock applet is not configured to appear? It would be trivial for a distro to configure the search dock to be enabled. Application update could be accomplished with the distro putting a line in cron for updating itself every day at midnight or something. It seems that either his point of this article is to change Linux into Mac OSX, or his solutions are written back in the days of Gnome 1 or KDE 2... Ubuntu, and among may other desktop distro already has this level of ease of use, so how is his solution going to help with the remaining problems? Application installation and removal isn't hard, and usually very easy with desktop distros that provide a GUI package mgmt programs; users shouldn't mess with system directory, because they're already provided
Yeah my current PC laptop is fine, except for a broken ACPI that didn't work with FreeBSD (I try not to constrain myself with Linux alone), and was having a heck of a time dealing with phantom PCMCIA slot errors (I use the PCMCIA slot for wireless) - turns out somehow the unused parallel port and the PCMCIA was fighting over IRQ 10 or something, so I disable the parallel. Macs not only have good application integration, but also have good hardware intergration. Had I been on an iBook I wouldn't have to worry about the ACPI or the PCMCIA going haywire on me. Besides that one button mouse that's annoying me, it's that dreaded broadcom wireless-g adaptor that prevents me from using wireless in something other than Mac OS X. If only they'd clear those two problems I'd probably get a Mac laptop too.
Well said, and Jobs is still sticking with the one button mouse. Being a *nix fan and getting more annoyed by Windows every day, I would absolutely love a laptop with good UNIX support, but besides the price tag that have been keeping me away, is that dreaded one button touch pad. I know there are laptop mouse that exists, but the iBook/PowerBook is designed such that there are no wires to trip the machine over (except for the A/C as needed). I would like to stay the heck away from having to plug a mouse into a Mac notebook as much as possible, but still they stick with the one button mouse. And the right button emulation by holding it down (or holding the Option key) just doesn't cut it. Or how about the RAM problem? the Mac 128K is obviously short on RAM, and look at the iBooks. Mac OS X sucks quite a bit of juice, and it should be no surprise that 256MB isn't quite enough for the iBook running Tiger.
Wait until you get to clean out thousands (I just cleaned out 3000 and gleaned some useful emails, by hand) and you'll want to know what you are doing.
qsort(), assuming that it's randomized quick sort, it plenty fast. Assuming the complaint about function pointers are valid, it shouldn't be too hard to code up one that doesn't use function pointers, and then a comparision could be made pretty quickly. And even with that I'm still not surprised that a GPU can do this faster. Given the insane amounts of sorting and stuff involved in 3D rendering, a lot of these stuff are accelerated in hardware. If you find out any binary sorting that runs faster than O(nlogn), let me know.
I can't remember whether it's based on ellipics...
NSA has historically been asked to intercept, gather, compile, etc... data for stuff like espionage, foreign policy and stuff like that. They do far more intelligence work than what the public thinks CIA is doing. I'm sure NSA have enough server farms to crack many of the encryption, but I would think if you made the government to ship your disks to NSA to be decrypted, I think you got other things to worry about than cracking the actual data.
Incidentally, I just might be flagged for saying that.
Not that this would look all that great in the court, but perhaps in an act to piss the cops off, they could've encrypted the hard drive and flush that key down/dev/null. I don't like indymedia. It's quite apparent what their bias is, but I don't agree with the government seizing journalist's equipment because someone posted on their site, unless that post has to do with some violent crime (and I don't mean protest, like murder or aggravated assault or something).
I'd definitely use OpenBSD's pf for a packet filter. I wouldn't say easy to configure because setting up OpenBSD is not quite trivial. But the pf, in my experience, has been easier to set up than ipchains (I didn't use packet filtering in Linux since I discovered pf). It takes like one line to filter spoofing. But pf is probably not enough for your servers. You should look into some kind of proxy for the services that you're hosting.
I don't care for Linspire, but Cedega interests me because there's only two things that made me feel like keeping a Windows desktop machine for myself. I'm sure I can find help on video encoding, and I wouldn't mind trying out Cedega to run my favourite games, thne it is goodbye Windows. Serious gamers with gaming rigs will still stick with Windows, but those Linux users who wanted to play games that aren't ported to Linux would certainly benefit from this, even if they have to pay for it.
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I don't recall that the Chinese said that every family should have a car... in fact, I think a country with 1.3 Billion people can figure that the crap really hit the fan when every family have a car. I thought it was Hitler who came with that idea, IIRC; hence Volkswagen - nothing against the company, I'm just pointing out how the name came about.
The Chinese are getting more cars because the people in the coastal region can afford it, often at the expense of other Chinese in the not-so-coastal region, where agriculture remains as the source of income. Also many of the businessmen are crooked, often selling food and consumable with industrial chemicals, or illegally dumping the industrial waste into the rivers, where there just might be people downstream who drinks the river water.
Sure, just hearing them talk about it means very little, but if you've been anywhere near China, especially the high-growth area, you know the pollution is causing a heck of a problem, and I am not surprised at all that they just might be serious about it.
Damn well agreed.
Friend (and currently my Superior) complains that there aren't a good groupware alternative available in *nix that has at least the same set of features as Exchange.
Samba already took care of the file/printer sharing and Domain control. If there's just something more reliable that can take over Exchange, and OpenOffice becomes slicker (and less sluggish last time I tried), you'd see the business people more willing to switch.
Seeing how you would be the only tech guy in your organization, you're probably going to use Windows on the machine.
While you're at it you might want to get "Building Internet Firewall 2nd ed" and "Practical UNIX and Internet Security, 3rd ed", both from O'reilly, cause you'll be needing it to keep your user sane from the malware.
You're going to need some kind of Anti-Virus.
You can probably build cheap servers out of old PCs for now, and use some UPS to deal with power outage. Or you might want to bid on an old server on eBay and try to get a tape drive and redundant power supply if you want these features.
Good luck.
If you must do this the hard way, find a directional antenna (try the pringles can, and in at least three different spots, try and find the direction of the AP... this won't rely on cutting someone's network access, and should work.
If you can get the company to establish a no WLAN policy, you can then remind everyone that WLANs are not allowed, and will take appropriate measure to make it so. There are devices out there that would prevent rogue wireless stations, and probably rogue wireless APs. They're not all that sophisticated (ie a hacker can figure it's an device deliberately stopping wireless), but your point seems to prevent insiders from putting up an wireless AP.
Yeah, I picked up the APUE when I was doing an intro course in OS, and damn that book sure did help me get through it.
I know the man pages are available, but the book is definitely better, and I end up lending it to a friend when he was doing the same course.
http://www.swallowtail.org/naughty-intel.html
I'm going to go through this article. Looks awfully interesting.
There's a line between not optimising the competition, and torpedoing the competition.
The problem isn't simply knowing how to comile the code paths for maximum performance in Intel, and taking the safe route, but in another thread it has been shown that it would deliberately not use SSE and other features that are available in AMD processors, as part of the agreement that AMD and Intel share some of these things. Why would you think AMD would be allowed to impement SSE and Intel AMD64 extensions?
Maybe I'm an uptight SOB, but Microsoft manage to make IE non-compliant enough that servers often send out HTML that doesn't render properly for compliant browsers. I thought I saw jhymn have to strip the info off a free AAC given away by iTMS, and I've tried to read PDF that's fscked up in xpdf/gpdf....
oh wait.... hardy har har
Death penalty he pondered?
The death penalty has been applied on murderers, and yet we don't see murderers going away.
(I'm not totally against the death penalty - proven serial murderers deserves it.)
I just don't see how the death penalty would prevent script kiddies around the world from using exploits and using virii kits to make the next generation virus/worm.
Besides, the real hackers who actually contributes to computing may be lumped into the crackers, and put to death. I'm not so sure whether society wants this to happen. And what to do with admins that are not diligent at all with being up to date and being patched? Should we enact the old British punishment for treason for those sysadmins - hung, drawn and quartered?
I'll grant you the benefit of the doubt that China has killed more people than Hitler in the 20th century, simply I don't, nor do I think you really do, know the true number of people killed in the last century, but this country is being more demanding and bloody imperialistic? Oh let me think for a minute.... Korea, Cuba (to some extent), Vietnam, El Salvador and a bunch of central/south American countries, Afghanistan - before you get confused, I'm talking the CIA buying AKs from collasping East European countries, have women and children carry them to the mujahideen in Afghanistan, taught them to shoot down various Russian aircraft...
The American government has involved itself in many of the small wars, often indirectly, but I wouldn't say they're absolved of blame when they keep a totalitarian regime in central/south American and they start killing their own population.
And by the way, which is more sinister? Filtering, or eavesdropping and gathering information, and storing it for god knows when. Before you think I'm a conspiracy theorist, go look up ECHELON, and how they broke the Russian VERNONA. You might want to worry about stuff like that somewhere in Fort Meade or any other outposts they have before you worry about the Great Firewall
Interestingly, in Criminology there is such a thing as natural law, where the law should be based on the teachings of god. Obviously said religion teaches morality and therefore natural law is, if you will, moral law. It's goal was to enforce moral behaviour. It may be unattainable, maybe because we aren't perfect in writing out all the moral behaviour we allow/block, but the essence is there.
I argue that, in contrary, moral values are not expressed in all human behaviour. How else can you explain the behaviours of Ted Bundy, or the Green River Killer, or for those who are Canadian, behaviours of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka?
Let's generalize such that the organization doesn't have to make money. Then it can be easily shown that organization of people often have diminished or non-existent moral values. Angry mob, terrorists, and many fanaticism are just like this.
I mean, worse come to worse, he could've just copied it off CBC.
How they managed to get a BC Supreme Court judge to play ball is beyond me.
Hell it isn't like the news is all that timely. There are stories that are 1-2 days late in comparison to the Inquirer or the Register.
That ain't going to happen unless Chipzilla would actually release something worthy of competition at the same time as being sued.
Did they spank them?
But I don't think necessarily grafting OSX onto linux is the right solution. .rpm, .tar.gz) /usr/lib, and force everything to be under a directory for every app installed. And really, Windows package don't put dlls in %windir%\system[32]? I call that bull. Windows package installers are no more consistent than Linux packages, and I *rarely* have to install a package using an installer from the developer. Debian may require you to use the contrib repository, but you could install realplayer, acroread, and other non-OSS package in the repository in many distro that I've used over the years. /home/user (I wouldn't want that to happen because my home directory is a mess), and the resulting Desktop folder is inside one of those hidden (.something) directories. This can be solved if KDE and GNOME would agree to use the same desktop under /home/user/Desktop. Besides, I thought the article is about the end user, so why would they look for their own documents outside the GUI environment anyways? It isn't like they want to edit their word documents by hand using Vim on commandline.
Granted that I'm command line oriented, I install my programs through the command line (apt-get install pkg | emerge -a pkg | pkg_add -r pkg). But given that there are one liners, how hard is it to make a GUI to go along with installing. The point is to make application installs as easy as possible. OSX went with making the app folder look like a file, and have the user to drag it somewhere, and we can just have a package manager that the user can find the program and click to install. I don't see how the latter is that much harder than the former. Also I thought modifying the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable can cause many problems, often security related (ie. a misconfigured installer may break things, a rogue installer could make it run a trojaned library). And how exactly did he solved the application problem by turning apps into documents while existing packaging managers already group all the files in one file format (.deb,
I couldn't get my head wrap around his ideas for the core library. It seems that he wants the distros to have all the library (and he's probably talking QT or GTK here) installed. The point of Linux is flexibility, and if you don't use the bloody library, don't install the bloody library. For example, I've hated the QT interface from a long time ago, and even now I don't really use any programs that uses QT, so I don't have the bloody QT library installed. App developers makes a certain library a requirement, and the package management maintainers sets up the dependency in the package such that the package system would get the library when needed. It isn't like a linux package management systems cannot remove all the files associated with a package already, so what's the worry with the libraries in
Documents - the only valid gripe that I saw is that when not in a GUI, files on the desktop seems to disappear. That's because the desktop isn't linked to
Desktop Environment - is it just me, or does his mockup looks awfully like GNOME 2.8 or whichever that Debian stable/Gentoo/FreeBSD 5.3 had installed? The only changes are a) the application icon is a menu, and b) the search dock applet is not configured to appear? It would be trivial for a distro to configure the search dock to be enabled.
Application update could be accomplished with the distro putting a line in cron for updating itself every day at midnight or something.
It seems that either his point of this article is to change Linux into Mac OSX, or his solutions are written back in the days of Gnome 1 or KDE 2... Ubuntu, and among may other desktop distro already has this level of ease of use, so how is his solution going to help with the remaining problems? Application installation and removal isn't hard, and usually very easy with desktop distros that provide a GUI package mgmt programs; users shouldn't mess with system directory, because they're already provided
Yeah my current PC laptop is fine, except for a broken ACPI that didn't work with FreeBSD (I try not to constrain myself with Linux alone), and was having a heck of a time dealing with phantom PCMCIA slot errors (I use the PCMCIA slot for wireless) - turns out somehow the unused parallel port and the PCMCIA was fighting over IRQ 10 or something, so I disable the parallel.
Macs not only have good application integration, but also have good hardware intergration. Had I been on an iBook I wouldn't have to worry about the ACPI or the PCMCIA going haywire on me. Besides that one button mouse that's annoying me, it's that dreaded broadcom wireless-g adaptor that prevents me from using wireless in something other than Mac OS X.
If only they'd clear those two problems I'd probably get a Mac laptop too.
Well said, and Jobs is still sticking with the one button mouse.
Being a *nix fan and getting more annoyed by Windows every day, I would absolutely love a laptop with good UNIX support, but besides the price tag that have been keeping me away, is that dreaded one button touch pad. I know there are laptop mouse that exists, but the iBook/PowerBook is designed such that there are no wires to trip the machine over (except for the A/C as needed). I would like to stay the heck away from having to plug a mouse into a Mac notebook as much as possible, but still they stick with the one button mouse. And the right button emulation by holding it down (or holding the Option key) just doesn't cut it.
Or how about the RAM problem? the Mac 128K is obviously short on RAM, and look at the iBooks. Mac OS X sucks quite a bit of juice, and it should be no surprise that 256MB isn't quite enough for the iBook running Tiger.
Wait until you get to clean out thousands (I just cleaned out 3000 and gleaned some useful emails, by hand) and you'll want to know what you are doing.
qsort(), assuming that it's randomized quick sort, it plenty fast. Assuming the complaint about function pointers are valid, it shouldn't be too hard to code up one that doesn't use function pointers, and then a comparision could be made pretty quickly. And even with that I'm still not surprised that a GPU can do this faster. Given the insane amounts of sorting and stuff involved in 3D rendering, a lot of these stuff are accelerated in hardware.
If you find out any binary sorting that runs faster than O(nlogn), let me know.
I can't remember whether it's based on ellipics...
NSA has historically been asked to intercept, gather, compile, etc... data for stuff like espionage, foreign policy and stuff like that. They do far more intelligence work than what the public thinks CIA is doing. I'm sure NSA have enough server farms to crack many of the encryption, but I would think if you made the government to ship your disks to NSA to be decrypted, I think you got other things to worry about than cracking the actual data.
Incidentally, I just might be flagged for saying that.
Not that this would look all that great in the court, but perhaps in an act to piss the cops off, they could've encrypted the hard drive and flush that key down /dev/null.
I don't like indymedia. It's quite apparent what their bias is, but I don't agree with the government seizing journalist's equipment because someone posted on their site, unless that post has to do with some violent crime (and I don't mean protest, like murder or aggravated assault or something).
Why don't we mine ice cubes from Haley's Comet, and drop them into the ocean to cool down the planet?
I'd definitely use OpenBSD's pf for a packet filter.
I wouldn't say easy to configure because setting up OpenBSD is not quite trivial. But the pf, in my experience, has been easier to set up than ipchains (I didn't use packet filtering in Linux since I discovered pf).
It takes like one line to filter spoofing.
But pf is probably not enough for your servers. You should look into some kind of proxy for the services that you're hosting.
I don't care for Linspire, but Cedega interests me because there's only two things that made me feel like keeping a Windows desktop machine for myself.
I'm sure I can find help on video encoding, and I wouldn't mind trying out Cedega to run my favourite games, thne it is goodbye Windows.
Serious gamers with gaming rigs will still stick with Windows, but those Linux users who wanted to play games that aren't ported to Linux would certainly benefit from this, even if they have to pay for it.