I know it's not really an encrypted filesystem, per se, but BestCrypt might be enough for you. It's a bit like NAI's PGPDisk. Essentially, you mount an encrypted file and then access it like any other disk (it has a mount point, etc). The nice part (for me) is that they have a Win32 version as well, so using BestCrypt and Samba means that I can have my wife's securely store her Quicken stuff on my fileserver (which is the only machine that gets a backup). The only "bad" thing about BestCrypt is installation. You have to make real sure your kernel sources are in good shape. I had a few issues installing it because I had a few different kernel sources laying around (not good, I know, I know...). Anyway, it's not that hard to install, but not a userland type thing either.
Like I said, it's not a filesystem, but it might get you by. I personally don't care if/etc is encrypted or not. But I might care if/home was encrypted. It's easy enough to mount a BestCrypt container file at/home, so that might be enough.
You probably did what every other American did when they tried it - they gobbed it on like peanut butter. Ever wonder why it comes in such a SMALL container? Because you're supposed to spread it VERY thinly - if it's still brown when you've spread it, you've put too much on.
No, I actually only had a wee little bit on a cracker. It was foul. Seems to me to be an acquired taste, like caviar or something.
I've never been able to figure out in laymans terms, much less technical terms WTF globbing is?
I real basic terms, to glob is to expand a wildcard character to mean one or more characters. Like if you say something like "sudo rm -rf/*" that asterisk is expanded to mean "zero or more of any character". You might have also seen the question mark used. It means one single character. The Foldoc web site has a much better explanation.
Oh, and while smarter people than I are explaining...the quote at the bottom (the one I see)...what is a Vegemite?
Ever since that Men at Work song, I've wondered.
Vegemite is a nasty product made of yeast extract. It's a brownish paste-like stuff which is spread on bread and the like. An Aussie could probably explain better. I tasted it just once (on a cracker), and that was enough for me.
Your one of those people who should really learn to read the entire page before posting.
...
(BTW: since I'm on the subject of corrections, the hole your thinking of is 'whole' as in everything, not hole as in an empty space. Hehe.)
You're not thinking of your contractions vs. possessive pronouns, are you?
This might be a lame question, but I think it would let us all know more about you as a person. What project(s) would you like to do, given the chance to do anything you wanted?
I guess there's lots of ancillary questions that could go with this. Like "What do you wish you had done (but maybe turned down)?" Or "What do you wish you hadn't done?" And "How much does it take for you to do something that you're not all that interested in?" (not necessarily money, I guess -- it could be a bad part with a good director or something, right?). And one more: If you weren't an actor (or wanted to quit tomorrow or whatever), what is it you would do?
Like I said, maybe kinda lame. But I've found you can tell a lot about someone by both their desires and their regrets. Being quite a fan or yours, I'm curious.
BTW, thanks for everything you done for those of us on the other side of the screen.
I dealt with the people there (also very positive experience).
Yes, I forgot to mention that part. The rep (who was actually like a director of engineering something, I think) who we dealt with was extremely refreshing. He answered all our idiotic questions, listened to our suggestions, worked with our guys. RLX were very nice to deal with. I was sorta sad we never hooked up with them business-wise (our business was just starting to move away from smaller web hosting type customers -- which is who we were eval'ing for in the first place)
The guy there told me that they had fixed a problem with the sleep state recently
Ahhhh, so it wasn't a setting so much as an unintended feature. We had wondered about that. My bet was on setting.:-) I bodged up a couple perl scripts which kept them all alive (and sent back host data while they were at it). Kind of a hack, but it worked.
There were some other issues with power cycling they were working with.
Hmmmm. That we didn't see. Not so good to have some of the blades bounce themselves...
Actually, I really want a set of blades for home. I work with lots of OSes, and one RLX and a decent KVM would make working from home very nice.
-B
Some RLX caveats
on
RLX Gets Denser
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· Score: 5, Informative
We played with an eval of the RLX deal in April. They were very nice. There were a couple issues with them. Not show-stoppers, but definitely things to think about before deploying them, however, which make the inappropriate in some situations. You'd have to do some work-arounding if you intended to replace "real" servers. Imagine an IBM Thinkpad as a server and you get an idea of what you'd need to do. Things we found:
They "slept". I had a server monitoring process which listened on a TCP port. If you didn't connect in a while (seemed like more than a couple hours, but we never timed it), a connection would take like 30 seconds. We figured out that the blade went into a suspend-like mode during periods of inactivity. Since we were looking at these as some sort of low-end round robin-ish thing, that wasn't a desireable feature. Probably could have been adjusted/conf'ed not to happen, but something to think about.
And that brings me to the other caveat: they have weasely little IBM microdrives. They're IDE, and slow and completely ill-suited for use in a server. However, you could easily boot off the network (or even the tiny drives; it has slots for two of them, so you could set up failover or something I guess) and then attach a NAS deal to it. But you could probably never get by with just the stock drives in anything but an extremely low-traffic situation.
If you had a shared server web hosting company, could spring for the net storage, and didn't mind a tweak or three, then you could probably host quite a few customers in a quarter rack as opposed to a full rack (the power savings alone would let you pack them in). Throw in another full-powered app/db server and you'd be golden. All in all, the RLX is very interesting in the right applications. Clustering is another possibly appropriate role, now that I think about it (no, I did not say the "B" word).
One more probably uninteresting note: The eval unit we had came with Debian pre-installed. The newer ones have Red Hat (and Win2K, I think). So if you only do Debian, you could probably get the older images and stick 'em on there. Might have to waive support or something though...
You said it all: "Someone has registered a domain name that we used to own." You used to own it, didn't renew your registration for whatever reason, and it went back up for "sale". It has new owners now. Unless you have some legal claim to the name, I don't think there's much hope for you getting it back.
Back when I worked at Qualcomm, I was going to register eudora.org when it's renewal came and went unnoticed and unpaid. But I was told that I'd likely have to give it back at the drop of an even semi-legal hat (or not even: "Give it up or pack your office" would have worked just as well). I was going to use the domain for all the tech support junk, plugins, etc that didn't make it on eudora.com for whatever reason. It was going to be a community-type site, not for profit or anything. As far from "bad faith" as you can get. I was told that the intent of the site wouldn't matter and that they would almost certainly get it from me.
IANAL, but I think unless you can show that you had a claim or that your business will be hurt or whatever (think Coke registering pepsi.biz) then you probably won't be able to get it back. You could try the nice guy route, though. Ask them if they would sell it to you (throw in a 50% "finder's fee" for them) and offer to host whatever email accounts hey have for a year while they transition (careful of spamming, though). Probably won't work, but it never hurts to be nice anyway. Sadly, I think you're S.O.L.
It's not really all that much more than a giant marketing orgy
I used to love COMDEX. I worked for a large Fortune 500 company, and I would always lie about how many purchasing decisions/budgets I had influence over. Everyone thought I was crazy and asking for new spam, but they didn't know about procmail. They were only marketing guys, after all. But when the other marketing guys who were aiming to market at me saw my membership stuff, I could weasel my way into plenty of free stuff.
The best meat-space schwag I ever got was getting into the last Digital party. Picture a huge hall, about 100 people, two bands, and about every possible type of food or drink you can imagine. And me and my brother in Chuck Taylors and t-shirts on a full-blown jag. I swear we were the only ones not in $5000 suits. It was very exclusive for some reason. The AMD party was packed. This place not so much. But they put on quite a show.
They had these five girls in gold catsuits and black wigs marching around. Like five identical people. I can't remember if the Intel bunny suit guys were out then (I think this was 97, but I'm not sure), although I was reminded of them after thinking about it later. Anyway, the sales weenies would sic these women on the hardcases who were waffling on some high-pressure sales thing. The girls would grab these oddball Arab dudes (or whomever was on the hook) and parade them about for a couple minutes and them rub them around the room and back to their chair. I'm not sure what it was supposed to do, but it didn't work on me and my brother, since we would probably have only bought what wasn't exactly for sale. It was like being on a different planet. You talk them up enough and there's almost no limit to the free shit you'll get.
My brother demanding that a Director of Sales something or other get him a "prime rib and a bottle of Chivas" or he would "start talking to Compaq and Intel" was particularly amusing. Especially since Digital was sold to Compaq not long after.
And all I have to show for it now is an Alpha t-shirt which says "Feed the Need" on the front and has some probably long-dead proc on the back. Feed it indeed. Those were the days...
What's changed between Multplayer Test 1 and the latest test? Below you'll find some of the more notable changes.
I'll tell you what hasn't changed: Nobody has bothered to tell server admins exactly what is and isn't different (console-wise) from running a Q3A server. What's worse is that folks new to Q3A or Wolf3D will have trouble finding any coherent docs on running a server if they've never run one before.
What's worsest is that guys who've never run a Linux-based Q3A server will have a very hard time finding Linux-specific docs about running a dedicated Wolf3D server.
Can someone, somewhere bother to tell us mere mortals what all we need to know in order to run a ded server safely (which includes kicking people, banning people, stopping cheating, etc)? Don't be like those Tribes2 guys and hide all the console commands from us. Just let us know what it is we need to know. Anything you can type at a console and its effect is what we're after. A simple list would be fine.
Yeah, I've tried searching Google. Every 15 year-old on the planet has a Wolf3D/Q3A site. None of them are useful. It makes searching for only Wolf3D info very hard. And as to searching any of the popular gaming sites... forget it. They're all paid to sell you Win32 games...
I'm aiming to run a Linux-based Wolf3D ded server on a very beefy (and dedicated) machine with lots of bandwidth. But only if I can find info about running that server. It would be in id's best interest to make the ded server info available to guys like me. The public servers run by private folks are what made id what it is.
I know this is buried in other comments. (And I know I should have written a cron job which checks/. headlines once a minute so I get a page when something new comes in, but...) But I have to comment.
The law doesn't mean a thing. Well, not really. The law means a lot, but only to little people. Those with expired tags ("And maybe perhaps could we check inside your vehicle, sir"). Those with less insurance than they need ("You should have opted for the 'Act of God -- but only under duress' clause, sir..."). Those who can't afford a lawyer ("One will be provided for you should you not be able to afford one"). Families with sudden tax burdens ("Actually, it's guilty until proven innocent in a non-jury trial, sir -- get out of your house immediately"). For large corporations and individuals, the law doesn't mean shit.
The law is what you've paid for. It's not what is right, or true, or just... or even what's wrong. It's what's been paid for. It's been this way ever since we've had governments. PoliSci 101: Those with power wield it primarily in order to gain more. I know I'm not saying anything new here, but I had to say it.
And in a capitalist society, power is money. Therfore, money is politics. Like I said, back to day one of class and nothing new. This is just the most astonishing example of money making government we've seen recently. It's a Morgan or Hearst-like thing.
And since the I have the soapbox out, here's some advice: Fuck Microsoft. They're petty, awful people and I feel that one day soon other people will find it in their best interest not to bet their careers on them.
I'm a card-carrying Libertarian, and stongly against any spurious government interdiction in the free market. But I'm also a realist and realize that there has to be some form of interaction. Shoddy products can be dangerous, after all. But the real power is held by the people: The people that buy stuff for IT departments. I beseech them to look at alternatives to MS prodcuts. They will likely save money (and their jobs) in the long term.
Again, all this is so old it's cliched. But that makes it no less true. Although it's so late in the story du jour that nobody will every see this, so it's all one hand clapping....
You have no idea what you're talking about. Of course you can make money off a search engine. Ask the guys at Inktomi; they started doing it a long time ago. If you are a Google, you license your search technology to someone like Yahoo. Or AOL. Or Red Hat. Or AT&T's and Cingular's and Sprint's mobile subscribers. If your search engine was very popular, you could also create a very easy way for people to advertise on it. All these things bring in money. As long as you bring in more than you spend, you make "$$$".
You should maybe stop reading fuckedcompany. Not everything associated with the Net is doomed.
The reason why is that real CS educations are portable. Perl [and other interpreted languages] are looked down upon by CS folk - so only non-CS folk will persue perl as a primary language.
Like the subject says, you should be safe in your career. After all, you know The One True Programming Language, right? Perl isn't a toy, though, is it? I mean, if it's functionally equivalent with Ruby or PHP in all respects then it must be worth something, right? (Just don't let those interpreted guys into the Compiled Officer's Club... they might tell wild stories about getting lots of work done really quickly or spread notions about non-compiled languages being the right tool for the job...)
Seriously (or maybe not), perhaps you could check your OO bigotry at Dr. Dobbs door when you come slumming it in Scripting Land? I know some of us started using Perl before a "real" language like C++ or Java, but that doesn't make us unable to learn that real language, does it? Does it mean that we won't be able to get real work done? Are the sites we work on less useful to you?
Why would you look down on someome who has started out with Perl? I started out in the computing world using BASIC on my VIC-20. I didn't have the luxury of Java or C++. Do you think I can still learn? Am I worthy? Can I evolve to your level? Will I ever be able to look down my OO nose at mere scripters like you do? Can I be effete?
Ok, sorry to bait you. I use perl as much as I use shell scripts. I no longer use BASIC or Pascal and I'm glad. Quick and dirty GUI apps in C and C++ are a pipe dream -- Java works very well for that (especially when your app has to very quickly work on everything from BSD to WinNT). But I hate to break it to you: I have no CS eductation. The only CS course I ever took I wound up teaching. Should I resign from my job? Am I doing my company a disservice by "trying" to write OO Java apps for them since I don't have a "real CS education"? Are the OO perl apps I've written even OO enough to get me in the club? Are my C apps more portable than my lack of education? Are my Java apps?
You should realize that your "real" CS education bought you knowledge, but not at the expense of anyone else's abilities. Software Engineering is not a zero-sum game; we can all play without dimishing the accomplishments of others. But if you need to feel important, then I guess your post is like therapy for you or something...
I would imagine we'll be seeing 1.30 for Windows, Linux, MacOS Classic (8.x, 9.x) and MacOS X. But has there been any word on a port to SiliconGraphics IRIX?
You're not serious, are you? The rest of us are lucky to get a non-Win32 port. Do you have any information which would lead id to believe that the market share for Irix is large enough to justify a port? I mean, SGI isn't exactly what it used to be, is it?
Technically, it's not a stretch, but this is an era of belt tightening. An Irix port seems a bit superfluous.
I'm not bagging on SGI or Irix, it's just that neither of them are doing particularly well as far as market share, you know?
Yeah, just yesterday (Wednesday). It was about half full, and fuller since last I'd seen it (the week before).
Go look up the Chapt 11 stuff on Exodus. They were smart, I'll give them that. Not one of their bandwidth providers is a creditor. But they are going to have to seriously restructure their physical assets. Have you ever MOVED running hardware to another IDC before? I have -- it sucks worse than anything I've ever known. But for customer types, it's just as easy to move to an IDC which stands a good chance of not making you move again in a year as to another one owned by the same company which is restructuring. You want stability over nearly all else in an IDC.
When your IDC/colo makes you move, the sales/marketing guys start calling around to find a better deal. That's scary. For Exodus.
I don't mind learning. I'd rather spend an extra hour and get some results I know can help me than throw my hands up in despair at the first sign of trouble (and hope some other nice programmer some place will fix it for me). WINE is worth it to me. If I can get it set such that I can play a game I would have to dual boot for otherwise, then a little investment now pays off many times later. I just don't like to dual boot, and I've invested quite a bit in Linux. Playing other games besides my Linux ports (T2, HG2, SC3K, SoF) would be cool, so I try.
But if you're suggesting that I run Windows all the time, then I'd rather "waste" my time playing with Linux. I'm all for the right tool for the job. I'm just not sure what job Windows is right for. Secretarial work, maybe. Whatever it is... I can't take Windows. You don't learn very much trying to get Explorer not to crash.
Exodus customers should find alternate hosting now. Not actually move servers now, just find someone that can give you assurances they will have rack space when Exodus starts closing down the less-used IDCs. (Seriously, have you been inside one of their IDCs lately? It's a ghost town...)
S4R does hosting, colo, services, and has rack space in SBC's Irvine IDC. Inflow is also good (and in SoCal, if you need that), but I get a very Exodus-like feeling from them... more sizzle than steak, like they've bought too many Aeron chairs.
Whatever happens, if you have a server in an Exodus rack, you should probably make plans.
Microsoft may be secure, but when everyone is trying to crack YOUR software, it don't matter if your competition is half as secure as you...
Microsoft products are rarely considered to be secure. Outlook is a laughing stock, and IIS is a running joke in the industry I'm in (managed services). So much so that we've been wondering whether or not to charge customers who insist on using IIS an extra fee for all the time we spend monitoring and patching their boxes. History has shown that if we get a new customer who demands to use IIS, then we can be reasonably assured that we'll have multiple headaches dealing with it so we might as well charge them. We (thankfully) never even considered supporting Exchange. We're going to ban IE from all NOC machines as well. Weaning people off Outlook may be harder, though. (Mirapoints help us mitigate that threat.)
The "competition"? That would be Apache, Opera, Eudora (or Pine for some of us), qmail, etc. The "competition" is not half as secure. It is far more secure, everything else being equal (i.e., everything is installed properly, configured correctly, etc). That's my opinion, to be sure, but a colo full of servers running about everything you can think of formed it for me and I stand by it.
You are the target, and you will be breached...
That statement is specious at best. The only way to be completely secure is to have a standalone box. Which isn't an option, and therefore silly to say.
MS software will never be completely secure. Yes, things like wu-ftp and such can be insecure as well. Anything can be. But at least most free/OS packages try to be secure. MS software isn't even trying to be secure. Hell, they apparently aren't even trying to be half-assed.
When will they get that through their thick skulls???
I'm wondering when people will stop drinking the MS koolaid and realize that there are many better, cheaper, more stable and more secure options available to them.
I might agree that I have an outdated clue...:-) I did some research a while back, but backburnered it after life got in the way.
Many people have enabled their Empeg/Rio units to do 802.11 while in the car. I will be one of them,.. I just got my home side (with a laptop and access point) working and the Rio player in the car is next.
How do you get the empeg set up? Do you have any links to like a how-to or some such? I'll do a search, but if you've got something you can paste in from a bookmark, that would be super cool.
And as far as hackinmg together your own linux computer for the car,.. good f'n luck. I tried it is a lot easier than it sounds,.. dealing with power supplies, custom on/off delay circuits, filesystem woas and the like are a major pain in the ass.
Hmmmm. It does sound like there are issues I hadn't considered. One thing I was thinking about a while ago was taking apart an old IBM laptop I have laying around and putting the bits in some form or another under the seats in my truck. At least then, I'd only need a PSU. When the car shut off, it would go to battery. That's overly simplistic, but workable maybe.
Another idea would be to hook up the SBC-based computer to direct battery power and then suspend it after a certain period of inactivity. You'd need something to make the power more regular, but it's certainly possible.
I wish I would have bought the Empeg first instead wasting so much time on trying to hack together a good looking usable system. It was a complete waste of time.
I might not really have that option now, though. Since it's allegedly been EOL'ed, we'll soon be back to where we were empeg-wise. I definitely will miss out on that display. The empeg had a wonderful gui. Maybe I'll look for an empeg. As long as you can get 802.11 shoehorned onto it, then I'm a happy camper.
If it had a PCMCIA slot, I would have paid the $1000 for it. But without it, no way. I'm not spending a grand to have to lug a unit into some cradle to transfer files.
Better would be to get an SBC that supports Linux, throw on a microdrive, add an 802.11b card, and then write a set of scripts that rsync to your home MP3 DB when you get in range of the access point (and after you exchange some cryptographic keys, of course). You can then use the apmd stuff to sleep your machine after the transfer.
I planned on using an old Palm IIIx and a serial cable for the GUI. PalmAMP works really well (for my purposes, anyway). Of course, it doesn't beat the Empeg's really fancy display. It's very nice. But worth an extra $500? Probably not.
Bad to see them go. Hopefully, they'll keep their software on the Net so others can play with it still.
When they first released the Windows version, I rebooted to Windows (first time in months) to try it out. It was awesome. I thought I wouldn't get anything done. Then Windows crashed. I tried again, and Windows crashed. After 10-15 crashes I decided not to bother anymore. Productivity was restored.?
I even installed a spare 2GB SCSI drive just for Win98. I haven't booted Windows since like February. I think. I thought I'd be consumed by RtCW, and I was for a while. Then Windows crashed. It kept crashing. I got frustrated and yanked the drive out of my box. Problem is that I decided to try and get SiN working on my GeForce2. I spent much more time with WINE than I did with RtCW, which is probably good since I learned something.
I have grave fears that I might not get nearly as much off-hours learning and personal development done now that they have a Linux version. I was just getting bored with Tribes2, and figured that I could play with Tomcat. I don't think I'll get very far with that now...
I'm not sure if you can understand a concept as complicated as this, but the people who did this are dead.
Thanks for the personally disparaging remarks.
Anyway, the people who physically controlled the planes are not what I was talking about. If that's the only thing you can find "wrong" with my post, then you have issues. I don't even like my thoughts. (Doesn't mean I don't still have 'em...)
The pilots in these attacks were simply tools. They were physical manifestations of some person's or organization's political/religious/personal agenda. Someone obviously doesn't like the people or policies of the U.S., and they seem to believe that killing innocent civilians will somehow further their agenda. Those are the people I was talking about. I don't understand how you failed to see that.
Think of World War 2. Did we try and convict the soldiers on guard duty at concentration camps? No, the leaders were to blame. The foot soldiers were just duped into a homocidal ideology. Are we putting Serbian soldiers on trial for the ethnic cleansings and whatnot that went on a couple years ago? No, it's Milosevic (sp?) that is to blame. Do we sue gun manufacturers for intentional shooting deaths? The person pulling the trigger is responsible for their actions. The gun is simply a tool. The pilots were tools.
The pilots were not the issue here. The architects of the plans are. Those are the people we need to find and make pay for their atrocities.
"To fight these bastards you don't need a military attack," said an experienced Israeli commando officer. "You only need to adopt Israel's assassination policy."
Oddly enough the U.S.'s ban on assassination only applies to heads of state. Normal folks like you and me and Saudi expatriates are
fair game. Lucky us... we can shoot the perpetrators on sight.
No matter who is found responsible (individual or state), I want two things to happen:
We should make very sure that we investigate thoroughly so that we can be guaranteed that we find the truly responsible parties.
The punishment for those parties should be both cruel and unusual.
Not to denigrate the Dalai Lama or his gentle philosophies, but the most hideous and prolonged death imaginable is too good for the people that did this. The last people that attacked us in a major way were taught a severe lesson, and they are doing very well now. A similar lesson should befall these terrorists. Although a nuke would be far to quick for them. (My meanest side imagines something involving alkalai in mucous membranes, electricity in contact with areas of concentrated nerve bundles and slow decompression in a publicly displayed venue. Slowly choke them with pork genitalia, I don't care. Just make it bad.)
If we don't do something harsh, then we're essentially inviting them back for another go at us. The Israelis may seem harsh on the ten o'clock news for all their bombings, air strikes, etc, but they have the right idea: You can never appear to be weak, you can't reason with the fanatical, and you must always teach that action begets reaction. For example, I guarantee that if we had a policy of always sacrificing hostages in order to kill hostage takers then we would have had fewer hostage situations over the years. But terrorists know we're soft and sentimental and our leaders are driven by public opinion. And they know they can do whatever they want to us because for the last 50 years we've lost our resolve.
The U.S. talks big, but that's about it. Read bin Laden's thoughts on the U.S.'s role in Somalia for a good example of this. Kosovo is another boondoggle and we got (are still getting?) lucky. Iraq was a fluke: we were up against a known enemy (of cowards, as it turned out). Without a tangible, easily-identifiable boogey man, we aren't as effective. Because we're too wishy-washy. One American gets killed in a ground war by someone nobody even saw and the mother of Private Didntduck is on TV crying with Diane Sawyer two nights later. Then the President has to start worrying about opinion polls. Ask the Israelis how they handle things. Something bad happens and they start breaking things and killing people, which is really the military's only real purpose anyway.
And about Bush's language: Screw them if they are still pissed about the Crusades. Pardon my French. The President isn't a man of many words (and what words he does have aren't very long), but now isn't the time to mince them. We shouldn't be overly concerned with anything but finding and slowly exterminating the people responsible for this. Anyone that honestly cares about what an Afgan leader thinks of the word "crusade", or some war that ended 800 years ago, has priority adjustment issues.
I'm really not overly reactionary by nature (honest; I'm a easy going geek guy who's fed the homeless and rescued injured animals from certain death), but I'd sincerely like to show the architects of these attacks what sick and cruel really is. Anyway, I'm the only one that has to live with my thoughts of UltraViolence since the rest of the country will wind up being pacified with a resolution or three, dramatically reduced civil liberties, and a kangaroo court in which the most symptomatic of solutions to future terrorism are engineered.
I'm predicting we're in for more hatred and violence, primarily done unto us -- not as we should do unto them. That we'll never do anything meaningful or substantive... like put away all the thoughts of flowers and fluffy things and try to actually come up with a solution to the problem of why we're going to be the biggest terrorist target on the planet. The bad guys will just hit us some place else, knowing that there really aren't any negative repurcussions whatsoever to their actions. Joy and life are great, but not when dealing with madmen whose stock in trade is everything but. You have to speak in their terms. If Ghandi was destroying parts of major U.S. cities, then we could talk about cycles of hatred and whether violent response is proper. What we're dealing with here are the Pol Pots of the 21st century (although 13th century might be more appropriate in some ways). Harsh lessons need to be taught.
Anyway sorry for the long, unintended rant. Your post touched a nerve. It's a messed up world and I'm a little upset at people right now.
When is Slashdot going to be available on WAP anyway? Is it already? It hasn't come up on my phone when I've tried. It would be nice to get the list of headlines and be able to select the headline I want to see the main story.
I don't mean to sound like a wag, but it should be fairly easy to roll your own WAP Slashdot headline deal. Here's how I would do it.
Go to dyndns.org and set up a account there. Point it at your cable modem/DSL/whatever. If you have a domain somewhere else where you can exert full (or near-full) control over the web server, then you can use that.
Set up your machine to grab RDF headlines. You only really need a one-liner: perl -MLWP::Simple -e 'getprint "http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf"'
Parse and arrange the headlines however you like. Group them by category perhaps. Add something that grabs sports scores and market numbers maybe.
Set up Apache to send out WAP-enabled "pages" when your phone comes calling.
Of course, I don't know squat about WAP, so all that is just off the top of my head...
Slashdot Mirror
Like I said, it's not a filesystem, but it might get you by. I personally don't care if /etc is encrypted or not. But I might care if /home was encrypted. It's easy enough to mount a BestCrypt container file at /home, so that might be enough.
-B
No, I actually only had a wee little bit on a cracker. It was foul. Seems to me to be an acquired taste, like caviar or something.
-B
I real basic terms, to glob is to expand a wildcard character to mean one or more characters. Like if you say something like "sudo rm -rf /*" that asterisk is expanded to mean "zero or more of any character". You might have also seen the question mark used. It means one single character. The Foldoc web site has a much better explanation.
Oh, and while smarter people than I are explaining...the quote at the bottom (the one I see)...what is a Vegemite? Ever since that Men at Work song, I've wondered.
Vegemite is a nasty product made of yeast extract. It's a brownish paste-like stuff which is spread on bread and the like. An Aussie could probably explain better. I tasted it just once (on a cracker), and that was enough for me.
-B
(BTW: since I'm on the subject of corrections, the hole your thinking of is 'whole' as in everything, not hole as in an empty space. Hehe.)
You're not thinking of your contractions vs. possessive pronouns, are you?
-B
I guess there's lots of ancillary questions that could go with this. Like "What do you wish you had done (but maybe turned down)?" Or "What do you wish you hadn't done?" And "How much does it take for you to do something that you're not all that interested in?" (not necessarily money, I guess -- it could be a bad part with a good director or something, right?). And one more: If you weren't an actor (or wanted to quit tomorrow or whatever), what is it you would do?
Like I said, maybe kinda lame. But I've found you can tell a lot about someone by both their desires and their regrets. Being quite a fan or yours, I'm curious.
BTW, thanks for everything you done for those of us on the other side of the screen.
-B
Yes, I forgot to mention that part. The rep (who was actually like a director of engineering something, I think) who we dealt with was extremely refreshing. He answered all our idiotic questions, listened to our suggestions, worked with our guys. RLX were very nice to deal with. I was sorta sad we never hooked up with them business-wise (our business was just starting to move away from smaller web hosting type customers -- which is who we were eval'ing for in the first place)
The guy there told me that they had fixed a problem with the sleep state recently
Ahhhh, so it wasn't a setting so much as an unintended feature. We had wondered about that. My bet was on setting. :-) I bodged up a couple perl scripts which kept them all alive (and sent back host data while they were at it). Kind of a hack, but it worked.
There were some other issues with power cycling they were working with.
Hmmmm. That we didn't see. Not so good to have some of the blades bounce themselves...
Actually, I really want a set of blades for home. I work with lots of OSes, and one RLX and a decent KVM would make working from home very nice. -B
-B
If you had a shared server web hosting company, could spring for the net storage, and didn't mind a tweak or three, then you could probably host quite a few customers in a quarter rack as opposed to a full rack (the power savings alone would let you pack them in). Throw in another full-powered app/db server and you'd be golden. All in all, the RLX is very interesting in the right applications. Clustering is another possibly appropriate role, now that I think about it (no, I did not say the "B" word).
One more probably uninteresting note: The eval unit we had came with Debian pre-installed. The newer ones have Red Hat (and Win2K, I think). So if you only do Debian, you could probably get the older images and stick 'em on there. Might have to waive support or something though...
-B
Back when I worked at Qualcomm, I was going to register eudora.org when it's renewal came and went unnoticed and unpaid. But I was told that I'd likely have to give it back at the drop of an even semi-legal hat (or not even: "Give it up or pack your office" would have worked just as well). I was going to use the domain for all the tech support junk, plugins, etc that didn't make it on eudora.com for whatever reason. It was going to be a community-type site, not for profit or anything. As far from "bad faith" as you can get. I was told that the intent of the site wouldn't matter and that they would almost certainly get it from me.
IANAL, but I think unless you can show that you had a claim or that your business will be hurt or whatever (think Coke registering pepsi.biz) then you probably won't be able to get it back. You could try the nice guy route, though. Ask them if they would sell it to you (throw in a 50% "finder's fee" for them) and offer to host whatever email accounts hey have for a year while they transition (careful of spamming, though). Probably won't work, but it never hurts to be nice anyway. Sadly, I think you're S.O.L.
-B
I used to love COMDEX. I worked for a large Fortune 500 company, and I would always lie about how many purchasing decisions/budgets I had influence over. Everyone thought I was crazy and asking for new spam, but they didn't know about procmail. They were only marketing guys, after all. But when the other marketing guys who were aiming to market at me saw my membership stuff, I could weasel my way into plenty of free stuff.
The best meat-space schwag I ever got was getting into the last Digital party. Picture a huge hall, about 100 people, two bands, and about every possible type of food or drink you can imagine. And me and my brother in Chuck Taylors and t-shirts on a full-blown jag. I swear we were the only ones not in $5000 suits. It was very exclusive for some reason. The AMD party was packed. This place not so much. But they put on quite a show.
They had these five girls in gold catsuits and black wigs marching around. Like five identical people. I can't remember if the Intel bunny suit guys were out then (I think this was 97, but I'm not sure), although I was reminded of them after thinking about it later. Anyway, the sales weenies would sic these women on the hardcases who were waffling on some high-pressure sales thing. The girls would grab these oddball Arab dudes (or whomever was on the hook) and parade them about for a couple minutes and them rub them around the room and back to their chair. I'm not sure what it was supposed to do, but it didn't work on me and my brother, since we would probably have only bought what wasn't exactly for sale. It was like being on a different planet. You talk them up enough and there's almost no limit to the free shit you'll get.
My brother demanding that a Director of Sales something or other get him a "prime rib and a bottle of Chivas" or he would "start talking to Compaq and Intel" was particularly amusing. Especially since Digital was sold to Compaq not long after.
And all I have to show for it now is an Alpha t-shirt which says "Feed the Need" on the front and has some probably long-dead proc on the back. Feed it indeed. Those were the days...
-B
I'll tell you what hasn't changed: Nobody has bothered to tell server admins exactly what is and isn't different (console-wise) from running a Q3A server. What's worse is that folks new to Q3A or Wolf3D will have trouble finding any coherent docs on running a server if they've never run one before. What's worsest is that guys who've never run a Linux-based Q3A server will have a very hard time finding Linux-specific docs about running a dedicated Wolf3D server.
Can someone, somewhere bother to tell us mere mortals what all we need to know in order to run a ded server safely (which includes kicking people, banning people, stopping cheating, etc)? Don't be like those Tribes2 guys and hide all the console commands from us. Just let us know what it is we need to know. Anything you can type at a console and its effect is what we're after. A simple list would be fine.
Yeah, I've tried searching Google. Every 15 year-old on the planet has a Wolf3D/Q3A site. None of them are useful. It makes searching for only Wolf3D info very hard. And as to searching any of the popular gaming sites... forget it. They're all paid to sell you Win32 games...
I'm aiming to run a Linux-based Wolf3D ded server on a very beefy (and dedicated) machine with lots of bandwidth. But only if I can find info about running that server. It would be in id's best interest to make the ded server info available to guys like me. The public servers run by private folks are what made id what it is.
-B
The law doesn't mean a thing. Well, not really. The law means a lot, but only to little people. Those with expired tags ("And maybe perhaps could we check inside your vehicle, sir"). Those with less insurance than they need ("You should have opted for the 'Act of God -- but only under duress' clause, sir..."). Those who can't afford a lawyer ("One will be provided for you should you not be able to afford one"). Families with sudden tax burdens ("Actually, it's guilty until proven innocent in a non-jury trial, sir -- get out of your house immediately"). For large corporations and individuals, the law doesn't mean shit.
The law is what you've paid for. It's not what is right, or true, or just... or even what's wrong. It's what's been paid for. It's been this way ever since we've had governments. PoliSci 101: Those with power wield it primarily in order to gain more. I know I'm not saying anything new here, but I had to say it. And in a capitalist society, power is money. Therfore, money is politics. Like I said, back to day one of class and nothing new. This is just the most astonishing example of money making government we've seen recently. It's a Morgan or Hearst-like thing.
And since the I have the soapbox out, here's some advice: Fuck Microsoft. They're petty, awful people and I feel that one day soon other people will find it in their best interest not to bet their careers on them.
I'm a card-carrying Libertarian, and stongly against any spurious government interdiction in the free market. But I'm also a realist and realize that there has to be some form of interaction. Shoddy products can be dangerous, after all. But the real power is held by the people: The people that buy stuff for IT departments. I beseech them to look at alternatives to MS prodcuts. They will likely save money (and their jobs) in the long term.
Again, all this is so old it's cliched. But that makes it no less true. Although it's so late in the story du jour that nobody will every see this, so it's all one hand clapping....
-B
You have no idea what you're talking about. Of course you can make money off a search engine. Ask the guys at Inktomi; they started doing it a long time ago. If you are a Google, you license your search technology to someone like Yahoo. Or AOL. Or Red Hat. Or AT&T's and Cingular's and Sprint's mobile subscribers. If your search engine was very popular, you could also create a very easy way for people to advertise on it. All these things bring in money. As long as you bring in more than you spend, you make "$$$".
You should maybe stop reading fuckedcompany. Not everything associated with the Net is doomed.
-B
Like the subject says, you should be safe in your career. After all, you know The One True Programming Language, right? Perl isn't a toy, though, is it? I mean, if it's functionally equivalent with Ruby or PHP in all respects then it must be worth something, right? (Just don't let those interpreted guys into the Compiled Officer's Club... they might tell wild stories about getting lots of work done really quickly or spread notions about non-compiled languages being the right tool for the job...)
Seriously (or maybe not), perhaps you could check your OO bigotry at Dr. Dobbs door when you come slumming it in Scripting Land? I know some of us started using Perl before a "real" language like C++ or Java, but that doesn't make us unable to learn that real language, does it? Does it mean that we won't be able to get real work done? Are the sites we work on less useful to you?
Why would you look down on someome who has started out with Perl? I started out in the computing world using BASIC on my VIC-20. I didn't have the luxury of Java or C++. Do you think I can still learn? Am I worthy? Can I evolve to your level? Will I ever be able to look down my OO nose at mere scripters like you do? Can I be effete?
Ok, sorry to bait you. I use perl as much as I use shell scripts. I no longer use BASIC or Pascal and I'm glad. Quick and dirty GUI apps in C and C++ are a pipe dream -- Java works very well for that (especially when your app has to very quickly work on everything from BSD to WinNT). But I hate to break it to you: I have no CS eductation. The only CS course I ever took I wound up teaching. Should I resign from my job? Am I doing my company a disservice by "trying" to write OO Java apps for them since I don't have a "real CS education"? Are the OO perl apps I've written even OO enough to get me in the club? Are my C apps more portable than my lack of education? Are my Java apps?
You should realize that your "real" CS education bought you knowledge, but not at the expense of anyone else's abilities. Software Engineering is not a zero-sum game; we can all play without dimishing the accomplishments of others. But if you need to feel important, then I guess your post is like therapy for you or something...
Life is too short to be a snob.
-B
You're not serious, are you? The rest of us are lucky to get a non-Win32 port. Do you have any information which would lead id to believe that the market share for Irix is large enough to justify a port? I mean, SGI isn't exactly what it used to be, is it? Technically, it's not a stretch, but this is an era of belt tightening. An Irix port seems a bit superfluous.
I'm not bagging on SGI or Irix, it's just that neither of them are doing particularly well as far as market share, you know?
-B
Yeah, just yesterday (Wednesday). It was about half full, and fuller since last I'd seen it (the week before).
Go look up the Chapt 11 stuff on Exodus. They were smart, I'll give them that. Not one of their bandwidth providers is a creditor. But they are going to have to seriously restructure their physical assets. Have you ever MOVED running hardware to another IDC before? I have -- it sucks worse than anything I've ever known. But for customer types, it's just as easy to move to an IDC which stands a good chance of not making you move again in a year as to another one owned by the same company which is restructuring. You want stability over nearly all else in an IDC.
When your IDC/colo makes you move, the sales/marketing guys start calling around to find a better deal. That's scary. For Exodus.
-B
But if you're suggesting that I run Windows all the time, then I'd rather "waste" my time playing with Linux. I'm all for the right tool for the job. I'm just not sure what job Windows is right for. Secretarial work, maybe. Whatever it is... I can't take Windows. You don't learn very much trying to get Explorer not to crash.
-B
S4R does hosting, colo, services, and has rack space in SBC's Irvine IDC. Inflow is also good (and in SoCal, if you need that), but I get a very Exodus-like feeling from them... more sizzle than steak, like they've bought too many Aeron chairs.
Whatever happens, if you have a server in an Exodus rack, you should probably make plans.
-B
Microsoft products are rarely considered to be secure. Outlook is a laughing stock, and IIS is a running joke in the industry I'm in (managed services). So much so that we've been wondering whether or not to charge customers who insist on using IIS an extra fee for all the time we spend monitoring and patching their boxes. History has shown that if we get a new customer who demands to use IIS, then we can be reasonably assured that we'll have multiple headaches dealing with it so we might as well charge them. We (thankfully) never even considered supporting Exchange. We're going to ban IE from all NOC machines as well. Weaning people off Outlook may be harder, though. (Mirapoints help us mitigate that threat.)
The "competition"? That would be Apache, Opera, Eudora (or Pine for some of us), qmail, etc. The "competition" is not half as secure. It is far more secure, everything else being equal (i.e., everything is installed properly, configured correctly, etc). That's my opinion, to be sure, but a colo full of servers running about everything you can think of formed it for me and I stand by it.
You are the target, and you will be breached...
That statement is specious at best. The only way to be completely secure is to have a standalone box. Which isn't an option, and therefore silly to say.
MS software will never be completely secure. Yes, things like wu-ftp and such can be insecure as well. Anything can be. But at least most free/OS packages try to be secure. MS software isn't even trying to be secure. Hell, they apparently aren't even trying to be half-assed.
When will they get that through their thick skulls???
I'm wondering when people will stop drinking the MS koolaid and realize that there are many better, cheaper, more stable and more secure options available to them.
-B
I might agree that I have an outdated clue... :-) I did some research a while back, but backburnered it after life got in the way.
Many people have enabled their Empeg/Rio units to do 802.11 while in the car. I will be one of them,.. I just got my home side (with a laptop and access point) working and the Rio player in the car is next.
How do you get the empeg set up? Do you have any links to like a how-to or some such? I'll do a search, but if you've got something you can paste in from a bookmark, that would be super cool.
And as far as hackinmg together your own linux computer for the car,.. good f'n luck. I tried it is a lot easier than it sounds,.. dealing with power supplies, custom on/off delay circuits, filesystem woas and the like are a major pain in the ass.
Hmmmm. It does sound like there are issues I hadn't considered. One thing I was thinking about a while ago was taking apart an old IBM laptop I have laying around and putting the bits in some form or another under the seats in my truck. At least then, I'd only need a PSU. When the car shut off, it would go to battery. That's overly simplistic, but workable maybe.
Another idea would be to hook up the SBC-based computer to direct battery power and then suspend it after a certain period of inactivity. You'd need something to make the power more regular, but it's certainly possible.
I wish I would have bought the Empeg first instead wasting so much time on trying to hack together a good looking usable system. It was a complete waste of time.
I might not really have that option now, though. Since it's allegedly been EOL'ed, we'll soon be back to where we were empeg-wise. I definitely will miss out on that display. The empeg had a wonderful gui. Maybe I'll look for an empeg. As long as you can get 802.11 shoehorned onto it, then I'm a happy camper.
Anyway, thanks for the eye-opener...
-B
Better would be to get an SBC that supports Linux, throw on a microdrive, add an 802.11b card, and then write a set of scripts that rsync to your home MP3 DB when you get in range of the access point (and after you exchange some cryptographic keys, of course). You can then use the apmd stuff to sleep your machine after the transfer.
I planned on using an old Palm IIIx and a serial cable for the GUI. PalmAMP works really well (for my purposes, anyway). Of course, it doesn't beat the Empeg's really fancy display. It's very nice. But worth an extra $500? Probably not.
Bad to see them go. Hopefully, they'll keep their software on the Net so others can play with it still.
-B
I even installed a spare 2GB SCSI drive just for Win98. I haven't booted Windows since like February. I think. I thought I'd be consumed by RtCW, and I was for a while. Then Windows crashed. It kept crashing. I got frustrated and yanked the drive out of my box. Problem is that I decided to try and get SiN working on my GeForce2. I spent much more time with WINE than I did with RtCW, which is probably good since I learned something.
I have grave fears that I might not get nearly as much off-hours learning and personal development done now that they have a Linux version. I was just getting bored with Tribes2, and figured that I could play with Tomcat. I don't think I'll get very far with that now...
-B
Thanks for the personally disparaging remarks.
Anyway, the people who physically controlled the planes are not what I was talking about. If that's the only thing you can find "wrong" with my post, then you have issues. I don't even like my thoughts. (Doesn't mean I don't still have 'em...)
The pilots in these attacks were simply tools. They were physical manifestations of some person's or organization's political/religious/personal agenda. Someone obviously doesn't like the people or policies of the U.S., and they seem to believe that killing innocent civilians will somehow further their agenda. Those are the people I was talking about. I don't understand how you failed to see that.
Think of World War 2. Did we try and convict the soldiers on guard duty at concentration camps? No, the leaders were to blame. The foot soldiers were just duped into a homocidal ideology. Are we putting Serbian soldiers on trial for the ethnic cleansings and whatnot that went on a couple years ago? No, it's Milosevic (sp?) that is to blame. Do we sue gun manufacturers for intentional shooting deaths? The person pulling the trigger is responsible for their actions. The gun is simply a tool. The pilots were tools.
The pilots were not the issue here. The architects of the plans are. Those are the people we need to find and make pay for their atrocities.
-B
No matter who is found responsible (individual or state), I want two things to happen:
Not to denigrate the Dalai Lama or his gentle philosophies, but the most hideous and prolonged death imaginable is too good for the people that did this. The last people that attacked us in a major way were taught a severe lesson, and they are doing very well now. A similar lesson should befall these terrorists. Although a nuke would be far to quick for them. (My meanest side imagines something involving alkalai in mucous membranes, electricity in contact with areas of concentrated nerve bundles and slow decompression in a publicly displayed venue. Slowly choke them with pork genitalia, I don't care. Just make it bad.)
If we don't do something harsh, then we're essentially inviting them back for another go at us. The Israelis may seem harsh on the ten o'clock news for all their bombings, air strikes, etc, but they have the right idea: You can never appear to be weak, you can't reason with the fanatical, and you must always teach that action begets reaction. For example, I guarantee that if we had a policy of always sacrificing hostages in order to kill hostage takers then we would have had fewer hostage situations over the years. But terrorists know we're soft and sentimental and our leaders are driven by public opinion. And they know they can do whatever they want to us because for the last 50 years we've lost our resolve.
The U.S. talks big, but that's about it. Read bin Laden's thoughts on the U.S.'s role in Somalia for a good example of this. Kosovo is another boondoggle and we got (are still getting?) lucky. Iraq was a fluke: we were up against a known enemy (of cowards, as it turned out). Without a tangible, easily-identifiable boogey man, we aren't as effective. Because we're too wishy-washy. One American gets killed in a ground war by someone nobody even saw and the mother of Private Didntduck is on TV crying with Diane Sawyer two nights later. Then the President has to start worrying about opinion polls. Ask the Israelis how they handle things. Something bad happens and they start breaking things and killing people, which is really the military's only real purpose anyway.
And about Bush's language: Screw them if they are still pissed about the Crusades. Pardon my French. The President isn't a man of many words (and what words he does have aren't very long), but now isn't the time to mince them. We shouldn't be overly concerned with anything but finding and slowly exterminating the people responsible for this. Anyone that honestly cares about what an Afgan leader thinks of the word "crusade", or some war that ended 800 years ago, has priority adjustment issues.
I'm really not overly reactionary by nature (honest; I'm a easy going geek guy who's fed the homeless and rescued injured animals from certain death), but I'd sincerely like to show the architects of these attacks what sick and cruel really is. Anyway, I'm the only one that has to live with my thoughts of UltraViolence since the rest of the country will wind up being pacified with a resolution or three, dramatically reduced civil liberties, and a kangaroo court in which the most symptomatic of solutions to future terrorism are engineered.
I'm predicting we're in for more hatred and violence, primarily done unto us -- not as we should do unto them. That we'll never do anything meaningful or substantive... like put away all the thoughts of flowers and fluffy things and try to actually come up with a solution to the problem of why we're going to be the biggest terrorist target on the planet. The bad guys will just hit us some place else, knowing that there really aren't any negative repurcussions whatsoever to their actions. Joy and life are great, but not when dealing with madmen whose stock in trade is everything but. You have to speak in their terms. If Ghandi was destroying parts of major U.S. cities, then we could talk about cycles of hatred and whether violent response is proper. What we're dealing with here are the Pol Pots of the 21st century (although 13th century might be more appropriate in some ways). Harsh lessons need to be taught.
Anyway sorry for the long, unintended rant. Your post touched a nerve. It's a messed up world and I'm a little upset at people right now.
-B
When is Slashdot going to be available on WAP anyway? Is it already? It hasn't come up on my phone when I've tried. It would be nice to get the list of headlines and be able to select the headline I want to see the main story.
I don't mean to sound like a wag, but it should be fairly easy to roll your own WAP Slashdot headline deal. Here's how I would do it.
perl -MLWP::Simple -e 'getprint "http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf"'
Of course, I don't know squat about WAP, so all that is just off the top of my head...
-B