Hello? What are you talking about? "cost of not participating"? Are you really afraid of no longer being able to buy food or clothing without Facebook and Twitter?
Planet Earth may well run out of food to feed us all, but Facebook and Twitter are quite irrelevant when it comes to essential needs.
If you are trolling, congrats, I for one fell for your scam.
If on the other hand you truly care about "discounts", consider for a moment the possibility that you are deluded. A discount is nothing more than just a trick to lure customers. If you don't understand this, don't bother. Just spend all your money on discounts and be merry. It's the Merrycan Dream I believe.;-)
That is why I have three different customer loyalty cards for a local supermarket chain. One I use for beer, one for frozen pizza and the third for Oreos.
Do I ever need all three at once? No, I am very organised. Besides, I *only* ever use a loyalty card when there is actually a discount to be had by using it. I would be very suspicious if there was always a discount with the card, it means they are ripping you off. And I don't shop when I know they are a rip-off.
This may be a bit of a stretch for the original poster, but if the intention is to lock down the desktop why not abolish it all together and put it all on the server using thin clients?
except perhaps for the sloppy authentication in the clear and the awkward use of random ports initiated in the wrong direction (from server to client).
What is wrong is that there are ftp servers allowing anonymous write access. That is how those miscreants work: they put a malicious file up on an anonymous ftp server (that allows write access) and then craft ftp URLs to spam people with.
I remember we warned all ftp server administrators about the issue 10 or more years ago, back when I was a rookie.
Of course scp/sftp is way better, everyone knows that. Or not?
I am subscribed to a couple of mailing lists, I could never manage all that traffic with webmail. Instead I use a full-featured MUA called mutt with procmail to sort things out and handle spam with SpamAssassin.
And wherever I am on the Internet, I can always ssh home and grep around all my mail archives to find something back. It's all searchable online, so to speak.
I don't know how old your Solaris experience is, but recent versions *do* include (some) GNU software. And Apache, even though it's not GNU software, has been bundled with Solaris since Solaris 8.
Set up a custom jumpstart server with Apache, Tomcat and all the good GNU stuff you want and you won't have to spend hours to install a new machine anymore.
You'll need that to post-install the recommended patch cluster anyway.
When it comes to Linux versus Solaris I wonder which of those two kernels you feel is always loaded with userland apps.;-)
Oh, and when it comes to hardware I'll have a sparc anytime.
Yes, yes, but... (was: 2 hours = Useful project?)
on
IT Literacy Test
·
· Score: 1
I can hear you brother, and it's pretty sad, but...
Are you really saying that computer literacy is defined as the ability to click a link? Really, really?
If that is so, maybe there's hope yet for this world.;-)
Eavesdropping is one thing, message integrity another.
Consider this: with (good) encryption you know that the message you get hasn't been tampered with. Without you have no idea if it's the same message that your correspondent sent off at you.
Frankly, I can't see how you must think to be able to post like this, so let me try to explain why I see things completely differently.
As you correctly observed, bandwidth costs money. It still costs me money, even now that thank gawd the dialup days are over, for me.
I have always been very selective in what I download from the Internet, from back in the good old days before Mosaic. And I don't see why I should now let it drop and start downloading unwanted material. If a dot-com has a crappy business model it's their problem, not mine surely.
Why, pray tell me, should I waste my precious bandwidth to download useless shit I never asked for? On what grounds am I obliged to download crap together with the content I am interested in?
Thank gawd the modem days are over, bit it is still my bandwidth and it is up to me, myself and I to decide how to use it.
First thing: the server does not know if the client downloaded the add, since the adds are usually served from a third party server.
And who is "double-click"? I am sure you don't mean doubleclick.net, which I mapped to a non-existant IP address in my/etc/hosts long ago, so I do not have to download 'material' from them that I am not interested in anyway.
I just don't see why I should have to download stuff I don't want.
We will lose big time while pretending to win :-(
on
A New Kind of War
·
· Score: 1
I can understand your anger. In fact, I can understand it very well. Had anything like this happened in my country, had *I* had lost many friends in a strike like this against my country, I would have been fighting to hold on to my sanity.
However, luck has it that I am in the innocent bystander role.
However, if I were in your place *and* had managed to keep sane, I would have reasoned like I did in the post you respond to.
What has happened, has happened, no matter how horrible. Nothing you and I can say or do, we will not be able to give life back to all the innocent people who died in this truely barbaric attack on humanity.
What I feel is even more important than retaliation is prevention. How can we make sure something horrific like this will never happen again? How many more terrorist attacks do you want to get after this one? I am sure that you, like me, don't want it to happen ever again...
To that end, we need to analyse how this one ever happened. Why do people hate the US so much that not only they do not care about all the innocent lifes but are even going to sacrifice their own life doing it?
If we get a good grasp of the why of this attack, we stand a chance of preventing anything similar in the future. If we just try to kill Osama bin Laden, we might end up with dozens more of him, maybe not as rich but much more determined to hurt the Western world. After all, we killed their "hero".
Call me weird, but I'd much rather have a structural solution of the problem itself instead of just killing one or two terrorist leaders and wait for the next terrorist attack.
[insert obvious WWII statement here about
the usefullness of military action against Germany and Japan]
You do not seem to have realised that this time around the US does *not* face a country that could be defeated.
Such is the nature of terrorism.
The US may well flatten another country or two, noone disputes the fact that they have the military power to do so. However, will that do anything to prevent more terrorist attacks in the future? Of course it won't.
Instead, such an act would further fuel the hate that this came from to begin with. If anything, we should investigate where this came from and try to remedy that. Take away the cause, research just *why* this could have happened and try to take away the causes of terrorism instead of just fight the effects. If we do not that (and the Bush Administration seems incapable of it) then this is only the beginning, no matter how many countries the US would nuke away for the purpose of retaliation.
If we want world peace (or at least an abcense of horrible terrorist attacks like this one), we *must* find out and take away the root causes of it.
I pray for world peace, even though I am not religious. At the same time, I feel we need to do more than just praying. What happened last week is too serious to not engage our collective brains on. Together, we should be able to come up with something better than just flattening a few more countries without hope that will change anything...
I've had a shell account with xs4all from the very beginning when the name was hacktic. In 1998 they sold out to the evil local telecom giant KPN. Almost three years later it's still a quality ISP and if I need to get hold of a techie or even the CTO I can usually find them on IRC. If not, I can email them and they'll respond fairly quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello? What are you talking about? "cost of not participating"? Are you really afraid of no longer being able to buy food or clothing without Facebook and Twitter?
Planet Earth may well run out of food to feed us all, but Facebook and Twitter are quite irrelevant when it comes to essential needs.
If you are trolling, congrats, I for one fell for your scam.
If on the other hand you truly care about "discounts", consider for a moment the possibility that you are deluded. A discount is nothing more than just a trick to lure customers. If you don't understand this, don't bother. Just spend all your money on discounts and be merry. It's the Merrycan Dream I believe. ;-)
That is why I have three different customer loyalty cards for a local supermarket chain. One I use for beer, one for frozen pizza and the third for Oreos.
Do I ever need all three at once? No, I am very organised. Besides, I *only* ever use a loyalty card when there is actually a discount to be had by using it. I would be very suspicious if there was always a discount with the card, it means they are ripping you off. And I don't shop when I know they are a rip-off.
This may be a bit of a stretch for the original poster, but if the intention is to lock down the desktop why not abolish it all together and put it all on the server using thin clients?
"Having distributors randomly change source code as they package it is fundamentally broken."
This is one of the reasons I switched to BSD, where such things tend not to happen.
There is (another) problem with biofuels. It's called world hunger.
Indeed. The idea of having nuclear reactors flying over my head day and night doesn't seem appealing.
except perhaps for the sloppy authentication in the clear and the awkward use of random ports initiated in the wrong direction (from server to client).
What is wrong is that there are ftp servers allowing anonymous write access. That is how those miscreants work: they put a malicious file up on an anonymous ftp server (that allows write access) and then craft ftp URLs to spam people with.
I remember we warned all ftp server administrators about the issue 10 or more years ago, back when I was a rookie.
Of course scp/sftp is way better, everyone knows that. Or not?
I am subscribed to a couple of mailing lists, I could never manage all that traffic with webmail. Instead I use a full-featured MUA called mutt with procmail to sort things out and handle spam with SpamAssassin.
And wherever I am on the Internet, I can always ssh home and grep around all my mail archives to find something back. It's all searchable online, so to speak.
I don't know how old your Solaris experience is, but recent versions *do* include (some) GNU software. And Apache, even though it's not GNU software, has been bundled with Solaris since Solaris 8.
You'll need that to post-install the recommended patch cluster anyway.
When it comes to Linux versus Solaris I wonder which of those two kernels you feel is always loaded with userland apps. ;-)
Oh, and when it comes to hardware I'll have a sparc anytime.
Are you really saying that computer literacy is defined as the ability to click a link? Really, really?
If that is so, maybe there's hope yet for this world.
Hardly - anyone worth his (or her) salt knows that CLI stands for the command line.
So if someone knows what "clicking a link" is you consider them computer literate? ;-)
Consider this: with (good) encryption you know that the message you get hasn't been tampered with. Without you have no idea if it's the same message that your correspondent sent off at you.
I only indicated a time period when keyboards with usable space bars were common, in my recollection.
Are you assuming that any post on Slashdot mentioning MS must be slamming it?
That was before MS Windows, I believe...
No, that is confusing cause and effect. ;-)
It takes effort to learn something new, and when learning unix I think the effort is best spent with Volberdings gift to the world.
All it takes is 1 single admin with a clue to install SpamAssassin to get rid of the bulk of it. ;-)
Frankly, I can't see how you must think to be able to post like this, so let me try to explain why I see things completely differently.
As you correctly observed, bandwidth costs money. It still costs me money, even now that thank gawd the dialup days are over, for me.
I have always been very selective in what I download from the Internet, from back in the good old days before Mosaic. And I don't see why I should now let it drop and start downloading unwanted material. If a dot-com has a crappy business model it's their problem, not mine surely.
Why, pray tell me, should I waste my precious bandwidth to download useless shit I never asked for? On what grounds am I obliged to download crap together with the content I am interested in?
Thank gawd the modem days are over, bit it is still my bandwidth and it is up to me, myself and I to decide how to use it.
First thing: the server does not know if the client downloaded the add, since the adds are usually served from a third party server.
/etc/hosts long ago, so I do not have to download 'material' from them that I am not interested in anyway.
And who is "double-click"? I am sure you don't mean doubleclick.net, which I mapped to a non-existant IP address in my
I just don't see why I should have to download stuff I don't want.
I can understand your anger. In fact, I can understand it very well. Had anything like this happened in my country, had *I* had lost many friends in a strike like this against my country, I would have been fighting to hold on to my sanity.
However, luck has it that I am in the innocent bystander role.
However, if I were in your place *and* had managed to keep sane, I would have reasoned like I did in the post you respond to.
What has happened, has happened, no matter how horrible. Nothing you and I can say or do, we will not be able to give life back to all the innocent people who died in this truely barbaric attack on humanity.
What I feel is even more important than retaliation is prevention. How can we make sure something horrific like this will never happen again? How many more terrorist attacks do you want to get after this one? I am sure that you, like me, don't want it to happen ever again...
To that end, we need to analyse how this one ever happened. Why do people hate the US so much that not only they do not care about all the innocent lifes but are even going to sacrifice their own life doing it?
If we get a good grasp of the why of this attack, we stand a chance of preventing anything similar in the future. If we just try to kill Osama bin Laden, we might end up with dozens more of him, maybe not as rich but much more determined to hurt the Western world. After all, we killed their "hero".
Call me weird, but I'd much rather have a structural solution of the problem itself instead of just killing one or two terrorist leaders and wait for the next terrorist attack.
> What is it good for?
> Absolutely nothing.
[insert obvious WWII statement here about
the usefullness of military action against Germany and Japan]
You do not seem to have realised that this time around the US does *not* face a country that could be defeated.
Such is the nature of terrorism.
The US may well flatten another country or two, noone disputes the fact that they have the military power to do so. However, will that do anything to prevent more terrorist attacks in the future? Of course it won't.
Instead, such an act would further fuel the hate that this came from to begin with. If anything, we should investigate where this came from and try to remedy that. Take away the cause, research just *why* this could have happened and try to take away the causes of terrorism instead of just fight the effects. If we do not that (and the Bush Administration seems incapable of it) then this is only the beginning, no matter how many countries the US would nuke away for the purpose of retaliation.
If we want world peace (or at least an abcense of horrible terrorist attacks like this one), we *must* find out and take away the root causes of it.
I pray for world peace, even though I am not religious. At the same time, I feel we need to do more than just praying. What happened last week is too serious to not engage our collective brains on. Together, we should be able to come up with something better than just flattening a few more countries without hope that will change anything...
The biggest kid on the block? The correct term for that country of yours is rogue state.
> 9:00am up 342 days, 43 min, 14 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00
;-)
Not too bad, although this looks better:
8:26pm up 448 days, 7:30, 19 users, load average: 1.45, 1.54, 1.44
This (Slackware) box is running Linux 2.2.13 because upgrading would of course kill the uptime.
I've had a shell account with xs4all from the very beginning when the name was hacktic. In 1998 they sold out to the evil local telecom giant KPN. Almost three years later it's still a quality ISP and if I need to get hold of a techie or even the CTO I can usually find them on IRC. If not, I can email them and they'll respond fairly quickly.