1. That every time anyone says anything about one OS being more secure than another, especially Windows vs. Linux, Slashdot thinks this is front-page news. 2. That every time such a story MAKES the front page, thousands of people post comments. 3. That many of those those comments obviously took more than five minutes to write.
Who the christ cares what so and so says about the security of one OS over another? Particularly when the two are Windows and Linux, and particularly when the party making the statement is completely biased! This isn't news for nerds! This isn't "what IT is!" This is stupid FUD that no one should care about!
Of course, my statement isn't any more original than the ones the original post is referring to. Isn't irony fun?
Two things about Knoppix that piss me off
on
Knoppix Tips and Tricks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've been playing with Knoppix a bit recently and enjoying it, but it has pissed me off with two systems.
One has a Biostar motherboard with a Via Rhine network card on it. For some reason, though Knoppix will load the Via Rhine module for it, the card won't come up. It works fine in Debian with the same module, and I've seen posts that the module is somehow compiled slightly wrong in Knoppix. But to fix it, I need to install the Knoppix kernel to a hard drive and then recompile the module! No thanks...
The other is my laptop which has a Senao pcmcia wifi card. Again, in Debian with wlan-ng I can make the card work fine using the prism_cs driver, but Knoppix seems to really, really want to use the orinoco driver for the card. So much that, no matter WHAT I do, I can't get it to use the prism_cs driver. Highly irritating!
There are a couple of applications for Windows that support multiple desktops. I replaced my Explorer shell with Geoshell, which includes a plugin for that. I would never go back to the regular Explorer shell again.
OK, everyone's talking about the "props" and "alt graph" keys on the Sun keyboards. What I want to know is, what the HELL is the purpose of the " " key. No, I'm not talking about the space bar; I refer you to the UNLABELED KEY between the "Help" and "F1" keys on my Sun Type 5 keyboard. It's freaking me out!
Einstein knew he was wrong
on
E ~ mc^2
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Not more than a few year's after developing his theories of general and special relativity, Einstein realized that they weren't perfect. The simple reason behind his realization was that the theories of relativity didn't make sense when applied on a quantum scale, and the theories of quantum physics didn't make sense when applies of a relative scale. Einstein refused to believe that the universe worked in such a way that there had to be two mutually exclusive theories to explain physics on the very small and the very large scale.
Of course, the rest of the world was busy experimenting with his theories of relativity, but after he published them he quickly lost interest in their progress. He spent the rest of his life searching for what he referred to as the "unified field theory," a single theory that could properly explain quantum physics and relativity at the same time.
I'm not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, but theoretical science does interest me. Brian Greene's book, The Elegant Universe does a great job of explaining the background on this. It's worth a look.
Free Kevin - with every purchase?
on
Kevin Free
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I always thought that the idea of freeing Kevin was retarded. I'm not even interested in what he was charged with originally. The guy skipped bail and ran from the law for two years. Why? I'm sorry, but I don't buy anyone's excuses about how there was no way he could get a fair trial under our corrupt, draconian legal system.
The media, for all intents and purposes, keeps the legal system fair. If you are being unjustly accused, there are many American organizations who will work to get the word out about your case, and in these cases justice pretty much always prevails. Look at the Dimitry case; ridiculous charges are leveled at him, Slashdot posts a story about it every two weeks, and in the end he gets off. Now look at Mumia Abu-Jamal; tens of thousands of ill-informed teenagers go around spouting off nonsense about how he's innocent, a search on Google reveals numerous web sites dedicated to his cause, yet almost 20 years after his first conviction, he still sits on death row, and my impression is that that is where he belongs. I've read all the pro-Mumia web sites and I've read a lot of anti-Mumia literature as well. I just don't see any evidence myself that he's innocent.
But back to Kevin. My biggest concern right now is that he learn from his mistakes and his time in prison so that he can find a way to use his obviously great talents for positive things. Look at Kevin Poulsen, one of the more famous hackers of the early 80's. He got caught, plead guilty, served a short prison sentence, and now does great computer security research for Securityfocus.com, among others. I have respect for him. I don't have much for Mitnick.
The Big Dig _is_ really cool, although right now it's just a major construction project that is not quite complete. One of its drawbacks is that most aspects of it will become available for use right at the same time. By now the project has been underway for over ten years, and although it is mostly finished, a relatively small amount of it is being used. It just worked out that way because each part of the project relies on the completion of other parts.
Since this was such a huge undertaking, the state went all-out on the PR front. The practical upshot of this is an amazing web site that changes constantly and is always interesting to look at when you have some time to kill.
Nation status seems very clear...
on
HavenCo Doing Well
·
· Score: 4, Informative
In the 80s territorial waters were extended to 12 miles. Sealand's nation status is this unclear, but this hasn't stopped HavenCo setting up their data haven.
This doesn't seem to be the case. This page on Sealand's web site clearly states:
On 1 October, 1987, Britain extended its territorial waters from 3 to 12 nautical miles. The previous day, Prince Roy declared the extension of Sealand's territorial waters to be a like 12 nautical miles, so that right of way from the open sea to Sealand would not be blocked by British claimed waters. No treaty has been signed between Britain and Sealand to divide up the overlapping areas, but a general policy of dividing the area between the two countries down the middle can be assumed. International law does not allow the claim of new land during the extension of sea rights, so Sealand's sovereignty was safely "grandfathered" in. Britain has no more right to Sealand's territory than Sealand has to the territory of the British coastline that falls within its claimed 12 nautical mile arc.
I'm the MIS Manager at a small software development company. I admin about 25 Windows 2000 desktops, among other things. I discovered that Windows has a rather simple backup tool built in. I believe it is included in 98 as well as 2000.
Start / Programs / Accessories / System Tools / Backup
I tell everyone to save all important work in their My Documents folder. Most people do this already. Then at 4pm every day, that folder is backed up to our network file server. Most people don't even realize it's happening. The file server hosts a 120G RAID 5, and I'm working on getting a tape system set up to back that up. Triple-redundant baby.
As for arrays, beware of the benefits of striping. RAID 0 (striping) has the problem that the more drives you add, the less reliable your array becomes. RAID 0+1 (or RAID 10) mirrors the data as well and keeps your data secure in the event of a single disk failure (and RAID 10 can occassionally suffer multiple disk failures).
Not sure if you're saying that RAID 0+1 and RAID 10 are the same, but if so, they are not. It's a fairly common misconception, but there is a subtle difference between these two types.
RAID 0+1 requires a minimum of four disks, and is a mirrored array whose segments are RAID 0 arrays. RAID 10 also requires a minimum of four disks, but is a striped array whose segments are RAID 1 arrays. The difference is that a single drive failure will cause an entire RAID 0+1 array to become essentially a RAID 0 array. In a RAID 10 setup, multiple drives can fail simultaneously (contingent on the number of drives obviously) and the array will still function as usual.
For more information, see AC&NC's excellent RAID tutorial here.
Re:I always find myself needed a wireless monitor
on
Wireless Monitors?
·
· Score: 1
The issue is a need to work with systems when they lose their network connections. A terminal server that could connect over a serial link would be nice, but impractical for Windows machines. The KVM works, but all the systems need to be hooked up to it. We've got headless servers all over the place (I have two on the desk behind me), so that's not a very good solution everywhere.
I always find myself needed a wireless monitor
on
Wireless Monitors?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm an MIS Manager at a small company, and I very often find myself wishing that I had a portable wireless monitor. We run a lot of machines headless, and when they have problems, dragging a monitor over to them can be a real pain. What if all I had to do was get within range, turn on my display, and diagnose the problem? Man, that'd be sweet.
"I never remember which is which between perigee and apogee."
Remember Apogee Games? Makers of classics as Duke Nukem, etc? Well, if they were at their lowest point, those games would have sucked a lot more than they did. That's how I remember the difference:)
So I can't burn LinuxBIOS to my BP6 (BX chipset) motherboard and boot Linux in two seconds flat? I'm having a hard time getting information about this project on a level that I can comprehend.
Slashdot Mirror
1. That every time anyone says anything about one OS being more secure than another, especially Windows vs. Linux, Slashdot thinks this is front-page news.
2. That every time such a story MAKES the front page, thousands of people post comments.
3. That many of those those comments obviously took more than five minutes to write.
Who the christ cares what so and so says about the security of one OS over another? Particularly when the two are Windows and Linux, and particularly when the party making the statement is completely biased! This isn't news for nerds! This isn't "what IT is!" This is stupid FUD that no one should care about!
Of course, my statement isn't any more original than the ones the original post is referring to. Isn't irony fun?
Don't you hate how, when things like this are published, and you make some prediction about it and turn out to be right, no one believes you?
Well, thanks to the magic of the interweb, I can preserve my prophecy for future reference!
Thus:
THIS WILL NEVER WORK.
I can't find a link or other information on this site about a "feedback loop." How do I get on it?
"After 20 years and billions of taxpayer dollars, it never produced an operational helicopter."
This CNN article indicates otherwise...
I've been playing with Knoppix a bit recently and enjoying it, but it has pissed me off with two systems.
One has a Biostar motherboard with a Via Rhine network card on it. For some reason, though Knoppix will load the Via Rhine module for it, the card won't come up. It works fine in Debian with the same module, and I've seen posts that the module is somehow compiled slightly wrong in Knoppix. But to fix it, I need to install the Knoppix kernel to a hard drive and then recompile the module! No thanks...
The other is my laptop which has a Senao pcmcia wifi card. Again, in Debian with wlan-ng I can make the card work fine using the prism_cs driver, but Knoppix seems to really, really want to use the orinoco driver for the card. So much that, no matter WHAT I do, I can't get it to use the prism_cs driver. Highly irritating!
Oh well.
The subject says it all, really...
"Here I thought /. was the source for fair and balanced coverage."
Hah. How long have you been reading Slashdot?
Maybe they need another spy satellite.
Or, they could use it as an offensive weapon. Focus the rays of the sun and fry cities!
Or perhaps they could use it for some kind of solar collector/intesifier to provide power?
There are a couple of applications for Windows that support multiple desktops. I replaced my Explorer shell with Geoshell, which includes a plugin for that. I would never go back to the regular Explorer shell again.
OK, everyone's talking about the "props" and "alt graph" keys on the Sun keyboards. What I want to know is, what the HELL is the purpose of the " " key. No, I'm not talking about the space bar; I refer you to the UNLABELED KEY between the "Help" and "F1" keys on my Sun Type 5 keyboard. It's freaking me out!
Not more than a few year's after developing his theories of general and special relativity, Einstein realized that they weren't perfect. The simple reason behind his realization was that the theories of relativity didn't make sense when applied on a quantum scale, and the theories of quantum physics didn't make sense when applies of a relative scale. Einstein refused to believe that the universe worked in such a way that there had to be two mutually exclusive theories to explain physics on the very small and the very large scale.
Of course, the rest of the world was busy experimenting with his theories of relativity, but after he published them he quickly lost interest in their progress. He spent the rest of his life searching for what he referred to as the "unified field theory," a single theory that could properly explain quantum physics and relativity at the same time.
I'm not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, but theoretical science does interest me. Brian Greene's book, The Elegant Universe does a great job of explaining the background on this. It's worth a look.
I always thought that the idea of freeing Kevin was retarded. I'm not even interested in what he was charged with originally. The guy skipped bail and ran from the law for two years. Why? I'm sorry, but I don't buy anyone's excuses about how there was no way he could get a fair trial under our corrupt, draconian legal system.
The media, for all intents and purposes, keeps the legal system fair. If you are being unjustly accused, there are many American organizations who will work to get the word out about your case, and in these cases justice pretty much always prevails. Look at the Dimitry case; ridiculous charges are leveled at him, Slashdot posts a story about it every two weeks, and in the end he gets off. Now look at Mumia Abu-Jamal; tens of thousands of ill-informed teenagers go around spouting off nonsense about how he's innocent, a search on Google reveals numerous web sites dedicated to his cause, yet almost 20 years after his first conviction, he still sits on death row, and my impression is that that is where he belongs. I've read all the pro-Mumia web sites and I've read a lot of anti-Mumia literature as well. I just don't see any evidence myself that he's innocent.
But back to Kevin. My biggest concern right now is that he learn from his mistakes and his time in prison so that he can find a way to use his obviously great talents for positive things. Look at Kevin Poulsen, one of the more famous hackers of the early 80's. He got caught, plead guilty, served a short prison sentence, and now does great computer security research for Securityfocus.com, among others. I have respect for him. I don't have much for Mitnick.
The Big Dig _is_ really cool, although right now it's just a major construction project that is not quite complete. One of its drawbacks is that most aspects of it will become available for use right at the same time. By now the project has been underway for over ten years, and although it is mostly finished, a relatively small amount of it is being used. It just worked out that way because each part of the project relies on the completion of other parts.
Since this was such a huge undertaking, the state went all-out on the PR front. The practical upshot of this is an amazing web site that changes constantly and is always interesting to look at when you have some time to kill.
http://www.bigdig.com
I'm the MIS Manager at a small software development company. I admin about 25 Windows 2000 desktops, among other things. I discovered that Windows has a rather simple backup tool built in. I believe it is included in 98 as well as 2000.
Start / Programs / Accessories / System Tools / Backup
I tell everyone to save all important work in their My Documents folder. Most people do this already. Then at 4pm every day, that folder is backed up to our network file server. Most people don't even realize it's happening. The file server hosts a 120G RAID 5, and I'm working on getting a tape system set up to back that up. Triple-redundant baby.
You can't spell C-R-A-P without C-A-R-P.
Not sure if you're saying that RAID 0+1 and RAID 10 are the same, but if so, they are not. It's a fairly common misconception, but there is a subtle difference between these two types.
RAID 0+1 requires a minimum of four disks, and is a mirrored array whose segments are RAID 0 arrays. RAID 10 also requires a minimum of four disks, but is a striped array whose segments are RAID 1 arrays. The difference is that a single drive failure will cause an entire RAID 0+1 array to become essentially a RAID 0 array. In a RAID 10 setup, multiple drives can fail simultaneously (contingent on the number of drives obviously) and the array will still function as usual.
For more information, see AC&NC's excellent RAID tutorial here.
The pictures are also available on Yahoo, which I'd bet will be able to handle a slashdotting.
Here they are.
The issue is a need to work with systems when they lose their network connections. A terminal server that could connect over a serial link would be nice, but impractical for Windows machines. The KVM works, but all the systems need to be hooked up to it. We've got headless servers all over the place (I have two on the desk behind me), so that's not a very good solution everywhere.
I'm an MIS Manager at a small company, and I very often find myself wishing that I had a portable wireless monitor. We run a lot of machines headless, and when they have problems, dragging a monitor over to them can be a real pain. What if all I had to do was get within range, turn on my display, and diagnose the problem? Man, that'd be sweet.
Haven't we been over this already?
"I never remember which is which between perigee and apogee."
:)
Remember Apogee Games? Makers of classics as Duke Nukem, etc? Well, if they were at their lowest point, those games would have sucked a lot more than they did. That's how I remember the difference
"Thank God Sex is not licensed under GPL or everyone would get to watch! -- me"
No, if sex were licensed under the GPL, everyone would get to join in.
I don't get it.
So I can't burn LinuxBIOS to my BP6 (BX chipset) motherboard and boot Linux in two seconds flat? I'm having a hard time getting information about this project on a level that I can comprehend.