Yes, so are a lot of others. I think you're feeling space envy.
we launched the space shuttle 20 years ago today, oh and btw, some russian dude did something 40 years ago today. Seems a lot of back slapping at NASA.
Listen, you were looking at NASA's web site, and the folks at NASA are justifiably proud of their achievement, and today marks a milestone in human space exploration--two of them!
Look around NASA's web sites and I'm sure you'll find lots of space history, both Russian and American.
For us Americans, anyway, our
National Archives and Records Administration
seems to be quite aware of the issues involved in storing digital data for future retrieval. They may even have some good clue factor going (a bit amazed, myself):
To do so, they are using a new computer language called eXtensible Markup Language, or XML. It is a way of marking up electronic documents with easily understood tags instead of coding dependent on what will some day be obsolete software.
Naturally, NARA's main focus is the archiving of
documents that are mainly of historical significance to Americans.
As so many have pointed it, it's blatantly obvious that the E-3 is no spy plane. Its radar cross-section is probably akin to a football field's, and is probably seen well over 100 miles away on Chinese radar, and even has problems outmaneuvering pigeons.
Since there is no way to hide the planes, anyway, and we (the US) will no doubt continue to gather intelligence in this fashion, fighter escorts should be provided to safeguard the poor squids
within.
Much like our carrier battle groups declare a no-fly zone within a certain distance (100 miles, I think) of the carrier, a safe zone should be declared around our ELINT planes, and if the Chinese pilots want to play around, they can do so against Sidewinders. A much more even match, I think most would agree. *g*
I leave the logistical hurdles of refueling and coordination to our military brothers and sisters:-)
Explaining why the hell you have to take about *umpteen* hours in downtime upgrading kernels every so often becomes such a hassle.
Linux isn't windows, man, you don't always have to upgrade it every time a new kernel comes out in order to obtain desired performance. (ok, I'm ragging a bit much on Windoze, I admit).
From a linux box:
aaron@titan:~$ uptime
1:11pm up 366 days, 2:48, 7 users, load average: 0.01, 0.06, 0.02
aaron@titan:~$ uname -a
Linux titan 2.2.12 #13 Wed Oct 27 13:37:06 PDT 1999 i686 unknown
A year and a day! Woohoo! (pardon me, I hadn't realized until now;-)
This machine is just rock solid, and a fairly busy web server as well (the load average looks pretty good, though, eh?:). There's no need for me to even touch it. Running a number of linux boxes here, and very rarely do I worry about upgrading kernels--only on the rare ocassion that I need to support some new hardware, and often that only entails compiling a new kernel module and inserting it.
Explaining why the hell you have to take about *umpteen* hours in downtime upgrading kernels every so often...
Hrmph. Now this, I don't get at all. Why would a kernel upgrade cause "umpteen hours downtime?" You compile it, let LILO know about it, reboot, and assuming you haven't fsck'd up, your downtime is measured in seconds.
You aren't paying attention, which is completely retarded especially because you are justifying shipping Netscape for security reasons. (Tech support I can see.)
No, I'm not a windoze tech support guy, which is precisely why I am retarded in not paying attention.
The deal is, we have selected the lesser of two evils for the sake of tech support's sanity. I wish it were different, yes, believe me. The fact remains that I see lots of MSIE security discussion on Bugtraq but little regarding Netscape (maybe a search of the archives will glean more than I may realize, but I'm not in the mood right now:). Probably why I have less knowledge of Netscape's particular vulnerabilities. So, the fact that you know of them means they were published *somewhere*, eh?
Yeah, so go ahead, feel happy and surf the web with Netscape 4.7x, an acknowledge POS that has had huge security holes in the past and will in the future. Or go use Mozilla, which might be better, but nobody knows because it's hasn't been audited due to it's pre-1.0 version number.
I can't remember the last time I saw a public notice regarding a security hole in Netscape. Does this mean that nobody is looking for them? There are a plethora of people on bugtraq that feel no compunction when reporting bugs without notifying the vendor, or writing to bugtraq if the vendor fails to notify the public. I have, over the millenia it seems, seen lots and lots of discussion regarding IE bugs, and so very little about Netscape. So, yes either they are extremely good at finding their bugs (that have security implications, I'm talking about), the vast majority of which seem to be very obscure, or else there is a major emphasis on finding IE bugs and ignoring Netscape's, or else there just haven't been any recent serious security problems.
Which is it? We distribute Netscape because of the whole of IE's security history, in my estimation, plus the fact that Netscape is so less a tech support nightmare, and I hate to do MS's work for them.
You guys sound like nobody ever finds any holes in Linux.
BIND?
Man, BIND is not Linux. IE and Outlook Express are shipped with and tied into the operating system known as Windows. We give a set up CD with Netscape to our customers, but IE and Upchuck Express stay there; why risk a gotcha by uninstalling the OS's choice browser. Who knows what that will mess up?
People installing multi-user operating systems with multiple services such as Linux are supposed to know what they need to do to secure the thing. I think many will agree that, in order to more tailor Linux for the masses (and I don't think that should be a prime focus, anyway, IMO), work needs done by vendors to provide locked down installations by default, and not install potentially dangerous software without active selection. The proliferation of inexperienced system administrators putting insecure linux boxen--machines open to trivial security breaches, that is--on the 'net is certainly a dilemma. Perhaps the demand for such talent is outstripping the available experience, especially in certain overseas (from me) locales, it would seem (my IDS shows most intrusion attempts and port scans coming from Asia these days). Anyway, I'm just speaking from anecdotal evidence here, and not using any hard data. So, back on topic:
Microsoft, however, touts their OS as the choice for the masses, yet most day-to-day operations and the act of actively checking for security holes and getting patches is beyond the ability or willingness of most users.
Bugs like this have serious implications for administrators and ISPs. Hey, when Joe User has problems upgrading to the latest version of IE to fix the security hole of the week, who do you think they call? Answer: their poor Internet Service Provider since MS support costs extra, and users have come to expect almost total support from their ISP for such things.
Ask me how many double-bounces I wade through every day thanks to W95.Hybris.gen -- it ain't pretty;-)
Re:Use DJBDNS instead of BIND.
on
New Linux Worm
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· Score: 1
Seriously, it's like it was coded to stress-test syslog so it has zero error checking
Ahem, attention to detail is the key.
Zero error checking would imply, for example, that it would try to open the directory and ignore the fact that opendir() returned a null pointer.
And, having used svscan (and djbdns) for quite some time, I've yet to ever see it behave in anything like the manner you specify--as in megabytes of messages every second. If it did start spitting out error messages, then who's fault is that? (and why would you send it to syslog, anyway?)
Another important fact, using djbdns does not mean you are required to use svscan, or anything else for that matter. Personally, however, I recommend it.
How about to brighten the day for us recovering sysadmins, that have to deal with pathetic users' virus infections day in and day out? Geez.
There's nothing worse for a unix guy than to babysit windoze users. I come to slashdot for a lot of things, and one of them is for entertainment. Slashcode enables a highly-customized site, anyway, so you should take advantage of it.
Your bitching and moaning doesn't make you part of the "/. community." It's not like you are a long-time registered user, anwyay. Ahem, well I guess it's your right.
Personally, I'm putting a link to this on our web site's important announcement area, as soon as the thing recovers from the slashdot effect. That way, I can brighten the day for our Outlook-using customers. Hah! The funny thing is, I'm certain at least one customer will take it seriously. (a local radio station once broadcast that the Internet was shutting down--we were then deluged with phone calls, and I had to issue a pop3 bulletin).
Re:One of the few remnants of communist Russia
on
Mir: Rest in Pieces
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· Score: 1
I view it as a proud achievement of russian people
Let's think of this as the beginning of a new era of Russian achievement.
Being the Anti-Spam monkey at my ISP, I'd like to see the sys admins get prosecuted for leaving their mail server as an open-relay.
Well, obviously that's a bit excessive.
It's sad that the damages caused by these spammers was really due to lame system administration. Of course, it's odd to punish someone for doing what was pretty common not too long ago. We know, however, that in this day and age, you are extremely remiss in operating a mail server open to third-party relay.
Veritools apparently had days of downtime (it took them that long to remove the mail from the queue? A winbloze mail server or what? Or did it cause hardware difficulties? How?), and they were in RSS for two months. See
their RSS entry. Did they not know, or was their mail server open to relay that whole time?
IANAL, so I don't know if a defense attorney could argue that competent system administration would have saved Veritools. If not them, then it would have been some broken mail server in Korea (and why did these idiot spammers use a local company's server? That's utterly stupid).
That being said, yes slap the spammers, hard. Veritools has probably already paid enough.
Since I have a SpamCop account, which uses some of these filters, no piece of SPAM ever got through to my mailbox (and even some mailbombing was stopped;)
Ahem, I know spammers are stupid, but how stupid would one have to be to not have removed a spamcop.net address?:)
Go to some place like contest junction and flood the return email addresses back. Hey, its rude, but it works.
What the hell are you talking about? You do realize that sane spammers don't use valid return addresses, but rather forged ones, such as at the plethora of free email services like yahoo.com?
This is exactly what you don't want to do, because you've now become worse than the spammers.
It's so stupid I almost believe you a troll.
Maybe I'm not understanding, but I'm not sure how spamming causes such a loss of money?
Your entire perspective is one of the end-user; SPAM costs ISPs money. Your entire perspective is one of an American (I assume--you don't bother to say anything in your user info) that doesn't pay per-minute phone charges, like much of the rest of the world.
To me, the law isn't the answer, tighter mail servers, and tighter free email systems...
There are tens of thousands of mail servers in many parts of the world that are not secure. Good luck.
The proliferation of free email services, a la hotmail and yahoo, mean that spammers have an almost limitless supply of email addresses; since one can sign up for an account almost instantly, and since ISPs can't block yahoo.com sender addresses without risking severe customer backlash.
If the free email providers started charging clean up fees or the like, and could actually collect, that would be different.
They must have at least a 25%-50% margin on every unit sold. It's refreshing to see the/. editors post a useful link/story even though it may hurt VA's bottom line.
We purchased a VA linux 2U server awhile back. Opened the thing up after we got it and wondered what all the money was for:-) Well, it was a 2U, even, and we purchased the 1U units from Penguin Computing, because of what you found: the 1U's seemed quite expensive. The VA box has been a stable platform, I must say.
The fact is, I wanted to by from VA and Penguin as a measure of support for Linux-aware companies. Probably could have gotten the things much cheaper elsewhere, but this was the first time I was made to worry about real technical support.
But I digress! As far as these half-sized 1U units go, I'd love them if they had some horsepower. That's what I need more and more these days, lots of RAM, mucho I/O throughput, and major CPU horsepower. So, I'd have to say "no" if they aren't (and the site is slashdotted, but I read in another post that they were 486-class).
A great concept that the show's authors have begun to take way too far. How many times can the holodeck be taken over? Of course, when it happens, then the safeguards are removed, yadda yadda. I sometimes think that, as fantastic as it is, warp drive is a much more realistic technology then crowding a hundred people into a small room that somehow ends up with a huge virtual size, complete with large numbers of perfectly rendered holograms.
Also, upon return to sector 001, if I were the brass, I'd summarily court martial Voyager's officers for incompetence. This would happen after a review of the ship's logs showed just how many times they allowed the ship to be hijacked.
Until 2007!! When did 6 years from now become Permanent??
Six years is a long time, when you consider the profit margin on domain registration.
I mean, really, just how much does it cost to maintain a database, provide abysmal customer service, and maintain a.root-servers.net?
Netsol is laughing all the way to the bank, thanks to the huge profits they made in a short number of years, plus their recent buyout. Verisign will be doing the same.
Re:This project is irresponsible
on
Anticryptography
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· Score: 1
Attempts to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence are irresponsible.
Wow, your words come across as extremely pessimistic.
It's a significant waste of time and resources for a project unlikely to produce real results soon.
Goodness! Why should the difficulty of finding life elsewhere preclude us from trying? It may never produce results, but thankfully some of us humans think beyond our own meager lifetimes.
How can we be sure that they won't cause us more harm than good?
How can you be sure that a future extraterrestrial contact won't produce rewards beyond our current comprehension? Again, you're pessimistic.
What are we trying to prove? That we're the most intelligent creature around? The only creature with the vision to reach outside our planet and solar system and try to contact the unknown? That's arrogance of the highest order.
The purpose of SETI would be to try to prove that intelligent life exists somewhere else save in this little corner of the universe. It's incredibly redundant to even have to say so. For sure, any intelligence we contact will be at least as advanced as us, proably more so, and chances are, if they are listening, then they have tried to make contact themselves in some fashion.
We don't spend enough resources as it is communicating with members of our own species.
What do you think the Internet is for? Besides, why aren't you harping about wasted taxpayer money on guns and bombs? There are much more pressing matters, IMO, that need addressing. Cursing the search for an answer to a question that has captivated millions is
pretty arrogant itself.
That idiotic ape crap you spouted is barely worth mention. There, I mentioned it.
Completely agreed. People are too quick to pull the lawsuit trigger in this country. The kid's parents should have given him a talking to for disrespecting the principal and accepted the suspension.
Well, we are missing some information that may or may not change one's opinion.
#1 thing I want to know: what did his parents do to discourage further acts like this? A monetary award of $10,000 probably doesn't help. If he's a bit immature, then such a reward may reinforce his behavior. Personally, I wouldn't mind my kid satirizing the asst. principal. A satire of him having sex and smoking weed, however, I would never approve of, and despite the principal's lackluster response, my kid would get his just reward from me.
Second, what prompted the kid to think so badly about the asst. principal in the first place? If he was the lousiest jerk school official I'd ever heard of, then maybe the kid's extreme behavior had a real motive that justfied it in his mind (again, however, I would hope I had brought up my kid to think through a more reasonable response).
Pretty damn close, excepting the "Moderator" stage, where you suddenly have all of this power and try to use it wisely.
Hmm, yes I remember it well. I remember being a bit upset at all the idiot posts about some goatse.cx crap (probably got the domain wrong).
Being all AC's, I couldn't determine if it was just
one jerkoff or a conspiracy.
I really wished there had been a "go get laid" moderation tag. One really must resist the temptation to waste your precious moderation points on such idiots, though.
With bind everything is included in a nice easy package to save admins a LOT of headaches.
Using BIND hasn't saved me any headaches. That
was the whole point of my diatribe:-)
Sendmail is in a nice, easy package, too...
Having a database backend and the tools to modify
the data file do indeed make it all easy, and pretty damn painless. That means with some sanity checking I can let others around here do some of that work.
Like many things worthwile, it just takes some work and motivation. I was personally highly motivated.
It's an amazing coincidence that I was in the process of ridding our network of BIND forever when I saw Paul Vixie post to NANOG. That was last Friday evening, three days before I saw anything about this on Bugtraq.
Just last week I had decided that BIND was just too much of a hog, and the past security issues always nagged at me. I got rid of Sendmaul three years ago for the same reasons and switched our mail servers to qmail; this time I decided again to use djb's software and did the work of installing djbdns, a pretty lightweight name server that does everything I need it to do.
Some of the things I have started to like about djbdns:
Easily-parsible data file format
Fast and lightweight, you can set it to use little memory and it will still work fine (my last day using BIND it had sucked 50MB of RAM)
It's secure! While still remaining skeptical, and no matter what you think of djb, he writes damn secure code
Return different answers depending on where the question came from; i.e. internal and external ip addresses get a different (or none) answer when
looking for foo.example.com. (did bind do this? not sure)
The easily-parsible data file format allows me to keep our DNS data in a mysql database and write tools to manage things easier--via the web, command-line, whatever. I would hate to have to hack together something to read/write bind's zone files (perhaps there is a tool already, I don't know off-hand, but I don't care any more;-).
It's nice to be running a piece of software that I know will not enable the script kiddie next door access to my network.
Even though I know BIND 9 is supposed to be completely different, it still does not engender my trust enough to use it any longer.
It looks like Microsoft has set TTL for their
records to be an hour.
Considering the number of name servers that would have cached data on
microsoft.com, had they a reasonable TTL, this issue would be almost
moot, save for those servers w/o cached data (but perhaps they forward
to other servers that may).
I've never really checked to see if they update their IP addresses all
that much, which may necessitate the need for low TTLs, or maybe
they need this to help with load balancing. But I'll tell you, these
big outfits like Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Microsoft, etc, that use such short
TTLs are all using up lots of our collective bandwidth. A peek at my
caching servers logs bears this out quite clearly. Really, why do
I even bother caching data at all these days?
During the assembly phase of the ISS one of the more persistent rumors about the reason for the delays was that the U.S. components were sub-par, made by the lowest bidder and had to be improved before being useable.
Friend, the most technologically advanced military
and space program in the world is based on obtaining the world's best equipment for as good a price as possible. What's your point? The M1 Abrams was probably made by the lowest bidder--do you want to tangle with one of those?:-)
Inevitably, some stuff won't be up to par, some will be lemons, whatever. Who's procurement system is any better? Someone's, probably, but no system is going to be perfect. Anyway, to imply that the station is suffering because of how NASA procures
equipment is foolish. As far as the rumor, why embarrass yourself by posting it? It's a rumor, and a lousy one at that, I would say. Post some facts, instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, so are a lot of others. I think you're feeling space envy.
we launched the space shuttle 20 years ago today, oh and btw, some russian dude did something 40 years ago today. Seems a lot of back slapping at NASA.
Listen, you were looking at NASA's web site, and the folks at NASA are justifiably proud of their achievement, and today marks a milestone in human space exploration--two of them!
Look around NASA's web sites and I'm sure you'll find lots of space history, both Russian and American.
You're right. I've heard that such high speeds tear holes in subspace!
To do so, they are using a new computer language called eXtensible Markup Language, or XML. It is a way of marking up electronic documents with easily understood tags instead of coding dependent on what will some day be obsolete software.
Naturally, NARA's main focus is the archiving of documents that are mainly of historical significance to Americans.
Since there is no way to hide the planes, anyway, and we (the US) will no doubt continue to gather intelligence in this fashion, fighter escorts should be provided to safeguard the poor squids within.
Much like our carrier battle groups declare a no-fly zone within a certain distance (100 miles, I think) of the carrier, a safe zone should be declared around our ELINT planes, and if the Chinese pilots want to play around, they can do so against Sidewinders. A much more even match, I think most would agree. *g*
I leave the logistical hurdles of refueling and coordination to our military brothers and sisters :-)
Linux isn't windows, man, you don't always have to upgrade it every time a new kernel comes out in order to obtain desired performance. (ok, I'm ragging a bit much on Windoze, I admit). From a linux box:
A year and a day! Woohoo! (pardon me, I hadn't realized until nowThis machine is just rock solid, and a fairly busy web server as well (the load average looks pretty good, though, eh? :). There's no need for me to even touch it. Running a number of linux boxes here, and very rarely do I worry about upgrading kernels--only on the rare ocassion that I need to support some new hardware, and often that only entails compiling a new kernel module and inserting it.
Explaining why the hell you have to take about *umpteen* hours in downtime upgrading kernels every so often...
Hrmph. Now this, I don't get at all. Why would a kernel upgrade cause "umpteen hours downtime?" You compile it, let LILO know about it, reboot, and assuming you haven't fsck'd up, your downtime is measured in seconds.
No, I'm not a windoze tech support guy, which is precisely why I am retarded in not paying attention.
The deal is, we have selected the lesser of two evils for the sake of tech support's sanity. I wish it were different, yes, believe me. The fact remains that I see lots of MSIE security discussion on Bugtraq but little regarding Netscape (maybe a search of the archives will glean more than I may realize, but I'm not in the mood right now :). Probably why I have less knowledge of Netscape's particular vulnerabilities. So, the fact that you know of them means they were published *somewhere*, eh?
I can't remember the last time I saw a public notice regarding a security hole in Netscape. Does this mean that nobody is looking for them? There are a plethora of people on bugtraq that feel no compunction when reporting bugs without notifying the vendor, or writing to bugtraq if the vendor fails to notify the public. I have, over the millenia it seems, seen lots and lots of discussion regarding IE bugs, and so very little about Netscape. So, yes either they are extremely good at finding their bugs (that have security implications, I'm talking about), the vast majority of which seem to be very obscure, or else there is a major emphasis on finding IE bugs and ignoring Netscape's, or else there just haven't been any recent serious security problems.
Which is it? We distribute Netscape because of the whole of IE's security history, in my estimation, plus the fact that Netscape is so less a tech support nightmare, and I hate to do MS's work for them.
BIND?
Man, BIND is not Linux. IE and Outlook Express are shipped with and tied into the operating system known as Windows. We give a set up CD with Netscape to our customers, but IE and Upchuck Express stay there; why risk a gotcha by uninstalling the OS's choice browser. Who knows what that will mess up?
People installing multi-user operating systems with multiple services such as Linux are supposed to know what they need to do to secure the thing. I think many will agree that, in order to more tailor Linux for the masses (and I don't think that should be a prime focus, anyway, IMO), work needs done by vendors to provide locked down installations by default, and not install potentially dangerous software without active selection. The proliferation of inexperienced system administrators putting insecure linux boxen--machines open to trivial security breaches, that is--on the 'net is certainly a dilemma. Perhaps the demand for such talent is outstripping the available experience, especially in certain overseas (from me) locales, it would seem (my IDS shows most intrusion attempts and port scans coming from Asia these days). Anyway, I'm just speaking from anecdotal evidence here, and not using any hard data. So, back on topic:
Microsoft, however, touts their OS as the choice for the masses, yet most day-to-day operations and the act of actively checking for security holes and getting patches is beyond the ability or willingness of most users.
Bugs like this have serious implications for administrators and ISPs. Hey, when Joe User has problems upgrading to the latest version of IE to fix the security hole of the week, who do you think they call? Answer: their poor Internet Service Provider since MS support costs extra, and users have come to expect almost total support from their ISP for such things.
Ask me how many double-bounces I wade through every day thanks to W95.Hybris.gen -- it ain't pretty ;-)
Ahem, attention to detail is the key.
Zero error checking would imply, for example, that it would try to open the directory and ignore the fact that opendir() returned a null pointer.
And, having used svscan (and djbdns) for quite some time, I've yet to ever see it behave in anything like the manner you specify--as in megabytes of messages every second. If it did start spitting out error messages, then who's fault is that? (and why would you send it to syslog, anyway?)
Another important fact, using djbdns does not mean you are required to use svscan, or anything else for that matter. Personally, however, I recommend it.
How about to brighten the day for us recovering sysadmins, that have to deal with pathetic users' virus infections day in and day out? Geez.
There's nothing worse for a unix guy than to babysit windoze users. I come to slashdot for a lot of things, and one of them is for entertainment. Slashcode enables a highly-customized site, anyway, so you should take advantage of it.
Your bitching and moaning doesn't make you part of the "/. community." It's not like you are a long-time registered user, anwyay. Ahem, well I guess it's your right.
Personally, I'm putting a link to this on our web site's important announcement area, as soon as the thing recovers from the slashdot effect. That way, I can brighten the day for our Outlook-using customers. Hah! The funny thing is, I'm certain at least one customer will take it seriously. (a local radio station once broadcast that the Internet was shutting down--we were then deluged with phone calls, and I had to issue a pop3 bulletin).
Let's think of this as the beginning of a new era of Russian achievement.
Well, obviously that's a bit excessive.
It's sad that the damages caused by these spammers was really due to lame system administration. Of course, it's odd to punish someone for doing what was pretty common not too long ago. We know, however, that in this day and age, you are extremely remiss in operating a mail server open to third-party relay.
Veritools apparently had days of downtime (it took them that long to remove the mail from the queue? A winbloze mail server or what? Or did it cause hardware difficulties? How?), and they were in RSS for two months. See their RSS entry. Did they not know, or was their mail server open to relay that whole time?
IANAL, so I don't know if a defense attorney could argue that competent system administration would have saved Veritools. If not them, then it would have been some broken mail server in Korea (and why did these idiot spammers use a local company's server? That's utterly stupid).
That being said, yes slap the spammers, hard. Veritools has probably already paid enough.
Ahem, I know spammers are stupid, but how stupid would one have to be to not have removed a spamcop.net address? :)
What the hell are you talking about? You do realize that sane spammers don't use valid return addresses, but rather forged ones, such as at the plethora of free email services like yahoo.com?
This is exactly what you don't want to do, because you've now become worse than the spammers. It's so stupid I almost believe you a troll.
Your entire perspective is one of the end-user; SPAM costs ISPs money. Your entire perspective is one of an American (I assume--you don't bother to say anything in your user info) that doesn't pay per-minute phone charges, like much of the rest of the world.
To me, the law isn't the answer, tighter mail servers, and tighter free email systems ...
There are tens of thousands of mail servers in many parts of the world that are not secure. Good luck.
The proliferation of free email services, a la hotmail and yahoo, mean that spammers have an almost limitless supply of email addresses; since one can sign up for an account almost instantly, and since ISPs can't block yahoo.com sender addresses without risking severe customer backlash.
If the free email providers started charging clean up fees or the like, and could actually collect, that would be different.
We purchased a VA linux 2U server awhile back. Opened the thing up after we got it and wondered what all the money was for :-) Well, it was a 2U, even, and we purchased the 1U units from Penguin Computing, because of what you found: the 1U's seemed quite expensive. The VA box has been a stable platform, I must say.
The fact is, I wanted to by from VA and Penguin as a measure of support for Linux-aware companies. Probably could have gotten the things much cheaper elsewhere, but this was the first time I was made to worry about real technical support.
But I digress! As far as these half-sized 1U units go, I'd love them if they had some horsepower. That's what I need more and more these days, lots of RAM, mucho I/O throughput, and major CPU horsepower. So, I'd have to say "no" if they aren't (and the site is slashdotted, but I read in another post that they were 486-class).
A great concept that the show's authors have begun to take way too far. How many times can the holodeck be taken over? Of course, when it happens, then the safeguards are removed, yadda yadda. I sometimes think that, as fantastic as it is, warp drive is a much more realistic technology then crowding a hundred people into a small room that somehow ends up with a huge virtual size, complete with large numbers of perfectly rendered holograms.
Also, upon return to sector 001, if I were the brass, I'd summarily court martial Voyager's officers for incompetence. This would happen after a review of the ship's logs showed just how many times they allowed the ship to be hijacked.
Six years is a long time, when you consider the profit margin on domain registration.
I mean, really, just how much does it cost to maintain a database, provide abysmal customer service, and maintain a.root-servers.net?
Netsol is laughing all the way to the bank, thanks to the huge profits they made in a short number of years, plus their recent buyout. Verisign will be doing the same.
Wow, your words come across as extremely pessimistic.
It's a significant waste of time and resources for a project unlikely to produce real results soon.
Goodness! Why should the difficulty of finding life elsewhere preclude us from trying? It may never produce results, but thankfully some of us humans think beyond our own meager lifetimes.
How can we be sure that they won't cause us more harm than good?
How can you be sure that a future extraterrestrial contact won't produce rewards beyond our current comprehension? Again, you're pessimistic.
What are we trying to prove? That we're the most intelligent creature around? The only creature with the vision to reach outside our planet and solar system and try to contact the unknown? That's arrogance of the highest order.
The purpose of SETI would be to try to prove that intelligent life exists somewhere else save in this little corner of the universe. It's incredibly redundant to even have to say so. For sure, any intelligence we contact will be at least as advanced as us, proably more so, and chances are, if they are listening, then they have tried to make contact themselves in some fashion.
We don't spend enough resources as it is communicating with members of our own species.
What do you think the Internet is for? Besides, why aren't you harping about wasted taxpayer money on guns and bombs? There are much more pressing matters, IMO, that need addressing. Cursing the search for an answer to a question that has captivated millions is pretty arrogant itself.
That idiotic ape crap you spouted is barely worth mention. There, I mentioned it.
Well, we are missing some information that may or may not change one's opinion.
#1 thing I want to know: what did his parents do to discourage further acts like this? A monetary award of $10,000 probably doesn't help. If he's a bit immature, then such a reward may reinforce his behavior. Personally, I wouldn't mind my kid satirizing the asst. principal. A satire of him having sex and smoking weed, however, I would never approve of, and despite the principal's lackluster response, my kid would get his just reward from me.
Second, what prompted the kid to think so badly about the asst. principal in the first place? If he was the lousiest jerk school official I'd ever heard of, then maybe the kid's extreme behavior had a real motive that justfied it in his mind (again, however, I would hope I had brought up my kid to think through a more reasonable response).
Hmm, yes I remember it well. I remember being a bit upset at all the idiot posts about some goatse.cx crap (probably got the domain wrong). Being all AC's, I couldn't determine if it was just one jerkoff or a conspiracy. I really wished there had been a "go get laid" moderation tag. One really must resist the temptation to waste your precious moderation points on such idiots, though.
Using BIND hasn't saved me any headaches. That was the whole point of my diatribe :-)
Sendmail is in a nice, easy package, too...
Having a database backend and the tools to modify the data file do indeed make it all easy, and pretty damn painless. That means with some sanity checking I can let others around here do some of that work.
Like many things worthwile, it just takes some work and motivation. I was personally highly motivated.
Just last week I had decided that BIND was just too much of a hog, and the past security issues always nagged at me. I got rid of Sendmaul three years ago for the same reasons and switched our mail servers to qmail; this time I decided again to use djb's software and did the work of installing djbdns, a pretty lightweight name server that does everything I need it to do.
Some of the things I have started to like about djbdns:
- Easily-parsible data file format
- Fast and lightweight, you can set it to use little memory and it will still work fine (my last day using BIND it had sucked 50MB of RAM)
- It's secure! While still remaining skeptical, and no matter what you think of djb, he writes damn secure code
- Return different answers depending on where the question came from; i.e. internal and external ip addresses get a different (or none) answer when
looking for foo.example.com. (did bind do this? not sure)
The easily-parsible data file format allows me to keep our DNS data in a mysql database and write tools to manage things easier--via the web, command-line, whatever. I would hate to have to hack together something to read/write bind's zone files (perhaps there is a tool already, I don't know off-hand, but I don't care any moreEven though I know BIND 9 is supposed to be completely different, it still does not engender my trust enough to use it any longer.
Considering the number of name servers that would have cached data on microsoft.com, had they a reasonable TTL, this issue would be almost moot, save for those servers w/o cached data (but perhaps they forward to other servers that may).
I've never really checked to see if they update their IP addresses all that much, which may necessitate the need for low TTLs, or maybe they need this to help with load balancing. But I'll tell you, these big outfits like Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Microsoft, etc, that use such short TTLs are all using up lots of our collective bandwidth. A peek at my caching servers logs bears this out quite clearly. Really, why do I even bother caching data at all these days?
Friend, the most technologically advanced military and space program in the world is based on obtaining the world's best equipment for as good a price as possible. What's your point? The M1 Abrams was probably made by the lowest bidder--do you want to tangle with one of those? :-)
Inevitably, some stuff won't be up to par, some will be lemons, whatever. Who's procurement system is any better? Someone's, probably, but no system is going to be perfect. Anyway, to imply that the station is suffering because of how NASA procures equipment is foolish. As far as the rumor, why embarrass yourself by posting it? It's a rumor, and a lousy one at that, I would say. Post some facts, instead.