crack.linuxppc.org looks to be a DSL connection which might help explain the packet loss and ping times, as well as the general speed of the site. DSL may have high throughput but the latencies are much higher than a T1 or other digital line since there is convolutional encoding to eliminate the effect of "spiky" noise.
[mcope@PhatLinus ~]$/usr/sbin/traceroute crack.linuxppc.org traceroute to crack.linuxppc.org (169.207.154.108), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets . . . 9 mae-west.nap.net (198.32.136.13) 24.966 ms 40.785 ms 26.910 ms 10 NChicago2-core0.nap.net (207.112.247.150) 119.067 ms 108.029 ms 128.163 m s 11 chi2-e3.execpc.com (207.112.240.178) 127.603 ms 151.088 ms 146.931 ms 12 2-20.atm1-0-0.rtr0.nbl-wi.execpc.net (169.207.50.165) 164.168 ms 176.232 m s 159.049 ms 13 vl2.sw1.nbl-wi.execpc.net (169.207.50.250) 166.004 ms 172.551 ms 160.264 ms 14 dslmux0.execpc.net (169.207.36.202) 140.090 ms 189.482 ms 167.609 ms 15 169.207.154.108 (169.207.154.108) 704.637 ms 390.105 ms 438.217 ms
www.windows2000test.com is, needless to say hung straight off a fat pipe at microsoft. [mcope@PhatLinus ~]$/usr/sbin/traceroute www.windows2000test.com traceroute to www.windows2000test.com (207.46.171.196), 30 hops max, 40 byte pac kets . . . 11 sl-microsoft-4-4-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.192.6) 38.162 ms 38.811 ms 38. 168 ms 12 iuscgsrfec7502-a4-00-1.cp.msft.net (207.46.190.46) 38.590 ms 39.038 ms 39 .998 ms 13 iuscb11ixc7502-a0-00-1.cp.msft.net (207.46.129.8) 39.729 ms 39.334 ms 40. 140 ms 14 iusd27nt5c7201-a2-0-1.cp.msft.net (207.46.168.68) 39.859 ms 40.737 ms 39. 445 ms 15 207.46.175.250 (207.46.175.250) 41.040 ms 44.067 ms 45.815 ms 16 * * * --
finger crack.linuxppc.org Login name: crack.linuxppc.org In real life: ???
Your finger program is trying to do exactly what you told it to do...find a user on your system with the username 'crack.linuxppc.org' you have to use the command
finger @crack.linuxppc.org to do what you thought you were doing in the first place. --
I always assumed you could force a server to stop responding or drop packets with packeting, but I didn't know that you could crash all servers that way. Is this the case? If so, can it be fixed? --
It may be a network problem on your end [mcope@PhatLinus ~]$ date Fri Aug 6 12:02:00 PDT 1999 [mcope@PhatLinus ~]$ telnet crack.linuxppc.org Trying 169.207.154.108... Connected to crack.linuxppc.org. Escape character is '^]'.
LinuxPPC 1999 default install Hello World. Welcome to crack.linuxppc.org Kernel 2.2.6-15apmac on a ppc
NOTE: LINUX DOES NOT LET YOU TELNET IN AS ROOT EVEN IF YOU HAVE THE RIGHT PASSWORD
First of all, most (all?) Linux systems do not allow root logins except at the console or through ssh. Telnet does not encrypt (or even obscure) passwords and they are remarkably easy to sniff if you are on the same subnet as the server.
Giving the root password is a taunt. Normally you have to exploit a buffer overflow or other design fault in a TCP/IP service, or get in as a normal user and exploit a buffer overflow or other design fault in a setuid program. The second is far easier in most cases since there are many setuid programs and local sysadmins may have written a few themselves. Additionally in a multi-user system many people are likely to have dictionary passwords or run unpriviledged services like CGI scripts which can be exploited.
Giving out the root password does not allow any easier access through exploiting TCP/IP services. It only means that if you get in to _any_ account it's as good as getting into root and you don't have to look for setuid bugs and such. Since there may not be any other accounts on this box other than root and there are certainly no newbie ones, it is not that great of a concession. A brute force attacker has to figure out the username and the password of a user without the benefit of finger, sendmail etc.
It would be more impressive to see every service that one can enable in the install enabled with no additional configuration. That being said "I gave out the root password and they still can't crack the box" would make a great.sig --
I agree that there will be many ISP's, partly because there are not significant returns to scale after a certain point in the provision of a connection. POP's and tech support costs scale fairly linearly with #'s of users. The biggest return to scale is in the attraction of eyes for advertising. As internet connections get faster, it will be more and more feasible to provide content only sites without an ISP backend. AOL has a huge lead in the content market and I don't see MS getting near them any time soon.
It may get down to 3 or 4 large providers... but it will not get down to only one. This is not necesarily bad. Oligarchies consist of the fiercest competitions there are (hello Coke and Pepsi). Prices will remain low, and incentives for improvement will be high.
Coke and Pepsi are, in fact a great example of the problems of Oligarchic markets. They "compete" but on rather narrow terms of trying to shift consumer preference. Neither side risks lowering prices because they would lower profits. If Pepsi and Coke were truly competing in the free market sense you would expect to see prices for their products at marginal cost + a reasonable return on capital. Needless to say, prices are comfortably above this limit (just how much does it cost to make fizzy sugar water anyway?). To get an idea of the pricing of a competitive cola, you need to only look at generic brand colas which are 20-50% less expensive. Even generic brands could would be probably be priced lower in a broader market as they now get their prices bouyed by an expensive premium cola market.
I personally believe that monopolies and oligopolies are inevitable and can be tolerated in most cases. But don't try to say that an oligopoly is better for the consumer because of fierce competition. You will usually be wrong. --
For that matter if they ported it to NetBSD, they'd at least have their game running on tons of platforms:^)
With the same binary!!!!? 'Dem NetBSD folks sure are amazing, even the machine code is portable.:-p --
Big Iron programs == real contract
on
UCITA is passed
·
· Score: 1
Big iron programs may never be open source, but I have a hard time believing that they will have such tyrannical license either. Nothing is forcing a software company to use a draconian license allowed by UCITA, although it does make doing so much easier.
I suspect that a company doing a mucho-million bucks software purchase has the power to actually _negotiate_ a _contract_ (yes, thats what these things people call shink wrapped licenses are, a non-negotiated, unsigned contract). The contract may include even stricter agreement than allowed by UCITA, but it may also include source access. If they don't negotiate a good contract than it is their fault and not the law's.
Clearly the same doesn't hold true in any software segment where there is a monopoly, relatively small purchases or in the consumer sector. Obviously UCITA is bad news in those cases, but let's not mourn the Fortune 500 yet. --
Many high quality mail order companies have a 100% satisfaction policy. L.L. Bean and Land's End come to mind. They realize that consumers will be fiercely loyal to a company that treats them with respect and acts quickly to correct even perceived problems.
A friend of my mother was getting backpacks out of the closet for her son's start of school and found that the backpack she bought the previous year from L.L. Bean for her son was badly worn and had a broken zipper. She returned it to have the zipper fixed, explaining the situation. They sent a new backpack, no questions asked. She later found the backpack that she had in fact bought the previous year (the one she returned was 5 years old). Needless to say, she has been loyal to the company ever since.
People want to be honest, but they want respect and are willing to pay more to a company that they trust and that gives them the benefit of the doubt. While I hadn't thought of it in this context previously, much of the loyalty to Open Source comes from this kind of experience. Any user that has found a bug and gotten rapid response from developers will never want to go back to the dreaded tech support line to wait an hour to get to the person that knows enough to tell you that it is a known bug and _may_ be fixed in the next release. And the satisfied customer will likely tell his friend.
The flip side of this is that bad experiences are also spread by word of mouth. We must do our best to realize that we are all the company in the open source movement and the customer deserves 100% satisfaction.
--
vaporware: the authoritative definiton
on
Beaming Money
·
· Score: 1
vaporware/vay'pr-weir/ n. Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place). See also brochureware .
I don't think I'll ever be able to make any sense out of the things people do for their religions...
I'll give you a hint. Major religions, while perhaps founded in truth and grace, and while their followers may be true believers, are inevitably guided from the top and eventually from within by the politics of power more than some divine light. --
NSI wants things to be very different from a phone book. Court's have decided that once information, like phone numbers are available to the public, there is nothing preventing anyone else from presenting the same information. In the case of a phonebook, the publisher does not even have a copyright on the format since alphabetization is considered to be trivial. NSI want's to say that their whois database is non-trivial and cannot be replicated, nor the information in it used for commercial purposes. It's a rather weak argument since the database has been traditionally accesible to the public and was generated and maintained under contract from the government. --
I'm as anti-spam as the next Joe Hacker, but let's face it. Spammers have many ways of harvesting email addresses and opening the whois database makes one avenue a little easier. Besides, who better to competently trace, filter, block or otherwise thwart spammers than domain contacts, who are presumably technically competent people. If things would be so bad, what's stopping the spammers now. A legal clause at the beginning of a whois result? At very worst, another company will repackage the whois database and sell the info in it. At that point there may be some increased spam, but what exactly prevented somebody from doing that before the whois database was "privatized." Has anyone actually gotten less spam since the privatization? In short, we all hate spam, and we all hate NSI, and most of us probably have no great love for the Commerce Department. Let's not let our fears and prejudices cloud the domain issue any more than it is. --
Starbridge System's HAL was discussed on Slashdot some time ago and fairly nicely torn apart. There are certain applications where massive FPGA arrays are quite useful, but it is not nearly as generally applicable as the web page would suggest. In case you don't want to wade through the discussion, the gist is that interchip communication and compiler design are two limiting factors. --
t's worth pointing out that the free Linux AIM and ICQ clients may also one day be illegal to use, if AOL makes it known that connections from these clients are not welcome.
It's also worth pointing out that the Tik (A Tcl/TK AIM client that works on any thing Tcl8.0 will run on) is distributed by AOL and comes with a licence that allows use of the AIM service. That's not to say that they couldn't break compatibility. They still could, but it would probably break their own clients as well. They did take the Tik page down but the links from it are still up, see discussion elsewhere in these comments.
I just downloaded Tik 0.75 and it is indeed GPL. It does not include the "disparaging to AOL" line, and in fact places no restrictions on the use of the software at all. It does provide terms of service for using the AIM service itself, which are pretty reasonable if a little humourous ("You will not decompile, reengineer or otherwise copy the Service.") Wow, I didn't even know I had the "Service's" executable. --
It's not GPL, at least the version I have (0.58). # Copyright (c) 1998 America Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved. # # AOL grants you ("Licensee") a non-exclusive, royalty free, license to use, # modify and redistribute this software in source and binary code form, # provided that i) this copyright notice and license appear on all copies of # the software; and ii) Licensee does not utilize the software in a manner # which is disparaging to AOL.
I don't think the "disparaging to AOL" part invalidates it's open-sourcedness, although it is a bit amusing. I suppose I can't bad mouth AOL using Tik. AOL must have done something very specific to disable the MSN version because Tik version 0.58 still works with no problem.
You can still access the old Tik page from google's cache (a very nice feature IMHO), although probably not for long. All the links from it are active but the original page is not. --
You don't need an SSN, just evidence of identity and work authorization and a Taxpayer ID Number (which any person can get including illegal aliens apparently). In fact the SSA will no longer give out SSN's to legal non-resident aliens. --
Maybe we're all geniuses
on
Quickie Fu
·
· Score: 1
"He's as much of a genius as I've ever met," says Mike McCue... Andreessen, only 28, spends his days surfing the Internet...
Now there's a visionary...help develop a product that allows you to waste time in the name of future watching. --
I feel as though I should be running Debian. After all, I'm no Unix newbie and all the big boys use Debian. I tried Debian briefly but I didn't like the install, especially dselect and didn't see any clear advantages to using it. I probably didn't give it a fair shake, only about a week, but I went back to using Red Hat. I felt that the aspects I liked the best in Debian, like apt, were better done in FreeBSD which also has a better installer IMHO, and I missed the "friendliness" of RedHat like linuxconf (does it work with Debian?).
As I said, I really like the idea of a completely open source OS, and I will try Debian again soon to see if I can feel the love. Let me know what I'm missing.
I feel as though I should be running Debian. After all, I'm no Unix newbie and all the big boys use Debian. I tried Debian briefly but I didn't like the install, especially dselect and didn't see any clear advantages to using it. I probably didn't give it a fair shake, only about a week, but I went back to using Red Hat. I felt that the aspects I liked the best in Debian, like apt, were better done in FreeBSD, and I missed the "friendliness" of RedHat like linuxconf (does it work with Debian?).
I heard Ralph Nader say that in a talk about engineering ethics. He also warned of the dangers of specialization in limiting your choices and leading to unquestioning acceptance of the status quo.
Neither I nor Nader really disagree with you. It is far better to have a general background including non-technical knowledge for scientists and engineers and technical knowledge for artists and humanists.
But, before you dismiss specialization altogether, condider this... can you design a CPU? The OS to run on it? The fabrication process and machinery? Mine and refine the minerals needed? Produce the chemicals? Create the marketing strategy?... Now for the monitor... --
The archived versions of Netscape Communicator are no longer on the Netscape FTP server. When did this happen? Why?
[conspiracy mode="greed"] The latest version of Communicator has AOL Instant Messenger "integrated" and AOL didn't want previous versions floating around. [/conspiracy]
[conspiracy mode="big brother"] The latest version of Communicator have a tracking mechanism ("What's Related") or some other Bad Thing. [/conspiracy]
Or else they just ran out of space.
In any case does anyone know of a FTP site that has 4.51 for Mac. 4.6 has a reputation of hosing computers (this according to my wife, a Mac tech support type).
Slashdot Mirror
crack.linuxppc.org looks to be a DSL connection which might help explain the packet loss and ping times, as well as the general speed of the site. DSL may have high throughput but the latencies are much higher than a T1 or other digital line since there is convolutional encoding to eliminate the effect of "spiky" noise.
/usr/sbin/traceroute crack.linuxppc.org
/usr/sbin/traceroute www.windows2000test.com
[mcope@PhatLinus ~]$
traceroute to crack.linuxppc.org (169.207.154.108), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
.
.
.
9 mae-west.nap.net (198.32.136.13) 24.966 ms 40.785 ms 26.910 ms
10 NChicago2-core0.nap.net (207.112.247.150) 119.067 ms 108.029 ms 128.163 m
s
11 chi2-e3.execpc.com (207.112.240.178) 127.603 ms 151.088 ms 146.931 ms
12 2-20.atm1-0-0.rtr0.nbl-wi.execpc.net (169.207.50.165) 164.168 ms 176.232 m
s 159.049 ms
13 vl2.sw1.nbl-wi.execpc.net (169.207.50.250) 166.004 ms 172.551 ms 160.264
ms
14 dslmux0.execpc.net (169.207.36.202) 140.090 ms 189.482 ms 167.609 ms
15 169.207.154.108 (169.207.154.108) 704.637 ms 390.105 ms 438.217 ms
www.windows2000test.com is, needless to say hung straight off a fat pipe at microsoft.
[mcope@PhatLinus ~]$
traceroute to www.windows2000test.com (207.46.171.196), 30 hops max, 40 byte pac
kets
.
.
.
11 sl-microsoft-4-4-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.192.6) 38.162 ms 38.811 ms 38.
168 ms
12 iuscgsrfec7502-a4-00-1.cp.msft.net (207.46.190.46) 38.590 ms 39.038 ms 39
.998 ms
13 iuscb11ixc7502-a0-00-1.cp.msft.net (207.46.129.8) 39.729 ms 39.334 ms 40.
140 ms
14 iusd27nt5c7201-a2-0-1.cp.msft.net (207.46.168.68) 39.859 ms 40.737 ms 39.
445 ms
15 207.46.175.250 (207.46.175.250) 41.040 ms 44.067 ms 45.815 ms
16 * * *
--
finger crack.linuxppc.org Login name: crack.linuxppc.org In real life: ???
Your finger program is trying to do exactly what you told it to do...find a user on your system with the username 'crack.linuxppc.org' you have to use the command
finger @crack.linuxppc.org
to do what you thought you were doing in the first place.
--
I always assumed you could force a server to stop responding or drop packets with packeting, but I didn't know that you could crash all servers that way. Is this the case? If so, can it be fixed?
--
It may be a network problem on your end
[mcope@PhatLinus ~]$ date
Fri Aug 6 12:02:00 PDT 1999
[mcope@PhatLinus ~]$ telnet crack.linuxppc.org
Trying 169.207.154.108...
Connected to crack.linuxppc.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
LinuxPPC 1999 default install
Hello World. Welcome to crack.linuxppc.org
Kernel 2.2.6-15apmac on a ppc
NOTE: LINUX DOES NOT LET YOU TELNET IN AS ROOT
EVEN IF YOU HAVE THE RIGHT PASSWORD
login:
--
First of all, most (all?) Linux systems do not allow root logins except at the console or through ssh. Telnet does not encrypt (or even obscure) passwords and they are remarkably easy to sniff if you are on the same subnet as the server.
.sig
Giving the root password is a taunt. Normally you have to exploit a buffer overflow or other design fault in a TCP/IP service, or get in as a normal user and exploit a buffer overflow or other design fault in a setuid program. The second is far easier in most cases since there are many setuid programs and local sysadmins may have written a few themselves. Additionally in a multi-user system many people are likely to have dictionary passwords or run unpriviledged services like CGI scripts which can be exploited.
Giving out the root password does not allow any easier access through exploiting TCP/IP services. It only means that if you get in to _any_ account it's as good as getting into root and you don't have to look for setuid bugs and such. Since there may not be any other accounts on this box other than root and there are certainly no newbie ones, it is not that great of a concession. A brute force attacker has to figure out the username and the password of a user without the benefit of finger, sendmail etc.
It would be more impressive to see every service that one can enable in the install enabled with no additional configuration. That being said "I gave out the root password and they still can't crack the box" would make a great
--
I agree that there will be many ISP's, partly because there are not significant returns to scale after a certain point in the provision of a connection. POP's and tech support costs scale fairly linearly with #'s of users. The biggest return to scale is in the attraction of eyes for advertising. As internet connections get faster, it will be more and more feasible to provide content only sites without an ISP backend. AOL has a huge lead in the content market and I don't see MS getting near them any time soon.
It may get down to 3 or 4 large providers... but it will not get down to only one. This is not necesarily bad. Oligarchies consist of the
fiercest competitions there are (hello Coke and Pepsi). Prices will remain low, and incentives for improvement will be high.
Coke and Pepsi are, in fact a great example of the problems of Oligarchic markets. They "compete" but on rather narrow terms of trying to shift consumer preference. Neither side risks lowering prices because they would lower profits. If Pepsi and Coke were truly competing in the free market sense you would expect to see prices for their products at marginal cost + a reasonable return on capital. Needless to say, prices are comfortably above this limit (just how much does it cost to make fizzy sugar water anyway?). To get an idea of the pricing of a competitive cola, you need to only look at generic brand colas which are 20-50% less expensive. Even generic brands could would be probably be priced lower in a broader market as they now get their prices bouyed by an expensive premium cola market.
I personally believe that monopolies and oligopolies are inevitable and can be tolerated in most cases. But don't try to say that an oligopoly is better for the consumer because of fierce competition. You will usually be wrong.
--
For that matter if they ported it to NetBSD, they'd at least have their game running on tons of :^)
:-p
platforms
With the same binary!!!!? 'Dem NetBSD folks sure are amazing, even the machine code is portable.
--
Big iron programs may never be open source, but I have a hard time believing that they will have such tyrannical license either. Nothing is forcing a software company to use a draconian license allowed by UCITA, although it does make doing so much easier.
I suspect that a company doing a mucho-million bucks software purchase has the power to actually _negotiate_ a _contract_ (yes, thats what these things people call shink wrapped licenses are, a non-negotiated, unsigned contract). The contract may include even stricter agreement than allowed by UCITA, but it may also include source access. If they don't negotiate a good contract than it is their fault and not the law's.
Clearly the same doesn't hold true in any software segment where there is a monopoly, relatively small purchases or in the consumer sector. Obviously UCITA is bad news in those cases, but let's not mourn the Fortune 500 yet.
--
Many high quality mail order companies have a 100% satisfaction policy. L.L. Bean and Land's End come to mind. They realize that consumers will be fiercely loyal to a company that treats them with respect and acts quickly to correct even perceived problems.
A friend of my mother was getting backpacks out of the closet for her son's start of school and found that the backpack she bought the previous year from L.L. Bean for her son was badly worn and had a broken zipper. She returned it to have the zipper fixed, explaining the situation. They sent a new backpack, no questions asked. She later found the backpack that she had in fact bought the previous year (the one she returned was 5 years old). Needless to say, she has been loyal to the company ever since.
People want to be honest, but they want respect and are willing to pay more to a company that they trust and that gives them the benefit of the doubt. While I hadn't thought of it in this context previously, much of the loyalty to Open Source comes from this kind of experience. Any user that has found a bug and gotten rapid response from developers will never want to go back to the dreaded tech support line to wait an hour to get to the person that knows enough to tell you that it is a known bug and _may_ be fixed in the next release. And the satisfied customer will likely tell his friend.
The flip side of this is that bad experiences are also spread by word of mouth. We must do our best to realize that we are all the company in the open source movement and the customer deserves 100% satisfaction.
--
vaporware /vay'pr-weir/ n.
Products announced far in
advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place).
See also brochureware .
So spaketh the Jargon File
--
I don't think I'll ever be able to make any sense out of the things people do for their religions...
I'll give you a hint. Major religions, while perhaps founded in truth and grace, and while their followers may be true believers, are inevitably guided from the top and eventually from within by the politics of power more than some divine light.
--
NSI wants things to be very different from a phone book. Court's have decided that once information, like phone numbers are available to the public, there is nothing preventing anyone else from presenting the same information. In the case of a phonebook, the publisher does not even have a copyright on the format since alphabetization is considered to be trivial.
NSI want's to say that their whois database is non-trivial and cannot be replicated, nor the information in it used for commercial purposes. It's a rather weak argument since the database has been traditionally accesible to the public and was generated and maintained under contract from the government.
--
I'm as anti-spam as the next Joe Hacker, but let's face it. Spammers have many ways of harvesting email addresses and opening the whois database makes one avenue a little easier. Besides, who better to competently trace, filter, block or otherwise thwart spammers than domain contacts, who are presumably technically competent people.
If things would be so bad, what's stopping the spammers now. A legal clause at the beginning of a whois result? At very worst, another company will repackage the whois database and sell the info in it. At that point there may be some increased spam, but what exactly prevented somebody from doing that before the whois database was "privatized." Has anyone actually gotten less spam since the privatization?
In short, we all hate spam, and we all hate NSI, and most of us probably have no great love for the Commerce Department. Let's not let our fears and prejudices cloud the domain issue any more than it is.
--
Starbridge System's HAL was discussed on Slashdot some time ago and fairly nicely torn apart. There are certain applications where massive FPGA arrays are quite useful, but it is not nearly as generally applicable as the web page would suggest. In case you don't want to wade through the discussion, the gist is that interchip communication and compiler design are two limiting factors.
--
t's worth pointing out that the free Linux AIM and ICQ clients may also one day be illegal to use, if AOL makes it known that connections from
these clients are not welcome.
It's also worth pointing out that the Tik (A Tcl/TK AIM client that works on any thing Tcl8.0 will run on) is distributed by AOL and comes with a licence that allows use of the AIM service. That's not to say that they couldn't break compatibility. They still could, but it would probably break their own clients as well. They did take the Tik page down but the links from it are still up, see discussion elsewhere in these comments.
--
I just downloaded Tik 0.75 and it is indeed GPL. It does not include the "disparaging to AOL" line, and in fact places no restrictions on the use of the software at all. It does provide terms of service for using the AIM service itself, which are pretty reasonable if a little humourous ("You will not
decompile, reengineer or otherwise copy the Service.") Wow, I didn't even know I had the "Service's" executable.
--
FWIW, you can get http://www.aim.aol.com/tik/tik-0.75.tar. gz and apparently all previous versions as well.
--
It's not GPL, at least the version I have (0.58).
# Copyright (c) 1998 America Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
#
# AOL grants you ("Licensee") a non-exclusive, royalty free, license to use,
# modify and redistribute this software in source and binary code form,
# provided that i) this copyright notice and license appear on all copies of
# the software; and ii) Licensee does not utilize the software in a manner
# which is disparaging to AOL.
I don't think the "disparaging to AOL" part invalidates it's open-sourcedness, although it is a bit amusing. I suppose I can't bad mouth AOL using Tik. AOL must have done something very specific to disable the MSN version because Tik version 0.58 still works with no problem.
You can still access the old Tik page from google's cache (a very nice feature IMHO), although probably not for long. All the links from it are active but the original page is not.
--
You don't need an SSN, just evidence of identity and work authorization and a Taxpayer ID Number (which any person can get including illegal aliens apparently). In fact the SSA will no longer give out SSN's to legal non-resident aliens.
--
"He's as much of a genius as I've ever met," says Mike McCue ... Andreessen, only 28, spends his days surfing the Internet...
Now there's a visionary...help develop a product that allows you to waste time in the name of future watching.
--
As I said, I really like the idea of a completely open source OS, and I will try Debian again soon to see if I can feel the love. Let me know what I'm missing.
--
I feel as though I should be running Debian. After all, I'm no Unix newbie and all the big boys use Debian. I tried Debian briefly but I didn't like the install, especially dselect and didn't see any clear advantages to using it. I probably didn't give it a fair shake, only about a week, but I went back to using Red Hat. I felt that the aspects I liked the best in Debian, like apt, were better done in FreeBSD, and I missed the "friendliness" of RedHat like linuxconf (does it work with Debian?).
--
Microsoft Developers Network.
--
I heard Ralph Nader say that in a talk about engineering ethics. He also warned of the dangers of specialization in limiting your choices and leading to unquestioning acceptance of the status quo.
Neither I nor Nader really disagree with you. It is far better to have a general background including non-technical knowledge for scientists and engineers and technical knowledge for artists and humanists.
But, before you dismiss specialization altogether, condider this... can you design a CPU? The OS to run on it? The fabrication process and machinery? Mine and refine the minerals needed? Produce the chemicals? Create the marketing strategy?... Now for the monitor...
--
The archived versions of Netscape Communicator are no longer on the Netscape FTP server. When did this happen? Why?
[conspiracy mode="greed"] The latest version of Communicator has AOL Instant Messenger "integrated" and AOL didn't want previous versions floating around. [/conspiracy]
[conspiracy mode="big brother"] The latest version of Communicator have a tracking mechanism ("What's Related") or some other Bad Thing. [/conspiracy]
Or else they just ran out of space.
In any case does anyone know of a FTP site that has 4.51 for Mac. 4.6 has a reputation of hosing computers (this according to my wife, a Mac tech support type).
--