I believe you'll find that the majority of Christians actually believe that God did it in 6 days and rested on the 7th. Not slowly and over millions of years. But neither one of us have any evidence that says what this "majority opinion" is, so it's really a pointless pair of posts.
It might take another decade, but collapse it will, when it becomes almost impossible to write one line of code without infringing on someones "IP" and when coders need a full time lawyer sitting right next to them as they type.
I knew I should have gotten that patent on "Hello World."
A method in a program to instruct a beginer how to output text to a screen or console in which a simple line, often, though not limited to, "Hello World" is output.:)
That's called a tax and it already exists... A better analogy for this so called "tiered Internet" would probably be if SBC bought the sidewalk in front of your shop, Comcast bought the one in front of the side door. SBC theatens to set up a checkpoint outside your shop and take up an extra minute of each customers time before they let them in unless you give them an extra dollar per customer. For the time being, Comcast doesn't. Note that both these companies already charge the customer $30/month to use the sidewalk at all. People are, of course, going to start using Comcast. But what happens when Comcast also decides to charge you $1 per customer or else they'll put them through the time wasting procedure. Now there either needs to be a new door or you have to start paying the extortion fees to avoid loosing customers to the chicken down the street that's already paying.
If rebooting a machine causes you problematic service downtime, your environment has fundamental problems that need to be addressed.
Some of us have IT departments that have very limited budgets. I, for one, can't afford multiple redundant servers and often find myself having to combine multiple functions onto a single server. It's far from ideal, but it does happen. The difference between restarting some network service that everyone uses, and restarting an entire machine, is usually a matter of semantics. If by semantics you mean several minutes, then sure. Most services on a linux box restart very quickly. For example, restarting the SMB service is only likely to effect a user if they happen to try to open (or save, print whatever) a file at the exact second the service is down. If they try again (which most users do being used to getting strange errors on windows on minute and having things work the next) all is well. Restarting the windows server (which seems to take longer the faster computers get!) will generally result in things taking so long that a user will actually go through the trouble of walking all the way over to my desk.
Now, one could argue (correctly) that I should be doing my patches in off hours and not during peak times. However, that doesn't cover for times when IIS developes some strange problem that doesn't seem to fix itself simply restarting the IIS related services. And, to make matters worse, IIS is installed on a file server (a secondary, less used one, sure, but a file server none-the-less) because of a lack of options.
Again, this is far from the ideal situation. I would never argue that point. But this is my real world. I had to beg (seriously) to get enough money to buy a server to replace our Exchange server which was running on a P-II 333 that was at least 7 years old. Yep, that was my primary server with no service contract, no new hardware, and no free disk space for a mission critical application.
I'll probably stick with Fedora for quite some time personally. Not because it's the best or really any personal loyalty or anything like that, but simply because I know how it work and where the configuration files are. I've tried using GUI config utilities, but all of them seem to lack real power and produce horrible looking.conf files. I've even tried a mixed approach where I use the GUI for most things and edit the.conf manually for more advanced stuff, but it never seemed to work out. Granted, I've only tried a few of them (firewall, Apache, Samba) but I've had horrible luck.
What was the point of my post again? I don't remember.
Fedora upgrades always seem to have at least some fun associated with them. I remember upgrading one time and no longer being able to use my email because the IMAP server I had installed didn't get updated along with the rest of the server. I had to install and configure a new one (I also had to import all my old messages, which was a bit of a pain). I had tons of fun with my most recent upgrade to FC4. I finally got it working, but it wasn't pretty. I'm not sure if they fixed that bug for FC5 or not, but I filed it not too long after FC4 came out (IIRC).
BTW, I probably started my download at about 17:00 GMT... and it looks like the release was at 16:18 GMT. This is the first time I've ever downloaded a distro on release day.... let alone started downloading about 45 minutes after the release was official!
When I started downloading there were two seeds and only about 18 or so peers (and at least one of those was a friend of mine who I told about the release!), so it was very slow going... I was only getting about 10kb/s. Now there's 5 seeds and 4 distributed copies with 55 peers and I'm downloading at about 300kb/s. So I think the slashdotting is helping things:).
Many times it's near impossible to control others. I had a friend in High School who currently has an account on one of those classmates.com type sites (don't remember which one off the top of my head). Except he really doesn't. Somebody else signed up for an account under his name and filled his profile with all kinds of false information. In this profile "he" denounces his religion and claims that marrying his wife was a mistake. If you really study the profile, the person who made it names his sister-in-law, not his wife. However, most people wouldn't really look that close. And there's a good chance he doesn't even know this profile exists (I have no way to contact him anymore).
So relying on a Google search of anybody certainly doesn't guantee accurate results as the sites that allow people to create this content do not in any way, shape, or form verify that the person creating the profile is actually who they claim to be.
Ya, you're accountants right. I've heard it many times that the three bigest reasons for divorce in America are disagreements regarding: money, sex, and religion. Money is definately number one. And before you ask, no I don't have an external reference.
The other advantage you get from a retail shop is design. This may not be quite as imporatant with newer desktop cases, but the OEM shops generally have their computers designed in such a way that everything looks more polished. Where this really shines, however, is in the laptop world. Other than for work, I've never bought a full computer. But every laptop I've owned (OK, so I've only owned two) has definately been a retail purchase (the most recent one an Alienware).
Never underestimate the credit card company's dispute department. I've only used it once, but it worked great. Sony Online Entertainment charged me for another year of service after I didn't explicitly cancel my account (despite the fact that their account center said my account would expire on a certain date and I wouldn't be able to play anymore). I contacted the "customer service" and got nowhere despite the fact that I hadn't played the game in about 6 months. I asked for their boss, and I'll they'd give me was an email address. So I emailed them. Got nowhere. They refused to refund the money stating that their policy says absolutely no refunds. So I called Discover Card. The instantly gave me a temporary credit for the disputed amount and I'd say at this point I can call it a permanent credit (this was about 3 months ago).
It seems that credit card companies love their customers a lot more than retail places love their customers... but hey, as long as somebody's on my side:).
I have to admit, that's a pretty slick feature, no doubt about it. I wonder where the TiVO gets it's information about what comercial is playing and if it's available to other PVRs. I mean, I can see why TiVO would want to make the "More Info" thing a TiVO only feature, but it seems that it would be in the intrest of the networks to offer it as an open standard.
In the case of a doctor, I suppose it's possible that if they do something wrong they could get sued; after all, they're supposed to know better. However, if they give it their best effort and it still doesn't work out, then the law will protect them (at least in the US). That goes for non-doctors, too. If I see an accident and stop to help, I'm protected by "good samaritan" type laws. Not that I can't get sued, per se, anybody can get sued. But the case wouldn't make it very far.
I can't say for sure whether or not Afganistan is served from Baghdad or not. Part of me says that would be strange because Afganistan has been a conflict much longer than Iraq has and part of me says that Iraq has much better infrustructure than I belive Afgansitan to have with a much larger US presense so maybe it would make sense. Also, I'm not sure that the IP would do much good. Keep in mind that it's a WAN that happens to provide Internet access and goes through a firewall to get to the larger world. I wouldn't be suprised if the actual 'net access came from the states. In fact, the cheapest way to place a call from over there is to abuse the military phone system to call a stateside base and ask them to place a call to your calling card number. The call then appears to come from the states and you actually get the number of minutes your card says it's worth (otherwise you'd be luck to get 1/4 of the minutes).
It actually streams for listen.airamericaradio.com, but the "Listen" link does point to a page on the www.airamericaradio.com domain and the media windows are opened by a JavaScript "onclick" event that point to the streaming server, so I could see how they could easily be mis-categorized.
The connection into Baghdad isn't wire. At least ours certianly wasn't and we were only about 10 miles away. The military has a large array of communications equipment that allows for networks that run line of sight for really long distances. While this provides for quite a bit of resiliance and flexibility for the network, it also makes it slower than molasis. If all you want is Internet access, you're much better off using one of the MWR facilities. Also, what he's managing is most likely the theater WAN which also happens to provide access to the Internet.
There's actually very little information he can give. OPSEC and all that. That doesn't nescessarily mean that network information is classified (though some of it is) but just that in an on going information even enough unclassified information can be pieced together to form a classified picture. In light of that, it's often wise to not give any real details.
About a year ago I was stationed about 10 miles outside of Baghdad and will confirm that our "buisness" connection went through Baghdad. We did, however, also have an MWR connection. This connection was intended for personal use and as far as I was able to tell, there was no filtering on it whatsoever.
I actually just thought of an interesting point. Just what evidence did you want him to provide? A link to his units website that says he's in Iraq. Big deal, we know there are units in Iraq and that wouldn't prove anything. The exact coords where he's located right now or where his datacenter is? That'd be a huge security risk and still wouldn't prove anything. Though I'd be willing to bet he's at Camp Victory (the one in Iraq, not in Kuwait). Where in Victory? Beats me. I had no need to know that and neither do you.
I can't speak for this list at all as I'm not a Marine and I'm not currently in Iraq. However, I was in Iraq a little more than a year ago in the Army. We had, as far as I could tell, completely unrestricted Internet access (we were limited to 30 minutes at a time, but I never found a site I couldn't visit). Also, one of the alleged blocked pages doesn't make any sense to me:
Website of the Al Franken Show (www.alfrankenshow.com)
I actually met Al Franken once. Any guesses where it was? It was at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. He was there as part of a USO tour. So why would the military allow him to perform in Iraq but not allow his content to be viewed by people in Iraq?
We have a file transfer utility that most people here seem to actually like. I wrote it, so of course I have a special attachment to it (no pun intended), but most of the other users seem to like it, too. It's really fairly simple.
A user from inside our firewall visits the site, they get two options. Upload a file or permit somebody on the outside to upload a file. They choose to upload a file. They put in their email address, the recipients email address, "browse" for the file, choose how long it will be active (up to 21 days), put in a subject and optionally a personalized note. They then click the button to upload it. File uploads (I've tested with a 600MB file and it worked). If there is a form validation error (bad/missing email address, didn't use "official company" email address as the "from" address, etc.), the file is stored in/tmp and they are allowed to correct the other aspects of the form. Once everything validates, a 20 character unique random hash is generated for the recipient. An email is composed to the recipient with a link to the file exchange utility containing their hash and file id. They get one of those anoying (but nescessary) interm "downloading now" type pages and then the file starts downloading.
A user from inside our firewall visits the site, they get two options. Upload a file or permit somebody on the outside to upload a file. They choose to permit somebody on the outside. A random unique 20 character hash is generated and a link containing that hash is sent to the recipient. They are then permitted to upload a file using the same proceedures as somebody inside the firewall.
A user from outside the firewall vists the utility without clicking on one of those fancy links. They are basically told "nothing to see here, move along."
Once a file expires (at a lenght of time determined by the uploader), it can no longer be retrieved and is purged from the system durning the next nightly cron job.
Not 100% fool proof or secure, but certainly in the "good enough" range. The only complaints I can remember hearing about it was when the server was down.
I have limits for just about everything. Mailbox size limits (currently at about 300MB), data retention limits (180 days), outgoing size limits (IIRC, about 5MB). I'd love to run without the data retention and mailbox limits, but I've found that things grow so large as to become unmanagable really fast when that's done. And a lot of times, it's stuff that doesn't need to be saved, but just is because it's easier to keep it than to delete it. If you make people work, even just a little, to save stuff, they generally are a little more discerning about what they keep.
And regarding the outgoing (and incoming) size limits, I did write a utility that allows people to share files semi-securely with people on the outside via HTTP. Not the best file transfer proticol, but definately better than SMTP. When they upload a file, the script generates a random 20 character hash and emails it to the person that the user requested. This link then allows them to download the file. I also have functionality to go the other way. I, from inside the company firewall, can put your email address into a form which then sends you a special link (20 character random hash) that allows you to upload a file. Not 100% secure, but certainly better than anonymous FTP.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you'll find that the majority of Christians actually believe that God did it in 6 days and rested on the 7th. Not slowly and over millions of years. But neither one of us have any evidence that says what this "majority opinion" is, so it's really a pointless pair of posts.
I knew I should have gotten that patent on "Hello World."
A method in a program to instruct a beginer how to output text to a screen or console in which a simple line, often, though not limited to, "Hello World" is output.
Really, sweet!
;)
It's 'IAmWeToddDid'
That's called a tax and it already exists... A better analogy for this so called "tiered Internet" would probably be if SBC bought the sidewalk in front of your shop, Comcast bought the one in front of the side door. SBC theatens to set up a checkpoint outside your shop and take up an extra minute of each customers time before they let them in unless you give them an extra dollar per customer. For the time being, Comcast doesn't. Note that both these companies already charge the customer $30/month to use the sidewalk at all. People are, of course, going to start using Comcast. But what happens when Comcast also decides to charge you $1 per customer or else they'll put them through the time wasting procedure. Now there either needs to be a new door or you have to start paying the extortion fees to avoid loosing customers to the chicken down the street that's already paying.
Some of us have IT departments that have very limited budgets. I, for one, can't afford multiple redundant servers and often find myself having to combine multiple functions onto a single server. It's far from ideal, but it does happen.
The difference between restarting some network service that everyone uses, and restarting an entire machine, is usually a matter of semantics.
If by semantics you mean several minutes, then sure. Most services on a linux box restart very quickly. For example, restarting the SMB service is only likely to effect a user if they happen to try to open (or save, print whatever) a file at the exact second the service is down. If they try again (which most users do being used to getting strange errors on windows on minute and having things work the next) all is well. Restarting the windows server (which seems to take longer the faster computers get!) will generally result in things taking so long that a user will actually go through the trouble of walking all the way over to my desk.
Now, one could argue (correctly) that I should be doing my patches in off hours and not during peak times. However, that doesn't cover for times when IIS developes some strange problem that doesn't seem to fix itself simply restarting the IIS related services. And, to make matters worse, IIS is installed on a file server (a secondary, less used one, sure, but a file server none-the-less) because of a lack of options.
Again, this is far from the ideal situation. I would never argue that point. But this is my real world. I had to beg (seriously) to get enough money to buy a server to replace our Exchange server which was running on a P-II 333 that was at least 7 years old. Yep, that was my primary server with no service contract, no new hardware, and no free disk space for a mission critical application.
I'll probably stick with Fedora for quite some time personally. Not because it's the best or really any personal loyalty or anything like that, but simply because I know how it work and where the configuration files are. I've tried using GUI config utilities, but all of them seem to lack real power and produce horrible looking .conf files. I've even tried a mixed approach where I use the GUI for most things and edit the .conf manually for more advanced stuff, but it never seemed to work out. Granted, I've only tried a few of them (firewall, Apache, Samba) but I've had horrible luck.
What was the point of my post again? I don't remember.
Fedora upgrades always seem to have at least some fun associated with them. I remember upgrading one time and no longer being able to use my email because the IMAP server I had installed didn't get updated along with the rest of the server. I had to install and configure a new one (I also had to import all my old messages, which was a bit of a pain). I had tons of fun with my most recent upgrade to FC4. I finally got it working, but it wasn't pretty. I'm not sure if they fixed that bug for FC5 or not, but I filed it not too long after FC4 came out (IIRC).
BTW, I probably started my download at about 17:00 GMT... and it looks like the release was at 16:18 GMT. This is the first time I've ever downloaded a distro on release day.... let alone started downloading about 45 minutes after the release was official!
When I started downloading there were two seeds and only about 18 or so peers (and at least one of those was a friend of mine who I told about the release!), so it was very slow going... I was only getting about 10kb/s. Now there's 5 seeds and 4 distributed copies with 55 peers and I'm downloading at about 300kb/s. So I think the slashdotting is helping things :).
Presumably her boss was an avid cam-junkie and stumbled across her site. It's called a double standard :).
Many times it's near impossible to control others. I had a friend in High School who currently has an account on one of those classmates.com type sites (don't remember which one off the top of my head). Except he really doesn't. Somebody else signed up for an account under his name and filled his profile with all kinds of false information. In this profile "he" denounces his religion and claims that marrying his wife was a mistake. If you really study the profile, the person who made it names his sister-in-law, not his wife. However, most people wouldn't really look that close. And there's a good chance he doesn't even know this profile exists (I have no way to contact him anymore).
So relying on a Google search of anybody certainly doesn't guantee accurate results as the sites that allow people to create this content do not in any way, shape, or form verify that the person creating the profile is actually who they claim to be.
Ya, you're accountants right. I've heard it many times that the three bigest reasons for divorce in America are disagreements regarding: money, sex, and religion. Money is definately number one. And before you ask, no I don't have an external reference.
The other advantage you get from a retail shop is design. This may not be quite as imporatant with newer desktop cases, but the OEM shops generally have their computers designed in such a way that everything looks more polished. Where this really shines, however, is in the laptop world. Other than for work, I've never bought a full computer. But every laptop I've owned (OK, so I've only owned two) has definately been a retail purchase (the most recent one an Alienware).
Never underestimate the credit card company's dispute department. I've only used it once, but it worked great. Sony Online Entertainment charged me for another year of service after I didn't explicitly cancel my account (despite the fact that their account center said my account would expire on a certain date and I wouldn't be able to play anymore). I contacted the "customer service" and got nowhere despite the fact that I hadn't played the game in about 6 months. I asked for their boss, and I'll they'd give me was an email address. So I emailed them. Got nowhere. They refused to refund the money stating that their policy says absolutely no refunds. So I called Discover Card. The instantly gave me a temporary credit for the disputed amount and I'd say at this point I can call it a permanent credit (this was about 3 months ago).
:).
It seems that credit card companies love their customers a lot more than retail places love their customers... but hey, as long as somebody's on my side
The old HR manager where I work was named Richard Burns.
That's gotta hurt.
I have to admit, that's a pretty slick feature, no doubt about it. I wonder where the TiVO gets it's information about what comercial is playing and if it's available to other PVRs. I mean, I can see why TiVO would want to make the "More Info" thing a TiVO only feature, but it seems that it would be in the intrest of the networks to offer it as an open standard.
In the case of a doctor, I suppose it's possible that if they do something wrong they could get sued; after all, they're supposed to know better. However, if they give it their best effort and it still doesn't work out, then the law will protect them (at least in the US). That goes for non-doctors, too. If I see an accident and stop to help, I'm protected by "good samaritan" type laws. Not that I can't get sued, per se, anybody can get sued. But the case wouldn't make it very far.
So would you rather everybody got back to .com? I mean, the URL so to end in something!!
I can't say for sure whether or not Afganistan is served from Baghdad or not. Part of me says that would be strange because Afganistan has been a conflict much longer than Iraq has and part of me says that Iraq has much better infrustructure than I belive Afgansitan to have with a much larger US presense so maybe it would make sense. Also, I'm not sure that the IP would do much good. Keep in mind that it's a WAN that happens to provide Internet access and goes through a firewall to get to the larger world. I wouldn't be suprised if the actual 'net access came from the states. In fact, the cheapest way to place a call from over there is to abuse the military phone system to call a stateside base and ask them to place a call to your calling card number. The call then appears to come from the states and you actually get the number of minutes your card says it's worth (otherwise you'd be luck to get 1/4 of the minutes).
It actually streams for listen.airamericaradio.com, but the "Listen" link does point to a page on the www.airamericaradio.com domain and the media windows are opened by a JavaScript "onclick" event that point to the streaming server, so I could see how they could easily be mis-categorized.
The connection into Baghdad isn't wire. At least ours certianly wasn't and we were only about 10 miles away. The military has a large array of communications equipment that allows for networks that run line of sight for really long distances. While this provides for quite a bit of resiliance and flexibility for the network, it also makes it slower than molasis. If all you want is Internet access, you're much better off using one of the MWR facilities. Also, what he's managing is most likely the theater WAN which also happens to provide access to the Internet.
There's actually very little information he can give. OPSEC and all that. That doesn't nescessarily mean that network information is classified (though some of it is) but just that in an on going information even enough unclassified information can be pieced together to form a classified picture. In light of that, it's often wise to not give any real details.
About a year ago I was stationed about 10 miles outside of Baghdad and will confirm that our "buisness" connection went through Baghdad. We did, however, also have an MWR connection. This connection was intended for personal use and as far as I was able to tell, there was no filtering on it whatsoever.
I actually just thought of an interesting point. Just what evidence did you want him to provide? A link to his units website that says he's in Iraq. Big deal, we know there are units in Iraq and that wouldn't prove anything. The exact coords where he's located right now or where his datacenter is? That'd be a huge security risk and still wouldn't prove anything. Though I'd be willing to bet he's at Camp Victory (the one in Iraq, not in Kuwait). Where in Victory? Beats me. I had no need to know that and neither do you.
I actually met Al Franken once. Any guesses where it was? It was at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. He was there as part of a USO tour. So why would the military allow him to perform in Iraq but not allow his content to be viewed by people in Iraq?
We have a file transfer utility that most people here seem to actually like. I wrote it, so of course I have a special attachment to it (no pun intended), but most of the other users seem to like it, too. It's really fairly simple.
/tmp and they are allowed to correct the other aspects of the form. Once everything validates, a 20 character unique random hash is generated for the recipient. An email is composed to the recipient with a link to the file exchange utility containing their hash and file id. They get one of those anoying (but nescessary) interm "downloading now" type pages and then the file starts downloading.
A user from inside our firewall visits the site, they get two options. Upload a file or permit somebody on the outside to upload a file. They choose to upload a file. They put in their email address, the recipients email address, "browse" for the file, choose how long it will be active (up to 21 days), put in a subject and optionally a personalized note. They then click the button to upload it. File uploads (I've tested with a 600MB file and it worked). If there is a form validation error (bad/missing email address, didn't use "official company" email address as the "from" address, etc.), the file is stored in
A user from inside our firewall visits the site, they get two options. Upload a file or permit somebody on the outside to upload a file. They choose to permit somebody on the outside. A random unique 20 character hash is generated and a link containing that hash is sent to the recipient. They are then permitted to upload a file using the same proceedures as somebody inside the firewall.
A user from outside the firewall vists the utility without clicking on one of those fancy links. They are basically told "nothing to see here, move along."
Once a file expires (at a lenght of time determined by the uploader), it can no longer be retrieved and is purged from the system durning the next nightly cron job.
Not 100% fool proof or secure, but certainly in the "good enough" range. The only complaints I can remember hearing about it was when the server was down.
I have limits for just about everything. Mailbox size limits (currently at about 300MB), data retention limits (180 days), outgoing size limits (IIRC, about 5MB). I'd love to run without the data retention and mailbox limits, but I've found that things grow so large as to become unmanagable really fast when that's done. And a lot of times, it's stuff that doesn't need to be saved, but just is because it's easier to keep it than to delete it. If you make people work, even just a little, to save stuff, they generally are a little more discerning about what they keep.
And regarding the outgoing (and incoming) size limits, I did write a utility that allows people to share files semi-securely with people on the outside via HTTP. Not the best file transfer proticol, but definately better than SMTP. When they upload a file, the script generates a random 20 character hash and emails it to the person that the user requested. This link then allows them to download the file. I also have functionality to go the other way. I, from inside the company firewall, can put your email address into a form which then sends you a special link (20 character random hash) that allows you to upload a file. Not 100% secure, but certainly better than anonymous FTP.