AMD claims it's not a bug with the Athlon processor, but with the motherboard
I got a question.
WHICH MOTHERBOARD??
I've got a bunch of customers with AMD's and NVIDIA-custom-driver setups out there in the field, KT-133A and KT266 and AMD-760 chipsets, that are seeing zero problems and wondering WTF is going on.
So am I.
Is this specific to the NVIDIA chipset or something? I've never seen this thing manifest.... what does it look like? I saw the guy say Windows went blooey... what would it do in Windows? Signal 11 the X server? Hang the box? Oops?
The world wonders here, and I'm not getting very many details.
Even after being found guilty of being an illegal monopoly, Microsoft's behavior has not changed. Regulation of their behavior, with the threat of severe criminal penalties for failure to comply, is the only remedy that I can see will curtail them. The market must be able to return to a state of competition.
Threat? Threat
Microsoft has been caught red-handed for this before. I won't comment on how they managed to settle rather than getting bitchslapped. But fool me one, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on the DOJ. The gloves should come off.
Microsoft should no longer be allowed to do business with the Federal Government.
When we the taxpayers are no longer paying Microsoft to maintain their monopoly, and everybody else that does business with FedGov (that's anybody who's not a teenie weenie business) has to use things that are compatible with what FedGov uses, Microsoft's monopoly will be broken.
Yes, I've already sent this to DOJ and to my Senator. Several weeks ago.
I rather agree with the idea of using this forum to collect ideas.... fast, effective when printed out... and shows the true power of Open Source, both from the point of view of Slash itself, and of the community.
What happens if AOL "wins" the OS war, using Linux? Now we are replacing one monopoly with another.
No, we're not. You're forgetting that while AOL will likely destroy Red Hat (thus putting a rather severe kink in my personal style, as we ship Red Hat at work), Mandrake is still out there (and for those poo-poohing Mandrake, you haven't gotten hold of 8.1, I can tell.... smooth as an android's bottom... but I digress), and there will ALWAYS be Debian.
Do I think it's going to be good for Red Hat's corporate customers? Probably. Do I think it's going to be good for Joe Sixpack trying to get end user support. Hell, no. That's what scares me, is that li'l ol' me is going to have a bitch of a time getting somebody's attention in Durham to yell about why the installer borks on certain well-known IDE raid cards...
But as has been pointed out for years now, Linux isn't a single entity. Hell, there are three viable kernels out there now, and I'm NOT using Linus', and the world hasn't ended, in fact, it's getting pretty damn good. No, I don't like the idea that one of the Top Five Evil Companies in America Today (the others being M$, DuPont, AT&T and all its progeny (it may be a whole bunch of companies, but its still one evil!), and RJ Reynolds) is taking over the biggest purveyor of Linux on the planet.... but it may well be good for Linux itself.... the purists will flee to Mandrake and Debian and SuSE, and Joe Sixpack will finally get rid of the Bill Gates virus.
It's a terrible price, but who knows, some good may come of it....
We're shipping machines with 2.4.9 preinstalled, and have had few problems; these run the gamut of mid- to high-range stuff, Intel and AMD... we did have one nasty problem involving a Mylex card, but after talking to the gentleman that wrote it, I went to 2.4.17-0.13 (Rawhide, with whatever AC did to that - it's not a Linus kernel) and pounded the hell out of them and couldn't make it die.... my intent is to make it our standard shipping kernel within a week or two...
The original article author went off and yelled about this problem and that problem in the Linus kernels, but totally left Red Hat's stuff out in the cold until the very end.... yes, I admit, right now is not a good time to be following 100% pristine Linus code. But the beauty of Linux now is what everybody feared would get really ugly: We have SEVERAL forks in the code, and at least one of them is working quite well....
I'd still rather run Alan's beta code than the best Bill can possibly offer.
Because I know how Bill Gates' mind works, and if I can't see the code, I'm not going to run it. Yes, us Linux sysadms have a rep for being paranoid bastards. Yer damn right we are, and proud of it. That's what's kept me virus-free and crack-free the last five years, watching boxes powered by You Know Who drop like flies.
Linux isn't perfect, no, but it'll take him a minimum of 2 years to get his codebase in order even with the army of people he's got.... and by then we'll have our world domination, and they'll be putting Linus' picture behind that Borg eye rather than Bill's. We might even get Mozilla to 1.0, who knows.
But, seriously. Even if l0pht and friends were to publish with much fanfare, "holy penguins! I can't crack this thing!" I still wouldn't buy it, and not just because I'm opposed to getting on this $100 every eighteen months to upgrade kick.... Not when I can run a product I personally helped design if not build. And can look at the code and see that it is good... or fix it if it's not. And there's huge advantages to being able to talk to the guy that wrote it.
Real-life situation, several weeks ago. I had a problem with the Mylex raid driver. Sent email to the guy who was listed in the headers for the source. A little email tag ensues. Eventually he sends me a patch. cut, paste, compile, init 6. Blammo. It worked. Total elapsed time, about 48 hours.
You will never get that out of Microsoft. Ever.
Then there's the principle of the thing. The Borg's stated objective is to take over the world and have it for his own. I'm not giving aid and support to that cause. I'm giving aid and support to another guy who wants to take over the world... and set it Free. I may be pagan, but there are some altars at which I will not kneel. Far more likely to torch'em.
-- Nuke'em from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
He's got a point (and I knew all that, I just wanted to get the meme out there and let folks do their own research:).... I would definitely vote for separating off TV from the rest of it, given that there's quite a bit of good stuff out there on the Small Screen, and Legend of the Rangers hopefully will be on come fall and make it into the 2003 vote... I'd hate to see that lose just because The Two Towers will be out....:)
On the other hand, BUFFY?!
You think the uproar when Harry Potter won it was bad.... BUFFY? That high-camp soap opera? Good god, man, put a stake in it!
Go ahead, mod me down, I have my asbestos underoos on, but that is not even within an order of magnitude of Harry Potter, much less Tolkein or JMS...
It's not over, bucko. With a defeatist attitude it might well be, but too many people are too fired up on both sides of the aisle for this to be over. I think we've just begun to fight.
I have a suggestion, however. Be part of the solution. Or get treated as part of the problem.
was this little snippet from the bottom of the article:
The inevitable conclusion is that these are some of the first salvos in what will be a bitter PR struggle. Microsoft may have shot itself in the foot this time, but future efforts may be a little more subtle.
(emphasis mine)
I rather hope they don't. Part of me hopes that a company so lame as to engineer a product like Exchange (that here at least has proved their undoing) won't get smart, that it will be this easy to fend them off in the future.
Part of me fears I may be wrong in harboring that hope.
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, Bill. My concern is how many you will take with you before you go.
--
And in the end, reality always tends to hit theory hard in the face when you least expect it.
-- Linus Torvalds
So do I understand correctly, the exploit depends on Shockwave creating a.COM file (Windows-specific) and thus all us non-Windows users are safe until some wiseguy decides to make one in ELF format?
Should I just go ahead and semi-permanently chmod 000 my libflashplayer.so? (The only thing I use it for on a regular basis are those lovely little Seattle Labs blurbs that get posted on User Friendly (which, ironically, are ads for WinDoze security products)....
Re:Viruses and the internet.
on
Linux Virus Alert
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Linux is not immune to internet worms, or have you forgotten the Ramen worm?
Which got about two nanometers, being one of those "click on me" kinds of things... li0n was more virulent in some ways, but not in others, as the fix was out TWO MONTHS before the virus hit....
One thing I forgot to mention, is that Linux users are far more apt to run some sort of firewall, or at least NAT, than Joe Windows.... as well as all sorts of other tricks to mitigate damage, like chroot jails, not running your daemons as root, etc.
Point being, there is a cultural resistance to virii - inherent in how we were taught to use it as much as in its technical features - amongst users of originally-multi-user operating systems that simply does not exist amongst folks who grew up masters of their domain by default. If that sounds elitist, well... let's put it this way. In the history of Unix-like operating systems, which have long had access to the Internet and the Arpanet before it, and to which college kids have had access for what, 20 years now? there have been four, count'em, F-O-U-R worms. Countless exploits, sure, but only four big memorable self-(or semi-self-)propogating beasties, only one of which (the first one, Morris') got loose and caused major damage. (Now, remember, these were the days of mostly-proprietary OS's, too, so I'm not even beating the Open Source drum here...) How many Windows or Mac beasties have there been floating around in the same twenty-year time frame? Like the stars.
If you're running around on the Big Bad Internet in God mode all the time, you're plainly and simply DOING IT WRONG. (Credit where credit is due, Win2k and OS X fix this little problem...) Running as an unprivileged user solves a whole lot of problems by default. (Not letting untrusted data run as a script (Outlook, Word, IE) will get 99% of the rest of it, IMHO...)
Security is a state of mind, a state of constant relaxed alertness, taking the time to notice where harm might lurk, and taking steps to avoid trouble altogether. You could run OpenBSD or Trustix or CDC NOS with A-level security, but if you're not keeping up with the bulletins, somebody's going to find a problem with your system eventually, and you're gonna get 0wn3d. Run what you want to... but keep up with the damn patches, and stay away from problem programs, or else... and if work or circumstance decree that you MUST run an OS in god mode to do your work, for pity's sake, BE CAREFUL. But hopefully you can get OS-X or Win2k (XP Pro? I know Home acts like 98...) or if Ghu smiles on you, something with a hash prompt... hey, Diablo II runs on Linux now, so what're you waiting for?:)
Re:Viruses and the internet.
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
OK, for one, the ubersimple install script only works for ubersimple apps and still leaves all your.o files hanging out there (not to mention he forgot the -r on cp)... for two,
Linux is vulnerable to worms because almost everyone uses the same kernel, webserver, dns, and email server.
As a matter of fact, we don't. Amongst the major latest/greatest distros there are three or four different versions of the 2.4. kernel with different patches floating about, and then there are those Potato purists (not that there's anything wrong with that!) still running 2.2, or the bleeding edgers running 2.4.16 or better... a lot of us do run apache, but some run TUX, and there are others; there are three different versions of BIND out there in addition to djbdns and dents, and sendmail is rapidly becoming passe' in favor of qmail (for those comfy with djb's scrooey licensing issues) and postfix (for those like me that aren't)....
Linux, and the Unix world in general, is so hard to write virii for *because* of the sheer heterogeny of it all. Sure, we've developed tools over the years to deal with such things (autoconf), but the fact remains that you're never really sure just what you're going to get when faced with a given machine that has "#" for its administrator prompt... in point of fact, we already *have* diversified.
And then there's the fact that most of the folks that own those hash prompts are, in fact, paranoid bastards who won't, in fact, install a random package from a random source without at least some recommendation, much less save out an ELF file, go "su", and run the darn thing.... or if he does happen to be Joe Sixpack, he's at least been shown by his guru buddy how to run whatever updater thingy the distro comes with, so he's at least got a good chance of having all the latest patches... unlike That Other OS, wherein the fix came in months before Code Red hit, and there were still a couple of million machines unpatched...
Of course, a large number of those machines were left unpatched because the "sysadm" didn't want to reboot the machine just to patch the darn thing... it still chaps my hide that patching a *service* (Universal Plug'n'Play comes to mind) requires a fscking *reboot*....
So, no, heterogeny (and good software update practices) are, in fact, already alive and well in the world of Tux and Chuck... and so are a few million pairs of eyeballs keeping watch over their systems by night just to see what they throw at us next.
College degrees have a similar effect. Besides showing that a major university considers you qualified and educated in your field, it proves that you're willing and able to achieve a difficult and long-term goal set before you by yourself. The goal isn't to prove you know your stuff, but to prove you can prove it, and hang in there long enough to impress someone much bigger than your corporate boss.
At the risk of infuriating the participants in this thread, I'm going to posit that there is an alternate route to respectability (although not the one that the writer of the original article is going to want to take).
The U.S. Military.
I have seen Uncle Sam, particularly the Navy (but other branches as well) produce more good, un-degreed but still extremely competent, engineers than any other school save my alma mater (and that's just because I knew folks that went there:), bar none. I've worked with them, I've worked for them, and they've got what it takes. And I'll probably be glad to have a few working for me one of these days.
The midshipman just chuckled to himself. He knew those signal flags said "GO NAVY BEAT ARMY"...
The communist party? Are you nuts? Islamic Jihad has nothing on the bloodiness of Papa Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao. Oh, and lest we forget? Enron is toast.
Personally, I don't like any of the fat cats, big business or big labor or big government. What I do like is personal responsibility. If you don't like somebody's labor practices, vote with your feet. Encourage others likewise. If you must organize, don't form a traditional union, form a guild. Train your people, set standards, start doing referrals. In the long run I think you'll make more for yourselves, and you won't be paying some fat cat to sit on his ass and whine every time the economy takes a hiccup, which actions tend to destroy perfectly good companies (and the union members' bank accounts into the bargain).
The party of personal responsibility is neither the GOP nor the DNC, nor the CPUSA nor the Greens. It is the Libertarian Party (http://www.lp.org). (and at least *I* told you up front whose party you're linking to...)
Now, I've finished ranting, somebody please mod that (blankety-blank) back into the stone age.
Despite this post being a monstrous troll, I think there is a good idea here...
Linux distributions need to band together and find a trusted individual who will be responsible for signing all packages and verifying that they do not contain backdoors.
I agree. I think there should be multiple independent verifiers across multiple nationalities, and you should be able to get your RPM's or debs from one country and your crypto checksums from another, and if they don't line up, you'll know something is rotten in Denmark (pun intentional). I nominate ESR, Alan Cox (that's Mister Cagey to you:), Marcelo Tosati, and I think we should have someone from continental Europe (somewhere with good privacy and crypto laws) and someone from Japan (or maybe South Korea if they have a good net connection)... the idea is that this would be done overnight by kicking off a shell script, so that these busy individuals wouldn't get bogged down with doing this, just that they're knowledgeable enough to see it done and well-known enough that there's a trust factor. I wouldn't be averse to more, but not too many more; if we let just any schmoe do it without the Internet equivalent of a background check, somebody's going to start feeding bogus data.... and of course the algorithm to generate the checksums should be GPL, and one should be able to use a known compiler source package, a known algorithm source package and a source rpm/deb and regenerate the compiler, the generator, and the package and duplicate the results.... sort of Linux From Scratch in miniature, just to check...
Of course, I wonder just how far the Fibbies will actually go in doing this. Most criminals are stupid. Hell, al Qaeda stood out like a sore thumb, it's just that most modern Americans have had their senses so dulled by television and government schools that nothing makes them paranoid anymore....
Sure, our hero slapped something together that dropped a back door in nothing flat. How many guys that smart are going to go work for what Uncle Sugar pays? How many of the ones that are smart enough actually know something about Linux?
And then there's the question of sheer manpower. Sure, they can tap your data, but who's going to go thru all that crap? They simply don't have THAT many Beowulf clusters....
If I was Ashcroft, I'd settle for netting all the Windows users, and worry about all those other OS's if and when I had a specific hard target. Once they hard-target you, you're a goner anyway; if they can't get what they want by giving you a Windows virus, they're just gonna come bust your door down. Meanwhile, I think most of us non-Windows users are relatively safe from any fishing expeditions the Fed might want to do on our hard drives.
And so it is that the umpteen zillion different distros of Linux becomes one of its advantages....
Besides, Red Hat has already let on that it's not going to play ball; remember that early release of a security patch (was it wu-ftpd?) that caused the flap a few weeks back? I think Bob Young and company had a lot of balls for doing that; it shows that his loyalty is to his users, and not to some calbal in some smoky chat room... I hope and pray and offer virgin sacrifices that it stays that way. Of course, there's also OpenBSD; Theo, cagey bastard that he is (and I *like* cagey bastards in these situations), isn't going to play cloak and dagger with *anyone*. I figure if anyone *tried* he'd raise six kinds of hell.
Bottom line, folks, there are more of us than there are of Them; they can't get to us all. And try and remember, if they do try to get to you, your first obligation is to escape and warn the rest of us. We have to hang together... lest we all hang separately.
Also contrast with Linux and internal support. Now you're to your own resources, and directly and immediately responsible for anything that goes wrong.
Tell that to IBM. Actually, tell that to Red Hat, who's actually going to be doing the support (watch that stock price go!)...
Note that NONE of this says a single thing about service levels, outages, or whatever. It's merely about adequate 'diffusion or responsibility' to keep the IT peoples' jobs protected. Microsoft provides a great 'responsibility diffusion sink,' one of the best at that.
Yes, but the whole POINT of Linux is taking responsibility for the quality of service and making excellence instead of paying thru the nose for mediocrity. Part of what's wrong with America, yea verily most of the world, is that nobody wants to take responsibility for what's going on, and the world suffers.
Fine. Y'all go ahead and suffer. I'm going to keep right on downloading the best software in the world and I'm going to take all that money I would have paid You Know Who for it and buy She Who Is Secretly An Ubergeek a nice anniversary present and we'll be very happy, thank you bloody much... meanwhile I'm just going to rub some more Corn Husker's into my calluses and start building that buttload of Linux boxes we just got orders for.
I agree with Red Hat on this one. They did people a favor by releasing the information.
As a diehard Linux guru and equal opportunity basher, I agree. My first thought was, "Way to go, Red Hat!" This security clique they've got going these days is going to bite us in the butt... unless, of course, Bob Young takes a stand and says no, we're not gonna play ball with the cabal, we're going to do this right and let folks know what the black hats already know.
Another tip for MSCE's: If Linux is your firewall, you don't have to worry about outsiders hacking on the file-sharing port... just insiders.
I'm just dreading all the spam I'm going to get as a *former* domain holder about "RESERVE YOUR HOT NEW.US DOMAIN NOW!!!!!"... I get enough bullshit about.biz and such like already....
<sigh>
--
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the
black flag, and begin slitting throats.
-- H. L. Mencken
Actually, I do "roll-my-own" and maintain a Linux distribution.I was not burned by this, because like other people "rolling their own/maintaining a distro" I do keep track of LKM posts.
Anyone else doing this type of work, will hopefully learn from this - and NOT install the latest kernel the day after it's out.
Actually, I simply keep an eye on Slashdot; if there's anything seriously wrong with a given rev, it will show up here... Funny thing, I was tinkering with 2.4.13 last night, and considered snagging.15 this morning, and I wake up to this.... heh.
But you're right, it's a Good Idea to stay about a week or two behind the Leading Bleeding Edge... and that's true for ANYTHING, Microsoft, Linux Kernel, Cisco, or even cars.... remember how the first few years of the Taurus were real lemons?
<shrug> Every once in a while this happens. It doesn't bother me. Bugs happen. They also get fixed. A lot faster than You-Know-Who...
-- Be sure you're right. Then go ahead. -- Davy Crockett
It is possible corrupt the data in an RPM file so code is executed on a Linux system when the RPM is queried for version information.
<TimAllen> Arooo? </ta>
Buffer overflow, or more MSNBC FUD?
I could see a buffer overflow happening in rpm, but really, I don't put anything past Unca Bill... particularly when Smith Barney today just put out a downgrade on MSFT that basically said the guys in Redmond have jumped the shark with XP and the XBox...
Well, the good news is that the FBI still thinks I'm stupid enough to run Windows.
The bad news is sooner or later some idiot is going to lable Open Source a terrorist movement....
Idea: Come up with an app that sits on the SMB port (139, is it?) and acts like a Windows box... I believe the word is "honey pot"? One could port-redirect one's firewall to an old 486 running this thing, so as not to overload the firewall itself, and use QoS to keep the bandwidth down... sort of a LaBrea... well, not sort of, I consider ANYBODY trying to sniff around my computers a criminal, badge or no.
it's 5:46 in the morning on the Left Coast of America; we watched from about 1:45 until 3 when one of our members' fingers went numb (hint: mittens, not gloves, unless you're manning the shutter release!)...
It wasn't quite a Fourth of July (major fireworks, for those not familiar) display, but it got up to one or two every few seconds there for a bit... the most spectacular one was nearly dead overhead, a triple trail in tight formation with a big flash at the end followed by a fourth along nearly the same track.... for something I know will be once in a lifetime, it was worth the drive. Now, I've got to go to bed before I face-plant the keyboard....
If you want to ship a computer safely, its gonna take some work. DO NOT SHIP IT WHOLE. Take everything out, even the motherboard, although you can probably leave the CPU's on the MB, but not the fans.
This is overkill.
We ship full-out turn-key systems every day...
the secret is to make sure the motherboard is parallel to the bottom of the box, and closest to it. Yeah, somebody will likely tip the thing over along the way, but _most_ of the big shocks will be absorbed by the bottom of the box. If the motherboard is down, the sudden stop simply seats everything more firmly, save the drives... make sure each drive has at least four screws in it, evenly distributed. We ship with eight in the workstation drives, four plus a hard bottom surface in rackmounts. And yes, we have the custom-cut foam bits. The trick is, however you do it, to suspend the case firmly in the center of the box-space, so that if the box comes in contact with a shoe or a floor or another box, there is either air or firm (not hard, not soft, but firm, like a really good matress) packing on the other side of the cardboard. Peanuts are for light stuff; a CD-ROM is pushing it real hard for being too heavy for peanuts. Drives come to us in this semi-soft grey foam like you see in a good gun case. (Come to think of it, a pistol case would make a good container to ship drives in.... just insure the bejeezus out of it, and carry backups on CD on your person, because somebody's liable to think it *is* a weapon... 'course, you could just put the pistol case in a second box, and it wouldn't matter if you used peanuts there, you'd have to tac-nuke the pistol case to hurt it...:)
But I digress...
Point is, you don't have to disassemble the damn thing, just figure out how to emulate the pros... I know of a store here in Seattle which sells matress-grade foam, which is what I would use if I didn't have access to professional shipping.... if you really gotta ship your multi-thousand dollar baby, it might be worth ponying up the bucks for a cheap foam futon, to which you take a good pair of scissors...
But, no, gods help you if you send it UPS Ground; we get stuff UPS all the time, but when we're hefting boxen out the door, the brownshirts know better than to come 'round. FedEx. Don't let it leave home without'em.
While books are eminently cool, I think some of the better writing of late has been done outside print. To-wit:
George Lucas. Yes, Phantom Menace wasn't all it was hyped to be. But after almost 25 years, Star Wars is still flying off the shelves....
Sir Paul McCartney. They don't make you a smelly English Knnnnnnnnnnniggit for nothing...
John Williams. Classical music for people who hate classical music. And then there's "Catina Band"....
Don Henley and Glenn Frey. Hell froze over, and they still play "Tequila Sunrise." And then they told us to Get Over It.
Andrew Lloyd Weber. CATS. Phantom. Evita. They shoulda named him "Tony."
Chuck Jones. The Grinch. Porky Pig. Wile E. Daffy. Hell, we know Daffy survived into the 23rd Century, just ask the next guy....
And last but not least, J. Michael Straczynski. Tolkien brought the saga into the 20th century. Lucas put it on the big screen. JMS brought it to the small screen, and did the same kind of pioneering with CGI that Lucas did with what became ILM...
Of course, there are others who are only recently dead that deserve mention... Charles Schultz, Gene Roddenberry (less for scriptwriting than for starting something that just won't die:), Dr. Seuss (of course, Teddy Geisel Jr. is still writing, much as Christopher Tolkein is)...
But the folks I have mentioned have, by creating outside of traditional print, created icons that have, for the most part, already stood the test of time. These aren't the only ones out there, either.... just what came off the top of my head over Sunday brunch...
--
Oh, drat these computers. They're so naughty and so complex. I could pinch them.
-- Marvin the Martian
Every programmer, sys-admin, developer, designer, de-bugger, support-desk jockey, etc. that I know DESPISES their job and can't wait to get home.
You poor bastards.
Most of the geeks I know do it because they love it. The boss had to run me off Thursday night, and had to remind me last night that today is Saturday and I don't work. Those of us who can have DSL at home and hack our own boxen at night and on rainy weekends (which happens a lot in Seattle:)... my best friend just wrote a PHP hack to assist convention schedulers in planning panels, and I'm busy learning the ins and outs of Debian and making it play nice with my Sony Vaio....
My opinion is that if you're just doing it for the money, GET OUT OF THE FIELD, and find something you really like doing. Yeah, so you'll have to trade the Beemer for a Saturn. Believe me, I'm a lot happier working for an itty bitty company doing what I love, than pimping myself to some huge faceless corporation making the big dime and hating it. Been there, done that.
Go read "What Color Is Your Parachute." Yeah, it looks dippy. It's not. Changed my life.
Geekdom is like baseball. Yeah, there are some that do it because they're good at it and can make money. (Fie on you, A-Rod.) But the best players play For Love Of The Game. (I-CHI-RO!)
My guess is that User Friendly's readership comes primarily from wanna-bes and the unemployed; people who, due to ignorance or poverty, actually want to have one of these drudge jobs.
Just because you hate your job doesn't mean that those of us that love our jobs are losers. My personal definition of success is doing what I love and getting paid for it. If you don't love what brings home the bacon, then I gotta put my hand up to my forehead with my thumb and pointy finger held at right angles, because frankly there is no sadder thing than depending on that which you hate. I don't have to have the fattest paycheck on my block. Don't want it.... the price is far too high in terms of stress and happiness.
Slashdot Mirror
WHICH MOTHERBOARD?? I've got a bunch of customers with AMD's and NVIDIA-custom-driver setups out there in the field, KT-133A and KT266 and AMD-760 chipsets, that are seeing zero problems and wondering WTF is going on.
So am I.
Is this specific to the NVIDIA chipset or something? I've never seen this thing manifest.... what does it look like? I saw the guy say Windows went blooey... what would it do in Windows? Signal 11 the X server? Hang the box? Oops?
The world wonders here, and I'm not getting very many details.
Microsoft has been caught red-handed for this before. I won't comment on how they managed to settle rather than getting bitchslapped. But fool me one, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on the DOJ. The gloves should come off.
Microsoft should no longer be allowed to do business with the Federal Government.
When we the taxpayers are no longer paying Microsoft to maintain their monopoly, and everybody else that does business with FedGov (that's anybody who's not a teenie weenie business) has to use things that are compatible with what FedGov uses, Microsoft's monopoly will be broken.
Yes, I've already sent this to DOJ and to my Senator. Several weeks ago.
I rather agree with the idea of using this forum to collect ideas.... fast, effective when printed out... and shows the true power of Open Source, both from the point of view of Slash itself, and of the community.
Do I think it's going to be good for Red Hat's corporate customers? Probably. Do I think it's going to be good for Joe Sixpack trying to get end user support. Hell, no. That's what scares me, is that li'l ol' me is going to have a bitch of a time getting somebody's attention in Durham to yell about why the installer borks on certain well-known IDE raid cards...
But as has been pointed out for years now, Linux isn't a single entity. Hell, there are three viable kernels out there now, and I'm NOT using Linus', and the world hasn't ended, in fact, it's getting pretty damn good. No, I don't like the idea that one of the Top Five Evil Companies in America Today (the others being M$, DuPont, AT&T and all its progeny (it may be a whole bunch of companies, but its still one evil!), and RJ Reynolds) is taking over the biggest purveyor of Linux on the planet.... but it may well be good for Linux itself.... the purists will flee to Mandrake and Debian and SuSE, and Joe Sixpack will finally get rid of the Bill Gates virus.
It's a terrible price, but who knows, some good may come of it....
The original article author went off and yelled about this problem and that problem in the Linus kernels, but totally left Red Hat's stuff out in the cold until the very end.... yes, I admit, right now is not a good time to be following 100% pristine Linus code. But the beauty of Linux now is what everybody feared would get really ugly: We have SEVERAL forks in the code, and at least one of them is working quite well....
I'd still rather run Alan's beta code than the best Bill can possibly offer.
Why?
Because I know how Bill Gates' mind works, and if I can't see the code, I'm not going to run it. Yes, us Linux sysadms have a rep for being paranoid bastards. Yer damn right we are, and proud of it. That's what's kept me virus-free and crack-free the last five years, watching boxes powered by You Know Who drop like flies.
Linux isn't perfect, no, but it'll take him a minimum of 2 years to get his codebase in order even with the army of people he's got.... and by then we'll have our world domination, and they'll be putting Linus' picture behind that Borg eye rather than Bill's. We might even get Mozilla to 1.0, who knows.
But, seriously. Even if l0pht and friends were to publish with much fanfare, "holy penguins! I can't crack this thing!" I still wouldn't buy it, and not just because I'm opposed to getting on this $100 every eighteen months to upgrade kick.... Not when I can run a product I personally helped design if not build. And can look at the code and see that it is good... or fix it if it's not. And there's huge advantages to being able to talk to the guy that wrote it.
Real-life situation, several weeks ago. I had a problem with the Mylex raid driver. Sent email to the guy who was listed in the headers for the source. A little email tag ensues. Eventually he sends me a patch. cut, paste, compile, init 6. Blammo. It worked. Total elapsed time, about 48 hours.
You will never get that out of Microsoft. Ever.
Then there's the principle of the thing. The Borg's stated objective is to take over the world and have it for his own. I'm not giving aid and support to that cause. I'm giving aid and support to another guy who wants to take over the world... and set it Free. I may be pagan, but there are some altars at which I will not kneel. Far more likely to torch'em.
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Nuke'em from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
On the other hand, BUFFY?!
You think the uproar when Harry Potter won it was bad.... BUFFY? That high-camp soap opera? Good god, man, put a stake in it!
Go ahead, mod me down, I have my asbestos underoos on, but that is not even within an order of magnitude of Harry Potter, much less Tolkein or JMS...
Buffy?!???
As a Worldcon 2002 member, I'm going to vote for Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter for Dramatic Presentation (you get to vote for five)...
And hey, Taco, take the time to Googlesearch for the Suggested Nominees and get the poll right, eh? Spelling too? Or is that too much to ask...
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Shipping the Penguin in Bill's backyard...
I have a suggestion, however. Be part of the solution. Or get treated as part of the problem.
I rather hope they don't. Part of me hopes that a company so lame as to engineer a product like Exchange (that here at least has proved their undoing) won't get smart, that it will be this easy to fend them off in the future.
Part of me fears I may be wrong in harboring that hope.
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, Bill. My concern is how many you will take with you before you go.
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And in the end, reality always tends to hit theory hard in the face when you least expect it.
-- Linus Torvalds
Should I just go ahead and semi-permanently chmod 000 my libflashplayer.so? (The only thing I use it for on a regular basis are those lovely little Seattle Labs blurbs that get posted on User Friendly (which, ironically, are ads for WinDoze security products)....
One thing I forgot to mention, is that Linux users are far more apt to run some sort of firewall, or at least NAT, than Joe Windows.... as well as all sorts of other tricks to mitigate damage, like chroot jails, not running your daemons as root, etc.
Point being, there is a cultural resistance to virii - inherent in how we were taught to use it as much as in its technical features - amongst users of originally-multi-user operating systems that simply does not exist amongst folks who grew up masters of their domain by default. If that sounds elitist, well... let's put it this way. In the history of Unix-like operating systems, which have long had access to the Internet and the Arpanet before it, and to which college kids have had access for what, 20 years now? there have been four, count'em, F-O-U-R worms. Countless exploits, sure, but only four big memorable self-(or semi-self-)propogating beasties, only one of which (the first one, Morris') got loose and caused major damage. (Now, remember, these were the days of mostly-proprietary OS's, too, so I'm not even beating the Open Source drum here...) How many Windows or Mac beasties have there been floating around in the same twenty-year time frame? Like the stars.
If you're running around on the Big Bad Internet in God mode all the time, you're plainly and simply DOING IT WRONG. (Credit where credit is due, Win2k and OS X fix this little problem...) Running as an unprivileged user solves a whole lot of problems by default. (Not letting untrusted data run as a script (Outlook, Word, IE) will get 99% of the rest of it, IMHO...)
Security is a state of mind, a state of constant relaxed alertness, taking the time to notice where harm might lurk, and taking steps to avoid trouble altogether. You could run OpenBSD or Trustix or CDC NOS with A-level security, but if you're not keeping up with the bulletins, somebody's going to find a problem with your system eventually, and you're gonna get 0wn3d. Run what you want to... but keep up with the damn patches, and stay away from problem programs, or else... and if work or circumstance decree that you MUST run an OS in god mode to do your work, for pity's sake, BE CAREFUL. But hopefully you can get OS-X or Win2k (XP Pro? I know Home acts like 98...) or if Ghu smiles on you, something with a hash prompt... hey, Diablo II runs on Linux now, so what're you waiting for? :)
Linux, and the Unix world in general, is so hard to write virii for *because* of the sheer heterogeny of it all. Sure, we've developed tools over the years to deal with such things (autoconf), but the fact remains that you're never really sure just what you're going to get when faced with a given machine that has "#" for its administrator prompt... in point of fact, we already *have* diversified.
And then there's the fact that most of the folks that own those hash prompts are, in fact, paranoid bastards who won't, in fact, install a random package from a random source without at least some recommendation, much less save out an ELF file, go "su", and run the darn thing.... or if he does happen to be Joe Sixpack, he's at least been shown by his guru buddy how to run whatever updater thingy the distro comes with, so he's at least got a good chance of having all the latest patches... unlike That Other OS, wherein the fix came in months before Code Red hit, and there were still a couple of million machines unpatched...
Of course, a large number of those machines were left unpatched because the "sysadm" didn't want to reboot the machine just to patch the darn thing... it still chaps my hide that patching a *service* (Universal Plug'n'Play comes to mind) requires a fscking *reboot*....
So, no, heterogeny (and good software update practices) are, in fact, already alive and well in the world of Tux and Chuck... and so are a few million pairs of eyeballs keeping watch over their systems by night just to see what they throw at us next.
The U.S. Military.
I have seen Uncle Sam, particularly the Navy (but other branches as well) produce more good, un-degreed but still extremely competent, engineers than any other school save my alma mater (and that's just because I knew folks that went there :), bar none. I've worked with them, I've worked for them, and they've got what it takes. And I'll probably be glad to have a few working for me one of these days.
The midshipman just chuckled to himself. He knew those signal flags said "GO NAVY BEAT ARMY"...
Personally, I don't like any of the fat cats, big business or big labor or big government. What I do like is personal responsibility. If you don't like somebody's labor practices, vote with your feet. Encourage others likewise. If you must organize, don't form a traditional union, form a guild. Train your people, set standards, start doing referrals. In the long run I think you'll make more for yourselves, and you won't be paying some fat cat to sit on his ass and whine every time the economy takes a hiccup, which actions tend to destroy perfectly good companies (and the union members' bank accounts into the bargain).
The party of personal responsibility is neither the GOP nor the DNC, nor the CPUSA nor the Greens. It is the Libertarian Party (http://www.lp.org). (and at least *I* told you up front whose party you're linking to...)
Now, I've finished ranting, somebody please mod that (blankety-blank) back into the stone age.
Of course, I wonder just how far the Fibbies will actually go in doing this. Most criminals are stupid. Hell, al Qaeda stood out like a sore thumb, it's just that most modern Americans have had their senses so dulled by television and government schools that nothing makes them paranoid anymore....
Sure, our hero slapped something together that dropped a back door in nothing flat. How many guys that smart are going to go work for what Uncle Sugar pays? How many of the ones that are smart enough actually know something about Linux?
And then there's the question of sheer manpower. Sure, they can tap your data, but who's going to go thru all that crap? They simply don't have THAT many Beowulf clusters....
If I was Ashcroft, I'd settle for netting all the Windows users, and worry about all those other OS's if and when I had a specific hard target. Once they hard-target you, you're a goner anyway; if they can't get what they want by giving you a Windows virus, they're just gonna come bust your door down. Meanwhile, I think most of us non-Windows users are relatively safe from any fishing expeditions the Fed might want to do on our hard drives.
And so it is that the umpteen zillion different distros of Linux becomes one of its advantages....
Besides, Red Hat has already let on that it's not going to play ball; remember that early release of a security patch (was it wu-ftpd?) that caused the flap a few weeks back? I think Bob Young and company had a lot of balls for doing that; it shows that his loyalty is to his users, and not to some calbal in some smoky chat room... I hope and pray and offer virgin sacrifices that it stays that way. Of course, there's also OpenBSD; Theo, cagey bastard that he is (and I *like* cagey bastards in these situations), isn't going to play cloak and dagger with *anyone*. I figure if anyone *tried* he'd raise six kinds of hell.
Bottom line, folks, there are more of us than there are of Them; they can't get to us all. And try and remember, if they do try to get to you, your first obligation is to escape and warn the rest of us. We have to hang together... lest we all hang separately.
Fine. Y'all go ahead and suffer. I'm going to keep right on downloading the best software in the world and I'm going to take all that money I would have paid You Know Who for it and buy She Who Is Secretly An Ubergeek a nice anniversary present and we'll be very happy, thank you bloody much... meanwhile I'm just going to rub some more Corn Husker's into my calluses and start building that buttload of Linux boxes we just got orders for.
Yeah, we're There Yet.
Another tip for MSCE's: If Linux is your firewall, you don't have to worry about outsiders hacking on the file-sharing port... just insiders.
<sigh>
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Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
-- H. L. Mencken
But you're right, it's a Good Idea to stay about a week or two behind the Leading Bleeding Edge... and that's true for ANYTHING, Microsoft, Linux Kernel, Cisco, or even cars.... remember how the first few years of the Taurus were real lemons? <shrug> Every once in a while this happens. It doesn't bother me. Bugs happen. They also get fixed. A lot faster than You-Know-Who...
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Be sure you're right. Then go ahead.
-- Davy Crockett
Buffer overflow, or more MSNBC FUD?
I could see a buffer overflow happening in rpm, but really, I don't put anything past Unca Bill... particularly when Smith Barney today just put out a downgrade on MSFT that basically said the guys in Redmond have jumped the shark with XP and the XBox...
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Shipping Penguins in Bill's backyard...
The bad news is sooner or later some idiot is going to lable Open Source a terrorist movement....
Idea: Come up with an app that sits on the SMB port (139, is it?) and acts like a Windows box... I believe the word is "honey pot"? One could port-redirect one's firewall to an old 486 running this thing, so as not to overload the firewall itself, and use QoS to keep the bandwidth down... sort of a LaBrea... well, not sort of, I consider ANYBODY trying to sniff around my computers a criminal, badge or no.
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Keep your laws off my Internet
It wasn't quite a Fourth of July (major fireworks, for those not familiar) display, but it got up to one or two every few seconds there for a bit... the most spectacular one was nearly dead overhead, a triple trail in tight formation with a big flash at the end followed by a fourth along nearly the same track.... for something I know will be once in a lifetime, it was worth the drive. Now, I've got to go to bed before I face-plant the keyboard....
Sign me,
Sleepy in Seattle
We ship full-out turn-key systems every day... the secret is to make sure the motherboard is parallel to the bottom of the box, and closest to it. Yeah, somebody will likely tip the thing over along the way, but _most_ of the big shocks will be absorbed by the bottom of the box. If the motherboard is down, the sudden stop simply seats everything more firmly, save the drives... make sure each drive has at least four screws in it, evenly distributed. We ship with eight in the workstation drives, four plus a hard bottom surface in rackmounts. And yes, we have the custom-cut foam bits. The trick is, however you do it, to suspend the case firmly in the center of the box-space, so that if the box comes in contact with a shoe or a floor or another box, there is either air or firm (not hard, not soft, but firm, like a really good matress) packing on the other side of the cardboard. Peanuts are for light stuff; a CD-ROM is pushing it real hard for being too heavy for peanuts. Drives come to us in this semi-soft grey foam like you see in a good gun case. (Come to think of it, a pistol case would make a good container to ship drives in.... just insure the bejeezus out of it, and carry backups on CD on your person, because somebody's liable to think it *is* a weapon... 'course, you could just put the pistol case in a second box, and it wouldn't matter if you used peanuts there, you'd have to tac-nuke the pistol case to hurt it... :)
But I digress...
Point is, you don't have to disassemble the damn thing, just figure out how to emulate the pros... I know of a store here in Seattle which sells matress-grade foam, which is what I would use if I didn't have access to professional shipping.... if you really gotta ship your multi-thousand dollar baby, it might be worth ponying up the bucks for a cheap foam futon, to which you take a good pair of scissors...
But, no, gods help you if you send it UPS Ground; we get stuff UPS all the time, but when we're hefting boxen out the door, the brownshirts know better than to come 'round. FedEx. Don't let it leave home without'em.
- George Lucas. Yes, Phantom Menace wasn't all it was hyped to be. But after almost 25 years, Star Wars is still flying off the shelves....
- Sir Paul McCartney. They don't make you a smelly English Knnnnnnnnnnniggit for nothing...
- John Williams. Classical music for people who hate classical music. And then there's "Catina Band"....
- Don Henley and Glenn Frey. Hell froze over, and they still play "Tequila Sunrise." And then they told us to Get Over It.
- Andrew Lloyd Weber. CATS. Phantom. Evita. They shoulda named him "Tony."
- Chuck Jones. The Grinch. Porky Pig. Wile E. Daffy. Hell, we know Daffy survived into the 23rd Century, just ask the next guy....
- And last but not least, J. Michael Straczynski. Tolkien brought the saga into the 20th century. Lucas put it on the big screen. JMS brought it to the small screen, and did the same kind of pioneering with CGI that Lucas did with what became ILM...
Of course, there are others who are only recently dead that deserve mention... Charles Schultz, Gene Roddenberry (less for scriptwriting than for starting something that just won't dieBut the folks I have mentioned have, by creating outside of traditional print, created icons that have, for the most part, already stood the test of time. These aren't the only ones out there, either.... just what came off the top of my head over Sunday brunch...
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Oh, drat these computers. They're so naughty and so complex. I could pinch them.
-- Marvin the Martian
Most of the geeks I know do it because they love it. The boss had to run me off Thursday night, and had to remind me last night that today is Saturday and I don't work. Those of us who can have DSL at home and hack our own boxen at night and on rainy weekends (which happens a lot in Seattle :)... my best friend just wrote a PHP hack to assist convention schedulers in planning panels, and I'm busy learning the ins and outs of Debian and making it play nice with my Sony Vaio....
My opinion is that if you're just doing it for the money, GET OUT OF THE FIELD, and find something you really like doing. Yeah, so you'll have to trade the Beemer for a Saturn. Believe me, I'm a lot happier working for an itty bitty company doing what I love, than pimping myself to some huge faceless corporation making the big dime and hating it. Been there, done that.
Go read "What Color Is Your Parachute." Yeah, it looks dippy. It's not. Changed my life.
Geekdom is like baseball. Yeah, there are some that do it because they're good at it and can make money. (Fie on you, A-Rod.) But the best players play For Love Of The Game. (I-CHI-RO!)
Just because you hate your job doesn't mean that those of us that love our jobs are losers. My personal definition of success is doing what I love and getting paid for it. If you don't love what brings home the bacon, then I gotta put my hand up to my forehead with my thumb and pointy finger held at right angles, because frankly there is no sadder thing than depending on that which you hate. I don't have to have the fattest paycheck on my block. Don't want it.... the price is far too high in terms of stress and happiness.Sign me, :)
Sleeping Well in Seattle