Y'know, that's fascinating, but I'm just not THAT eager to read the original articles from which/. posts are made. Thanks for adding the tip, though. That was a good call on your part.
This guy's nameservers are down. It's not that the webserver is down; you can browse it by the IP address listed in his whois information. It's that the webserver has a default Apache start page as its default and his domain as a vhost, but none of his nameservers are up to resolve requests for his domain.
I'm amazed not only that so many posts were made "about" the story from various diagonal points of view, but without anyone actually browsing his site. It's even more interesting that his story got posted at all without the referenced content being reachable. I read a great story once at a web site that's no longer up; maybe I should post it!
The Gates Foundation contributes millions of dollars to charities worldwide already. This is nothing new for Bill, who really does have a humanitarian heart. That his business has been opportunistic to the edge of abusive is irrelevant. That he's a billionaire contributing "only" $750M is irrelevant. "Linux" will not match his dollar amount, period; we'll be lucky if any organized segment of the Linux community even matches his income percentage given to contributions, let alone his dollar amount. Last I heard, he was worth something like $60B. $750M is about 1.25% of his net worth, given to one cause. Kudos to Bill.
This new planet is 1.5x the size of Jupiter and 5x Jupiter's mass. Its orbit is 30% farther out from its star than Pluto is from our sun. To put things in perspective, Jupiter has been described as a brown dwarf star, since it is mostly gaseous and gives off more radiation than can be accounted for by solar reflection. This new planet-star relationship is closer to a binary star system than to our 365 day whirl around the block at a balmy 65 degrees F. (I make a point about the design and structure of their system in comparison to ours, so I won't argue with astronomy buffs about the particulars.) It's still interesting, but it's not like there's much possibility of a Starbucks there yet.
This idea was in the news last year, if I remember correctly. It's been around a long time at any rate. Yes, the idea proposed was that these little units are commoditized and affordable, and you leave a bad one in place until such time as you can take part of the stack apart for maintenance. All in all, though, decommissioning a bad cube is done by software at the cluster level.
I spent two years trying to relocate myself to a new job. I offered to interview at my own expense. I offered to MOVE at my own expense. No company would even talk to me. If I wasn't "Local candidates only, please", I didn't get so much as an honest read of my resume. I looked in the northeast corridor and Florida and the midwest and Texas and Colorado. I got considered for a shift job making $34K in San Antonio, which would have afforded a nice spot by the dumpster in the parking garage, but I had to move there on my own dime.
I'm not questioning this company's experience, but I'm pointing out what must have been a fascinating turn of events. Apparently, in less than twelve months time, the market has gone from unwilling to relocate anyone to needing so many relocations that they can't find people to fill them. Something about this stacks up as a recruiting industry failure of Biblical-plague proportions. All I know is that when I expressed an interest, my current boss flew me into town, wined and dined me, and had only the concern that *I* wouldn't be content to stay after being moved into town at their expense!
LM = Lan Manager in older Windows environments. LM was known to be a bit weak on password hashing. Though I can't reach the site to read the actual article, I'm going to bet my first-productive-post ranking that this is Lan Manager.
I know domestic companies that blackhole traffic from overseas IP spaces for security reasons. Not "security" as in "we don't want you reading our page", but as in "quit trying to login to our ssh daemons and run http://../scripts/cmd.exe 200 times a night from.kr and.ca and.jp". Folks, this is not news. If anything, they're safeguarding the site against intrusions. I'm surprised people overseas can even PING it.
Anything the GWB campaign wants to be public can be distributed in 10 minutes through other sources. George can say it, and John can say what a catastrophic error in judgement it was. My Yahoo! page headline will update (with Kerry's quote and "Bush optimistic"), and it'll be out there. There's nothing at the campaign HQ page that someone in.ru can't get off of a dozen other places on the web. There's nothing a foreign visitor needs from the website a week before the election. The five undecided American citizens who are overseas can get to a proxy or an embassy to read the site, and they've all voted absentee from both Florida and New York, anyway. Let it go. This is a technically and financially sound decision. Has nothing to do with the election.
I know I'm a day late, and I don't care. I clicked through to this article, something I didn't find in the top two or three screens of comments I browsed. The site hosting this "review" formats their pages with banner ads (bearing scantily-clad women, advertising some "matchmaking" service), then about a 3" deep layer of article content, then a discussion thread. There were 8 pages, but I only saw the first few. In three pages, I saw about 5 short paragraphs of text (the size of this comment), no pictures, and who-knows-how-many boobs.
Does anybody even preview these things? That article, and this post of that article, consist almost entirely of people commenting on their opinion of TurboLinux or some other distro that makes TurboLinux sux0rz. I'd pay a quarter to shake hands with one person who actually read the so-called review.
Apparently, we've seen not only the first cell phone worm/virus, but the first one with a spam engine that submits copies of itself to slashdot all day.
There was an offer from MS to get an all-inclusive CD with updates from 98 through XP, shipped free to your home. I requested it. I got email several weeks ago that my CD had been shipped. Never got here. Never heard back from them at all. If I just got the CD that MS offered to GIVE AWAY, I'd already be a step ahead of this silly game.
... that I've ever even applied to work for has endorsed telecommuting. I was laid off so many times in the last five years that I've actually interviewed for probably 40 jobs in that time. Every time I've ever asked about telecommuting, the employer's objection has been that having employees work from home daily adds a health insurance liability they cannot afford to carry. They're afraid of employees sitting at slouchy chairs with bad keyboards for a month, then filing claims for carpal tunnel problems and chiropractic work. They're afraid of employees using their less-than-industrially cleaned bathrooms and slipping on their own uncarpeted floors.
I read about telecommuting as the wave of future employment at least three times every single year. Not one employer I've ever spoken to in eleven years in the workforce would touch it with a ten foot pole.
This is a useless attention grab that won't make a difference in his LUG or in our military. That he objects to "Linux being used for killing" is, I guess one could call it, "noble". I object to using guns, bombs, barbed wire, or sticks with nails in them for "killing", but I don't object to the military's defined purpose to kill people and break stuff. Would this person prefer that our military use Windows software "for killing"? (I just love that phrase. Not "as a tool" or "in warfare" or "for military purposes", but "for killing". It conjures up images of PFCs sitting around peeling potatoes and sharpening the edges of Mandrake 7.0 CDs to use as throwing stars.) I think we tried that once, and I read about a raft of Chinese spam that got relayed to the US through the Exchange server on a docked US Navy warship on the coast of Japan. Frankly, I think I'm more comfortable with the notion of Linux being used as one of many weapons of war than I am with getting even more foreign junk mail.
Only alcohol testing? Please, people. Why not have every vehicle test us for alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, LSD, ecstasy, opiods, tryptophan, prescription drugs that have "do not drive or operate machinery" labels, IQ, a valid license, vision, unpaid parking and traffic tickets, and a properly executed parallel park before letting us on the street?
Seriously.... this is alcohol-only because it's backed by a "DWI special interest group" mentality. Not a group of people, but a mentality that progresses from a single symptom to a broad sweeping cure-all. There's already a black market for clean urine samples. It'd be even easier to provide a puff of clean air for a tube. The problem is not "drunk driving", per se; the problem is that people get away with DWI and DUI crimes that are already clearly defined, either without being caught or without a seriously prohibitive and @*$#-scary set of consequences. If people had their licenses revoked for a year on a DWI/DUI conviction, it would go farther to prevent the offense than new laws or expensive and mandatory new technology.
My employee handbook is explicitly clear that anything I post or transmit through any company-managed infrastructure is the company's property. I have no rights of privacy to any of it. This simplifies things greatly, as anything I send or read through the company mail server, whether we host it or not, is already explicitly company property.
Before anybody reacts that this seems awfully fascist or intrusive, I want to say that it provides me a real sense of security to know exactly where my boundaries are and that they are not flexible or partisan in their enforcement. That said, I'm the sysadmin whom others would call when they need so-and-so's email, and I've done exactly that on more than a few occasions already. "Company mail" is company mail.
I'm going to forego the opportunity to use my moderator points today on this story because every odd-numbered post in the list is already "Score:5 Insightful". There's just a wealth of wisdom here, and I have precious little to add.
In all fairness to those who questioned the future of X, I was momentarily confused by the announcement, too. It appears this little group of developers has finally just gotten out of the way. I'm hoping there's still a person or two to moderate code additions while the rest of the community keeps up the project.
This is a handy way for an IP address to be linked to a self-admitted number of Linux installations. I got halfway through the "at work" survey before I realized that I was quoting my company's assets and Linux installs to a web site on an IP address instead of a name. For all I know, that IP could be a guy on a cable modem, working for SCO or the BSA. No thanks. Not for me.
"I'll bet some horrifying data could be gathered on the speed with which riders' heads impact the pavement after an accident."
CowboyNeal, I know you own the page and you can write whatever you want, but you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. This is about as charming as a dog pile, and it makes less sense. First, the head would impact the ground at approximately the same speed that the bike was moving at the time of the accident. Second, cyclists who've had state-endorsed safety training or any degree of experience on the road know better than to refer to a crash as an "accident". They're not "accidents" because they're avoidable by smart riders who pay attention to their surroundings. Last, cyclists are more focused on the road than on their cell phones and their breakfast and their necktie/makeup/hair. You've demonstrated an impressive degree of narrow-minded dipstickery today. Congratulations.
I've been patching XFS support into my distro for a few months now. Let me get you caught up briefly. We had ext3 patched with acl support. That patch tends to lag behind kernel versions a little, which is not a problem if you're running a distro's standard back-ported kernel. However, I just undertook a migration on a live production box from ext3+acl to XFS on a second attached disk array, so I've been in Patch Hell for the last few weeks. I will say up front that I am not a k3rn31 h4ck0rz, but I get more done with it than probably anyone I personally know. That I got as far as I did in this story amazes me even today!
SGI ports their patch up to the latest kernel within a few days, but they have a nasty habit of removing older versions from their downloads when newer versions come out. When I only had the ext3+acl patches for kernel 2.4.20, and acl.bestbits.at was down for over a week ('grumble'), SGI only had XFS patches out for kernel 2.4.22. Andreas was kind enough to personally provide me some 2.4.22 ext3 patches. By the hardest, I got my 2.4.22 kernel built on my file server with ext3+acl and XFS.
The next DAY, I read of a root exploit in 2.4.22. The patch from kernel.org rendered my ext3+acl patches incompatible, and I'm not the type of guy yet to divvy up patches into even smaller pieces on any sort of schedule. I had to either forego backward compatibility or maintain a shell exploit in an environment where people do have shells.
I found, just yesterday, that Red Hat's newest kernel package includes xattrs and acls for ext3 and the 2.4.22 exploit's bugfix. It won't accept my xfs patch for 2.4.23 over some posix_acl and kdb conflicts. I found yesterday that SGI's latest kernel image has XFS and ext3+acl, but not the bugfix. The 2.4.23 patch broke my build. I find today that XFS is about to be added onto the native kernel tree, which just received both the bugfix and the ext3+acl extensions.
Pardon me for being morbidly curious, as this was just hysterical. I have heard people dream about zero-G sex a hundred times. I have never once heard any account of any space-faring human who came back and said "We did it, and it was fantastic". Has anybody ever heard that anyone ever even DID this?
Please differentiate for us the differences between Fedora Core and its periodic scheduled releases, Rawhide (which used to be a bleeding-edge, "unstable/testing" compilation), and the Fedora Legacy project. I've only heard of Legacy once in an online discussion, and there was a link back to another discussion. This knowledge would be invaluable to those of us who are willing to use a more recent compilation like Fedora, but are uncomfortable going completely without an established system for fishing through updated packages from hundreds of willing volunteers and setting up an install-compatible repository. The Legacy project especially interests me as a gesture toward the low-price entry point for small business servers that Red Hat is abandoning with the death of RHL9.
Slashdot Mirror
Y'know, that's fascinating, but I'm just not THAT eager to read the original articles from which /. posts are made. Thanks for adding the tip, though. That was a good call on your part.
This guy's nameservers are down. It's not that the webserver is down; you can browse it by the IP address listed in his whois information. It's that the webserver has a default Apache start page as its default and his domain as a vhost, but none of his nameservers are up to resolve requests for his domain.
I'm amazed not only that so many posts were made "about" the story from various diagonal points of view, but without anyone actually browsing his site. It's even more interesting that his story got posted at all without the referenced content being reachable. I read a great story once at a web site that's no longer up; maybe I should post it!
The Gates Foundation contributes millions of dollars to charities worldwide already. This is nothing new for Bill, who really does have a humanitarian heart. That his business has been opportunistic to the edge of abusive is irrelevant. That he's a billionaire contributing "only" $750M is irrelevant. "Linux" will not match his dollar amount, period; we'll be lucky if any organized segment of the Linux community even matches his income percentage given to contributions, let alone his dollar amount. Last I heard, he was worth something like $60B. $750M is about 1.25% of his net worth, given to one cause. Kudos to Bill.
This new planet is 1.5x the size of Jupiter and 5x Jupiter's mass. Its orbit is 30% farther out from its star than Pluto is from our sun. To put things in perspective, Jupiter has been described as a brown dwarf star, since it is mostly gaseous and gives off more radiation than can be accounted for by solar reflection. This new planet-star relationship is closer to a binary star system than to our 365 day whirl around the block at a balmy 65 degrees F. (I make a point about the design and structure of their system in comparison to ours, so I won't argue with astronomy buffs about the particulars.) It's still interesting, but it's not like there's much possibility of a Starbucks there yet.
This idea was in the news last year, if I remember correctly. It's been around a long time at any rate. Yes, the idea proposed was that these little units are commoditized and affordable, and you leave a bad one in place until such time as you can take part of the stack apart for maintenance. All in all, though, decommissioning a bad cube is done by software at the cluster level.
I spent two years trying to relocate myself to a new job. I offered to interview at my own expense. I offered to MOVE at my own expense. No company would even talk to me. If I wasn't "Local candidates only, please", I didn't get so much as an honest read of my resume. I looked in the northeast corridor and Florida and the midwest and Texas and Colorado. I got considered for a shift job making $34K in San Antonio, which would have afforded a nice spot by the dumpster in the parking garage, but I had to move there on my own dime.
I'm not questioning this company's experience, but I'm pointing out what must have been a fascinating turn of events. Apparently, in less than twelve months time, the market has gone from unwilling to relocate anyone to needing so many relocations that they can't find people to fill them. Something about this stacks up as a recruiting industry failure of Biblical-plague proportions. All I know is that when I expressed an interest, my current boss flew me into town, wined and dined me, and had only the concern that *I* wouldn't be content to stay after being moved into town at their expense!
LM = Lan Manager in older Windows environments. LM was known to be a bit weak on password hashing. Though I can't reach the site to read the actual article, I'm going to bet my first-productive-post ranking that this is Lan Manager.
I know domestic companies that blackhole traffic from overseas IP spaces for security reasons. Not "security" as in "we don't want you reading our page", but as in "quit trying to login to our ssh daemons and run http://../scripts/cmd.exe 200 times a night from .kr and .ca and .jp". Folks, this is not news. If anything, they're safeguarding the site against intrusions. I'm surprised people overseas can even PING it.
.ru can't get off of a dozen other places on the web. There's nothing a foreign visitor needs from the website a week before the election. The five undecided American citizens who are overseas can get to a proxy or an embassy to read the site, and they've all voted absentee from both Florida and New York, anyway. Let it go. This is a technically and financially sound decision. Has nothing to do with the election.
Anything the GWB campaign wants to be public can be distributed in 10 minutes through other sources. George can say it, and John can say what a catastrophic error in judgement it was. My Yahoo! page headline will update (with Kerry's quote and "Bush optimistic"), and it'll be out there. There's nothing at the campaign HQ page that someone in
I know I'm a day late, and I don't care. I clicked through to this article, something I didn't find in the top two or three screens of comments I browsed. The site hosting this "review" formats their pages with banner ads (bearing scantily-clad women, advertising some "matchmaking" service), then about a 3" deep layer of article content, then a discussion thread. There were 8 pages, but I only saw the first few. In three pages, I saw about 5 short paragraphs of text (the size of this comment), no pictures, and who-knows-how-many boobs.
Does anybody even preview these things? That article, and this post of that article, consist almost entirely of people commenting on their opinion of TurboLinux or some other distro that makes TurboLinux sux0rz. I'd pay a quarter to shake hands with one person who actually read the so-called review.
Apparently, we've seen not only the first cell phone worm/virus, but the first one with a spam engine that submits copies of itself to slashdot all day.
There was an offer from MS to get an all-inclusive CD with updates from 98 through XP, shipped free to your home. I requested it. I got email several weeks ago that my CD had been shipped. Never got here. Never heard back from them at all. If I just got the CD that MS offered to GIVE AWAY, I'd already be a step ahead of this silly game.
... that I've ever even applied to work for has endorsed telecommuting. I was laid off so many times in the last five years that I've actually interviewed for probably 40 jobs in that time. Every time I've ever asked about telecommuting, the employer's objection has been that having employees work from home daily adds a health insurance liability they cannot afford to carry. They're afraid of employees sitting at slouchy chairs with bad keyboards for a month, then filing claims for carpal tunnel problems and chiropractic work. They're afraid of employees using their less-than-industrially cleaned bathrooms and slipping on their own uncarpeted floors.
I read about telecommuting as the wave of future employment at least three times every single year. Not one employer I've ever spoken to in eleven years in the workforce would touch it with a ten foot pole.
... the (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/07/20332 53) last time this question was asked.
This is a useless attention grab that won't make a difference in his LUG or in our military. That he objects to "Linux being used for killing" is, I guess one could call it, "noble". I object to using guns, bombs, barbed wire, or sticks with nails in them for "killing", but I don't object to the military's defined purpose to kill people and break stuff. Would this person prefer that our military use Windows software "for killing"? (I just love that phrase. Not "as a tool" or "in warfare" or "for military purposes", but "for killing". It conjures up images of PFCs sitting around peeling potatoes and sharpening the edges of Mandrake 7.0 CDs to use as throwing stars.) I think we tried that once, and I read about a raft of Chinese spam that got relayed to the US through the Exchange server on a docked US Navy warship on the coast of Japan. Frankly, I think I'm more comfortable with the notion of Linux being used as one of many weapons of war than I am with getting even more foreign junk mail.
... to send the law offices of Canter and Siegel about 5 million unsolicited emails. Who's with me?
Only alcohol testing? Please, people. Why not have every vehicle test us for alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, LSD, ecstasy, opiods, tryptophan, prescription drugs that have "do not drive or operate machinery" labels, IQ, a valid license, vision, unpaid parking and traffic tickets, and a properly executed parallel park before letting us on the street?
Seriously.... this is alcohol-only because it's backed by a "DWI special interest group" mentality. Not a group of people, but a mentality that progresses from a single symptom to a broad sweeping cure-all. There's already a black market for clean urine samples. It'd be even easier to provide a puff of clean air for a tube. The problem is not "drunk driving", per se; the problem is that people get away with DWI and DUI crimes that are already clearly defined, either without being caught or without a seriously prohibitive and @*$#-scary set of consequences. If people had their licenses revoked for a year on a DWI/DUI conviction, it would go farther to prevent the offense than new laws or expensive and mandatory new technology.
My employee handbook is explicitly clear that anything I post or transmit through any company-managed infrastructure is the company's property. I have no rights of privacy to any of it. This simplifies things greatly, as anything I send or read through the company mail server, whether we host it or not, is already explicitly company property.
Before anybody reacts that this seems awfully fascist or intrusive, I want to say that it provides me a real sense of security to know exactly where my boundaries are and that they are not flexible or partisan in their enforcement. That said, I'm the sysadmin whom others would call when they need so-and-so's email, and I've done exactly that on more than a few occasions already. "Company mail" is company mail.
I'm going to forego the opportunity to use my moderator points today on this story because every odd-numbered post in the list is already "Score:5 Insightful". There's just a wealth of wisdom here, and I have precious little to add.
In all fairness to those who questioned the future of X, I was momentarily confused by the announcement, too. It appears this little group of developers has finally just gotten out of the way. I'm hoping there's still a person or two to moderate code additions while the rest of the community keeps up the project.
No. Not us, not anyone I even know.
This is a handy way for an IP address to be linked to a self-admitted number of Linux installations. I got halfway through the "at work" survey before I realized that I was quoting my company's assets and Linux installs to a web site on an IP address instead of a name. For all I know, that IP could be a guy on a cable modem, working for SCO or the BSA. No thanks. Not for me.
"I'll bet some horrifying data could be gathered on the speed with which riders' heads impact the pavement after an accident."
CowboyNeal, I know you own the page and you can write whatever you want, but you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. This is about as charming as a dog pile, and it makes less sense. First, the head would impact the ground at approximately the same speed that the bike was moving at the time of the accident. Second, cyclists who've had state-endorsed safety training or any degree of experience on the road know better than to refer to a crash as an "accident". They're not "accidents" because they're avoidable by smart riders who pay attention to their surroundings. Last, cyclists are more focused on the road than on their cell phones and their breakfast and their necktie/makeup/hair. You've demonstrated an impressive degree of narrow-minded dipstickery today. Congratulations.
I've been patching XFS support into my distro for a few months now. Let me get you caught up briefly. We had ext3 patched with acl support. That patch tends to lag behind kernel versions a little, which is not a problem if you're running a distro's standard back-ported kernel. However, I just undertook a migration on a live production box from ext3+acl to XFS on a second attached disk array, so I've been in Patch Hell for the last few weeks. I will say up front that I am not a k3rn31 h4ck0rz, but I get more done with it than probably anyone I personally know. That I got as far as I did in this story amazes me even today!
:-D
SGI ports their patch up to the latest kernel within a few days, but they have a nasty habit of removing older versions from their downloads when newer versions come out. When I only had the ext3+acl patches for kernel 2.4.20, and acl.bestbits.at was down for over a week ('grumble'), SGI only had XFS patches out for kernel 2.4.22. Andreas was kind enough to personally provide me some 2.4.22 ext3 patches. By the hardest, I got my 2.4.22 kernel built on my file server with ext3+acl and XFS.
The next DAY, I read of a root exploit in 2.4.22. The patch from kernel.org rendered my ext3+acl patches incompatible, and I'm not the type of guy yet to divvy up patches into even smaller pieces on any sort of schedule. I had to either forego backward compatibility or maintain a shell exploit in an environment where people do have shells.
I found, just yesterday, that Red Hat's newest kernel package includes xattrs and acls for ext3 and the 2.4.22 exploit's bugfix. It won't accept my xfs patch for 2.4.23 over some posix_acl and kdb conflicts. I found yesterday that SGI's latest kernel image has XFS and ext3+acl, but not the bugfix. The 2.4.23 patch broke my build. I find today that XFS is about to be added onto the native kernel tree, which just received both the bugfix and the ext3+acl extensions.
It's about TIME!
Pardon me for being morbidly curious, as this was just hysterical. I have heard people dream about zero-G sex a hundred times. I have never once heard any account of any space-faring human who came back and said "We did it, and it was fantastic". Has anybody ever heard that anyone ever even DID this?
Please differentiate for us the differences between Fedora Core and its periodic scheduled releases, Rawhide (which used to be a bleeding-edge, "unstable/testing" compilation), and the Fedora Legacy project. I've only heard of Legacy once in an online discussion, and there was a link back to another discussion. This knowledge would be invaluable to those of us who are willing to use a more recent compilation like Fedora, but are uncomfortable going completely without an established system for fishing through updated packages from hundreds of willing volunteers and setting up an install-compatible repository. The Legacy project especially interests me as a gesture toward the low-price entry point for small business servers that Red Hat is abandoning with the death of RHL9.
... that doesn't really seem to matter anymore in discussions of legal issues.