Interesting, because, IMO, the prototypical non-OS is MS-DOS and friends. You type in the name of a program and it runs, and you don't touch the OS again.
Have you ever done any DOS programming?
It's awful, really. I don't blame you for saying no. Bleah.
However, there are these things called interrupts. They're kind-of an important part of DOS.
And even if you're not a programmer: you start WP 5.1, for example; what do you have to do? Tell it to print to LPT1: - where do you think that came from?
DOS is certainly not nearly as intrusive as Win95 (well, the Win32 overlay on DOS 7 actually, but I digress); but it's there.
That might be true. However, it ignores a simple fact.
Most radio stations these days have DAT decks, and industrial-quality ones at that. Press record on the DAT, take it home, and rip. Oh, so hard. (Lots of DJs tape their shows this way: and yes, lots of DJs have home DAT decks, precisely for this reason.)
Trying to use technological means to stop DJs from being pirates is like trying to use a vaccuum cleaner to stop the Pacific Ocean from being wet. You're going to need a really big one.;)
I don't bother with compiling ports. I just grab the packages, with precompiled binaries.
I am using the Intel variety of FreeBSD; I am aware that this isn't an option for Alpha users. but really: why compile ports?
I only compile other things that I can't get from ports... (an increasing number these days, as I'm still living in 3.4 and I don't have the drive space necessary to upgrade; currently I get my ports from an unofficial mirror in Sweden:)
This directory contains FreeBSD ISO images that can be used to burn a complete set of FreeBSD installation and package CDs. Starting with FreeBSD 4.4, 5 CD images are provided:
4.4-install.iso 4.4 ISO 9660 bootable (El Torrito) CDROM image.
4.4-disc2.iso Live filesystem "Fix it" CD and CVS repository.
4.4-disc3.iso Extra packages for FreeBSD 4.4
4.4-disc4.iso Extra packages for FreeBSD 4.4
Only 4.4-install.iso is required for the "standard FreeBSD installation experience", e.g. FreeBSD 4.4 + XFree86 3.3.6 + an essential (but minimal) package collection. If you want just FreeBSD 4.4 and little else,
the 4.4-mini.iso image can also be used. The other ISO images are more or less self-explanatory as listed above and purely optional.
Previous to this, you had two options:
Download the floppy images and FTP the files you needed during system setup (which SUCKS when you're setting up a machine which may not have net access during setup), or
download the -install.iso, customize your kernel using it, and then depend on ftp sites for ports.
Now you can just burn and go. This is excellent for anyone who wants to install on a lot of machines at once.
Also, the mini ISO gives some access for dialup users who don't want to leave their modems on all night;)
It drives me nuts. The stuff tastes different from normal nachos. I think it's better. For a while, the yuppies were buying it to Look Beautiful; eventually blue went out of fashion (I guess; every time I'm on the street I feel like I'm drowning in a sea of ugly colours, no blue) and now I can't eat my blue nachos anymore.:(
The important thing that I like about it is that it forces any requests to *.twwol.dyndns.org that don't match any of my hosts to get forwarded to the main www address, because the dummy host is first. (DynDNS allows for a wildcard feature; lookup any *.twwol.dyndns.org and you get my gateway; connect to port 80 and you wake up Apache, which then determines which host you really wanted and forwards the request inwards to the LAN (via a ProxyPass directive).
The other nice thing that I like about it is that it totally blocks access from bots that don't know the right name of my machines (which, naturally, you can't get from gethostbyaddr, since my DSL provider gives me my Official hostname). This includes, for example, Code Red worms; they connect to my gateway, get a 302, and wander along. Since I don't have a global CustomLog directive (I provide CustomLog directives for each of the real hosts), there's no logs kept for the annoying little Code Red worms.
Which is good. I run a stripped-down Apache on the gateway partly for security, but also partly because its hard drive space is not spacious.
The device supports SMB/CIFS and NFS, unsurprisingly as those are the two most common file-sharing protocols at the moment. It's interesting though that, considering they're using FreeBSD, they didn't include AppleTalk support (easily available via the ports tree). It may be that with the advent of OS X, they think NFS is enough for the entire non-Win32 universe.
True, I can't put a second NIC in it. However, it's not my gateway machine. Frankly, I'd rather have as stripped-down a machine as possible as my gateway. So I have a Compaq Deskpro; not quite ideal but it was very, very cheap.
SCSI? Huh, Firewire.:)
TV tuner? See Firewire. See VCR with Firewire port. Oh. (Actually, I believe you can also get stand-alone tuners with Firewire outputs.)
Linus is an unabashed Linux zealot. I guess this is fine; I'm sure Linux is great. But, I get the feeling he is so focused on the details that I feel like reading stuff from him will only be interesting if I want to know something about Linux.
Yes, the comparison applies. Chuck Moore wrote Forth in the beginning. Of course he loves it: writing a programming language (at least a useful one) is work, and you wouldn't do it except because you really, really wanted to.
Put it another way: If Dennis Ritchie were to be interviewed on/. would you be shocked if the C programming language were mentioned from time to time?
Among my numerous computers is an iMac. Actually, I'm posting from it right now.
It's one of the summer 2000 iMacs: it has a DVD player, no internal burner. It cost more than $900 of course, but that was then, this is now.:)
What features does it have that the Dell doesn't?
Internal firewire.
Ten-second RAM upgrade.
Luggability: actually it's easier to move the iMac than most '80s laptops.
Fanless.
Side-mounted ports. (Why do PC manufacturers want everything to be on the back or the front? The side is better.)
What's the Dell got on it?
Video card upgrade as a possibility. The iMac has a pretty nice ATI AGP card, but there are many better cards out there.
Run Windows.
Legacy ports.
Really, what else do you need PCI/ISA for? Gigabit ethernet? (The iMac has 10/100.) Firewire? (Whoops.) Wireless network? (Antenna's built into the iMac case; 10-second procedure to install the card.) Framegrabber? (Get a Firewire VCR; the picture quality will be significantly better too.)
Honestly, I can't think of anything that you can do with PCI/ISA that you can't do with USB/Firewire, except gigabit (which is built-in to a lot of higher-end Apple systems too IIRC). And I can think of lots of things you can do with USB/Firewire that you can't do with legacy systems: like run a glitch-free scanner and printer together.
You appear to be under the impression that non-online retailers do not keep electronic databases of credit cards, and, in the cases when they do, their databases are never broken into.
Dot-coms aren't the only targets of credit card fraudsters, ya know.;)
The European Directive on Data Privacy is only effective against corporations with reasonably significant financial resources inside the jurisdiction of the European Union; for example, Siemens. I haven't read it recently, but from what I remember, it wouldn't allow a claim of jurisdiction simply based on the location of an e-mail server.
I heard the same interview; can't remember the guy's name, but he was with the Independent (U.K.)...
There seem to be two images emerging of bin Laden. One is of a technologically obsessed mastermind, sitting on his mountaintop surrounded by computers, controlling an international network of terrorists via email. The other is this deranged multimillionaire, issuing occasional pronoucements from his mountaintop, and perhaps giving random terrorists money. The second one makes more sense, given that he's cooperating with the Taliban, who ban all Internet access from Afghanistan. Also, the second one seems less like someone in a James Bond movie, and therefore is probably more realistic.;)
With carnivore, the government sees all traffic. They see crypto they can't break
The crucial part of this phrase is "they see."
It's that part which stego is designed to break down.
Organized crime has been using stegonography for centuries: the famous writing commands on a paper napkin technique (to prevent audio bugs from picking them up) is just the latest example.
What's more, since it's used by the copyright folks so heavily in watermarking, stego research is unlikely to be strongly attacked.
Also, there's the time-tested technique of cracking people's PPP accounts, and not using your own dialup. God knows, there are enough stolen cellphones out there; I can't imagine how many unlimited-access PPP accounts are getting "borrowed."
it doesn't take a trained pilot to keep a plane in the air. it does take a trained pilot to cause the plane to turn into a missile.
and as it turns out, among the terrorists were several trained pilots: all of whom apparently received their training in the USA, and were on a list of known terrorists.
this is a failure of intelligence at the highest level.
The 1x1 gifs are only useful in email: they already know to whom they served the page. However, they are really useful when embedded in html mail. They let the sender know that you tend to read your pr0n spam rather than just delete it immediately.
This is incorrect. Many mailers (e.g. Netscape) will automatically start downloading the HTML-linked images when you click on the name in your subject list (e.g. to delete it).
The consensus from all the experts I've seen today is that the US is relying too much on sig-int. They think the attack today could only have been circumvented by old-fashioned human surveillance; that is, getting an infiltrator in the terrorist organization.
The NSA doesn't do that. That's really the CIA's area. And man, the CIA really sucks.
However, the current administration is in bed with the CIA so I doubt much will happen. But maybe. You never know. It wouldn't be the first time he's rebelled against daddy.
Perhaps you are now witnessing a cover that is destined to become a collector's item when the record company pulls it from the stores?;)
Re:You think this is war? I'LL show you War!
on
Our New Pearl Harbor
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You may not have experienced war since WW II, but certainly a number of other countries have experienced war, either directly with U.S. troops or with U.S.-trained and -funded troops.
A partial list:
Korea
Vietnam
Cambodia
Hell, most of Southeast Asia
Nicaragua
El Salvador
Chile
Hell, most of Latin America
Iraq
Palestine
Iran
Lebanon
Hell, most of the Middle East
Well, at least most of Africa and Europe have remained free of the grip of American soldiery.
This is why the terrorists engage in these kinds of activities. They do not feel they have anything to lose. Sadly, they may be right: the United States' grasp of realpolitik is incredibly weak.
That is why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary for peace. It would have cost hundreds of thousands of U.S. lives and would have cost millions of Japanese lives to take Japan, and the U.S. could not afford to leave a hostile nation with the ability to wage war on us in the future to rebuild their nation.
The U.S. could have easily blockaded Japan. The Japanese had no remaining navy. Given a blockade of a month or two, they would have surrendered.
No: Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened because the U.S. was irritated. The Japanese had lost: how dare they show any pride whatsoever in their country. Also, they wanted to play with their New Toy. (Remember Bikini Atoll? Same thing.)
Also remember that Great Britain did not start the aggression in World War II. Hitler would have attacked Great Britain eventually one way or another. Allowing your enemy to choose the time and place for your battles is a sure fire way to guarantee that you lose. Blaming the Blitz on the British is like blaming a rape victim for her the actions of her assailant.
It's true that Britain didn't start the aggression. That was actually my point too.
I'm equating bin Laden with the Brits, and the Americans with the Germans. Please read my posts more carefully in the future.
(Also note that I'm only discussing German military strategy. I don't mean to suggest that the current American regime suffers from the racism that infected the Hitler government.)
Slashdot Mirror
An idea whose time has come!
Instead of clicking with the button, you just think "click", your computer reads your mind, and clicks on the screen somewhere. :)
Oh wait. Did you mean a one-button mouse? ;)
Have you ever done any DOS programming?
It's awful, really. I don't blame you for saying no. Bleah.
However, there are these things called interrupts. They're kind-of an important part of DOS.
And even if you're not a programmer: you start WP 5.1, for example; what do you have to do? Tell it to print to LPT1: - where do you think that came from?
DOS is certainly not nearly as intrusive as Win95 (well, the Win32 overlay on DOS 7 actually, but I digress); but it's there.
Perhaps M$ has a move to a suburb of New Orleans in its future... :)
That might be true. However, it ignores a simple fact.
Most radio stations these days have DAT decks, and industrial-quality ones at that. Press record on the DAT, take it home, and rip. Oh, so hard. (Lots of DJs tape their shows this way: and yes, lots of DJs have home DAT decks, precisely for this reason.)
Trying to use technological means to stop DJs from being pirates is like trying to use a vaccuum cleaner to stop the Pacific Ocean from being wet. You're going to need a really big one. ;)
er, compile?
I don't bother with compiling ports. I just grab the packages, with precompiled binaries.
I am using the Intel variety of FreeBSD; I am aware that this isn't an option for Alpha users. but really: why compile ports?
I only compile other things that I can't get from ports... (an increasing number these days, as I'm still living in 3.4 and I don't have the drive space necessary to upgrade; currently I get my ports from an unofficial mirror in Sweden :)
yes, well, except that the federal government uses financial incentives to encourage private organizations to promote certain messages.
I can't wait until the ONDCP starts paying people to logon to AOL chat rooms to Spread the Word.
From the Readme, slightly reformatted:
Previous to this, you had two options:
Now you can just burn and go. This is excellent for anyone who wants to install on a lot of machines at once.
Also, the mini ISO gives some access for dialup users who don't want to leave their modems on all night ;)
Maybe with 5.0 they will give us UDF images. :)
Hey, I love blue corn nachos!
It drives me nuts. The stuff tastes different from normal nachos. I think it's better. For a while, the yuppies were buying it to Look Beautiful; eventually blue went out of fashion (I guess; every time I'm on the street I feel like I'm drowning in a sea of ugly colours, no blue) and now I can't eat my blue nachos anymore. :(
okay, I'm skipping my bonus on this post... :)
I run a stripped-down Apache on the gateway machine.
In my httpd.conf:
NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin loki@twwol.dyndns.org
ServerName dummy.twwol.dyndns.org
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.twwol.dyndns.org$1 [R,L]
</VirtualHost>
This does two things.
The important thing that I like about it is that it forces any requests to *.twwol.dyndns.org that don't match any of my hosts to get forwarded to the main www address, because the dummy host is first. (DynDNS allows for a wildcard feature; lookup any *.twwol.dyndns.org and you get my gateway; connect to port 80 and you wake up Apache, which then determines which host you really wanted and forwards the request inwards to the LAN (via a ProxyPass directive).
The other nice thing that I like about it is that it totally blocks access from bots that don't know the right name of my machines (which, naturally, you can't get from gethostbyaddr, since my DSL provider gives me my Official hostname). This includes, for example, Code Red worms; they connect to my gateway, get a 302, and wander along. Since I don't have a global CustomLog directive (I provide CustomLog directives for each of the real hosts), there's no logs kept for the annoying little Code Red worms.
Which is good. I run a stripped-down Apache on the gateway partly for security, but also partly because its hard drive space is not spacious.
The device supports SMB/CIFS and NFS, unsurprisingly as those are the two most common file-sharing protocols at the moment. It's interesting though that, considering they're using FreeBSD, they didn't include AppleTalk support (easily available via the ports tree). It may be that with the advent of OS X, they think NFS is enough for the entire non-Win32 universe.
True, I can't put a second NIC in it. However, it's not my gateway machine. Frankly, I'd rather have as stripped-down a machine as possible as my gateway. So I have a Compaq Deskpro; not quite ideal but it was very, very cheap.
SCSI? Huh, Firewire. :)
TV tuner? See Firewire. See VCR with Firewire port. Oh. (Actually, I believe you can also get stand-alone tuners with Firewire outputs.)
Linus is an unabashed Linux zealot. I guess this is fine; I'm sure Linux is great. But, I get the feeling he is so focused on the details that I feel like reading stuff from him will only be interesting if I want to know something about Linux.
Yes, the comparison applies. Chuck Moore wrote Forth in the beginning. Of course he loves it: writing a programming language (at least a useful one) is work, and you wouldn't do it except because you really, really wanted to.
Put it another way: If Dennis Ritchie were to be interviewed on /. would you be shocked if the C programming language were mentioned from time to time?
Ship with at least 2x256. RAM is dirt cheap these days, even poor broke me is thinking of buying some more.
Among my numerous computers is an iMac. Actually, I'm posting from it right now.
It's one of the summer 2000 iMacs: it has a DVD player, no internal burner. It cost more than $900 of course, but that was then, this is now. :)
What features does it have that the Dell doesn't?
What's the Dell got on it?
Really, what else do you need PCI/ISA for? Gigabit ethernet? (The iMac has 10/100.) Firewire? (Whoops.) Wireless network? (Antenna's built into the iMac case; 10-second procedure to install the card.) Framegrabber? (Get a Firewire VCR; the picture quality will be significantly better too.)
Honestly, I can't think of anything that you can do with PCI/ISA that you can't do with USB/Firewire, except gigabit (which is built-in to a lot of higher-end Apple systems too IIRC). And I can think of lots of things you can do with USB/Firewire that you can't do with legacy systems: like run a glitch-free scanner and printer together.
You appear to be under the impression that non-online retailers do not keep electronic databases of credit cards, and, in the cases when they do, their databases are never broken into.
Dot-coms aren't the only targets of credit card fraudsters, ya know. ;)
The European Directive on Data Privacy is only effective against corporations with reasonably significant financial resources inside the jurisdiction of the European Union; for example, Siemens. I haven't read it recently, but from what I remember, it wouldn't allow a claim of jurisdiction simply based on the location of an e-mail server.
Move to the EU: then you'll get its protection.
This sounds like something you should send to the FBI... ideally with the name of the coworker included.
I heard the same interview; can't remember the guy's name, but he was with the Independent (U.K.)...
There seem to be two images emerging of bin Laden. One is of a technologically obsessed mastermind, sitting on his mountaintop surrounded by computers, controlling an international network of terrorists via email. The other is this deranged multimillionaire, issuing occasional pronoucements from his mountaintop, and perhaps giving random terrorists money. The second one makes more sense, given that he's cooperating with the Taliban, who ban all Internet access from Afghanistan. Also, the second one seems less like someone in a James Bond movie, and therefore is probably more realistic. ;)
The crucial part of this phrase is "they see."
It's that part which stego is designed to break down.
Organized crime has been using stegonography for centuries: the famous writing commands on a paper napkin technique (to prevent audio bugs from picking them up) is just the latest example.
What's more, since it's used by the copyright folks so heavily in watermarking, stego research is unlikely to be strongly attacked.
Also, there's the time-tested technique of cracking people's PPP accounts, and not using your own dialup. God knows, there are enough stolen cellphones out there; I can't imagine how many unlimited-access PPP accounts are getting "borrowed."
as it turns out, of course, I'm right.
it doesn't take a trained pilot to keep a plane in the air. it does take a trained pilot to cause the plane to turn into a missile.
and as it turns out, among the terrorists were several trained pilots: all of whom apparently received their training in the USA, and were on a list of known terrorists.
this is a failure of intelligence at the highest level.
This is incorrect. Many mailers (e.g. Netscape) will automatically start downloading the HTML-linked images when you click on the name in your subject list (e.g. to delete it).
They cannot deduce anything from this behaviour.
The consensus from all the experts I've seen today is that the US is relying too much on sig-int. They think the attack today could only have been circumvented by old-fashioned human surveillance; that is, getting an infiltrator in the terrorist organization.
The NSA doesn't do that. That's really the CIA's area. And man, the CIA really sucks.
However, the current administration is in bed with the CIA so I doubt much will happen. But maybe. You never know. It wouldn't be the first time he's rebelled against daddy.
Perhaps you are now witnessing a cover that is destined to become a collector's item when the record company pulls it from the stores? ;)
You may not have experienced war since WW II, but certainly a number of other countries have experienced war, either directly with U.S. troops or with U.S.-trained and -funded troops. A partial list:
Well, at least most of Africa and Europe have remained free of the grip of American soldiery.
This is why the terrorists engage in these kinds of activities. They do not feel they have anything to lose. Sadly, they may be right: the United States' grasp of realpolitik is incredibly weak.
The U.S. could have easily blockaded Japan. The Japanese had no remaining navy. Given a blockade of a month or two, they would have surrendered.
No: Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened because the U.S. was irritated. The Japanese had lost: how dare they show any pride whatsoever in their country. Also, they wanted to play with their New Toy. (Remember Bikini Atoll? Same thing.)
It's true that Britain didn't start the aggression. That was actually my point too.
I'm equating bin Laden with the Brits, and the Americans with the Germans. Please read my posts more carefully in the future.
(Also note that I'm only discussing German military strategy. I don't mean to suggest that the current American regime suffers from the racism that infected the Hitler government.)