It can probably be blamed on stupid default installs. It's really is pretty easy to run BIND as a non-root user. I always create a bind user and group and run it as that. BSDs ship that way by default; why is it so hard for linux distros to get the idea through their heads?
The phone line question may be different because long distance is a service that is provided by a company on the other end of the line.
But as far as cell phones go, yes you can. And (in the US anyway) it's perfectly legal. You can go to an electronics store, buy a radio scanner, and listen in on cell phone conversations and your neighbors' cordless phones. IIRC, the only legal restriction is that you can't record someone else's conversation, or use what you hear for extortion...
The old school scanners don't work with newer digital phones, but I'm pretty sure decoders are readily available.
Also you have to consider that the population of the planet has increased exponentially. So even if the percentage of persons who don't fit the majority definition of "wholesome" hasn't changed, there will still be more of them simply because there are more people.
If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution. - Robert Sewell
Seems regular CDs and CD-RWs work because the silver color reflects the red laser light better than blue or green. I have a few greyish-sliver CD-Rs that came with one of those funny packs of different colored CD-Rs; I wonder of those will work...
Hmm, not quite... Remember the recent poll asking about browsers? And a lot of slashdotters were using Internet Explorer...? Well, IE5 and higher doesn't send the referer field if it's from a different domain. So they'll have no idea where it came from...
It wasn't. Look directly at the post. Notice the lack of moderation totals at the bottom of the page. The comment was posted from an account with low enough karma (below -10 or so if I remember right) that it starts at 0 instead of +1.
Slashdot wisdom: If you can't be insightful, be funny
Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]
(C) Copyright 1985-2000 Microsoft Corp.
H:\>uptime
Uptime - system uptime utility for Windows NT
by Mark Russinovich
Systems Internals - http://www.sysinternals.com
This computer has been up for 52 days, 10 hours, 3 minutes, 35 seconds.
H:\>
Not bad for a Win2k box eh?
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and use it at home (and have introduced a Linux cluster, insert shameless MOSIX plug here, and a couple FreeBSD servers at work). But for workplace desktops 2k does a pretty damn good job. People moan and bitch about NTs stability all the time and I think they're either full FUD or clueless as to how to properly maintain the system.
I'll give the NT team some due credit. Bill Gates had nothing to do with NT other than stealing some VMS and OS/2 designers from other companies. NT was originally built on the same principles as *nix -- High-level language only, never sacrifice anything for doing things the "right way". Because of that, the NT kernel is rock solid; the only times I've ever had it crash on me (even in 4.0) were related to cheap hardware and shoddy device drivers. Now, the IE/Explorer interface written by the 9x team and grafted on is a piece of crap and crashes on me about once a week, but I can at least start it back up without bringing down the entire OS...
Win2k plus the resource kit even has a halfway decent CLI. Add cygwin to the mix and it makes it even better. I regularly use bash as a shell on my machine; it also runs an SSH server for remote access.
And before someone accuses me of getting that high uptime by leaving this box sitting around doing nothing, let me tell you what I use it for. I regularly have 60+ processes running taking up 200MB+ of memory (I've got 256MB physical and about a gig of swap space) in the background. I leave inetd (for ssh), BIND, Winamp, ICQ, Task manager (running in the context of the SYSTEM account thanks to a little service I wrote, hehe:), GetRight, and Outlook running 24/7. I frequently do graphic design in Corel Photopaint 9, and have other various programs on the other monitors (I have 3 monitors on 3 video cards and one big virtual desktop). I do development with both MSVC6 and GCC, as well as extensive testing and debugging. I have to put my taskbar on the side of the screen because I have so much stuff open and running, and even then it runs out of space...
All that and the only time I ever have to reboot is for the silly IE security fixes M$ sometimes releases (most of the time when something wants to reboot I just ignore it and it works anyway). True, once or twice (over 52 days ago though:) I've had to reboot after getting a process that couldn't be killed because it was stuck in a kernel call, but hell, I've had that happen in Linux too... The sad part is I think in both cases the kernel call was in a driver for some brain-damaged hardware I'd added.
As far as security goes, I wouldn't trust 2k to be secure out of the box. Then again, I wouldn't trust Red Hat to be secure out of the box either. Like UNIX, NT *CAN* be secure if the admin knows what he's doing. Unfortunately, the GUI makes it seem easier than it really is so there's a lot of substandard NT admins out there. I'd recommend checking out the Sysinternals tools (www.sysinternals.com) and the registry hack database at www.jsiinc.com.
Anyway, before I get too far off topic, I agree with the poster I'm replying too. Randomly bashing NT/2k without having even taken the time to fully use and understand how it works is no better than the MS loyalists spreading FUD about Linux when they've never even used it. Supporting Linux is great, it's come a long way and I hope to see it get even better, but turning this into some kind of holy war won't help anyone.
So these are the idiots who have been trying to scan my network from IPs on Exodus Communications (64.41.x.x)... Good thing I've been blackholing their packets for about 4 months...
Hey, you're lucky you had a c64. I was one of the few I know who actually got started on a vic-20. 3k of RAM and a tape drive that used standard audio tapes:) But at least I had a bunch of Compute! magazines filled with BASIC and machine-language code... oh, yeah, those were the days...:)
I do have to say that's what really sparked my interest in computers though.
ActiveX... yuck! What idiot at Microsoft came up with that one? "Hey, Bob! I've got an idea! Let's let websites run arbitrary code on machines! It'll be k3wl..."
Because, spam is incredibly cheap to send out. And for every 10,000 people with a clue, there's unfortunately 1 idiot (read A0L LAM3R) who's dumb enough to actually read it and possibly buy something.
There would be this thing called a 'floppy disk'. And upon this 'floppy disk' your OS configuration and game saves would be written. And all games would use the same standard type 'floppy disk'.
When's the last time you played a game? As far back as Quake, saved games were quite large. I've seen quite a few with multi-megabyte files for a SINGLE saved game. Even the old Sierra adventure games made six years ago required a hard drive because the saved games were too large to fit more than a couple on a floppy.
And if more room was needed for new drivers and stuff not on the CD, the 'floppy disk' would contain links to files in partitions on the 'hard drive' where these updates would be downloaded to.
And if I gave a burned game to my friend who runs Windows, how would it store files on his hard drive? What if his filesystem is NTFS? Or OS/2 HPFS? Or the XFS or ext3 development code? Even if it's ext2, are you comfortable with letting a game from somebody you might not completely trust mount your hard drive partition, effectively giving it root privledges?
Why are you so concerned with saying "can't"? If you don't think it is possible, then shove off. If I want to have a series of games burned to a cd with a known good config, then I can do it. What you seem to be overlooking is that some of thoes patches/hacks to make Q3:Arena work on a system may also make it unstable. In that case, having a system of bootable cds is almost a requirement.
I'm trying very hard to understand the logic of this argument. I thought the implication of the article was that game companies could use this to ship CDs with a pre-made bootable linux distro. If you want to burn bootable CDs of your own games with your own custom configuration, I'm certainly not going to stop you or try to tell you that you can't. I'm simply saying that having a game on a bootable CD pre-configured by the vendor that cannot be easily run by any means other than booting from the CD would be a Bad Thing(tm).
While the article didn't directly state this, I could see it as a very possible end-result based on the previous inane actions by software companies and game publishers alike.
In any case, if you buy a game with Linux already on the CD, nobody says you _have_ to use that copy of Linux. If you're part of the unlucky 20% whose hardware is not detected correctly, you can just run it from your own installation.
Hopefully. If I could still run it from within my own Linux installation than I have no problem with it. It's just if the game designer decides that users are too stupid to maintain their own OS and makes it so that the game will ONLY work if you boot from the CD. I can just see some PHB using this logic to say that it will reduce support costs if they only have to worry about one possible configuration. And there are a lot of dumb commercial software companies out there...
Those aren't compiler warnings, they're suggestions.
Why is it that everyone seems to think that this is a good idea? Remember how long it took you to get your favorite sound card/video card/joystick/other piece of hardware working under Linux? Now imagine having to go through that for every game that you want to play. And to top it off, you can't save your changes to the configuration without burning a new CD.
Don't get me wrong, Linux is a great OS, but the type of hardware used in games happens to be the hardware that is most lacking in Linux support (it IS getting better, but slowly). It's okay to have to wrestle with manually patching drivers for some weird brand sound card into the kernel because the patch is for a different version or doesn't work quite right, but I only want to have to go through that once please...
There's no way that a single OS image can anticipate every possible hardware configuration without having to tweak anything. Even Windoze often can't do plug-and-pray good enough for that to work. This is why they invented consoles.
`dont forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away.' -- mingo on linux-kernel
What kind of router do you have? Even lower-end Cisco boxes support traffic shaping and prioritization. It's not exactly easy to configure unless you really know what you're doing, but they can be set up to either limit the bandwidth on certain types of traffic (i.e. Napster can't use more than 50% of our total bandwidth), or prioritize traffic into queues (for example, incoming web/mail traffic gets top priority, then outbound web traffic, followed by FTP, and Napster gets whatever is left over).
As far as the bandwidth question goes, I really think traffic shaping and smart queuing is the answer rather than blocking the service entirely. Most hardware out there can already handle it, your important services can get at the bandwidth first, and you're not censoring anything so you can avoid sticky legal issues.
`dont forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away.' -- mingo on linux-kernel
They are, at least new ones. My point is that they would be even MORE insanely expensive. When a company comes up with a new type of medication, they can get a patent on it (doesn't last as long as normal patents, less than 10 years if I remember right -- somebody help me out here). Once it runs out though, it can be cloned by every cheapo drug company in existence, hence the generic brands the store always offers you. That's why I can get a bottle of Deltasone (a Prednesone knockoff) with 50 tablets for around $8, but Singulair costs about $70 for the same amount.
And yes, it's true about people going to Canada to get prescription drugs, but that's a somewhat unrelated issue. That has to do with the fact that the Canadian government regulates the prices of prescriptions, where the US government has been bought by the pharmacutical companies.
No kidding. The main reason that Doom was so popular is because of all the additional levels and add-ons. id was actually considering protecting their file format better, but decided to leave it easily hackable. Turns out it was a pretty good decision...
Slashdot Mirror
It can probably be blamed on stupid default installs. It's really is pretty easy to run BIND as a non-root user. I always create a bind user and group and run it as that. BSDs ship that way by default; why is it so hard for linux distros to get the idea through their heads?
Wouldn't it technically blow?
*cough* Starcraft *cough*
The phone line question may be different because long distance is a service that is provided by a company on the other end of the line.
But as far as cell phones go, yes you can. And (in the US anyway) it's perfectly legal. You can go to an electronics store, buy a radio scanner, and listen in on cell phone conversations and your neighbors' cordless phones. IIRC, the only legal restriction is that you can't record someone else's conversation, or use what you hear for extortion...
The old school scanners don't work with newer digital phones, but I'm pretty sure decoders are readily available.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat.Also you have to consider that the population of the planet has increased exponentially. So even if the percentage of persons who don't fit the majority definition of "wholesome" hasn't changed, there will still be more of them simply because there are more people.
If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution. - Robert Sewell
Seems regular CDs and CD-RWs work because the silver color reflects the red laser light better than blue or green. I have a few greyish-sliver CD-Rs that came with one of those funny packs of different colored CD-Rs; I wonder of those will work...
Hmm, not quite... Remember the recent poll asking about browsers? And a lot of slashdotters were using Internet Explorer...? Well, IE5 and higher doesn't send the referer field if it's from a different domain. So they'll have no idea where it came from...
Wouldn't parents technically be wetware?
It wasn't. Look directly at the post. Notice the lack of moderation totals at the bottom of the page. The comment was posted from an account with low enough karma (below -10 or so if I remember right) that it starts at 0 instead of +1.
Slashdot wisdom: If you can't be insightful, be funnyWhat the...? Hey, /. stripped out my <SOAPBOX> tags! Grrr, guess I should have looked at the preview more closely...
Hmm...
:), GetRight, and Outlook running 24/7. I frequently do graphic design in Corel Photopaint 9, and have other various programs on the other monitors (I have 3 monitors on 3 video cards and one big virtual desktop). I do development with both MSVC6 and GCC, as well as extensive testing and debugging. I have to put my taskbar on the side of the screen because I have so much stuff open and running, and even then it runs out of space...
:) I've had to reboot after getting a process that couldn't be killed because it was stuck in a kernel call, but hell, I've had that happen in Linux too... The sad part is I think in both cases the kernel call was in a driver for some brain-damaged hardware I'd added.
/sbin/init is still Job 1
Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]
(C) Copyright 1985-2000 Microsoft Corp.
H:\>uptime
Uptime - system uptime utility for Windows NT
by Mark Russinovich
Systems Internals - http://www.sysinternals.com
This computer has been up for 52 days, 10 hours, 3 minutes, 35 seconds.
H:\>
Not bad for a Win2k box eh?
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and use it at home (and have introduced a Linux cluster, insert shameless MOSIX plug here, and a couple FreeBSD servers at work). But for workplace desktops 2k does a pretty damn good job. People moan and bitch about NTs stability all the time and I think they're either full FUD or clueless as to how to properly maintain the system.
I'll give the NT team some due credit. Bill Gates had nothing to do with NT other than stealing some VMS and OS/2 designers from other companies. NT was originally built on the same principles as *nix -- High-level language only, never sacrifice anything for doing things the "right way". Because of that, the NT kernel is rock solid; the only times I've ever had it crash on me (even in 4.0) were related to cheap hardware and shoddy device drivers. Now, the IE/Explorer interface written by the 9x team and grafted on is a piece of crap and crashes on me about once a week, but I can at least start it back up without bringing down the entire OS...
Win2k plus the resource kit even has a halfway decent CLI. Add cygwin to the mix and it makes it even better. I regularly use bash as a shell on my machine; it also runs an SSH server for remote access.
And before someone accuses me of getting that high uptime by leaving this box sitting around doing nothing, let me tell you what I use it for. I regularly have 60+ processes running taking up 200MB+ of memory (I've got 256MB physical and about a gig of swap space) in the background. I leave inetd (for ssh), BIND, Winamp, ICQ, Task manager (running in the context of the SYSTEM account thanks to a little service I wrote, hehe
All that and the only time I ever have to reboot is for the silly IE security fixes M$ sometimes releases (most of the time when something wants to reboot I just ignore it and it works anyway). True, once or twice (over 52 days ago though
As far as security goes, I wouldn't trust 2k to be secure out of the box. Then again, I wouldn't trust Red Hat to be secure out of the box either. Like UNIX, NT *CAN* be secure if the admin knows what he's doing. Unfortunately, the GUI makes it seem easier than it really is so there's a lot of substandard NT admins out there. I'd recommend checking out the Sysinternals tools (www.sysinternals.com) and the registry hack database at www.jsiinc.com.
Anyway, before I get too far off topic, I agree with the poster I'm replying too. Randomly bashing NT/2k without having even taken the time to fully use and understand how it works is no better than the MS loyalists spreading FUD about Linux when they've never even used it. Supporting Linux is great, it's come a long way and I hope to see it get even better, but turning this into some kind of holy war won't help anyone.
Unix: Where
So these are the idiots who have been trying to scan my network from IPs on Exodus Communications (64.41.x.x)... Good thing I've been blackholing their packets for about 4 months...
Mod parent up please; it's a valid point with the current progression of things and quite possible if we don't do something to stop it.
Hey, you're lucky you had a c64. I was one of the few I know who actually got started on a vic-20. 3k of RAM and a tape drive that used standard audio tapes :) But at least I had a bunch of Compute! magazines filled with BASIC and machine-language code... oh, yeah, those were the days... :)
I do have to say that's what really sparked my interest in computers though.
ActiveX... yuck! What idiot at Microsoft came up with that one? "Hey, Bob! I've got an idea! Let's let websites run arbitrary code on machines! It'll be k3wl..."
Because, spam is incredibly cheap to send out. And for every 10,000 people with a clue, there's unfortunately 1 idiot (read A0L LAM3R) who's dumb enough to actually read it and possibly buy something.
Vote Vader. Or else.
When's the last time you played a game? As far back as Quake, saved games were quite large. I've seen quite a few with multi-megabyte files for a SINGLE saved game. Even the old Sierra adventure games made six years ago required a hard drive because the saved games were too large to fit more than a couple on a floppy.
And if more room was needed for new drivers and stuff not on the CD, the 'floppy disk' would contain links to files in partitions on the 'hard drive' where these updates would be downloaded to.
And if I gave a burned game to my friend who runs Windows, how would it store files on his hard drive? What if his filesystem is NTFS? Or OS/2 HPFS? Or the XFS or ext3 development code? Even if it's ext2, are you comfortable with letting a game from somebody you might not completely trust mount your hard drive partition, effectively giving it root privledges?
I'm trying very hard to understand the logic of this argument. I thought the implication of the article was that game companies could use this to ship CDs with a pre-made bootable linux distro. If you want to burn bootable CDs of your own games with your own custom configuration, I'm certainly not going to stop you or try to tell you that you can't. I'm simply saying that having a game on a bootable CD pre-configured by the vendor that cannot be easily run by any means other than booting from the CD would be a Bad Thing(tm).
While the article didn't directly state this, I could see it as a very possible end-result based on the previous inane actions by software companies and game publishers alike.
"Will code for food."
Hopefully. If I could still run it from within my own Linux installation than I have no problem with it. It's just if the game designer decides that users are too stupid to maintain their own OS and makes it so that the game will ONLY work if you boot from the CD. I can just see some PHB using this logic to say that it will reduce support costs if they only have to worry about one possible configuration. And there are a lot of dumb commercial software companies out there...
Those aren't compiler warnings, they're suggestions.
Why is it that everyone seems to think that this is a good idea? Remember how long it took you to get your favorite sound card/video card/joystick/other piece of hardware working under Linux? Now imagine having to go through that for every game that you want to play. And to top it off, you can't save your changes to the configuration without burning a new CD.
Don't get me wrong, Linux is a great OS, but the type of hardware used in games happens to be the hardware that is most lacking in Linux support (it IS getting better, but slowly). It's okay to have to wrestle with manually patching drivers for some weird brand sound card into the kernel because the patch is for a different version or doesn't work quite right, but I only want to have to go through that once please...
There's no way that a single OS image can anticipate every possible hardware configuration without having to tweak anything. Even Windoze often can't do plug-and-pray good enough for that to work. This is why they invented consoles.
`dont forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away.' -- mingo on linux-kernel
What kind of router do you have? Even lower-end Cisco boxes support traffic shaping and prioritization. It's not exactly easy to configure unless you really know what you're doing, but they can be set up to either limit the bandwidth on certain types of traffic (i.e. Napster can't use more than 50% of our total bandwidth), or prioritize traffic into queues (for example, incoming web/mail traffic gets top priority, then outbound web traffic, followed by FTP, and Napster gets whatever is left over).
As far as the bandwidth question goes, I really think traffic shaping and smart queuing is the answer rather than blocking the service entirely. Most hardware out there can already handle it, your important services can get at the bandwidth first, and you're not censoring anything so you can avoid sticky legal issues.
`dont forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away.' -- mingo on linux-kernel
to "pull my finger".
Stupid lameness filters. How are we supposed to do one-liners?
They are, at least new ones. My point is that they would be even MORE insanely expensive. When a company comes up with a new type of medication, they can get a patent on it (doesn't last as long as normal patents, less than 10 years if I remember right -- somebody help me out here). Once it runs out though, it can be cloned by every cheapo drug company in existence, hence the generic brands the store always offers you. That's why I can get a bottle of Deltasone (a Prednesone knockoff) with 50 tablets for around $8, but Singulair costs about $70 for the same amount.
And yes, it's true about people going to Canada to get prescription drugs, but that's a somewhat unrelated issue. That has to do with the fact that the Canadian government regulates the prices of prescriptions, where the US government has been bought by the pharmacutical companies.
[.sig not found; starting fs check]
No kidding. The main reason that Doom was so popular is because of all the additional levels and add-ons. id was actually considering protecting their file format better, but decided to leave it easily hackable. Turns out it was a pretty good decision...