I was one of my super-paranoid thought paths the other day, and ended
up trying to think of a way to restrict access.
Passwords are vulnerable to keylogging and snooping, your method would
require that the keylogging/snooper timed the keystrokes - definately
in the realm of possibility. Some sort of combined graphical/mouse/keyboard
login would be more difficult, but snooping/screen captures/Van Eck freaking
would do the trick. Biological measures would also be difficult, since
you can be coerced into accessing the machine.
In the end, probably the best way of doing it that I could come up with
was to use a laptop (integrated design makes hardware screen capture/
key logging harder, and I'm under the [possibly mistaken] impression that
Van Eck's freaking would be harder with a LCD display then a CRT display),
use a non-writeable boot CD and keep all data on an USB keydrive, mounted
noexec. No network connection, and some sort of combined graphical/keyboard
login. Then always carry a method of quickly destroying the USB keydrive.
(Thermite would be a dramatic, but quick way of doing it.)
Of course, this is far from perfect, since there is always the possibility
of being drugged through food/environment, then being interrogated with the
USB drive out of your possession, until they have your password.
Pride went out the window a long time ago. Now its about quantity and
speed. The guy who takes an extra 15 minutes to do an excellent job
mopping the floors will be fired and the guy who does it "good enough for
now" will stay employed.
It could be worse. At least linux IRC clients tend to filter out mIRC
colours, and there are decent win32 IRC clients. You should see what those
Outlook and Outlook Express users do to Usenet posts. *shudder*
The best part of it is that Outlook and Outlook Express demangles its own
creation, so that the post is only broken in every other news client on
earth, which leads to "dude, your client is broken", "looks fine to me"
threads.
I had the opposite experience. I was using a windows (win98, so this probably wasn't fair) to try to ICS a dialup line. Turned a rather stable machine (by win98 standards) into a machine that would frequently drop the internet connect and crash.
A week later, a hardware modem I bought for linux had arrived ($50 for the USR hardware modem, compared to $25 for the Intel software modem). Shut down, plugged it into a free pci slot, booted back up, apt-getted the ppp packages, and I could connect. A quick glance at the NAT and IPTABLES howtos, and I had a shared NAT connection that works without a problem.
The parent poster writes:
Remember when 14.4K was fast? So do I. And I think with a correction in the
system, it can be a decent speed.
Nope. Sorry. There are 2 reasons why 14.4K will never be fast again:
Graphics. There are plenty of web pages that are not optimizing for
graphics, and plenty of web pages that are using more complicated
technologies (such as flash) where simple technologies (such as gif)
will work.
HTML Mail. Isn't it wonderful how a simple "Meet you at 5" can end
up being bloated to half a meg with a "pretty" html background?
Actually, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible to filter
all Usenet news through a spamfilter (such as bogofilter) locally, before
reading it.
If I was in the really spammy groups, I'd try that. For now, I just rely
on scoring, and not reading messages that don't interest me on the few
groups I read daily.
First of all, I must state that Debian isn't the most newbie friendly
distribution out there, although, some non-newbie friendly aspects, such as
dselect is slated for replacement in the next release.
That being said, Debian is one of the easiest systems to configure, *if*
you know what you are doing. (If you don't know what you are doing, all
operating systems are hard to configure - some just guess better at what you
want). The packaging support is excellent, and as the OP said, the
installation scripts are rather refined for the most part.
However, the OP has one thing wrong about Debian - there are usually 3,
(sometimes 4) branches out there. First branch is the stable branch, and
its codenamed "woody" in this release. The second branch is the testing
branch, codenamed "sarge". The third branch is unstable, and is forever
known as "sid" (after the boy next door in Toy Story who liked to break toys).
Packages/updates first appear in sid/unstable, then, after a short period of
testing to make sure nothing breaks, they move to sarge/testing.
Sarge/testing tries to keep its numbers of bugs low, so its always
a good release candidate. Woody/stable
has no new packages or updates, save for back-ported bug fixes. (The Debian
project is rather good at getting quick bug fixes, btw). When the Debian
project is close to a release, sarge will be frozen, a new testing branch will
be made, and for a short period of time, there will be four branches in
existance.
Several complaints are frequently heard about debian. One of the most
common ones is that the stable distribution tends to have older packages,
which is very, very true. The goal for the "official" Debian stable release
isn't to have the newest collection of packages, but the most tested and
stable collection of packages. Another complaint is the selection of
packages out there, and the Debian package requirements. A vanilla Debian
install, with no non-free sources, tends to be a rather good example of
FOSS. Again, this has to do with the Debian philosophy (and it makes the
maintainance of packages easier). Complaining that Debian doesn't have
Cool-Binary-Nonfree-Package-XYZ is like complaining that iptables doesn't
run on windows.
Other then the package management, the one area where Debian really,
truly shines (IMHO), is the wide collection of ports out there, and that
Debian (unlike many other distributions out there) does not treat non-x86
users as lower-class citizens. Woody runs on (IIRC) 11 different hardware
architectures. That impresses me. I can go out, right now, find an old
Alpha, Sparc, m68k or a new Itanium, and can run the latest Debian release
on it, and for the most part, it will act like the same release on my
x86 laptop. When the AMD64 CPUs are widely available, I'm expecting that
Debian will quickly jump over to supporting that architecture.
Oh, and Debian tends to have a wonderful user community.:)
First of all, if you haven't gotten a virus through your MUA, you
either don't get a lot of email, or have a relatively obscure
email address. Before you flame away, please note that there is a
difference between receiving an email virus and being infected. I
am receiving a lot of the "Fake MS Update Virus" lately, but I'm
not infected.
That being said, one of the reasons why people are so against
Outlook and Outlook Express is that its security model is broken:
It is possible to be infected by certain viruses just by reading a
message. Some viruses just need the document viewed in the preview
pane. Quite frankly, that's a hell of a security risk. (To be fair,
Outlook/Outlook Express's latest releases have been getting better at
the security game, and Unix MUA are not immune from security problems,
although Unix MUAs tend more towards mail bombs then viruses being
spread.)
A good virus scanner will help protect you against email viruses,
especially if the scanner acts like a pop3/smtp proxy (most of the
popular modern ones do). But I'm not going to rely on AV software
getting the virus definitions updated with the latest "virus of the
moment" before my email client polls the pop3 server in the morning.
There are other free email clients for windows, so cost is not an issue.
I've used several non-Outlook clients for windows, and as a general user,
their performance and features compared to Outlook. (Although, if you
need to poll a hotmail account, Outlook Express under windows is the only
free win32 email client that I know of that can do it.) So, assuming
that a free client will do everything you need, why not break the virus
trilogy of Windows-IE-Outlook and use it?
Btw, the reason I said "Joe Outlook Idiot" is twofold. First, notice
the "Idiot" - No MUA can protect a person from their own stupidity.
Second, if your virus is going to target idiots and use their MUA to
mail outgoing viruses, you are going to choose the MUA that most
idiots use - which is Outlook/Outlook Express. (Note that while all
Greeks are Human, not all Humans are Greek - or, although most of the
idiots out there use Outlook/Outlook Express, not all Outlook/Outlook
Express users are idiots). Therefore: "Joe Outlook Idiot"
SMTP is broken? Maybe, but lets look at this logic.
An email attachment pretends to be something it isn't, people click on it.
The email attachment opens up a relay, sends email back to an hotmail
account.
Spammer uses email account to spam other email accounts.
Now lets look at this with $SMTP+1 (With spiffy authentication).
An email attachment arrives from a trusted source/new source. People click on it.
The email attachment opens up a backdoor, sends email back to hotmail.
Spammer uses email software on that machine to spam other machines.
Since we have email authentication now, the other users either get
"from a trusted source" (if they already knew the person) or "from a new
source (Key matches Joe Outlook Idiot)".
In Heinlein's "Beyond this Horizon", in addition to the typical
gun-toting libertarian utopia, there was a rather interesting approach
to Eugenics.
Basically, instead of creating new genes, couples would go to the
genetic engineer when they wanted a child, and their child would be
created from the best possible combination of their genes. If the
father had one gene for diabetes, and another non-diabetic gene, the
non-diabetic gene would be choosen for his offspring. If the mother had
one gene for flat feet, and another gene for a normal arched foot, only
the arched gene would be choosen for her offspring.
Now, this is an interesting approach, and one that has several benefits
going for it. First of all, you aren't introducing new genes to the
germ line - you are only maximizing the genes that are there. Second,
its a harder policy to criticize - Its easy to pass a law against giving
people new genes, its harder to pass a law preventing a mother from giving
her son Tay-Sachs disease.
The parent poster writes:
else I'll be using NFS which is a much better protocol in every
area.
Er, yes... like how NFS relies on the hostname for security, while
SMB/CIFS relies on a password.
NFS is as (in)secure as the r* commands (rlogin, rcp, rsh). It relies
on the client to authenticate the user, and the server only trusts
certain clients (or anything pretending to be certain clients).
Now I'll admit, a good firewall should keep NFS safe. Under certain
setups, even a good router should be enough. However, I prefer to think
of a firewall as one layer of security - not my first, last, and only
line of defense.
Although I'm not currently using it, AFS/Code seems to be a cross platform
(win, mac, unix) secure replacement to NFS.
NFS might be a better protocol then SMB/CIFS in certain areas, but for
security, SMB/CIFS wins (even the old versions of SMB that rely on plaintext
passwords).
Smart vim users know that ctrl-[ is the same as escape. Smarter vim users remap the caps lock and control keys so that control is to the left of the a key on a US querty keyboard.
The parent poster writes:
I don't get it... If I am going to such extremes to AVOID
spam, why should the spamemr WANT to go to lenghts to get
around it? I obviously am someone who DOES NOT and WILL NOT
patronize their products... So why waste the effort?
Easy enough answered. Now you and I probably both use spam filters on
our private accounts, and would never respond to spam. Thus, evading
our spam filters is a pointless, pointless task.
Joe Blow's internet/email provider (MSN, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail) also have
been promoting spam filters. Some of their customers are ignorant or
foolish enough to respond to spam, as long as the spam gets through their
provider's spam filters.
Thus, the action of spammers bypassing spam filters isn't from stupidity,
its from making an extra buck.
Quick question - I've been here for only a few months - what *is* there to do on a Friday night? (Please reply - even by emailing me at dasunt [at] hotmail dot com.)
KnightStalker writes Canticle might get you fired if you're in a very liberal school district. Someone who wouldn't blink at the pseudo-science-religion in Stranger in a Strange Land might get upset at what could be interpreted as Catholic apologetics.:-)
Luckily, with the US educational system emphasis on Latin and understanding various theologies, there's a great chance that nobody will understand that Canticle is actually about the Catholic church.:)
Great book, btw, but I see any book (especially an SF book) that details revelations being a really hard sell in a public school. (Atheist Left: Ewww, it has religion! Catholic Right: Ewww, it has science!
)
Oh, and just to get modded off-topic: Remember: when pissed at the gods, burn a shaman a day.
Re:It's big, it's old, and we're stuck with it
on
XFree86 Politics
·
· Score: 1
I'm probably screwing this up somehow, but my/usr/bin/X11 is only 8M in
size. 'Top' shows that Xfree86 is currently using roughly 15M of memory.
Looking in/usr/bin/X11, the largest program seems to be xnview at 1.7M
(??? - thought that was an app), then XFree86. (Oddly enough, I seem to
have "dillo" also existing in the same directory - looking at debian
[specifically dpkg -L dillo and dpkg -L xnview], seems that a lot of X
apps end up in/usr/bin/X11). In you '70M' figure, are you counting the
apps that end up in/usr/bin/X11?
Btw, my system is debian-woody, upgraded from debian-stable, with
XFree86 version 4.1.0.1 with module loader present, using the chips
drivers (Chips and Technologies CT5555 video chipset on this older laptop),
with Fluxbox 0.1.14, which is very usable on my Pentium 166/80M laptop.
Now, my uneducated, non-programming, non-network saavy opinion is that I
strongly suspect that X's design and XFree86's architecture is being blamed
for a lot more then it deserves. While I have seen plenty of criticism
directed towards X/XFree86, and plenty of suggestions on why it "needs to
be replaced", I have never seen a detailed criticism that seems legitiment
and factual. Something along the lines of "X network-transparent architecture
introduces a latency of 50ms, which means that hyperfrobber applications are
unworkable, and this is a problem with the network specifications, which
cannot be fixed by optimization." [Links to why X is evil are appreciated -
mail to dasunt at hotmail dot com.]
Remember, an potential X replacement has to measure up to X/XFree86, and
that's quite some competition. XFree86 isn't x86 hardware specific, nor
is it linux specific. I believe that the Debian project has XFree86
running on roughly a dozen platforms, and that the BSD's also use XFree86.
A vast collection of apps use X, understand X, and _don't_ have an army
of developers standing behind them to convert them to X's would-be
replacement. There is nobody standing in line to convert all of XFree86's
drivers to the new thing, and debug them all as well. Also, it does not only need all the features of X, it needs
to be better then X, or else why should we take the time to switch?
Remember, "all the features" does not mean "all the features you use",
a graphical display system that only runs on nVidia chipsets with no
network transparency, only runs the latest games, and gets twice the
FPS that X does might be perfect for you, but is worthless for the
vast majority of people.
In short, when you want to make statements saying that X/XFree86 is
bad, have statistics and benchmarks showing why X is bad, show where
X/XFree86 is having trouble and show why it is a problem with the X
protocol, and not the implimentation, and show why this problem is so
bad that it requires changing everything to a new system which will
have to be extended and debugged on dozens of architectures and several
OS's. Then I'll pay attention.
My 1 linux gripe is that certain X apps have serious usability issues at a
resolution of 800x600 or below.
Using Galeon as an example:
Go to settings/perferences, click.
Great, the settings pane is larger then the entire screen. No
window bar, can't reach the close buttons. Argh!
Of course, just because of this, I have alt-shift-[hjkl] mapped to
bignudge the window left-down-up-right. So, nudge the window down
and to the left, and I see a maximize button. Click it. Expands to
fill the entire screen again.
Now I'm not trying to pick on Galeon, its a fast browser for my older
laptop, and allows me to browse without a problem on most web sites.
However, apps like this are one of the reasons why linux isn't ready
as a desktop for the masses.
Billy at Redmond had his OS at Redmond usable at 800x600 for a long
time, and everything up to 2k was usable at at 640x480. (Haven't used
XP, so I can't vouch for it). Now the 640x480 resolution is probably
dead and buried for most new systems, but plenty of older systems are
using it, and 800x600 is still the most optimal resolution for some
new laptops, and plenty of older ones.
I'm sorry, but this is one of the areas where Linux is so far behind
Windows that it is shameful.
I suggest trying xftree and the excellent xfsamba for an
explorer replacement. Under debian, they can be found with
the xfce window manager package.
I empathize with you, since a few weeks ago, I was trying
to find a decent file browser for my low end laptop. Tried
a few, but finally was happy with xftree.
Sure, life extension is unnatural. So is insulin, open heart surgery, cooked food, anti-stroke drugs, central heating/cooling, canned foods, automobiles, plumbing, farming, herding, manufacturing...
In short, look around you. Its all unnatural. Unless you are a pre-fire hunter gatherer that does not wear clothing or use tools, your life in altered by technology.
As for overpopulation, yep, technology already caused that. Guess how many pre-fire non-tool using hunter gatherers the world can support? Nowhere near six billion.
Slashdot Mirror
I was one of my super-paranoid thought paths the other day, and ended up trying to think of a way to restrict access.
Passwords are vulnerable to keylogging and snooping, your method would require that the keylogging/snooper timed the keystrokes - definately in the realm of possibility. Some sort of combined graphical/mouse/keyboard login would be more difficult, but snooping/screen captures/Van Eck freaking would do the trick. Biological measures would also be difficult, since you can be coerced into accessing the machine.
In the end, probably the best way of doing it that I could come up with was to use a laptop (integrated design makes hardware screen capture/ key logging harder, and I'm under the [possibly mistaken] impression that Van Eck's freaking would be harder with a LCD display then a CRT display), use a non-writeable boot CD and keep all data on an USB keydrive, mounted noexec. No network connection, and some sort of combined graphical/keyboard login. Then always carry a method of quickly destroying the USB keydrive. (Thermite would be a dramatic, but quick way of doing it.)
Of course, this is far from perfect, since there is always the possibility of being drugged through food/environment, then being interrogated with the USB drive out of your possession, until they have your password.
Pride went out the window a long time ago. Now its about quantity and speed. The guy who takes an extra 15 minutes to do an excellent job mopping the floors will be fired and the guy who does it "good enough for now" will stay employed.
It could be worse. At least linux IRC clients tend to filter out mIRC colours, and there are decent win32 IRC clients. You should see what those Outlook and Outlook Express users do to Usenet posts. *shudder*
The best part of it is that Outlook and Outlook Express demangles its own creation, so that the post is only broken in every other news client on earth, which leads to "dude, your client is broken", "looks fine to me" threads.
How was Skylab launched 20 years ago, and reentered 25 years ago?
Ah, I see that the magical slashdot gnomes just changed '20' to '30' on the front page.
I had the opposite experience. I was using a windows (win98, so this probably wasn't fair) to try to ICS a dialup line. Turned a rather stable machine (by win98 standards) into a machine that would frequently drop the internet connect and crash.
A week later, a hardware modem I bought for linux had arrived ($50 for the USR hardware modem, compared to $25 for the Intel software modem). Shut down, plugged it into a free pci slot, booted back up, apt-getted the ppp packages, and I could connect. A quick glance at the NAT and IPTABLES howtos, and I had a shared NAT connection that works without a problem.
Bobby Shaftoe went to sea,
Silver buckles on his knee,
He'll come back and marry me,
Pretty Bobby Shaftoe.
Bobby Shaftoe's fine and fair,
Combing down his auburn hair,
He's my friend for ever more,
Pretty Bobby Shaftoe.
Old nursery rhyme - my mother (b. 1945) is familiar with it, but I was not until I did a little digging.
The parent poster writes:
Remember when 14.4K was fast? So do I. And I think with a correction in the system, it can be a decent speed.
Nope. Sorry. There are 2 reasons why 14.4K will never be fast again:
Actually, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible to filter all Usenet news through a spamfilter (such as bogofilter) locally, before reading it.
If I was in the really spammy groups, I'd try that. For now, I just rely on scoring, and not reading messages that don't interest me on the few groups I read daily.
First of all, I must state that Debian isn't the most newbie friendly distribution out there, although, some non-newbie friendly aspects, such as dselect is slated for replacement in the next release.
That being said, Debian is one of the easiest systems to configure, *if* you know what you are doing. (If you don't know what you are doing, all operating systems are hard to configure - some just guess better at what you want). The packaging support is excellent, and as the OP said, the installation scripts are rather refined for the most part.
However, the OP has one thing wrong about Debian - there are usually 3, (sometimes 4) branches out there. First branch is the stable branch, and its codenamed "woody" in this release. The second branch is the testing branch, codenamed "sarge". The third branch is unstable, and is forever known as "sid" (after the boy next door in Toy Story who liked to break toys). Packages/updates first appear in sid/unstable, then, after a short period of testing to make sure nothing breaks, they move to sarge/testing. Sarge/testing tries to keep its numbers of bugs low, so its always a good release candidate. Woody/stable has no new packages or updates, save for back-ported bug fixes. (The Debian project is rather good at getting quick bug fixes, btw). When the Debian project is close to a release, sarge will be frozen, a new testing branch will be made, and for a short period of time, there will be four branches in existance.
Several complaints are frequently heard about debian. One of the most common ones is that the stable distribution tends to have older packages, which is very, very true. The goal for the "official" Debian stable release isn't to have the newest collection of packages, but the most tested and stable collection of packages. Another complaint is the selection of packages out there, and the Debian package requirements. A vanilla Debian install, with no non-free sources, tends to be a rather good example of FOSS. Again, this has to do with the Debian philosophy (and it makes the maintainance of packages easier). Complaining that Debian doesn't have Cool-Binary-Nonfree-Package-XYZ is like complaining that iptables doesn't run on windows.
Other then the package management, the one area where Debian really, truly shines (IMHO), is the wide collection of ports out there, and that Debian (unlike many other distributions out there) does not treat non-x86 users as lower-class citizens. Woody runs on (IIRC) 11 different hardware architectures. That impresses me. I can go out, right now, find an old Alpha, Sparc, m68k or a new Itanium, and can run the latest Debian release on it, and for the most part, it will act like the same release on my x86 laptop. When the AMD64 CPUs are widely available, I'm expecting that Debian will quickly jump over to supporting that architecture.
Oh, and Debian tends to have a wonderful user community. :)
First of all, if you haven't gotten a virus through your MUA, you either don't get a lot of email, or have a relatively obscure email address. Before you flame away, please note that there is a difference between receiving an email virus and being infected. I am receiving a lot of the "Fake MS Update Virus" lately, but I'm not infected.
That being said, one of the reasons why people are so against Outlook and Outlook Express is that its security model is broken: It is possible to be infected by certain viruses just by reading a message. Some viruses just need the document viewed in the preview pane. Quite frankly, that's a hell of a security risk. (To be fair, Outlook/Outlook Express's latest releases have been getting better at the security game, and Unix MUA are not immune from security problems, although Unix MUAs tend more towards mail bombs then viruses being spread.)
A good virus scanner will help protect you against email viruses, especially if the scanner acts like a pop3/smtp proxy (most of the popular modern ones do). But I'm not going to rely on AV software getting the virus definitions updated with the latest "virus of the moment" before my email client polls the pop3 server in the morning.
There are other free email clients for windows, so cost is not an issue. I've used several non-Outlook clients for windows, and as a general user, their performance and features compared to Outlook. (Although, if you need to poll a hotmail account, Outlook Express under windows is the only free win32 email client that I know of that can do it.) So, assuming that a free client will do everything you need, why not break the virus trilogy of Windows-IE-Outlook and use it?
Btw, the reason I said "Joe Outlook Idiot" is twofold. First, notice the "Idiot" - No MUA can protect a person from their own stupidity. Second, if your virus is going to target idiots and use their MUA to mail outgoing viruses, you are going to choose the MUA that most idiots use - which is Outlook/Outlook Express. (Note that while all Greeks are Human, not all Humans are Greek - or, although most of the idiots out there use Outlook/Outlook Express, not all Outlook/Outlook Express users are idiots). Therefore: "Joe Outlook Idiot"
SMTP is broken? Maybe, but lets look at this logic.
Now lets look at this with $SMTP+1 (With spiffy authentication).
Yep, that sure fixed the problem.
In Heinlein's "Beyond this Horizon", in addition to the typical gun-toting libertarian utopia, there was a rather interesting approach to Eugenics.
Basically, instead of creating new genes, couples would go to the genetic engineer when they wanted a child, and their child would be created from the best possible combination of their genes. If the father had one gene for diabetes, and another non-diabetic gene, the non-diabetic gene would be choosen for his offspring. If the mother had one gene for flat feet, and another gene for a normal arched foot, only the arched gene would be choosen for her offspring.
Now, this is an interesting approach, and one that has several benefits going for it. First of all, you aren't introducing new genes to the germ line - you are only maximizing the genes that are there. Second, its a harder policy to criticize - Its easy to pass a law against giving people new genes, its harder to pass a law preventing a mother from giving her son Tay-Sachs disease.
For the curious, googling for "Rosalind Franklin" is rather informative.
And no, this isn't offtopic.
The parent poster writes:
else I'll be using NFS which is a much better protocol in every area.
Er, yes... like how NFS relies on the hostname for security, while SMB/CIFS relies on a password.
NFS is as (in)secure as the r* commands (rlogin, rcp, rsh). It relies on the client to authenticate the user, and the server only trusts certain clients (or anything pretending to be certain clients).
Now I'll admit, a good firewall should keep NFS safe. Under certain setups, even a good router should be enough. However, I prefer to think of a firewall as one layer of security - not my first, last, and only line of defense.
Although I'm not currently using it, AFS/Code seems to be a cross platform (win, mac, unix) secure replacement to NFS.
NFS might be a better protocol then SMB/CIFS in certain areas, but for security, SMB/CIFS wins (even the old versions of SMB that rely on plaintext passwords).
If by sickness, you mean disease, then yes, the chance of little green men infecting the crew with the Jovian Flu halfway through the mission is high.
Think! 5 men in isolation will not have a lot of opertunities to catch a disease.
When did you move from Mexico?
Does it have control and the "[" key?
Smart vim users know that ctrl-[ is the same as escape. Smarter vim users remap the caps lock and control keys so that control is to the left of the a key on a US querty keyboard.
The parent poster writes:
I don't get it... If I am going to such extremes to AVOID spam, why should the spamemr WANT to go to lenghts to get around it? I obviously am someone who DOES NOT and WILL NOT patronize their products... So why waste the effort?
Easy enough answered. Now you and I probably both use spam filters on our private accounts, and would never respond to spam. Thus, evading our spam filters is a pointless, pointless task.
Joe Blow's internet/email provider (MSN, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail) also have been promoting spam filters. Some of their customers are ignorant or foolish enough to respond to spam, as long as the spam gets through their provider's spam filters.
Thus, the action of spammers bypassing spam filters isn't from stupidity, its from making an extra buck.
Woah, another Fargo person.
Quick question - I've been here for only a few months - what *is* there to do on a Friday night? (Please reply - even by emailing me at dasunt [at] hotmail dot com.)
KnightStalker writes :-)
Canticle might get you fired if you're in a very liberal school district. Someone who wouldn't blink at the pseudo-science-religion in Stranger in a Strange Land might get upset at what could be interpreted as Catholic apologetics.
Luckily, with the US educational system emphasis on Latin and understanding various theologies, there's a great chance that nobody will understand that Canticle is actually about the Catholic church. :)
Great book, btw, but I see any book (especially an SF book) that details revelations being a really hard sell in a public school. (Atheist Left: Ewww, it has religion! Catholic Right: Ewww, it has science! )
Oh, and just to get modded off-topic: Remember: when pissed at the gods, burn a shaman a day.
I'm probably screwing this up somehow, but my /usr/bin/X11 is only 8M in
size. 'Top' shows that Xfree86 is currently using roughly 15M of memory.
Looking in /usr/bin/X11, the largest program seems to be xnview at 1.7M
(??? - thought that was an app), then XFree86. (Oddly enough, I seem to
have "dillo" also existing in the same directory - looking at debian
[specifically dpkg -L dillo and dpkg -L xnview], seems that a lot of X
apps end up in /usr/bin/X11). In you '70M' figure, are you counting the
apps that end up in /usr/bin/X11?
Btw, my system is debian-woody, upgraded from debian-stable, with XFree86 version 4.1.0.1 with module loader present, using the chips drivers (Chips and Technologies CT5555 video chipset on this older laptop), with Fluxbox 0.1.14, which is very usable on my Pentium 166/80M laptop.
Now, my uneducated, non-programming, non-network saavy opinion is that I strongly suspect that X's design and XFree86's architecture is being blamed for a lot more then it deserves. While I have seen plenty of criticism directed towards X/XFree86, and plenty of suggestions on why it "needs to be replaced", I have never seen a detailed criticism that seems legitiment and factual. Something along the lines of "X network-transparent architecture introduces a latency of 50ms, which means that hyperfrobber applications are unworkable, and this is a problem with the network specifications, which cannot be fixed by optimization." [Links to why X is evil are appreciated - mail to dasunt at hotmail dot com.]
Remember, an potential X replacement has to measure up to X/XFree86, and that's quite some competition. XFree86 isn't x86 hardware specific, nor is it linux specific. I believe that the Debian project has XFree86 running on roughly a dozen platforms, and that the BSD's also use XFree86. A vast collection of apps use X, understand X, and _don't_ have an army of developers standing behind them to convert them to X's would-be replacement. There is nobody standing in line to convert all of XFree86's drivers to the new thing, and debug them all as well. Also, it does not only need all the features of X, it needs to be better then X, or else why should we take the time to switch? Remember, "all the features" does not mean "all the features you use", a graphical display system that only runs on nVidia chipsets with no network transparency, only runs the latest games, and gets twice the FPS that X does might be perfect for you, but is worthless for the vast majority of people.
In short, when you want to make statements saying that X/XFree86 is bad, have statistics and benchmarks showing why X is bad, show where X/XFree86 is having trouble and show why it is a problem with the X protocol, and not the implimentation, and show why this problem is so bad that it requires changing everything to a new system which will have to be extended and debugged on dozens of architectures and several OS's. Then I'll pay attention.
I was actually thinking, what happened to pax? Supports both cpio and tar formats, worked great last time I tried it.
My 1 linux gripe is that certain X apps have serious usability issues at a resolution of 800x600 or below.
Using Galeon as an example:Go to settings/perferences, click.
Great, the settings pane is larger then the entire screen. No window bar, can't reach the close buttons. Argh!
Of course, just because of this, I have alt-shift-[hjkl] mapped to bignudge the window left-down-up-right. So, nudge the window down and to the left, and I see a maximize button. Click it. Expands to fill the entire screen again.
Now I'm not trying to pick on Galeon, its a fast browser for my older laptop, and allows me to browse without a problem on most web sites. However, apps like this are one of the reasons why linux isn't ready as a desktop for the masses.
Billy at Redmond had his OS at Redmond usable at 800x600 for a long time, and everything up to 2k was usable at at 640x480. (Haven't used XP, so I can't vouch for it). Now the 640x480 resolution is probably dead and buried for most new systems, but plenty of older systems are using it, and 800x600 is still the most optimal resolution for some new laptops, and plenty of older ones.
I'm sorry, but this is one of the areas where Linux is so far behind Windows that it is shameful.
I suggest trying xftree and the excellent xfsamba for an explorer replacement. Under debian, they can be found with the xfce window manager package.
I empathize with you, since a few weeks ago, I was trying to find a decent file browser for my low end laptop. Tried a few, but finally was happy with xftree.
Sure, life extension is unnatural. So is insulin, open heart surgery, cooked food, anti-stroke drugs, central heating/cooling, canned foods, automobiles, plumbing, farming, herding, manufacturing...
In short, look around you. Its all unnatural. Unless you are a pre-fire hunter gatherer that does not wear clothing or use tools, your life in altered by technology.
As for overpopulation, yep, technology already caused that. Guess how many pre-fire non-tool using hunter gatherers the world can support? Nowhere near six billion.
In short, these are idiots, nothing more.