I don't know about "lame", it's just that the list is a little short. I suspect this article was hammered together in a rush because the author had been to busy partying to think of a decent list. Well, it is Christmas, so I'll cut Yahoo! some slack on that.
Instead, why not try and think of some stuff they missed?
The SCO Group
The current incarnation of the music business
Digital Rights Management
WAP
"Push" based web content
And some stuff which seems/should be doomed:
Spam
The current incarnation of the movie business
Tablet PCs
Film based P&S cameras
Geeks with no life;)
What are everyone else's personal "WTF were/are they thinking?"
Not too closely it appears, since as it says in bold on the front page "the only way to really learn scripting is to write scripts". It's right. There seems to be a view amongst people who "can't" write shell script that it needs to be taught which is utterly wrong. It is not an arcane programming language like C for crying out loud; it's the commands you use at the command line *every* day, unless you are entirely reliant on a GUI.
The only major difference is that you have core programming contructs like loops and conditionals to play with as well, although the true hacker would say that's wrong since you can actually use all those from the prompt too! What you *need* to write effective shell scripts are:
The Unix "man" pages.
A good reference.
Some example scripts; there's a bunch under/etc. You can learn *far* more from looking at a good real example than anything else.
A grasp of programming "style"; indentation and so on. Again, real examples are good.
A little time and nous.
The reference is optional (it was for me, my only reference was "man"), but does help to speed up the process somewhat. You most certainly do not need a step by step tutorial or, heaven forbid, to drop a few hundred on a "training course".
I can (and frequently do) write stuff in shell that I gather from the comments in this article most people would have used Perl/Python/Ruby/... for. Sure, it's slower, less efficient, and I guess it kind of makes me into a bit of a dinosaur, but you know what? I don't care! I *know* I can be sat down in front of a shell prompt on any Unix system, anywhere, and get the job done with what is there. No need for any niceties like change requests to get my scripting language of choice installed, waiting for compilations, or anything like that. These days the Perl coders might be able to get away with it, but how many other scripting language only guys can claim that?
The LDP includes the "Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide" which is available in both HTML and PDF (1MB!) formats, and there is even a version for PalmOS! Since I found it, it's been the only reference I've *ever* needed when I've stumbled over some obscure nuance of shell scripting.
Seconded on the HPs; both the printers and the drivers are rock solid. I've got a LaserJet 6L which has been going strong for six years now and is on its third toner cartridge and due another RSN. I have it on a network print server and it's been just fine printing with Red Hat from v6.1 onwards using LPRng and now CUPS with v9.0, no PostScript, but the Linux drivers handle that just fine too.
It's just starting to have some problems with the paperfeed though, occasionally pulling several sheets of paper through at a time (successfully I might add!). And that's another thing about HPs; when they actually do jam you very seldom have any problems getting the paper out, you can usually pretty much expose the entire paper path by flipping the lid and removing the cartridge. I'm actually kind of sad to see it failing because it's served me that well, so I'll definately be getting another HP laser to replace it. The big question for me is whether or not to go colour...
I don't see this happening anytime soon. We've just had a big media upheaval whereby we've switched almost all our audio/video/computer media to the 12cm shiny disc. If it was one media type, I could maybe see it happening, but I think people are getting very accustomed to the interchangeable media situation to take that either - I know I am. It may have its drawbacks, but being too bulky and prone to scratches aren't ones that I've had, and my three year old niece seems to be able to load her games into my PC without scratching them or touching the shiny side either. She does spend an excessive amount of time looking at the light patterns though, but I suppose that it's preferable to dropping some acid or the damn "Tweenies".;)
In a similar vein to your "Demolition Man" example, there's a scene in "Buck Rogers" where he sticks a CD ROM into a drive his spaceship and records some camera footage to it. I think I'm with Buck on this - the 12cm disc probably *is* going to be around in the 25th Century, even if its capacity is vastly greater than now.
I can't find a corroborative link for this on Google because I'm not sure of the terminology, but I watched a program that showed that your "cases" example isn't strictly correct. IIRC, someone attached a device to some test subjects to monitor retina movements while reading and it transpired that the human eye/brain processess entire words as a single symbol. "The" is processed immediately as "the" and not "t-h-e" or "th-e" or "t-he". It's only on longer words that we break up the word, and even then there was significant evidence that we scan for vowels and split the syllables apart. "Sig-nif-i-cant", for example.
The conclusion was that this was possibly an ingrained thing from early written languages which used symbols to represent a phoneme rather than an arbitrary letter, ie "th" would have it's own symbol. As an aside, for a fascinating look at the processes and effort that goes into the decryption and understanding of a dead language, take a look at the work of Michael Ventris on the decryption of the syllabic "Linear B" script.
Yeah, it was a little bit superflous and a little trollish from the Gnome vs KDE point of view. On the otherhand, KDE/Qt probably *is* the best environment for languages that eschew the left to right orientation which is largely a Latin language thing. It's certainly the one environment on *any* platform that I've seen praised the most for its BiDi support, and wasn't the state of Windows BiDi support the reason Israel (Hebrew is another right to left language) gave for dumping Microsoft?
Don't know about the 1970's, but I sure remember reading about it at the end of November. Hmm. The story makes Slashdot on the day of the announcement, and the BBC is a month behind? Maybe it's not as bad around here as some would have us believe...;)
Sure it's been done before
on
Cube House
·
· Score: 1
There was the "Tent of Doom" at Netscape for example, which was waaay cool.
Actually, probably not. You might *think* SCO is doing an illegal pump-and-dump and should be done over by the SEC, but can you prove it? In court? Beyond all reasonable doubt? The SEC is going to have to be able to answer "yes" to all of the above before it will even consider the next step. I don't think the SEC is going to be ripping SCO apart until the aftermath of the IBM case somehow.
So, SCO plans to single out one large Linux using corporate for license infringement and "make an example of them". What's the bet that they will try and perform the usual predatory tactic and try and cull one of the weaker members of the GNU/Hurd?;)
I think your drunk driving analogy is a bit extreme - you left out the words "Unix code" on that occassion. There is a big difference between "your employees contributed to Linux" and "your employees contributed Unix code to Linux". The former would be the devious legal weasel thing you imply, while the latter *is* wrong unless the license of the Unix code concerned permits this, and SCO's license does not.
It does however give them a signed document they can produce in a courtroom if one of your employees is found to have contributed some "infringing" code to Linux however. If I were one of SCO's customer's I'd be very worried they were about to pull an RIAA and start sueing the hand that pays the bills real soon now... Now *there's* the legal weasel tactic we all expect from SCO.
You need to tweak some rules manually from time to time to get the most from it, and make sure it is properly tuned for your system of course. For example, if you don't get any non-English emails then the default score is *way* to low, so you might want to add this:
Your mileage may vary of course; you need to look at the specific spams that are slipping through *your* net and spot the common patterns or keywords. Especially the keywords; I defined a bunch of custom rules based around "Sildenafil Citrate" a while ago to deal with some jerk's marketing campaign. All hits on these rules went directly to my automatic spam reporting script - the campaign didn't seem to last very long...;)
While Halliburton does indeed have a huge role in post-war Iraq, I rather think you missed the implied point. A significant investor in Saddam's Iraq would be the tens of billion dollar oil investment made by Total-Elf-Fina, who are indeed French. Any arguments about who is financially exploiting the Iraqis the most might as well be between the pot and the kettle.
Did any customer actually fall for their 'legal disclaimer?'. Sure they did; the same demographic of people that receives a "confidential email" from a Mr. Mobutu of Nigeria and parts with large sums of cash. However, it's far more likely that the majority of customers probably saw that and thought "yeah, right!", followed quickly by the thoughts "cheap cable!" and "where's my credit card?"
That's an interesting point and Microsoft must be torn over this issue. On one hand, they could take this as an opportunity to lock out a few more dodgy copies of Windows XP... for the few days it takes for the inevitable patch or workaround. On the other hand, by waiving that, they potentially get to vastly improve the security of deployed Windows XP installations. Given the amount of bad press that Microsoft gets each time some Internet worm is doing the rounds I wonder which way they will go...
Taking a hit maybe, but not dying (at least not to the power user). Here are some of the features I get from my Windows personal firewall of choice (Agnitum's Outpost Pro) that are not offered by ICF:
Outgoing connection filtering
Application checksumming (with MD5)
Protocol level mail attachment scanning
*Really* detailed logging
Pop-up ad blocking (OK, this is going to be in IE but is off by default)
Banner ad blocking (not in SP2 IE at all as far as I can see)
Cookie control
Policies for pop-ups, scripting, ActiveX and so on handled on a per-site basis
And the list goes on... This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened; Microsoft used to bundle an Anti-virus product with DOS and Windows, and that didn't kill the market. It still does bundle a disk defragmenter, yet Diskeeper seems to be be doing just fine.
Oh no, SCO definately doesn't want Linux to die; they couldn't care less what happens to it. Have you seen how much of SCO's application suite relies on the Linux Kernel Personality to work? If they lose the case, then SCO's Unicies are dead. If they win the case, then Linux has a hiatus to fix the issue and SCO support will "disappear" in a lot of apps; SCO's Unicies are still dead.
Ergo, what SCO wants is a chunk of cash, (whether that comes from licensing, damages or a buyout doesn't matter). They may or may not also be serious about wanting all of the code under a GPL license made available to plunder as they see fit, but I suspect this is just McBride/Boies blowing more smoke over the issue.
And there-in is why this idea is doomed to fail. The only people who would need to take advantage of this kind of idea are those who are living on the financial edge. They might watch adverts for cheap flights, cars or whatever, but in reality they won't be buying too many of them. I think that someone might be seriously over-estimating the kind of advertising revenue this kind of demographic is going to attact.
It remains to be seen whether this is a good idea, but I'm sure IBM have done their sums, and a bit of research.
I'm pretty sure IBM's research would only have gone as far as "do we get enough cash for the hardware up front to show a profit?". If the answer to that is "yes", then IBM really doesn't have to care whether this succeeds or fails, does it? They get a profit and, perhaps more importantly, some column inches about how they are helping bring computing to those who might not otherwise have it.
ONLY three minutes! You mean there are Windows XP boxes out thre that only force you to watch that advert for Windows XP you get after a reboot for three minutes every hour? Where do I sign up?
I use this technique too. One other often over looked benefit of doing this is that it makes sorting your incoming mail into folders *very* easy. For example, email to "amazon@domain.com" is from Amazon Books and can be filed into the folder "Amazon" - simple. Even if the company or mailing list changes thier subject tag, domain or anything else you might try filtering on, they are never going to change *your* email address.
Assuming the dual load balancer hypothesis is correct, it doesn't have to have been unused. Maybe one was the load balancer for a web cluster and the one was used for a ftp cluster, or both were being used for both roles. As part of SCO's attempts to mitigate the effect of the DDoS they assign a new IP to the second load balancer, switch the web site DNS to it and off they go with one load balancer now handling all the legit traffic and the other taking the SYNs. At some point the DDoS initiator realises this and tweaks the zombies to target the new server, hence the second DDoS late at night. That fits pretty closely with the observed traffic from CAIDA, but doesn't quite explain how there is an offset between web and ftp DDoS attacks in the second major traffic spike, so there would have to be some additional configurations I've not convered.
Take a look at the graph at CAIDA. The web server takes a beating for about an hour around 4am PST, and again for a bit longer around midnight. Just as the latter is leveling off, an even bigger spike hits the FTP server which lasts about an hour and then tails off over the next several. All in all a pretty poor DDoS attack if they couldn't sustain it for more than a few hours so the originator can't have been too smart. Bit bit like the victim that failed to have adequate SYN attack protection really... do you suppose there is a connection?
Slashdot Mirror
Instead, why not try and think of some stuff they missed?
- The SCO Group
- The current incarnation of the music business
- Digital Rights Management
- WAP
- "Push" based web content
And some stuff which seems/should be doomed:- Spam
- The current incarnation of the movie business
- Tablet PCs
- Film based P&S cameras
- Geeks with no life
;)
What are everyone else's personal "WTF were/are they thinking?"Not too closely it appears, since as it says in bold on the front page "the only way to really learn scripting is to write scripts". It's right. There seems to be a view amongst people who "can't" write shell script that it needs to be taught which is utterly wrong. It is not an arcane programming language like C for crying out loud; it's the commands you use at the command line *every* day, unless you are entirely reliant on a GUI.
The only major difference is that you have core programming contructs like loops and conditionals to play with as well, although the true hacker would say that's wrong since you can actually use all those from the prompt too! What you *need* to write effective shell scripts are:
- The Unix "man" pages.
- A good reference.
- Some example scripts; there's a bunch under
/etc. You can learn *far* more from looking at a good real example than anything else.
- A grasp of programming "style"; indentation and so on. Again, real examples are good.
- A little time and nous.
The reference is optional (it was for me, my only reference was "man"), but does help to speed up the process somewhat. You most certainly do not need a step by step tutorial or, heaven forbid, to drop a few hundred on a "training course".I can (and frequently do) write stuff in shell that I gather from the comments in this article most people would have used Perl/Python/Ruby/... for. Sure, it's slower, less efficient, and I guess it kind of makes me into a bit of a dinosaur, but you know what? I don't care! I *know* I can be sat down in front of a shell prompt on any Unix system, anywhere, and get the job done with what is there. No need for any niceties like change requests to get my scripting language of choice installed, waiting for compilations, or anything like that. These days the Perl coders might be able to get away with it, but how many other scripting language only guys can claim that?
The LDP includes the "Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide" which is available in both HTML and PDF (1MB!) formats, and there is even a version for PalmOS! Since I found it, it's been the only reference I've *ever* needed when I've stumbled over some obscure nuance of shell scripting.
It's just starting to have some problems with the paperfeed though, occasionally pulling several sheets of paper through at a time (successfully I might add!). And that's another thing about HPs; when they actually do jam you very seldom have any problems getting the paper out, you can usually pretty much expose the entire paper path by flipping the lid and removing the cartridge. I'm actually kind of sad to see it failing because it's served me that well, so I'll definately be getting another HP laser to replace it. The big question for me is whether or not to go colour...
I don't see this happening anytime soon. We've just had a big media upheaval whereby we've switched almost all our audio/video/computer media to the 12cm shiny disc. If it was one media type, I could maybe see it happening, but I think people are getting very accustomed to the interchangeable media situation to take that either - I know I am. It may have its drawbacks, but being too bulky and prone to scratches aren't ones that I've had, and my three year old niece seems to be able to load her games into my PC without scratching them or touching the shiny side either. She does spend an excessive amount of time looking at the light patterns though, but I suppose that it's preferable to dropping some acid or the damn "Tweenies". ;)
In a similar vein to your "Demolition Man" example, there's a scene in "Buck Rogers" where he sticks a CD ROM into a drive his spaceship and records some camera footage to it. I think I'm with Buck on this - the 12cm disc probably *is* going to be around in the 25th Century, even if its capacity is vastly greater than now.
The conclusion was that this was possibly an ingrained thing from early written languages which used symbols to represent a phoneme rather than an arbitrary letter, ie "th" would have it's own symbol. As an aside, for a fascinating look at the processes and effort that goes into the decryption and understanding of a dead language, take a look at the work of Michael Ventris on the decryption of the syllabic "Linear B" script.
Yeah, it was a little bit superflous and a little trollish from the Gnome vs KDE point of view. On the otherhand, KDE/Qt probably *is* the best environment for languages that eschew the left to right orientation which is largely a Latin language thing. It's certainly the one environment on *any* platform that I've seen praised the most for its BiDi support, and wasn't the state of Windows BiDi support the reason Israel (Hebrew is another right to left language) gave for dumping Microsoft?
Don't know about the 1970's, but I sure remember reading about it at the end of November. Hmm. The story makes Slashdot on the day of the announcement, and the BBC is a month behind? Maybe it's not as bad around here as some would have us believe... ;)
There was the "Tent of Doom" at Netscape for example, which was waaay cool.
Actually, probably not. You might *think* SCO is doing an illegal pump-and-dump and should be done over by the SEC, but can you prove it? In court? Beyond all reasonable doubt? The SEC is going to have to be able to answer "yes" to all of the above before it will even consider the next step. I don't think the SEC is going to be ripping SCO apart until the aftermath of the IBM case somehow.
It does however give them a signed document they can produce in a courtroom if one of your employees is found to have contributed some "infringing" code to Linux however. If I were one of SCO's customer's I'd be very worried they were about to pull an RIAA and start sueing the hand that pays the bills real soon now... Now *there's* the legal weasel tactic we all expect from SCO.
While Halliburton does indeed have a huge role in post-war Iraq, I rather think you missed the implied point. A significant investor in Saddam's Iraq would be the tens of billion dollar oil investment made by Total-Elf-Fina, who are indeed French. Any arguments about who is financially exploiting the Iraqis the most might as well be between the pot and the kettle.
So, any bets on how long before New Zealand really does win that Oscar for "Best Supporting Country" like their tourist board is using in its adverts?
Did any customer actually fall for their 'legal disclaimer?'. Sure they did; the same demographic of people that receives a "confidential email" from a Mr. Mobutu of Nigeria and parts with large sums of cash. However, it's far more likely that the majority of customers probably saw that and thought "yeah, right!", followed quickly by the thoughts "cheap cable!" and "where's my credit card?"
That's an interesting point and Microsoft must be torn over this issue. On one hand, they could take this as an opportunity to lock out a few more dodgy copies of Windows XP... for the few days it takes for the inevitable patch or workaround. On the other hand, by waiving that, they potentially get to vastly improve the security of deployed Windows XP installations. Given the amount of bad press that Microsoft gets each time some Internet worm is doing the rounds I wonder which way they will go...
- Outgoing connection filtering
- Application checksumming (with MD5)
- Protocol level mail attachment scanning
- *Really* detailed logging
- Pop-up ad blocking (OK, this is going to be in IE but is off by default)
- Banner ad blocking (not in SP2 IE at all as far as I can see)
- Cookie control
- Policies for pop-ups, scripting, ActiveX and so on handled on a per-site basis
And the list goes on... This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened; Microsoft used to bundle an Anti-virus product with DOS and Windows, and that didn't kill the market. It still does bundle a disk defragmenter, yet Diskeeper seems to be be doing just fine.Ergo, what SCO wants is a chunk of cash, (whether that comes from licensing, damages or a buyout doesn't matter). They may or may not also be serious about wanting all of the code under a GPL license made available to plunder as they see fit, but I suspect this is just McBride/Boies blowing more smoke over the issue.
And there-in is why this idea is doomed to fail. The only people who would need to take advantage of this kind of idea are those who are living on the financial edge. They might watch adverts for cheap flights, cars or whatever, but in reality they won't be buying too many of them. I think that someone might be seriously over-estimating the kind of advertising revenue this kind of demographic is going to attact.
I'm pretty sure IBM's research would only have gone as far as "do we get enough cash for the hardware up front to show a profit?". If the answer to that is "yes", then IBM really doesn't have to care whether this succeeds or fails, does it? They get a profit and, perhaps more importantly, some column inches about how they are helping bring computing to those who might not otherwise have it.
ONLY three minutes! You mean there are Windows XP boxes out thre that only force you to watch that advert for Windows XP you get after a reboot for three minutes every hour? Where do I sign up?
I use this technique too. One other often over looked benefit of doing this is that it makes sorting your incoming mail into folders *very* easy. For example, email to "amazon@domain.com" is from Amazon Books and can be filed into the folder "Amazon" - simple. Even if the company or mailing list changes thier subject tag, domain or anything else you might try filtering on, they are never going to change *your* email address.
Again: all speculation. ;)
Take a look at the graph at CAIDA. The web server takes a beating for about an hour around 4am PST, and again for a bit longer around midnight. Just as the latter is leveling off, an even bigger spike hits the FTP server which lasts about an hour and then tails off over the next several. All in all a pretty poor DDoS attack if they couldn't sustain it for more than a few hours so the originator can't have been too smart. Bit bit like the victim that failed to have adequate SYN attack protection really... do you suppose there is a connection?