While I agree that lately a lot of questions have been pretty brain dead, I think a lot of these questions have been pretty good discussion starters and I get a lot out of the responses from people who either know what they are talking about or know how to look things up and provide a reference URL when they respond. There are usually at least a few of these people replying to most questions.
I do ask people posting replies to avoid posting anything if you don't know for sure or you are too lazy to check your facts before posting. There are far too many people writing uninformed opinions and using phrases like AFAIK and IIRC to forgive themselves for not checking their facts before posting.
"Once the product has entered the marketplace, with the author's agreement, he can no longer engage rights of authorship" to interfere with secondary sales."
I hate to engage in reckless speculation, but this sounds like it could put the kibosh on clauses in licensing that place restrictions on relicensing such as the GPL.
Any German speakers that read the decision care to comment?
I was really looking forward to the released code, but after reading the paper, my impression is that of a mess created out of sheer market necessity instead of a beautiful combination of MacOS front end and Mach/BSD back end.
I've got a G4, I'm definitely going to give it a whirl and hopefully I'll be proven wrong.
The single best reason I can think of to go with a 2 CPU solution is to allow you to run virus scanning on the server. Since you are using Samba, I'm going to got out on a limb here and guess that you are serving up files to Windows clients. I wouldn't think of running a file server for Windows machines that didn't have a good virus scan in place.
A well thought out anti-virus solution will have scanning at every possible point (mail gateway, client machines, file server, etc...)
There are anti-virus solutions that run on Linux and a second CPU would definitely help out if you decide to do that.
IANAL, but I have had some relevant experience with this in my state (Ohio)
If you buy something from out of state that would normally be taxable if you had purchased it in the state, then you must pay the sales tax by writing a check directly to the Secretary of State.
This is no different from how it was before the internet came along. This rule was previously applied to stuff bought mail order.
The fact that almost nobody pays attention to this rule doesn't change the fact that it is a state law.
I suspect other states have pretty much the same setup. Of course now that state governments sense a migration of sales to the internet they are screaming about lost revenues (despite another state budget surplus!).
IMHO, the whole freakin' US tax system is jacked up beyond repair. I'd much rather have one tax bill for each of the three taxing authorities I pay to so I would send one check to city, one to state, and one to the national government. Instead I pay sales tax, gas taxes, property tax, income tax, fishing license fees, E-Check (Ohio EPA required emissions check fee), estate tax, capital gains taxes. The list is endless. I'd rather just pay my share of what my governments cost and decide for myself if I'm getting a good deal or if it's time to move.
There must be something wrong. I timed my Windows 2000 boot last night. It was about 65 seconds to boot on my P2-300 with 64MB/ram. I timed from the moment the video card initialized until I had a login screen and the disk stopped going crazy.
I happen to live in Akron. Maybe I'll use this as an excuse to visit the Inventors' Hall of Fame for the very first time. I've always wondered what it was like in there.
Read that again. It's being transmitted over _an_ IP network, not the Internet. They are aparently using a dedicated connection provided by Qwest and are encrypting the transmission to ensure that nobody with physical access to the connection makes a copy while in transit.
To be really cool it would also have to translate the "feel" of the language. There are always unique cultural concepts like the words describing snow in Inuktitut or the differences in the male and female speech patterns in a Japanese that simply don't translate well at all. There are similar difficulties with translation of all spoken languages.
My opinion of the Exodus network (which was quite high) just went down about 10 notches.
Why don't they have anti-spoof filters that drop all 192.168.x, 172.16.x, and 10.x addresses?
I know this wouldn't have helped in this attach since these weren't the only spoofed addresses used, but still that stuff should never have arrived unless it originated on the Exodus network to begin with.
Anyway - good job to get it cleaned up and stable Thanks to all of those who busted butt to get the site back online and stable. I know what it's like to get attacked and it's not fun.
MSFC stands for "Multilayer switch feature card". This is the part of a Cisco switch/router that makes it do layer-3 switching (routing at wire speeds).
The GPL isn't a US law. It's a software license that applied to ABIT as soon as they distributed a copy on a CD with one of their motherboards.
ABIT sells motherboards to distributors in other countries. Those countries can certainly control the import of ABIT products.
This whole thing has nothing to do with the US or it's laws. Anyway, ABIT is certainly going to do the right thing here. They have made a killing selling to Linux users (among others) and they have no business reason to make money off the software. They are a hardware business.
From the MSNBC.com artice - "Rouland said "X-force" researcher Wilson discovered the backdoor during a standard review of Red Hat's Linux source code, which is freely available. The user name and password were embedded in the code."
It appears from this article that having the source was most definitely relevant in this case.
Internet cafes are the way to go. I've used about 10 of these in the UK, France, Greece and Japan and all of them were just using some simple NAT box and DHCP. They are always affordable (~$5US per hour). Most of them don't give a rats ass what you do with the connection, they just want their money. If they give you a hassle, there is always another one nearby.
None of them minded me plugging in my laptop and using it instead of their cheap clone systems.
If you are dead set on using dial-up, IBM global services, UUNET (resold through a 3rd party), iPass, and AOL (believe it or not!) are all solid choices with access numbers all over the globe.
GSM would be nice, but I'd bet that it won't be as convenient or work as well as either of the first two methods.
Re:It's not necessarily as good as it sounds
on
Homebrew S/ADSL
·
· Score: 1
This is exactly what my cable modem service was like three years ago. They would secretly reboot stuff all the time without telling anybody and it was impossible to talk to anybody with a clue.
It use to be some dumbass cable installer who didn't know anything except what signal levels he was supposed to look for. Nowadays, everybody I talk to at the cable company is using the service so I don't hear dumb answers like "Reboot your PC, it will fix the flashing light on your cable modem!"
Hang in there while they will get their act together or they will be replaced. It's that simple.
Despite that fact, well-established custom and netiquette dictates that experienced online users don't take these kinds of comments on USENET seriously. This is obviously quite different from the "old" world of newspapers, magazine, and T.V. media, where publishers take responsibility for what the turn out. I'd like to see that responsibility extended to the online world and have this guy go after the person who posted the offending material (if he can track him down - not very likely!)
This is another ridiculous law that doesn't take into account the impossibility of enforcement.
The plaintiff needs to get a set of leather britches in my opinion, and not let the flames or insults get to him, no matter how personally offensive they might be. It's USENET for crying out loud.
Man, I can clearly remember reading a copy of Wired back in 1994 or 1995 that talked about toaster-nets, which were simply people daisy-chaining connections together to share bandwidth to the net.
I read that while playing around on a NeXT box and thought about how kick-ass the future seemed where everything would be connected using a single global protocol.
I had so much optimism then. I still think that clearly people are using the Internet as a tool to re-shape governments and lives, but there is so much resistance to overcome it gets you down now and again.
All we want is a cheap, fast, unblocked, unfiltered connection from anyone to anyone, anywhere in the world with no laws, or regulations, or acceptable use policies, with no restrictions on content replication or modification.
When you want to extract money from a large corporation by cyber squatting, you're supposed to grab the domain name early, put up a token web site and establish yourself.
Then when they come knocking you have a leg to stand on.
This is meant to be used in is a file system full of standard Windows system images. It's called a remote install server, so you would have a dozen copies of Windows, each of them for a different hardware configuration. So in this setup, it is possible to realize big gains with single instance storage. Particularly because this would largely be a read only type setup.
IMHO, this is Microsoft coming up with a solution to a problem that they created in the first place and calling it a breakthrough technology. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Why do you need a remote install server? One of the primary reasons is that companies have discovered it is far cheaper to support Windows machines by re-imaging them then by solving problems with the operating system or applications.
Why do you need many different system images? Because the OS is ultra-customized to the hardware, which means it's damn difficult and not worth the effort to ever migrate a system image to new or different hardware.
Other operating systems don't suffer from either of these failings. When something breaks, it is usually a pretty simple matter to check a log file, find the _useful_ error message and fix the problem and maybe restart a daemon. All this may be done without a reboot.
When you want to upgrade to faster hardware, you can move the disk, or even image the disk and lay the image down on the new disk, fire it up and through the magic of loadable modules be up and running in short order. I've done this with my home firewall and been back up and running in under an hour.
While this remote install server will certainly make life easier for Corporations using Windows, it would be better if Microsoft worked on the real problems and not the symptoms.
The RoadRunner service in North East Ohio is excellent. This was one of the first markets served and it shows. The uptime on the service this year has just been fantastic.
Contrast this to when the service launched, it was down all of the time, and they had many other problems (forced login, forced proxy, news server was a complete waste of time, etc...) All of these problems have been fixed.
I think all new broadband deployments need to go through this pain until they get them stable. I am kind of anxious but fearful of what Open Access will bring to this network. On the one hand, I'd really like to get a static IP instead of forking over $400 for one from RR. On the other hand, being the first large deployment of Open Access on cable is certainly going to mean trouble while they sort out the technical and political details.
I bought one of these and I've been using it to connect in from the road via telnet for the last few weeks. The battery life just rocks - my first charge laster 10 hours and I'm still using it.
I tried the NetBSD port and was able to get it to boot up. Next step is to get ssh running.
There is also a Linux kernel port that will boot but isn't too useful as of yet. I haven't tried it out.
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While I agree that lately a lot of questions have been pretty brain dead, I think a lot of these questions have been pretty good discussion starters and I get a lot out of the responses from people who either know what they are talking about or know how to look things up and provide a reference URL when they respond. There are usually at least a few of these people replying to most questions.
I do ask people posting replies to avoid posting anything if you don't know for sure or you are too lazy to check your facts before posting. There are far too many people writing uninformed opinions and using phrases like AFAIK and IIRC to forgive themselves for not checking their facts before posting.
Sorry this post turned into a rant.
Thanks for a clearly written analysis. I was also confusing the issue of the physical goods versus the copyright issues involved in the software.
"Once the product has entered the marketplace, with the author's agreement, he can no longer engage rights of authorship" to interfere with secondary sales."
I hate to engage in reckless speculation, but this sounds like it could put the kibosh on clauses in licensing that place restrictions on relicensing such as the GPL.
Any German speakers that read the decision care to comment?
I was really looking forward to the released code, but after reading the paper, my impression is that of a mess created out of sheer market necessity instead of a beautiful combination of MacOS front end and Mach/BSD back end.
I've got a G4, I'm definitely going to give it a whirl and hopefully I'll be proven wrong.
The single best reason I can think of to go with a 2 CPU solution is to allow you to run virus scanning on the server. Since you are using Samba, I'm going to got out on a limb here and guess that you are serving up files to Windows clients. I wouldn't think of running a file server for Windows machines that didn't have a good virus scan in place.
A well thought out anti-virus solution will have scanning at every possible point (mail gateway, client machines, file server, etc...)
There are anti-virus solutions that run on Linux and a second CPU would definitely help out if you decide to do that.
IANAL, but I have had some relevant experience with this in my state (Ohio)
If you buy something from out of state that would normally be taxable if you had purchased it in the state, then you must pay the sales tax by writing a check directly to the Secretary of State.
This is no different from how it was before the internet came along. This rule was previously applied to stuff bought mail order.
The fact that almost nobody pays attention to this rule doesn't change the fact that it is a state law.
I suspect other states have pretty much the same setup. Of course now that state governments sense a migration of sales to the internet they are screaming about lost revenues (despite another state budget surplus!).
IMHO, the whole freakin' US tax system is jacked up beyond repair. I'd much rather have one tax bill for each of the three taxing authorities I pay to so I would send one check to city, one to state, and one to the national government. Instead I pay sales tax, gas taxes, property tax, income tax, fishing license fees, E-Check (Ohio EPA required emissions check fee), estate tax, capital gains taxes. The list is endless. I'd rather just pay my share of what my governments cost and decide for myself if I'm getting a good deal or if it's time to move.
There must be something wrong. I timed my Windows 2000 boot last night. It was about 65 seconds to boot on my P2-300 with 64MB/ram. I timed from the moment the video card initialized until I had a login screen and the disk stopped going crazy.
I happen to live in Akron. Maybe I'll use this as an excuse to visit the Inventors' Hall of Fame for the very first time. I've always wondered what it was like in there.
It's actually Aironet. Now owned by Cisco. No I don't work for them.
Read that again. It's being transmitted over _an_ IP network, not the Internet. They are aparently using a dedicated connection provided by Qwest and are encrypting the transmission to ensure that nobody with physical access to the connection makes a copy while in transit.
To be really cool it would also have to translate the "feel" of the language. There are always unique cultural concepts like the words describing snow in Inuktitut or the differences in the male and female speech patterns in a Japanese that simply don't translate well at all. There are similar difficulties with translation of all spoken languages.
My opinion of the Exodus network (which was quite high) just went down about 10 notches.
Why don't they have anti-spoof filters that drop all 192.168.x, 172.16.x, and 10.x addresses?
I know this wouldn't have helped in this attach since these weren't the only spoofed addresses used, but still that stuff should never have arrived unless it originated on the Exodus network to begin with.
Anyway - good job to get it cleaned up and stable Thanks to all of those who busted butt to get the site back online and stable. I know what it's like to get attacked and it's not fun.
MSFC stands for "Multilayer switch feature card". This is the part of a Cisco switch/router that makes it do layer-3 switching (routing at wire speeds).
I hardly know where to start with this one.
The GPL isn't a US law. It's a software license that applied to ABIT as soon as they distributed a copy on a CD with one of their motherboards.
ABIT sells motherboards to distributors in other countries. Those countries can certainly control the import of ABIT products.
This whole thing has nothing to do with the US or it's laws. Anyway, ABIT is certainly going to do the right thing here. They have made a killing selling to Linux users (among others) and they have no business reason to make money off the software. They are a hardware business.
From the MSNBC.com artice - "Rouland said "X-force" researcher Wilson discovered the backdoor during a standard review of Red Hat's Linux source code, which is freely available. The user name and password were embedded in the code."
It appears from this article that having the source was most definitely relevant in this case.
Internet cafes are the way to go. I've used about 10 of these in the UK, France, Greece and Japan and all of them were just using some simple NAT box and DHCP. They are always affordable (~$5US per hour). Most of them don't give a rats ass what you do with the connection, they just want their money. If they give you a hassle, there is always another one nearby.
None of them minded me plugging in my laptop and using it instead of their cheap clone systems.
If you are dead set on using dial-up, IBM global services, UUNET (resold through a 3rd party), iPass, and AOL (believe it or not!) are all solid choices with access numbers all over the globe.
GSM would be nice, but I'd bet that it won't be as convenient or work as well as either of the first two methods.
This is exactly what my cable modem service was like three years ago. They would secretly reboot stuff all the time without telling anybody and it was impossible to talk to anybody with a clue.
It use to be some dumbass cable installer who didn't know anything except what signal levels he was supposed to look for. Nowadays, everybody I talk to at the cable company is using the service so I don't hear dumb answers like "Reboot your PC, it will fix the flashing light on your cable modem!"
Hang in there while they will get their act together or they will be replaced. It's that simple.
Free speech doesn't include libel or slander.
Despite that fact, well-established custom and netiquette dictates that experienced online users don't take these kinds of comments on USENET seriously. This is obviously quite different from the "old" world of newspapers, magazine, and T.V. media, where publishers take responsibility for what the turn out. I'd like to see that responsibility extended to the online world and have this guy go after the person who posted the offending material (if he can track him down - not very likely!)
This is another ridiculous law that doesn't take into account the impossibility of enforcement.
The plaintiff needs to get a set of leather britches in my opinion, and not let the flames or insults get to him, no matter how personally offensive they might be. It's USENET for crying out loud.
Man, I can clearly remember reading a copy of Wired back in 1994 or 1995 that talked about toaster-nets, which were simply people daisy-chaining connections together to share bandwidth to the net.
I read that while playing around on a NeXT box and thought about how kick-ass the future seemed where everything would be connected using a single global protocol.
I had so much optimism then. I still think that clearly people are using the Internet as a tool to re-shape governments and lives, but there is so much resistance to overcome it gets you down now and again.
All we want is a cheap, fast, unblocked, unfiltered connection from anyone to anyone, anywhere in the world with no laws, or regulations, or acceptable use policies, with no restrictions on content replication or modification.
Is it really too much to ask?
One good solution is to send your kids abroad when they are in high school.
They'll pick up a new language faster than you can say "polyglot"
When you want to extract money from a large corporation by cyber squatting, you're supposed to grab the domain name early, put up a token web site and establish yourself.
Then when they come knocking you have a leg to stand on.
This is meant to be used in is a file system full of standard Windows system images. It's called a remote install server, so you would have a dozen copies of Windows, each of them for a different hardware configuration. So in this setup, it is possible to realize big gains with single instance storage. Particularly because this would largely be a read only type setup.
IMHO, this is Microsoft coming up with a solution to a problem that they created in the first place and calling it a breakthrough technology. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Why do you need a remote install server? One of the primary reasons is that companies have discovered it is far cheaper to support Windows machines by re-imaging them then by solving problems with the operating system or applications.
Why do you need many different system images? Because the OS is ultra-customized to the hardware, which means it's damn difficult and not worth the effort to ever migrate a system image to new or different hardware.
Other operating systems don't suffer from either of these failings. When something breaks, it is usually a pretty simple matter to check a log file, find the _useful_ error message and fix the problem and maybe restart a daemon. All this may be done without a reboot.
When you want to upgrade to faster hardware, you can move the disk, or even image the disk and lay the image down on the new disk, fire it up and through the magic of loadable modules be up and running in short order. I've done this with my home firewall and been back up and running in under an hour.
While this remote install server will certainly make life easier for Corporations using Windows, it would be better if Microsoft worked on the real problems and not the symptoms.
The RoadRunner service in North East Ohio is excellent. This was one of the first markets served and it shows. The uptime on the service this year has just been fantastic.
Contrast this to when the service launched, it was down all of the time, and they had many other problems (forced login, forced proxy, news server was a complete waste of time, etc...) All of these problems have been fixed.
I think all new broadband deployments need to go through this pain until they get them stable. I am kind of anxious but fearful of what Open Access will bring to this network. On the one hand, I'd really like to get a static IP instead of forking over $400 for one from RR. On the other hand, being the first large deployment of Open Access on cable is certainly going to mean trouble while they sort out the technical and political details.
Anyway, it sure beats having no choice.
The only problem is that most of their customers are the kind of people who would choose AOL over the any other ISP.
I bought one of these and I've been using it to connect in from the road via telnet for the last few weeks. The battery life just rocks - my first charge laster 10 hours and I'm still using it.
I tried the NetBSD port and was able to get it to boot up. Next step is to get ssh running.
There is also a Linux kernel port that will boot but isn't too useful as of yet. I haven't tried it out.