Ah, I see. No hard feelings, I'm sure. You're right, it was a relatively minor error, and probably one that most people wouldn't even notice. I suppose it irked me mainly because I tend to get really annoyed by grammatical errors. I often don't realize that, while the error may be a big deal to me, your average reader could probably care less.
Interesting how the original Slashdot post, last night, repeatedly used the incorrect term "Las Alamos". Several readers posted comments stating that the correct term is "Los Alamos". This morning, the article has been fixed, however there is no disclaimer from the Slashdot authors saying that they fixed a mistake. Thus, all those helpful, grammatically correct readers who pointed out the mistake now look like idiots.
Considering the popularity of Slashdot, you'd think the authors should know at least a little bit about proper journalism. Come on guys, have some respect for your readers, for crying out loud. When you make mistakes, 'fess up. Give credit where credit is due. Don't make your readers with better grammar than you look like idiots.
I'd say the solution to this is quite simple. Microsoft's letter was very polite, and they are merely asking that you remove messages that contain illegally reproduced copyrighted material. As far as I can see, Microsoft is totally within their rights on this one, and if I were running that company, I'd be making the same request.
Posting opinions and ideas and thoughts to Slashdot is one thing, but posting copyrighted material...well, that's different. If I were to post a comment containing the entire text of Snow Crash, one of my favorite Neal Stephenson novels, would you not remove my posts due to copyright violation? I believe you would. And I believe that you should extend the same courtesy to Microsoft and respect their copyrights just as you would respect those of your favorite author. Freedom of speech is not going to be impaired by the removal of a few comments containing illegally reproduced, copyrighted material.
Eww. I'm listening to episodes of Does Humour Belong in Technology, and no offense, but.....it's pure crap. This is the most boring radio show of any kind that I've ever heard. GiS is light years ahead of this moldy puke-inducer.
About a month ago, I bought a Ricoh RDC-4300 from Fry's Electronics for about $329. The camera came with everything and the kitchen sink. In the box was a 4 meg memory card, a frigging instructional video, a really nice custom-made padded cloth carrying case, four top-o-the-line NiCad rechargeable memory-less batteries plus charger, AC adaptor and computer parallel port connector, multimedia cables for hooking up to a TV or VCR, and a TON of free software (such as Kai's Power Show, MetaCreations LogoMotion, Enroute QuickStich 360 [for 360-degree images and QuickTime VR movies], and ArcSoft PhotoStudio).
The camera takes very nice pictures, even at the lower resolutions. It has six resolutions...three quality levels at 1280x960, and three levels at 640x480. It has a ton of features, including a zoom lens, telephoto, 180-degree rotating lens, and a ton of options that you can set such as auto or manual focus, white balance, etc. If you want to see some pictures I took with my camera, go here. Those pix were taken on the lowest quality setting at 1280x960.
Oh yeah, and the camera also records sound bytes, if you're into that sort of thing. All in all, a very professional, high-quality camera for only $329. I was surprised.
Fer gossake! Why'd you guys have to pick Saturday night, of all times? Saturday at exactly 5pm I've got a once-in-a-lifetime date with the girl of my dreams, and there ain't no way I'm missing that to log on to SlashNet. Argh!
Whether he forsaw the Web or not, it's impossible to say that he foresaw global warming in 1989. I was learning about global warming in grade school in 1988.
That's a very flawed premise for a book. I'm surprised the author got away with that. The simple fact of the matter is, history itself is fundamentally flawed. Most of the history that is taught in schools today is wildly inaccurate and full of propagandistic nonsense. Creating an accurate personality simulation of someone using merely historical data would be completely impossible.
Maybe Heinlien had it right. Any soceity that grows to the point of requiring IDs is a soceity to leave behind.
Of course Heinlein had it right! The times I've disagreed with Heinlein's thoughts have been very few and far between. The man was a political genius, in addition to having an amazing flair for storytelling. If only someone with power would realize the perfection behind many of Heinlein's ideas and put them into practice....
I can't believe this. For once, Microsoft designs a halfway decent OS that actually does what it's supposed to and is pretty stable while doing it, and the world turns against them, saying, "You made a stable OS! You're just doing that because you're afraid of Linux! You must die!"
I swear, people have no sense. Those of us who aren't brainwashed Linux zealots realize that there are actually some very good things about Windows 2000. When Linux users run around chanting "Down with Microsoft!" it just makes me wonder what they're scared of. If Win2K is really as big a piece of crap as you guys seem to think (and it isn't, in my experience), then what are you afraid of?? Let events take their course. The best will survive. If people like Windows better, they'll use Windows. If they like Linux better, they'll use Linux.
I prefer being able to choose between Windows 2000 and Linux rather than being forced to use Linux. There are quite a few things that Windows 2000 does (and does nicely) that Linux doesn't...especially in the realm of server linking, COM objects, smart caching of pages in IIS, and most of all: usability.
Ummmm... folks, as far as I know, Win2k hasn't been released yet, so those votes are bogus, yes?? So other than SCO, Windows NOS's are in last place in the poll.
Er, wrong. Windows 2000 has been widely available in various prerelease and/or beta stages for over two years. I've been running it as a server OS ever since it was called NT 5.0 beta 2 (a little over a year ago). Plenty of people have used Windows 2000. In fact, I'm typing this on a final release version Win2000 Pro machine.
Hmm. I suppose with the load you described, and taking an average that includes downtime, you might be able to arrive at 4 days of average uptime, although that number still seems pretty small.
You can see some slightly old statistics for wonko.com over here. Those stats are only for a few hours, but I'll update them again when I get home this evening (I'm at work now). You can see stats for the front page here (only the front page though, these stats aren't server-wide). That's just the WWW service. The FTP service isn't very active. The machine has never given me an illegal operation, or for that matter any serious error at all (/me knocks on wood). I've probably rebooted about 5 times since the initial installation of Windows 2000 Server, but only to install new drivers or software...never due to a crash or error (although one time was because the power went out, but that's hardly any fault of Windows).
The only thing I can think of that you might have done to cause your box to crash every 4 days is if you went through the system services and set them all to start on system startup...or perhaps your swap file is insanely small and you keep running out of memory...and of course, there's always the chance that you're running a third-party app that's leaking memory. What types of calls do you use to talk to the SQL server? It's possible that something may be opening database connections and forgetting to close them, though SQL Server tends to notice that and deal with it in most cases.
And of course, it's entirely possible that you just have bad karma.:) Slashdot reported months and months ago on a scientific study in which researchers found that some computer users just simply encounter more bugs than others, even when using the same unmodified systems. They weren't able to explain it any other way than saying that certain users are just more bug-prone than others. I use this to explain why I generally tend to have excellent luck with Microsoft software, yet the Linux kernel often coredumps in the middle of an install when I'm sitting in front of the machine it's installing on (yes, it's true...if you doubt me, I'll be happy to demonstrate...my aura must be anti-Linux or something).;)
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Re:Win 2k can't be the best unless IDG's been paid
on
Red Hat Finishes Last
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· Score: 2
Which network operating system do you prefer?
Windows 2000 17% 1462 votes
Windows NT 10% 875 votes
Netware 13% 1106 votes
Red Hat Linux 46% 3948 votes
SCO UnixWare 2% 170 votes
Other 12% 1040 votes
Um...think about it. 4,000 Slashdotters go visit the site and take the poll. Do you think they're going to vote for Windows? Bah. The poll is invalid until 4,000 Microsoft employees get their chance to spam it as well.
That's all well and good but what are the average uptimes with Windows 2000. I use the latest beta release on one machine and have an average uptime of about 4 days. This is on a lightly hit server with ftp and IIS running. My Linux box has been up for 185 days and that's only because i needed to add a new NIC.
4 days?!???!? You've got to be kidding me. Either that or you're the most unlucky Win2K user on the planet.
As I've stated here many times before, I run wonko.com on a Windows 2000 Server. The machine is a Pentium 166 with 64 megs of RAM and a 6-gig hard drive. I use IIS5's www and ftp services, and SQL Server 7.0 for my database backend. That sucker has been running nonstop and without trouble since the day I booted it up, about 80 days ago. A friend of mine has been running his Win2000 server for nearly 200 days now, with no problems.
The stability of Windows 2000 is very much improved over that of NT4. If your server only lasts 4 days, you must've done something horribly wrong to it when you set it up.
By your logic, everyone should buy one computer at an early age and then never upgrade it again, and all software companies should write software that will run on that old piece of crap computer even though technology has advanced considerably. Yeah, right. Doing things that way will only bog down technological advancement.
By developing software that runs best on newer equipment, software-makers cause more demand for the new equipment, which then prompts hardware-makers to put more money into developing even newer equipment, which is the only way technology ever gets anywhere. I, for one, like this course of events. If you're too poor to be able to save up for a little while and buy a new processor, well, what are you doing playing with computers?
I bought my current machine for less than $700: a Celeron 300A OC'ed to 450mhz, running on an ABIT BH6 motherboard, with 128 megs of RAM and 37 gigs worth of 7200rpm IDE hard drive, SoundBlaster Live!, and a Riva TNT AGP video card. Yes, less than $700, and it runs all the latest software without flinching. And I'm a high school student with a low-paying part-time job. If you can't afford that, then perhaps you need to think about getting a better job.
Complete and utter bull. I run wonko.com on a Windows 2000 Server, and the machine it's on is a Pentium 166 with only 64 megs of RAM. It runs fine. That machine serves up web pages as well as running Microsoft SQL Server 7.0, and it's speedy as all get-out. If you had problems, they were most likely caused by not configuring things correctly.
Hmmm. I guess you didn't write your article too well. I quote, "...installed Win2K, did an emergency restore of my wonko.com backup (which, luckily, was totally up to date)." Sure sounds like a Win2K backup program to me! How was I supposed to know that a totally up-to-date "backup" really meant you did a file copy after the problem happened? To me, a backup is something you do before problems occur.
Yet again, the problem here is you not reading things correctly. I said I did an emergency restore of my wonko.com backup. NOT my hard drive backup. The wonko.com backup was a backup file made by IIS that contains all the settings for the web site. It contains NO files. Just settings. THAT is what I restored. Try to actually read the sentence before you start jumping down my throat.
Really? You don't use many OSes, do you? According to your own website, you've had Windows 2000 go bonkers. SVCHOST.EXE starting eating up all your RAM and CPU. Very interesting, that.
That particular issue occurred while I was running Win2K RC2...a beta release. The issue was reported to Microsoft, and is fixed in the final release. As for running different OSes...despite my age, I've managed to use DOS, OS/2, OS/2 Warp, UNIX, Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, GEOS, QNX, Win 3.0, Win 3.1, Win95, WinNT 3.51, Win98, WinNT 4.0, Win CE, and Win2K. So to answer your question, yes, I have used many different OSes.
You see, there are no mystery processes under Linux. There are no huge, monolithic programs that are part of the system. No single, huge "System Services Manager".
Funny you should mention that. In fact, my friend, that is exactly what the Linux kernel is. Yes, the Linux kernel is a huge, monolithic program (thus the term "monolithic kernel") that contains a good deal of Linux's device support as well as a zillion other things.
Another thing about Linux: Linux backup software can handle file names longer then eight characters. I guess in Micros~1 land, that is too advanced to do.
Hmm. I guess you didn't read my article too well. I didn't use backup software to back up my files. I stuck the hard drives in a DOS machine and copied them that way...thus the reason for the lost long file names, since DOS doesn't support them.
I find it very interesting that you assert Win2K is the best OS on the market, when you yourself have encountered problems Linux has never had, and never will.
When I made that statement, I was referring to the final release of Windows 2000, which I am now using. My previous problems, as I've stated before, were with a beta version of the OS. Bugs are to be expected in betas, just as bugs are to be expected in Linux's unstable development releases.
If that's the case, then Linus Torvalds and all his minions are just as evil and stupid as Microsoft. Do you really think Linux is secure by default? If so, then the only one here who's an idiot is you. Linux is most certainly not secure by default. In fact, no operating system is. Just because SQL Server has a built-in account (which, by the way, the setup program gives you the option to disable from the very beginning, genius) doesn't mean Microsoft did anything wrong.
Have you ever used Windows 2000? Eh? What's that? No? Then what's all this "too bloated" crap you're spouting? Go use the thing first, silly. Then you can spout your misinformed opinions. I've used Windows 2000 as a server for almost a year now (yes, starting with the early betas) and I think it's the best thing ever to come out of Microsoft. For that matter, it's the best OS currently on the market.
Yet again, Slashdot spews out anti-Microsoft FUD with as much fervor and skill as Microsoft spews out anti-Linux FUD.
People, the credit card numbers that MSNBC stole were not stolen through a "cracked" database. MSNBC did no cracking of any kind, and therefore the security of MS SQL Server is not the issue. The issue is, once more, the people who stupidly set the sites up and left the default "sa" account active. The "sa" account is included in SQL Server merely to allow the software to be set up. It is not meant to be left active on a server connected to the web.
Try cracking a Microsoft SQL Server that's been configured correctly, by someone who actually has half an idea what they're doing. It's just as impossible as cracking any other database solution...in fact, I'd venture to say MS SQL Server is even more secure than most other database servers.
Furthermore, the "::$DATA" vulnerability was only in IIS4. Microsoft patched that bug over two years ago, and anyone stupid enough to still be running an unpatched IIS4 server is just asking for trouble.
They only want £10 million ransom? Are they crazy? If they get £10 million in ransom, they'll have to jump through some really insane hoops to get that money laundered so the Scotland Yard, FBI, and whoever else can't find them. In fact, if they take that £10 million, it's almost guaranteed they'll be caught.
But they've (supposedly) got thousands of credit card numbers! They could squeeze far more money out of those credit cards than £10 million, and if they did it carefully, it would be very difficult to catch them at it. Silly crackers...learn how to play the game before you start.
Slashdot Mirror
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Considering the popularity of Slashdot, you'd think the authors should know at least a little bit about proper journalism. Come on guys, have some respect for your readers, for crying out loud. When you make mistakes, 'fess up. Give credit where credit is due. Don't make your readers with better grammar than you look like idiots.
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Posting opinions and ideas and thoughts to Slashdot is one thing, but posting copyrighted material...well, that's different. If I were to post a comment containing the entire text of Snow Crash, one of my favorite Neal Stephenson novels, would you not remove my posts due to copyright violation? I believe you would. And I believe that you should extend the same courtesy to Microsoft and respect their copyrights just as you would respect those of your favorite author. Freedom of speech is not going to be impaired by the removal of a few comments containing illegally reproduced, copyrighted material.
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The camera takes very nice pictures, even at the lower resolutions. It has six resolutions...three quality levels at 1280x960, and three levels at 640x480. It has a ton of features, including a zoom lens, telephoto, 180-degree rotating lens, and a ton of options that you can set such as auto or manual focus, white balance, etc. If you want to see some pictures I took with my camera, go here. Those pix were taken on the lowest quality setting at 1280x960.
Oh yeah, and the camera also records sound bytes, if you're into that sort of thing. All in all, a very professional, high-quality camera for only $329. I was surprised.
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(say it out loud...fast...)
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Of course Heinlein had it right! The times I've disagreed with Heinlein's thoughts have been very few and far between. The man was a political genius, in addition to having an amazing flair for storytelling. If only someone with power would realize the perfection behind many of Heinlein's ideas and put them into practice....
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I swear, people have no sense. Those of us who aren't brainwashed Linux zealots realize that there are actually some very good things about Windows 2000. When Linux users run around chanting "Down with Microsoft!" it just makes me wonder what they're scared of. If Win2K is really as big a piece of crap as you guys seem to think (and it isn't, in my experience), then what are you afraid of?? Let events take their course. The best will survive. If people like Windows better, they'll use Windows. If they like Linux better, they'll use Linux.
I prefer being able to choose between Windows 2000 and Linux rather than being forced to use Linux. There are quite a few things that Windows 2000 does (and does nicely) that Linux doesn't...especially in the realm of server linking, COM objects, smart caching of pages in IIS, and most of all: usability .
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Er, wrong. Windows 2000 has been widely available in various prerelease and/or beta stages for over two years. I've been running it as a server OS ever since it was called NT 5.0 beta 2 (a little over a year ago). Plenty of people have used Windows 2000. In fact, I'm typing this on a final release version Win2000 Pro machine.
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You can see some slightly old statistics for wonko.com over here. Those stats are only for a few hours, but I'll update them again when I get home this evening (I'm at work now). You can see stats for the front page here (only the front page though, these stats aren't server-wide). That's just the WWW service. The FTP service isn't very active. The machine has never given me an illegal operation, or for that matter any serious error at all (/me knocks on wood). I've probably rebooted about 5 times since the initial installation of Windows 2000 Server, but only to install new drivers or software...never due to a crash or error (although one time was because the power went out, but that's hardly any fault of Windows).
The only thing I can think of that you might have done to cause your box to crash every 4 days is if you went through the system services and set them all to start on system startup...or perhaps your swap file is insanely small and you keep running out of memory...and of course, there's always the chance that you're running a third-party app that's leaking memory. What types of calls do you use to talk to the SQL server? It's possible that something may be opening database connections and forgetting to close them, though SQL Server tends to notice that and deal with it in most cases.
And of course, it's entirely possible that you just have bad karma. :) Slashdot reported months and months ago on a scientific study in which researchers found that some computer users just simply encounter more bugs than others, even when using the same unmodified systems. They weren't able to explain it any other way than saying that certain users are just more bug-prone than others. I use this to explain why I generally tend to have excellent luck with Microsoft software, yet the Linux kernel often coredumps in the middle of an install when I'm sitting in front of the machine it's installing on (yes, it's true...if you doubt me, I'll be happy to demonstrate...my aura must be anti-Linux or something). ;)
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Um...think about it. 4,000 Slashdotters go visit the site and take the poll. Do you think they're going to vote for Windows? Bah. The poll is invalid until 4,000 Microsoft employees get their chance to spam it as well.
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4 days?!???!? You've got to be kidding me. Either that or you're the most unlucky Win2K user on the planet.
As I've stated here many times before, I run wonko.com on a Windows 2000 Server. The machine is a Pentium 166 with 64 megs of RAM and a 6-gig hard drive. I use IIS5's www and ftp services, and SQL Server 7.0 for my database backend. That sucker has been running nonstop and without trouble since the day I booted it up, about 80 days ago. A friend of mine has been running his Win2000 server for nearly 200 days now, with no problems.
The stability of Windows 2000 is very much improved over that of NT4. If your server only lasts 4 days, you must've done something horribly wrong to it when you set it up.
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By developing software that runs best on newer equipment, software-makers cause more demand for the new equipment, which then prompts hardware-makers to put more money into developing even newer equipment, which is the only way technology ever gets anywhere. I, for one, like this course of events. If you're too poor to be able to save up for a little while and buy a new processor, well, what are you doing playing with computers?
I bought my current machine for less than $700: a Celeron 300A OC'ed to 450mhz, running on an ABIT BH6 motherboard, with 128 megs of RAM and 37 gigs worth of 7200rpm IDE hard drive, SoundBlaster Live!, and a Riva TNT AGP video card. Yes, less than $700, and it runs all the latest software without flinching. And I'm a high school student with a low-paying part-time job. If you can't afford that, then perhaps you need to think about getting a better job.
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Yet again, the problem here is you not reading things correctly. I said I did an emergency restore of my wonko.com backup. NOT my hard drive backup. The wonko.com backup was a backup file made by IIS that contains all the settings for the web site. It contains NO files. Just settings. THAT is what I restored. Try to actually read the sentence before you start jumping down my throat.
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That particular issue occurred while I was running Win2K RC2...a beta release. The issue was reported to Microsoft, and is fixed in the final release. As for running different OSes...despite my age, I've managed to use DOS, OS/2, OS/2 Warp, UNIX, Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, GEOS, QNX, Win 3.0, Win 3.1, Win95, WinNT 3.51, Win98, WinNT 4.0, Win CE, and Win2K. So to answer your question, yes, I have used many different OSes.
You see, there are no mystery processes under Linux. There are no huge, monolithic programs that are part of the system. No single, huge "System Services Manager".
Funny you should mention that. In fact, my friend, that is exactly what the Linux kernel is. Yes, the Linux kernel is a huge, monolithic program (thus the term "monolithic kernel") that contains a good deal of Linux's device support as well as a zillion other things.
Another thing about Linux: Linux backup software can handle file names longer then eight characters. I guess in Micros~1 land, that is too advanced to do.
Hmm. I guess you didn't read my article too well. I didn't use backup software to back up my files. I stuck the hard drives in a DOS machine and copied them that way...thus the reason for the lost long file names, since DOS doesn't support them.
I find it very interesting that you assert Win2K is the best OS on the market, when you yourself have encountered problems Linux has never had, and never will.
When I made that statement, I was referring to the final release of Windows 2000, which I am now using. My previous problems, as I've stated before, were with a beta version of the OS. Bugs are to be expected in betas, just as bugs are to be expected in Linux's unstable development releases.
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People, the credit card numbers that MSNBC stole were not stolen through a "cracked" database. MSNBC did no cracking of any kind, and therefore the security of MS SQL Server is not the issue. The issue is, once more, the people who stupidly set the sites up and left the default "sa" account active. The "sa" account is included in SQL Server merely to allow the software to be set up. It is not meant to be left active on a server connected to the web.
Try cracking a Microsoft SQL Server that's been configured correctly, by someone who actually has half an idea what they're doing. It's just as impossible as cracking any other database solution...in fact, I'd venture to say MS SQL Server is even more secure than most other database servers.
Furthermore, the "::$DATA" vulnerability was only in IIS4. Microsoft patched that bug over two years ago, and anyone stupid enough to still be running an unpatched IIS4 server is just asking for trouble.
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But they've (supposedly) got thousands of credit card numbers! They could squeeze far more money out of those credit cards than £10 million, and if they did it carefully, it would be very difficult to catch them at it. Silly crackers...learn how to play the game before you start.
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