In the San Francisco Bay Area. It's not as reliable as I'd like, expensive too. ($199/month for 384Kbps symmetric.) Still, until DSL is available (cable modem just got here in El Cerrito) it's the only choice besides leased-line.
>Ahh, so God did all the stuff the Bible >describes, but then planted evidence to try to >trick us into thinking otherwise?
Yes, that's one possibility. It could be a form of test. Are you going to trust the syslogs on a box that has been r00ted?:)
Another possibility is that God used evolution as His development process. Either He speed up time to fit the process into 7 days, or the 7 days isn't literal.
Basically, you can't use science to argue against a concept of God if the concept includes the ability to modify science.
Poulsen has indicated that his parole officer told him that the cash registers at Mcdonalds are computers, and he can't use them. Poulsen has indicated several times that the PO is the final word on something like that.
Kevin Mitnick has indicated that he has been specifically banned from using celular or even cordless phones.
I work for Sybase. Perks vary from location to location, I'm at the Emeryville, California headquarters. They bought us Episode I passes. We did an electric car pilot. There's a gym. Free garage. Free Internet access (at work, obviously, and at your home.) Standard benefits are good, too.
Didn't they learn from software in the 80's that copy protection doesn't work?
It is, in fact, impossible to devise a copy protection scheme that can't be cracked if all the components are under the complete control of the cracker.
In effect, all this will likely do is screw the honest person. The pirates will be able to copy freely. Those of us who can deal with downloading cracks produced by others, yet still want to remain legal, will be only inconvienienced.
Every day when I take my kids out to the car, they play a game. It's a simple racing game.
As soon as the front door is opened, they run to the car. The winner is the one who touches the sliding door first.
The triumphant child accounces their victory by shouting "First!"
This is usually followed by arguements from the other two, along the lines of "But we weren't racing!"
My kids are 3, 5 and 8.
Can anyone explain to me why my kids feel it neccessary to do this? Or why some AC does? Do we have a 5-year-old AC scanning the site, looking for new posts?
Re:microsoft makes great software. I agree
on
NT vs. Linux: Again
·
· Score: 1
>Sure, there are you guys out there who don't want >things to be simple, you'd rather excercise your >brains doing "hard" things like mounting >NFS/SMB dirves by typing rather than doing it in >a few clicks.
It's quite obvious you've never supported a large network running MS networking services.
I get to investigate when pointing and clicking don't work. I haven't seen any uglier protocols. If you're a MS fan, this isn't the technology you want to refer to to make your point.
Re:Linux is not the fastest. No excuses.
on
NT vs. Linux: Again
·
· Score: 1
On the other hand, it's pointing to a deficiency in the IP stack that could be improved. Improving this will help the vast majority of the things that people want to use Linux for.
If trying to beat NT is what motivates the kernel codeers to do this, then I'll benefit, and I have no complaints.
Look like a much more fair test this time, and it has provided us with better information.
Of course, I'd have preferred to see Linux win now, but it doesn't make me feel bad that it didn't. It will also help with NT tuning information, for those of us with both.
I'd have like to see a little more qualification on what the results mean. I believe the tests only measure throughput for example, and not responsiveness.
All information is useful. I believe Linux will catch up, and far faste than NT would have had it been the slower one.
These benchmarks will always leapfrog each-other. Witness the TPCC numbers race. We all benefit in the end.
I think people tend to overestimate the amount of brilliance needed to do documentation. I believe for a project like this, the ability to communicate clearly, and the patience to do some grunt work are more important than being an expert programmer.
As I see it, they have expert programmers, and now they're looking for someone who can write documentation.
A lot depends on other factors. Take a look at a comment I made on a different thread for this topic.
Some assumptions: -A reasonable amount of time would be given to complete the book (6-9 months) -The book is expected to be a reasonable number of pages (600) -There is not an expectation of a full-scale polished application as a by-product. Certainly some smaller things would be developed in the book as examples. -For people who need it, there would have to be some pay along the way to take care of expenses. I believe this is standard.. 25% of the pay for each 25% of the work submitted. -They have to be willing to take a "nobody" who can submit a good proposal, samples, etc..
He's why it would work for (someone like) me:
-6-9 months is enough time for me to do it in the evenings/weekends/vacation. Even for me, who knows next to nothing about GNOME (but can program) because it gives me the time to do needed research. -This last weekend, I wrote a 30 page chapter for a book to be published soon. This particular chapter is on a subject I know well. It took me about 35 hours over the last two days, so obviously I wish I were sleeping right now.. but the point is it can be done. This is the fastest I've been able to get a chapter done so far, so it's an exceptional case. The pay for this chapter was less than $1000, flat-fee, no royalties. -I already make a pretty good salary at my day job.
So why am I "wasting my time" writing at this pay rate?
-I get to have my name on a book -I get to learn more (turns out a really good way to learn a subject is to write a book on it) -It looks good on my resume. -A little extra cash never hurts.
So, basically, I argue that this wouldn't be a full-time job. However, if any of my assumptions are shot down, that would eliminate someone in my position being able to do it. It may not for others.
P.S. I'm not really buckin for this deal, though it sounds like that.. I've got other projects I'm more interested in writing about.
I think people might be overestimating a little what a book like this might bring in for an author going through the typical publisher channels.
There are probably some people out there who would love to have a book published, and would love to work on something like this to advance GNOME, and the money will simply help them be able to spend time on something they would do willingly.
I don't think anyone expects this amount of money to sway someone who wouldn't normally do a project like this anyway.
I think that amount of money is a good way for the FSF to communicate their priorities and wants.
Some are criticizing the FSF for the expenditure, some are criticizing them for getting the profits. I have no problem with either. I think free books are a good use of FSF funds, and I think it's just fine that they keep the money.
That way, they can finance the next book or software project. It's also a very acceptable profit for the amount of risk to be taken... this type of book has a fairly narrow interest group.
I agree the writing a book is a heck of a lot of work, much more than most people would think.
I have to disagree, though, that $20K is not much money. I've done professional writing for much less, if you pro-rate individual chapters and scale it to a whole book. Perhaps I just work cheap.:)
Here are the factors that play into how much this type of job is worth:
-How soon do they need it? This is a major facotr for people like me who have a day job, and do their writing at night. -What kind of author are you looking for? Are you looking for the proven, best-selling author, or are you willing to give an unknown a chance? -What, exactly, is desired in the book? Are we talking mostly code examples, text explainations, docs for people who don't really know programming, or what? -How much upkeep is the $20K expected to buy for after-the-fact? Presumably, some updates would be desired when GNOME gets upgraded. -How many pages/chapters?
Does anyone know if this was an actual offer of work, or was he just giving his opinion on how much something like this would be worth?
Cable companies are private, so what exactly did the government give them?
They gave them right-of-way. Don't underestimate exactly how valuable that is. You (and their competitors) can't go planting telephone poles, or pur your wire on existing poles. You can't go trenching conduit all over town. Our government has a history of mostly giving away rights to large companies like this. We benefit, but we pay for the priveledge. That's why these companies are regulared as public utilities.
Now, let's discuss what it takes to build a cable-modem network... at least, one that doesn't require a separate uplink channel (usually analog modem.) You really don't want a cable modem with separated uplink.
TCI in California has a pretty nice setup. They use the Motorola "Cybersurfer" modems. It's Ethernet to your PC, and uses the cable for both directions. It's DES encrypted, and the modems do bridging. This eliminates the kids next-door from sniffing your communications, unless they happen to be RF engineers and can crack DES in a reasonable amount of time. I guess you're screwed if you live next-door to the guys who built Deep Crakc for the EFF. Anyway..
In order to build out the cable network like this, TCI (Now AT&T also) had to upgrade to a fiber/coax network. The fiber is neccessary for things like Digitial Cable, and for the uplinks back to the head office. The traditional cable network is fairly one-way.. broadband repeaters tend to limit communications to away from the head end. The point is, a lot of work has to be done to make a cable network IP ready.
Who is going to pay to build out a cable network? The competing ISP? Maybe.
Now, there are no standards (yet) for cable modems. Right now, if a cable vendor wants to roll out IP service, they have to invest in a proprietary solution.
Which solution will be picked, and what happens when the competition wants to use something different? Who wins? It's not simple like DSL, where you have point-to-point wiring, and mixing different DSL equipment is easy. The cable network is shared media, and that won't be changing. Possibly different frequencies will be used, but that presents problems as well. Typical broadband repeaters and splitters are only rated for particular frequencies.
TCI has far outstripped their ability to support their cable network. My mom has TCI@Home, and it took them 7 days to fix their proxy server when it went down. It took them 9 days to respond to my e-mail (mom's e-mail was dead) to tell me yes it was down.
Here's where a real ISP could be useful, for support. But, what if the problem is that the cable is out... what are they going to be able to tell you? "Cable is out. We called them." I suppose that's better than the cable companies, who you typically can't even get on the phone to tell you that much.
As is typical, legislators seem ignorant of the types of problems they create with mandates like this. At best, one can hope that what they've accomplished is to motivate cable companies in other areas that haven't drawn the attention of the state government yet.
In the 80's, my understanding of the word hacker was someone who broke into systems. A cracker was someone who could disable (crack) copy protection. I didn't qualify for either, at the time.
I should also note that crackers were mostly respected at the time. Obviously, the illegal abuse aspect was fairly clear, piracy. What was respected was the techical skill needed. There were even "professional" crackers, like Central Point who would sell you programs to make the copies. To make your own backups for personal use, of course.
I wasn't introduced to any other definition of hacker until the 90's. This definition was people who had the skill to "hack" (break) into systems, but didn't do so for systems they didn't have permission to. Well, usually.
So, as I see it today, a hacker is someone who can. A cracker is someone who does. The poor programmers who work out clever "hacks" have lost use of the word.
Word meanings are decided by majority vote. So, no matter how emphatically we try to educate, we lose. I give up trying to get anyone to use cracker instead of hacker. "Hacker" now means someone who breaks into systems.
We might as well start calling the clever programmers "foobars" or something.
I see Redhat as doing a number of positive things. They've made it easy to install, they've done a good job at helping commercial software companies and traditional hardware companies get on the Linux bandwagon, and RPMs are great.
If I had to speculate, I suspect people are upset that Redhat is becoming successful. For a free, open movement like this, it's easy to be suspicious that Redhat will start to leverage it's success in way that don't benefit the community overall. Some might see the Redhat certification as a start down that path.
Still, there is noting intrinsically wrong with Redhat, or Linux in general, being popular. As long as they treat Linux fair, there should be no complaint.
If they do get cocky and do something stupid, there are other distributions to use. They can't go COMPLETELY MS on us, if we have the source:)
Even Microsoft can come up with a good algorithm occasionally. If the hype is true, what do I care if it was invented by Microsoft? If you don't want to run MS software or Windows, wait for the independent, free, open-source Linux or *bsd port.
If they do something stupid like patent parts and refuse to let others use it, well then they've screwed themselves and it won't matter.
Do you people refuse to use Samba because it's based on an MS protocol?
Slashdot Mirror
In the San Francisco Bay Area. It's not as reliable as I'd like, expensive too. ($199/month for 384Kbps symmetric.) Still, until DSL is available (cable modem just got here in El Cerrito) it's the only choice besides leased-line.
Check out:
http://www.wavepath.com/
>Ahh, so God did all the stuff the Bible
:)
>describes, but then planted evidence to try to
>trick us into thinking otherwise?
Yes, that's one possibility. It could be a form of test. Are you going to trust the syslogs on a box that has been r00ted?
Another possibility is that God used evolution as His development process. Either He speed up time to fit the process into 7 days, or the 7 days isn't literal.
Basically, you can't use science to argue against a concept of God if the concept includes the ability to modify science.
Poulsen is the precedent.
Poulsen has indicated that his parole officer told him that the cash registers at Mcdonalds are computers, and he can't use them. Poulsen has indicated several times that the PO is the final word on something like that.
Kevin Mitnick has indicated that he has been specifically banned from using celular or even cordless phones.
What the heck.
I work for Sybase. Perks vary from location to location, I'm at the Emeryville, California headquarters. They bought us Episode I passes. We did an electric car pilot. There's a gym. Free garage. Free Internet access (at work, obviously, and at your home.) Standard benefits are good, too.
Didn't they learn from software in the 80's that copy protection doesn't work?
It is, in fact, impossible to devise a copy protection scheme that can't be cracked if all the components are under the complete control of the cracker.
In effect, all this will likely do is screw the honest person. The pirates will be able to copy freely. Those of us who can deal with downloading cracks produced by others, yet still want to remain legal, will be only inconvienienced.
Every day when I take my kids out to the car, they play a game. It's a simple racing game.
As soon as the front door is opened, they run to the car. The winner is the one who touches the sliding door first.
The triumphant child accounces their victory by shouting "First!"
This is usually followed by arguements from the other two, along the lines of "But we weren't racing!"
My kids are 3, 5 and 8.
Can anyone explain to me why my kids feel it neccessary to do this? Or why some AC does? Do we have a 5-year-old AC scanning the site, looking for new posts?
>Sure, there are you guys out there who don't want
>things to be simple, you'd rather excercise your
>brains doing "hard" things like mounting
>NFS/SMB dirves by typing rather than doing it in
>a few clicks.
It's quite obvious you've never supported a large network running MS networking services.
I get to investigate when pointing and clicking don't work. I haven't seen any uglier protocols. If you're a MS fan, this isn't the technology you want to refer to to make your point.
On the other hand, it's pointing to a deficiency in the IP stack that could be improved. Improving this will help the vast majority of the things that people want to use Linux for.
If trying to beat NT is what motivates the kernel codeers to do this, then I'll benefit, and I have no complaints.
Look like a much more fair test this time, and it has provided us with better information.
Of course, I'd have preferred to see Linux win now, but it doesn't make me feel bad that it didn't. It will also help with NT tuning information, for those of us with both.
I'd have like to see a little more qualification on what the results mean. I believe the tests only measure throughput for example, and not responsiveness.
All information is useful. I believe Linux will catch up, and far faste than NT would have had it been the slower one.
These benchmarks will always leapfrog each-other. Witness the TPCC numbers race. We all benefit in the end.
You might be making reference to responsiveness rather than throughput. (i.e. Bandwidth vs. latency.)
These benchmarks measure throughput.
That occured to me, too.
I suppose the worst thing that drunken frat boys used to have to worry about was waking up with a face drawn on their genetalia.
Now, you've got to worry about videotapes being circulated with a microbot tour of your colon.
And how does traffic get back upstream?
Do you realize just how little traffic you can get on one channel? For all users?
I think people tend to overestimate the amount of brilliance needed to do documentation. I believe for a project like this, the ability to communicate clearly, and the patience to do some grunt work are more important than being an expert programmer.
As I see it, they have expert programmers, and now they're looking for someone who can write documentation.
>And what are they going to document? Cool, lets
>write docs for buggy code that don't even work >some of the time
And what better way to help get rid of the bugs than documenting the API?
(KDE troll ignored.)
See, this is why $20K is a pretty generous offer.
It would have been pretty sad if we lost out on the Linux kernel because a paltry $20K wasn't work Linus' time.
A lot depends on other factors. Take a look at a comment I made on a different thread for this topic.
Some assumptions:
-A reasonable amount of time would be given to complete the book (6-9 months)
-The book is expected to be a reasonable number of pages (600)
-There is not an expectation of a full-scale polished application as a by-product. Certainly some smaller things would be developed in the book as examples.
-For people who need it, there would have to be some pay along the way to take care of expenses. I believe this is standard.. 25% of the pay for each 25% of the work submitted.
-They have to be willing to take a "nobody" who can submit a good proposal, samples, etc..
He's why it would work for (someone like) me:
-6-9 months is enough time for me to do it in the evenings/weekends/vacation. Even for me, who knows next to nothing about GNOME (but can program) because it gives me the time to do needed research.
-This last weekend, I wrote a 30 page chapter for a book to be published soon. This particular chapter is on a subject I know well. It took me about 35 hours over the last two days, so obviously I wish I were sleeping right now.. but the point is it can be done. This is the fastest I've been able to get a chapter done so far, so it's an exceptional case. The pay for this chapter was less than $1000, flat-fee, no royalties.
-I already make a pretty good salary at my day job.
So why am I "wasting my time" writing at this pay rate?
-I get to have my name on a book
-I get to learn more (turns out a really good way to learn a subject is to write a book on it)
-It looks good on my resume.
-A little extra cash never hurts.
So, basically, I argue that this wouldn't be a full-time job. However, if any of my assumptions are shot down, that would eliminate someone in my position being able to do it. It may not for others.
P.S. I'm not really buckin for this deal, though it sounds like that.. I've got other projects I'm more interested in writing about.
Oh, I almost forgot:
If you're into conspiracy theory, then something like this is probably an excellent way to tank an O'Reilly project.
I have absolutely no suspicions that this is what is going on, just speculating.
I think people might be overestimating a little what a book like this might bring in for an author going through the typical publisher channels.
There are probably some people out there who would love to have a book published, and would love to work on something like this to advance GNOME, and the money will simply help them be able to spend time on something they would do willingly.
I don't think anyone expects this amount of money to sway someone who wouldn't normally do a project like this anyway.
I think that amount of money is a good way for the FSF to communicate their priorities and wants.
Some are criticizing the FSF for the expenditure, some are criticizing them for getting the profits. I have no problem with either. I think free books are a good use of FSF funds, and I think it's just fine that they keep the money.
That way, they can finance the next book or software project. It's also a very acceptable profit for the amount of risk to be taken... this type of book has a fairly narrow interest group.
I agree the writing a book is a heck of a lot of work, much more than most people would think.
:)
I have to disagree, though, that $20K is not much money. I've done professional writing for much less, if you pro-rate individual chapters and scale it to a whole book. Perhaps I just work cheap.
Here are the factors that play into how much this type of job is worth:
-How soon do they need it? This is a major facotr for people like me who have a day job, and do their writing at night.
-What kind of author are you looking for? Are you looking for the proven, best-selling author, or are you willing to give an unknown a chance?
-What, exactly, is desired in the book? Are we talking mostly code examples, text explainations, docs for people who don't really know programming, or what?
-How much upkeep is the $20K expected to buy for after-the-fact? Presumably, some updates would be desired when GNOME gets upgraded.
-How many pages/chapters?
Does anyone know if this was an actual offer of work, or was he just giving his opinion on how much something like this would be worth?
Cable companies are private, so what exactly did the government give them?
They gave them right-of-way. Don't underestimate exactly how valuable that is. You (and their competitors) can't go planting telephone poles, or pur your wire on existing poles. You can't go trenching conduit all over town. Our government has a history of mostly giving away rights to large companies like this. We benefit, but we pay for the priveledge. That's why these companies are regulared as public utilities.
Now, let's discuss what it takes to build a cable-modem network... at least, one that doesn't require a separate uplink channel (usually analog modem.) You really don't want a cable modem with separated uplink.
TCI in California has a pretty nice setup. They use the Motorola "Cybersurfer" modems. It's Ethernet to your PC, and uses the cable for both directions. It's DES encrypted, and the modems do bridging. This eliminates the kids next-door from sniffing your communications, unless they happen to be RF engineers and can crack DES in a reasonable amount of time. I guess you're screwed if you live next-door to the guys who built Deep Crakc for the EFF. Anyway..
In order to build out the cable network like this, TCI (Now AT&T also) had to upgrade to a fiber/coax network. The fiber is neccessary for things like Digitial Cable, and for the uplinks back to the head office. The traditional cable network is fairly one-way.. broadband repeaters tend to limit communications to away from the head end. The point is, a lot of work has to be done to make a cable network IP ready.
Who is going to pay to build out a cable network? The competing ISP? Maybe.
Now, there are no standards (yet) for cable modems. Right now, if a cable vendor wants to roll out IP service, they have to invest in a proprietary solution.
Which solution will be picked, and what happens when the competition wants to use something different? Who wins? It's not simple like DSL, where you have point-to-point wiring, and mixing different DSL equipment is easy. The cable network is shared media, and that won't be changing. Possibly different frequencies will be used, but that presents problems as well. Typical broadband repeaters and splitters are only rated for particular frequencies.
TCI has far outstripped their ability to support their cable network. My mom has TCI@Home, and it took them 7 days to fix their proxy server when it went down. It took them 9 days to respond to my e-mail (mom's e-mail was dead) to tell me yes it was down.
Here's where a real ISP could be useful, for support. But, what if the problem is that the cable is out... what are they going to be able to tell you? "Cable is out. We called them." I suppose that's better than the cable companies, who you typically can't even get on the phone to tell you that much.
As is typical, legislators seem ignorant of the types of problems they create with mandates like this. At best, one can hope that what they've accomplished is to motivate cable companies in other areas that haven't drawn the attention of the state government yet.
Oh, I'm aware of where foobar comes from.
I think it fits the tradition.
Depends on which field of "hacking" you're trying to get a word for.
If you're doing legitimate security review, "white hat hacker" has gotten popular.
If you're referring to coding, how about "foobar".
Of course you do.
Back when I was a youngster...
In the 80's, my understanding of the word hacker was someone who broke into systems. A cracker was someone who could disable (crack) copy protection. I didn't qualify for either, at the time.
I should also note that crackers were mostly respected at the time. Obviously, the illegal abuse aspect was fairly clear, piracy. What was respected was the techical skill needed. There were even "professional" crackers, like Central Point who would sell you programs to make the copies. To make your own backups for personal use, of course.
I wasn't introduced to any other definition of hacker until the 90's. This definition was people who had the skill to "hack" (break) into systems, but didn't do so for systems they didn't have permission to. Well, usually.
So, as I see it today, a hacker is someone who can. A cracker is someone who does. The poor programmers who work out clever "hacks" have lost use of the word.
Word meanings are decided by majority vote. So, no matter how emphatically we try to educate, we lose. I give up trying to get anyone to use cracker instead of hacker. "Hacker" now means someone who breaks into systems.
We might as well start calling the clever programmers "foobars" or something.
Ryan
I see Redhat as doing a number of positive things. They've made it easy to install, they've done a good job at helping commercial software companies and traditional hardware companies get on the Linux bandwagon, and RPMs are great.
:)
If I had to speculate, I suspect people are upset that Redhat is becoming successful. For a free, open movement like this, it's easy to be suspicious that Redhat will start to leverage it's success in way that don't benefit the community overall. Some might see the Redhat certification as a start down that path.
Still, there is noting intrinsically wrong with Redhat, or Linux in general, being popular. As long as they treat Linux fair, there should be no complaint.
If they do get cocky and do something stupid, there are other distributions to use. They can't go COMPLETELY MS on us, if we have the source
Ryan
Even Microsoft can come up with a good algorithm occasionally. If the hype is true, what do I care if it was invented by Microsoft? If you don't want to run MS software or Windows, wait for the independent, free, open-source Linux or *bsd port.
If they do something stupid like patent parts and refuse to let others use it, well then they've screwed themselves and it won't matter.
Do you people refuse to use Samba because it's based on an MS protocol?