Naaah, they'd just somehow relate it to Penis size, so only insecure guys who want bigger numbers would buy the latest models.
You'd have:
Intel "But if I shaved it would look longer..." AMD "Feel the girth Baby!" Intel "Ours now gets real hot." AMD "You'll need a fan in your underpants for this one!" Intel "Ron Jeremy uses this!" AMD "Annabelle Cheong uses ours! No! Wait! Damn!"
What Pabst is trying to convery is that he needs more views on his website, even though historically, he's made a point of exagerrating the statistical differences between test results to push Asus motherboards (for example). I remember him making a huge procuction out of a less than one percent difference in the performance between sone dual processor motherboards. I realised then that either he was mathemathically incompetent or he was just a shill for his advertisers.
Either way, he's not worth the bother of checking out anymore.
Yep, ever single DVD rip of a movie I've seen coming from China has has been an Academy Awards Screener. Basically, someone is sending out the copies that the people who vote on the movies for the Oscars get. When I saw The Two Towers in the cinema, it was playing in my local computer mall on the same day.
Of course he does because, in his experience, the female human brain can cope with whatever he's most interested in *and* the fact that the ceiling needs painting.
Well, for a start, port 23 (Telnet) should be closed. You should only allow access by someone being either physically presnt in the office or via Port 22 and insist on huge passwords (and also keep up to date with CERT warnings, etc.)
If you're more than a few days behind CERT warnings, you're not paying attention.
You should also be noticing usage patterns, however. Are you getting a lot of relay attempts on your mail servers? A lot of CONNECT attempts on your http servers? Funny referrals on your web pages? (The list goes on, there are thousands of ways people abuse your services from outside.)
If you can't monitor your logfiles yourself, write some perl to complain about things out of the ordinary in the logfiles. If they're not abuse, code them into your perl files as ordinary.
As as sysadmin, you *should* be paranoid. After all, the world *is* trying to take advantage of your servers. make them secure to the best of your ability and then police what goes through them.
Sure, your initial check on what goes through your servers will chuck up lots of false positives. You'll learn from experience and know exactly what "default\.ida:XXXXX" means in your http logs and all the other little signs of abuse are.
The price of *all* software is eternal vigilance. This is your job as a sysadmin.
It's a great feeling when your users come up and say "hey BoFH, that virus thing that knocked out every other company yesterday; how come we weren't affected?"
BoFH: "Because *we* [points to sysadmin team] do our job, and we do it *right*."
dave
Re:Independent review sites?
on
ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember reading a review of dual cpu motherboards on Tom's Hardware Guide. Everything scored within a few percent of the others, but he kept going on about how the Asus board was cleary faster than the others. There would be a graph of, for example, encoding mp3s, and all of the motherboard were withing in afew seconds of each other, and yet this guy is raving about one board and comdemning another. I stopped taking him seriously at that point.
Of course, you also get things like the infamous NT vs Linux benchmark: Let's test a rollout of NT specially calibrated and tuned for us by the NT development team, versus some old Linux distro we found in a trashcan.
Whenever you see one of these reviews, just ask yourself: where's the money to do this coming from? That'll tell you whether you should believe it or not.
No, it wasn't a translation. it if had been 'The hood and the trunk are full of cookies' then maybe you'd need to translate it, but 'The Gripping Hand'?
Anyway, usually moronic translations from British English to American English are done by American editors. Books don't get translated from American to British.
Strata is a very clear homage to Niven's Ringworld, with many original elements of it's own. It's one of the earlier examples of pTerry taking a similar millieu and turning it up to 11 to see what breaks.
So, there's this rumour that you and Jerry Pournelle used the 'Star Wars' SDI to bankrupt the USSR. Specifically, given that the USSR had to maintain equality in military hardware with the USA, you, and several other advisors who had the ears of infulential people in Government, proposed a hugely expensive series of projects which, if the USSR was to match, would break their economy and cause a collapse of their economy.
Joyce's father's name is 'Wang Mei Ling'[1] You then say that Joyce took her father's surname: 'Mei Ling'. Now, this is so stupidly wrong, it's hard to believe. In Chinese, the family name comes first, followed by the family name. Joyce would have been Joyce Wang-Trujillo.
For me, this was a 'these guys have done no research at all' moment in the book. I was gobsmacked that no one had commented on line in any way that I could find. Do you not know anything about Chinese culture at all?
Also, the UK title of 'The Gripping Hand' is 'The Moat Around Murcheson's Eye'. Have you ever felt like meeting that guy who came up with that awful title in a dark alley? Is a baseball bat involved? At the very least, he deserves half his head shaved in a proper asymmetrical beard.
dave
[1] Mei Ling is a girl's name, in fact, it's incredibly girly, meaning something like 'pretty beutiful'. No one in their right mind would name a boy Mei Ling. 'Wong Mei Ling' is the Chinese name of Suzie Wong, from the book and the film of the same name.
A 'branding issue bug' is when you have morons who hard code the name of the OS into the source files instead of referring to a specific variable or a fixed file.
As a quote from the interview says: "I went out and handpicked the three best developers on the team and said, 'just go and fix it.' One developer fixed over 7,000 references to [Windows].NET Server. Let's just say that there are people I trust, and people I don't trust. I told these guys, 'don't tell me what you're doing. Just do it.'"
So clearly a lot of the developers are hard-coding certain things into the code rather than relying on a solid design document. Sloppy, very sloppy.
The bootleg of TTT I saw the other night was 'For the consideration of members of the Academy of Motion Pictures: Not for public release.'
Pretty good quality too, although I *think* there were discrepancies between the English words and the Chinese characters. I don't read Chinese very well, but I did see few errors in what I could read.
Email used to be all about people sending you messages you were interested in. Now, that's been taken away from us, because there's so much crap coming through it.
If I have to tell my mother she has to download my instant messaging client, "and hey, mom, su to root, cd to that directory, do make clean; make all; make install, than add the davesIM service to your/etc/init.d directory", ok *my* mom can do that, but can yours? Why should she have to? What if she's running windows/amiga-os/beos/mac-os/etc?
My mom's in a different timezone. One that is eight hours different from mine. Instant messaging doesn't work in that case. Email works. It's asynchronous. Why should we tolerate it being abused by antisocial morons? Why should I have to jump through hoops to tell my mother her grandson is going "da-da"? Shouldn't it be the spammers jumping through the hoops?
If someone steals my car becuase I didn't have enough security on it, is it my fault? You can't say that the person who took it isn't a thief.
We had a world where you could trust people not to steal your car. In fact, you could leave your car unlocked (your relays open) and people who need it would use it, but not abuse it, and you wouldn't notice (it would be returned to you full of gas).
I had a friend lving in a village where the neighbours might come in (because the door was never locked) and help themselves to something from the fridge. But that was ok, because they'd always replace it or you could always just go round to their place for something. I remember being there when a neighbour dropped by and deposited a few cases of beer in the fridge ("we had a party and we've got beer left over 'cause we needed some of yours last night.") It was a tremendous environment. You *trusted* your neighbours.
That's what the 'net was like: "Hey, I need a news feed for alt.fan.pratchett." "Sure, leech some of mine, one of my users needs an account on your VAX." "No worries, point them here."
They are stealing bandwidth. You may pay a fixed rate per month, but your ISP has to pay for extra load on their lines by having more powerful servers, more diskspace. These costs get passed to you.
They steal your time. If you don't care about stopping these thieves, you can just hit delete. How much time does that take? What if you never had to receive the crap in the first place? If you want to track them down (as you *know* that they're stealing from you), that takes even more time.
I can remember when getting an email meant that one of my friends or family wanted to communicate. Spammers have stolen that feeling from me. Now, when I get an email, I have to worry about whether I can open that email in the office, whether I'm going to be pissed off about someone intruding on my work with their marketing crap.
Spammers are thieves. Lowlife, scum-sucking thieves. They are taking advantage of a system built on everyone behaving responsibly and polluting it for everyone. They are greedy, self-centred and short-sighted. They are destroying a means of communication which had so much promise. Email is rapidly becoming worthless thanks to spammers. Thay have taken that from us. It didn't belong to them, it belonged to all of us, but they took it anyway and abused it until it was useless. It is the Tragedy of the Commons writ large.
Spam is not free speech. Spam is not about content, it's about consent. No one is preventing spammers putting their message on a webpage or in a print advert. What we want to stop is spammers sending advertising to us on *our* *dime*. If you have to pay ten cents for each ad on TV, or pay one dollar each time some telmarketer rang you up, you'd be fscking livid. with spam, *your* bandwidth is paying for *their* advertising.
It's not free speech - if they wanted that they can make a web page - it's theft.
Why should we have to adopt a new system because antisocial thieves have rendered the original concept unsafe?
The system is not inherently unsafe, it's just that thieves are taking advantage of the inherent levels of trust in the system. surely we should punish the thieves, not develop some overly paranoid system in its place?
It's not just China: ISPs in South America don't care about spam either. Also, some major US ISPs like UUNET, Level3 and Worldcom don't, in my experience, give a fig about their users spamming, or undertaking any abuseive activities. I get probed by all three regularly and get no response when I send LARTS to abuse@ anyone of those three ISPs. Well, i get a response from Level3, but they just send my complaint to the spammer and I get more spam.
The major backbones in the USA condone spam. What makes you think a Chinese ISP will condemn it?
Shove all of Worldcom, UUNET and Level3 into SPEWS, that's what I say!
It doesn't solve the problem: the spam is still sent and consumes bandwidth up until it hits your filter. You don't see it, but you're still paying for it to be delivered to you so that your filter can delete it.
Charter?! charterpipeline.net!? A bunch of spamming fuckwits with non-operational abuse addresses. I get regular relay-rape attempts from charter users and complaints do nothing.
They're on my 'block on any networks I have anything to do with' list.
POSSIBLE += $(shell test -f bitdomain && echo bitdomain.db) POSSIBLE += $(shell test -f uudomain && echo uudomain.db) POSSIBLE += $(shell test -f genericstable && echo genericstable.db)
Slashdot Mirror
Naaah, they'd just somehow relate it to Penis size, so only insecure guys who want bigger numbers would buy the latest models.
You'd have:
Intel "But if I shaved it would look longer..."
AMD "Feel the girth Baby!"
Intel "Ours now gets real hot."
AMD "You'll need a fan in your underpants for this one!"
Intel "Ron Jeremy uses this!"
AMD "Annabelle Cheong uses ours! No! Wait! Damn!"
dave
Now you're unfairly maligning THG: it's whoever gave him the latest "Ooh! Shiny!" toy.
dave
No this is not what Pabst is trying to convey.
What Pabst is trying to convery is that he needs more views on his website, even though historically, he's made a point of exagerrating the statistical differences between test results to push Asus motherboards (for example). I remember him making a huge procuction out of a less than one percent difference in the performance between sone dual processor motherboards. I realised then that either he was mathemathically incompetent or he was just a shill for his advertisers.
Either way, he's not worth the bother of checking out anymore.
dave
Yep, ever single DVD rip of a movie I've seen coming from China has has been an Academy Awards Screener. Basically, someone is sending out the copies that the people who vote on the movies for the Oscars get. When I saw The Two Towers in the cinema, it was playing in my local computer mall on the same day.
dave
> Don't you mean the male human brain? :)
Of course he does because, in his experience, the female human brain can cope with whatever he's most interested in *and* the fact that the ceiling needs painting.
dave
Well, for a start, port 23 (Telnet) should be closed. You should only allow access by someone being either physically presnt in the office or via Port 22 and insist on huge passwords (and also keep up to date with CERT warnings, etc.)
If you're more than a few days behind CERT warnings, you're not paying attention.
You should also be noticing usage patterns, however. Are you getting a lot of relay attempts on your mail servers? A lot of CONNECT attempts on your http servers? Funny referrals on your web pages? (The list goes on, there are thousands of ways people abuse your services from outside.)
If you can't monitor your logfiles yourself, write some perl to complain about things out of the ordinary in the logfiles. If they're not abuse, code them into your perl files as ordinary.
As as sysadmin, you *should* be paranoid. After all, the world *is* trying to take advantage of your servers. make them secure to the best of your ability and then police what goes through them.
Sure, your initial check on what goes through your servers will chuck up lots of false positives. You'll learn from experience and know exactly what "default\.ida:XXXXX" means in your http logs and all the other little signs of abuse are.
The price of *all* software is eternal vigilance. This is your job as a sysadmin.
dave
Mods, mod the parent up.
It's a great feeling when your users come up and say "hey BoFH, that virus thing that knocked out every other company yesterday; how come we weren't affected?"
BoFH: "Because *we* [points to sysadmin team] do our job, and we do it *right*."
dave
I remember reading a review of dual cpu motherboards on Tom's Hardware Guide. Everything scored within a few percent of the others, but he kept going on about how the Asus board was cleary faster than the others. There would be a graph of, for example, encoding mp3s, and all of the motherboard were withing in afew seconds of each other, and yet this guy is raving about one board and comdemning another. I stopped taking him seriously at that point.
Of course, you also get things like the infamous NT vs Linux benchmark: Let's test a rollout of NT specially calibrated and tuned for us by the NT development team, versus some old Linux distro we found in a trashcan.
Whenever you see one of these reviews, just ask yourself: where's the money to do this coming from? That'll tell you whether you should believe it or not.
dave
No, it wasn't a translation. it if had been 'The hood and the trunk are full of cookies' then maybe you'd need to translate it, but 'The Gripping Hand'?
Anyway, usually moronic translations from British English to American English are done by American editors. Books don't get translated from American to British.
dave
Strata is a very clear homage to Niven's Ringworld, with many original elements of it's own. It's one of the earlier examples of pTerry taking a similar millieu and turning it up to 11 to see what breaks.
dave
So, there's this rumour that you and Jerry Pournelle used the 'Star Wars' SDI to bankrupt the USSR. Specifically, given that the USSR had to maintain equality in military hardware with the USA, you, and several other advisors who had the ears of infulential people in Government, proposed a hugely expensive series of projects which, if the USSR was to match, would break their economy and cause a collapse of their economy.
Is this true? Is it classified?
dave "and did Bjo Trimble take the minutes?"
Joyce's father's name is 'Wang Mei Ling'[1] You then say that Joyce took her father's surname: 'Mei Ling'. Now, this is so stupidly wrong, it's hard to believe. In Chinese, the family name comes first, followed by the family name. Joyce would have been Joyce Wang-Trujillo.
For me, this was a 'these guys have done no research at all' moment in the book. I was gobsmacked that no one had commented on line in any way that I could find. Do you not know anything about Chinese culture at all?
Also, the UK title of 'The Gripping Hand' is 'The Moat Around Murcheson's Eye'. Have you ever felt like meeting that guy who came up with that awful title in a dark alley? Is a baseball bat involved? At the very least, he deserves half his head shaved in a proper asymmetrical beard.
dave
[1] Mei Ling is a girl's name, in fact, it's incredibly girly, meaning something like 'pretty beutiful'. No one in their right mind would name a boy Mei Ling. 'Wong Mei Ling' is the Chinese name of Suzie Wong, from the book and the film of the same name.
Nope, I get it here in Hong Kong.
dave
A 'branding issue bug' is when you have morons who hard code the name of the OS into the source files instead of referring to a specific variable or a fixed file.
As a quote from the interview says: "I went out and handpicked the three best developers on the team and said, 'just go and fix it.' One developer fixed over 7,000 references to [Windows] .NET Server. Let's just say that there are people I trust, and people I don't trust. I told these guys, 'don't tell me what you're doing. Just do it.'"
So clearly a lot of the developers are hard-coding certain things into the code rather than relying on a solid design document. Sloppy, very sloppy.
dave
The bootleg of TTT I saw the other night was 'For the consideration of members of the Academy of Motion Pictures: Not for public release.'
Pretty good quality too, although I *think* there were discrepancies between the English words and the Chinese characters. I don't read Chinese very well, but I did see few errors in what I could read.
Mind you, for 6 Yuan, it was damn good.
dave
You are completely missing the point.
/etc/init.d directory", ok *my* mom can do that, but can yours? Why should she have to? What if she's running windows/amiga-os/beos/mac-os/etc?
Email used to be all about people sending you messages you were interested in. Now, that's been taken away from us, because there's so much crap coming through it.
If I have to tell my mother she has to download my instant messaging client, "and hey, mom, su to root, cd to that directory, do make clean; make all; make install, than add the davesIM service to your
My mom's in a different timezone. One that is eight hours different from mine. Instant messaging doesn't work in that case. Email works. It's asynchronous. Why should we tolerate it being abused by antisocial morons? Why should I have to jump through hoops to tell my mother her grandson is going "da-da"? Shouldn't it be the spammers jumping through the hoops?
dave
This is not a good analogy.
If someone steals my car becuase I didn't have enough security on it, is it my fault? You can't say that the person who took it isn't a thief.
We had a world where you could trust people not to steal your car. In fact, you could leave your car unlocked (your relays open) and people who need it would use it, but not abuse it, and you wouldn't notice (it would be returned to you full of gas).
I had a friend lving in a village where the neighbours might come in (because the door was never locked) and help themselves to something from the fridge. But that was ok, because they'd always replace it or you could always just go round to their place for something. I remember being there when a neighbour dropped by and deposited a few cases of beer in the fridge ("we had a party and we've got beer left over 'cause we needed some of yours last night.") It was a tremendous environment. You *trusted* your neighbours.
That's what the 'net was like: "Hey, I need a news feed for alt.fan.pratchett." "Sure, leech some of mine, one of my users needs an account on your VAX." "No worries, point them here."
Now its: "Do I know you? No? Fuck off!"
That's what the spammers have stolen.
dave
Spam is theft.
They are stealing bandwidth. You may pay a fixed rate per month, but your ISP has to pay for extra load on their lines by having more powerful servers, more diskspace. These costs get passed to you.
They steal your time. If you don't care about stopping these thieves, you can just hit delete. How much time does that take? What if you never had to receive the crap in the first place? If you want to track them down (as you *know* that they're stealing from you), that takes even more time.
I can remember when getting an email meant that one of my friends or family wanted to communicate. Spammers have stolen that feeling from me. Now, when I get an email, I have to worry about whether I can open that email in the office, whether I'm going to be pissed off about someone intruding on my work with their marketing crap.
Spammers are thieves. Lowlife, scum-sucking thieves. They are taking advantage of a system built on everyone behaving responsibly and polluting it for everyone. They are greedy, self-centred and short-sighted. They are destroying a means of communication which had so much promise. Email is rapidly becoming worthless thanks to spammers. Thay have taken that from us. It didn't belong to them, it belonged to all of us, but they took it anyway and abused it until it was useless. It is the Tragedy of the Commons writ large.
dave
They're on a lot of blacklists: Choose from one of the following
http://openrbl.org/ip/65/242/117/50.htm
dave
Spam is not free speech. Spam is not about content, it's about consent. No one is preventing spammers putting their message on a webpage or in a print advert. What we want to stop is spammers sending advertising to us on *our* *dime*. If you have to pay ten cents for each ad on TV, or pay one dollar each time some telmarketer rang you up, you'd be fscking livid. with spam, *your* bandwidth is paying for *their* advertising.
It's not free speech - if they wanted that they can make a web page - it's theft.
dave
Why should we have to adopt a new system because antisocial thieves have rendered the original concept unsafe?
The system is not inherently unsafe, it's just that thieves are taking advantage of the inherent levels of trust in the system. surely we should punish the thieves, not develop some overly paranoid system in its place?
dave
It's not just China: ISPs in South America don't care about spam either. Also, some major US ISPs like UUNET, Level3 and Worldcom don't, in my experience, give a fig about their users spamming, or undertaking any abuseive activities. I get probed by all three regularly and get no response when I send LARTS to abuse@ anyone of those three ISPs. Well, i get a response from Level3, but they just send my complaint to the spammer and I get more spam.
The major backbones in the USA condone spam. What makes you think a Chinese ISP will condemn it?
Shove all of Worldcom, UUNET and Level3 into SPEWS, that's what I say!
dave "rot in Spews"
It doesn't solve the problem: the spam is still sent and consumes bandwidth up until it hits your filter. You don't see it, but you're still paying for it to be delivered to you so that your filter can delete it.
dave
Charter?! charterpipeline.net!? A bunch of spamming fuckwits with non-operational abuse addresses. I get regular relay-rape attempts from charter users and complaints do nothing.
They're on my 'block on any networks I have anything to do with' list.
dave
POSSIBLE += $(shell test -f bitdomain && echo bitdomain.db)
/etc/sendmail.cf
POSSIBLE += $(shell test -f uudomain && echo uudomain.db)
POSSIBLE += $(shell test -f genericstable && echo genericstable.db)
all: ${POSSIBLE} virtusertable.db access.db domaintable.db mailertable.db sendmail.cf
virtusertable.db : virtusertable
makemap -f hash $@ < $<
userdb.db : userdb
makemap -f hash $@ < $<
%.db : %
makemap hash $@ < $<
clean:
rm -f *.db *~
sendmail.cf: sendmail.mc
m4 sendmail.mc >
(Damn html entities!)