If we are lucky (hint, hint, JD) perhaps Derbyshire's next book will cover the newly-proven Poincare Conjecture
The lucky part about that would be that someone had finally proved it, and that a consensus of mathematicians accepted the proof. To the best of my knowledge, the current state is that one man claims to have proved it but that the verdict's still out.
I disagree. In the summer, without DST, the sun comes up uncomfortably early in the morning. That extra hour of darkness is pretty welcome to me, since the start of my work schedule is based on the clock and not dawn.
In the winter, the sun comes up uncomfortably late. If we set our clocks permanently to DST, then I'd spend the first hour of work in the dark.
Basically, I don't want DST permanently on or off. I'm quite happy with the current setup.
This one time, yeah. Had the worm been a human attacker, though, he might've been curious about that "/dev/gvinum/hugefreakinraid/mnt/backup" entry in/etc/fstab.
Solution? Unmount any backup drives when you are not doing any backups...I don't care that it's mounted in such a way that only root can access it, it's still dangerous (for backup purposes).
That's fine, IFF by "unmount" you mean "physically disconnect". Pretty much anything short of actual removal still leaves you vulnerable.
No! It's still an attached harddrive and subject to being compromised by an attacker, unless you're planning to physically disconnect it after the backups are run.
First of all, the exploit is in PHP (see here), not phpBB, the worm just happens to attack phpBB. I just think that should be cleared up before people start spreading FUD about how phpBB is insecure.
Considering that PHP is doing its best to surpass Sendmail in the "pwn my server!" category, I'd say that any application written in PHP should be considered suspect.
This is different from C, where bad programmers can use perfectly reasonable functions in an unsafe way (excluding gets(); that's just an abomination). In PHP, you can use the built-in functions in a completely "safe" way and still get rooted because the functions themselves are problematic.
They've done good things such as finally disabling register_globals - I'll certainly give them credit for that - but it always seems like it's something new to contend with. I've spent the last few hours moving all the PHP sites on my FreeBSD server into their own new little jail so that if they get compromised, at least the rest of my system is reasonably safe.
So, I'd have to disagree with your statement that phpBB isn't insecure. I haven't read its source, but even if it's bugfree, its underlying platform needs to be taken out and shot.
Here's to hoping that PHP5 is a little less of a security nightmare for server admins.
10.) Hold on! You've forgotten the farmers! They can't be four days off in spring planting!
They don't need to be four days off in spring planting. They just check the date on their calendar that is painted on the wall (painted, since it remains identical from year to year), and then they check what the Gregorian Date is, to see if it is planting day yet. The Gregorian Calendar does not cease to exist, it just isn't ordinarily used. Except by hicks.
I would be hard pressed to come up with a way to get the rural population to dismiss the idea with prejudice, short of ending it with "Except by Jesus-loving rednecks watching NASCAR." Someone needs to brush up on their Dale Carnegie coursework.
Wow - I just finished reading that last night. If I concentrate on it long enough, maybe I can see the causal relationship between my nightstand and Slashdot's front page.
In order for the EULA to give MS that right, you have to establish that a EULA with such a clause existed at the time the customer originally agreed to it, which brings us back to square one.
I refuse to be bound by a EULA not printed by them, on their paper, and distributed to me. How could end users possibly be expected to prove that the EULA they printed out is exactly the same as the one that was on the website that particular day? If a judge had to choose between a customer-printed copy of a EULA or the "live" version on a website, which would he pick?
No, I think the only sane and remotely legally binding form would be if Microsoft et al printed tear-off pads of EULAs to hand out upon request. This would protect the consumers (they'd have MS's own document) and the vendor (since there's no way the customer could insert their own wording).
Nice work, guys. I admin a few servers that are several hundred miles away from where I live. When I swing by there next time, I'll definitely be upgrading to 5.x. In the mean time, it's nice to know that I'll still have a few new features and bugfixes to keep things reasonably current with a minimum of disruption.
Are you sure of that? It seems like copyright law says that you can't distribute copies. If the Windows EULA were non-binding, then is there anything in law that says I can't install it on every computer in my house?
IANAL, so I'm asking this seriously. I can photocopy every book in my house as many times as I want, I believe, but is software inherently different?
Even more to the point, what's the battery life on a VIA C3 going to be like compared to a P4? For anything I do with a laptop, this would actually be far superior to its more power-hungry brethren.
Its specs mention a 1.5 hour battery lifetime. How's that compare to other recent laptops?
Those are the ONLY advantages to college. you can learn EVERYTHING they teach in a college without ever setting foot in one or ever listening to a "professor".
Yep, just like I learned that
I actually like some liberal arts subjects, like political science, economics, and philosophy.
You only think you know how computers do arithmetic until you've been made to study CPU architecture.
Normalizing databases is a good thing.
A simple O(n^2) algorithm can be much better than a complex O(log n) algorithm in certain situations (and what that means in the first place).
Functional programming corresponds very well to how I naturally think of certain solutions.
Although I'm a super-genius and God's gift to the programming world, I don't know everything and I still have to do what my professor^Wboss tells me to.
Geek girls have a built-in "attractiveness bonus".
...all without ever going into a classroom with scores of other students who were struggling through the same problems, building connections, and learning how to work with others (even outside the dreaded "group projects") to get through some of the hard stuff.
OK, I'm lying. If it weren't for college, then I'd still think I was Hot Stuff and be an insufferable (and ignorant) toolshed. I'm probably still a pain in the butt, but at least now I know what I don't know. I also have quite a few extra skills that I never would have picked up on my own because they just didn't sound interesting. Finally, I actually got enough of a liberal arts education along the way to understand a little more about the world around me than I would have otherwise. I can flat-out guarantee you that I never would have cracked a poli-sci or economics textbook if it hadn't been required in order for me to get a diploma.
If someone's been telling you that college is all about learning things in the classroom of your major, then they're lying to you.
8. Check the privacy agreement on the website and make sure that they will not give you email address to everyone
9. Check those checkboxes and make sure that you will not receive Spam from them they may be worded funny so that you will check yes to them.
Rule #1: Spammers lie
If a website is going to collection your personal information to sell to third parties, they're going to do so regardless of whether they have a nice privacy notice. Put another way, these people make their living my lying and stealing, but you expect their privacy notice to be an accurate reflection of their real intent?
Disregard privacy notices. If they're an honest company, then they won't need one. If they're spam-friendly, then they won't care about adding one more lie to the mix.
By the way, I find it interesting that your homepage is a link into an MLM website. I clicked the link, added a random junk item to my shopping cart, and proceeded to checkout. When it asked for my "advisor number", I followed the link to their "Finding your Advisor" search. I typed in "fras" (based on the "advno" parameter in your URL) and determined that your name is Todd Fraser, and you live in Troy, NY.
That's about as far as I'm interested in fleshing out your personal information that you posted to the Internet. I'd call you to talk about it in person at the number Google returned when I searched for "todd fraser troy, ny" (you just live a block from a golf course - is it a nice one?) but I'm still at work.
For trying your hardest to protect your email address, you're awfully eager to give away your real name, address, and phone number. I've given up even attempting to hide mine, but I also post to Slashdot with my real email address so I tend not to worry about such things.
Using Thunderbird greatly cuts down on the amount of spam you see in the inbox.
...but does nothing at all to reduce an ISP's bandwidth, storage, and tech support costs. As such, "just convert everyone to Thunderbird" is more or less useless as a first-line response against spam.
The real payoff is in blocking spam before it ever gets into the system. This is where greylisting, RHSBLs, and server-side spam filtering can save a bundle of cash, both in hardware and reduced administration time.
Disclaimer: I'm in the process of writing a magazine article on exactly this subject, so I might be a little biased.
More to the point, those drivers are not "people without subscriptions". They're renting a car from a company who has arranged for their use of a subscription service on their behalf.
In the same way, HBO is currently broadcast to millions of hotel guests who aren't directly subscribing to HBO, but who have access to that service due to arrangements that the hotel has made for them.
I guess that when you're getting desperate, every crackpot theory seems pretty reasonable.
It's good to examine one's options, but it's also good to be aware that often those who have the fewest options are those who could use them the most.
Perhaps, but those are the people who typically have the least strong ties to a community. Maybe it's because I moved a lot in the military and on my own, but I've just never understood how people can get stuck in a place they hate. I know that there are special circumstances (sick family member, custody issues, etc.) but without those restrictionss, I think it's only good and healthy to explore those options.
There's also the point that it's unfair to penalize the victim of mistreatment by putting the burden on them to move away, get a new job, leave friends and possibly family behind, etc.
Sure, but how much suffering are you willing to put up with in the name of fairness? It's not fair that my wife and I had to move several hundred miles to honor her non-compete agreement, but that was better than the alternative of insisting on our right to stay put (and go jobless).
I guess we'll have to agree that our life experiences have been different and leave it at that.
That isn't the definition of a cult, its just kind of standard fanatical Christian especially in rural areas where mainstream Christian churches have a high propensity to develop extreme intolerance (doubt its anything like you'll find in urban California if thats where you live).
Actually, I live in rural Nebraska.
To put it another way, I'm not sure exactly how strongly your congregation is against homosexuality but what would they do if you came to church with your arms around a gay lover and kissed in the pews.
They'd react with the same distaste as if I was kissing on my straight lover in church. Well, a bit more, sure, but I don't think it'd be radically different than the reaction of the general population.
Well fact is most churches try to shape how you think whether you admit it or not.
I guess I just don't see the alternative. Of course they try to influence how you think; that's why you go there. That's like saying that a doctor tries to influence your health, or a mechanic tries to influence your transmission.
I'm just going to wager a guess - you live south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Nope - far north of it, but quite a bit west. I live in northeast Nebraska (within 30 miles of being as far north as Buffalo, NY). The South doesn't have a monopoly on hospitality.:-)
I really have to disagree with your overall sentiment. I know exactly the sorts of people you're talking about, but I honestly believe (and hope) that they're the vocal minority.
Slashdot Mirror
AH-HAH
</nelson>
Seriously, SCO should be in the OED under "schadenfreude". I love seeing this stuff!
The lucky part about that would be that someone had finally proved it, and that a consensus of mathematicians accepted the proof. To the best of my knowledge, the current state is that one man claims to have proved it but that the verdict's still out.
In the winter, the sun comes up uncomfortably late. If we set our clocks permanently to DST, then I'd spend the first hour of work in the dark.
Basically, I don't want DST permanently on or off. I'm quite happy with the current setup.
The worm didn't touch a single file not owned by user 'www' - just the few thousand files that were.
This one time, yeah. Had the worm been a human attacker, though, he might've been curious about that "/dev/gvinum/hugefreakinraid /mnt/backup" entry in /etc/fstab.
That's fine, IFF by "unmount" you mean "physically disconnect". Pretty much anything short of actual removal still leaves you vulnerable.
No! It's still an attached harddrive and subject to being compromised by an attacker, unless you're planning to physically disconnect it after the backups are run.
Considering that PHP is doing its best to surpass Sendmail in the "pwn my server!" category, I'd say that any application written in PHP should be considered suspect.
This is different from C, where bad programmers can use perfectly reasonable functions in an unsafe way (excluding gets(); that's just an abomination). In PHP, you can use the built-in functions in a completely "safe" way and still get rooted because the functions themselves are problematic.
They've done good things such as finally disabling register_globals - I'll certainly give them credit for that - but it always seems like it's something new to contend with. I've spent the last few hours moving all the PHP sites on my FreeBSD server into their own new little jail so that if they get compromised, at least the rest of my system is reasonably safe.
So, I'd have to disagree with your statement that phpBB isn't insecure. I haven't read its source, but even if it's bugfree, its underlying platform needs to be taken out and shot.
Here's to hoping that PHP5 is a little less of a security nightmare for server admins.
I would be hard pressed to come up with a way to get the rural population to dismiss the idea with prejudice, short of ending it with "Except by Jesus-loving rednecks watching NASCAR." Someone needs to brush up on their Dale Carnegie coursework.
Wow - I just finished reading that last night. If I concentrate on it long enough, maybe I can see the causal relationship between my nightstand and Slashdot's front page.
In order for the EULA to give MS that right, you have to establish that a EULA with such a clause existed at the time the customer originally agreed to it, which brings us back to square one.
I refuse to be bound by a EULA not printed by them, on their paper, and distributed to me. How could end users possibly be expected to prove that the EULA they printed out is exactly the same as the one that was on the website that particular day? If a judge had to choose between a customer-printed copy of a EULA or the "live" version on a website, which would he pick?
No, I think the only sane and remotely legally binding form would be if Microsoft et al printed tear-off pads of EULAs to hand out upon request. This would protect the consumers (they'd have MS's own document) and the vendor (since there's no way the customer could insert their own wording).
Thanks for the nice work!
IANAL, so I'm asking this seriously. I can photocopy every book in my house as many times as I want, I believe, but is software inherently different?
Its specs mention a 1.5 hour battery lifetime. How's that compare to other recent laptops?
Yep, just like I learned that
OK, I'm lying. If it weren't for college, then I'd still think I was Hot Stuff and be an insufferable (and ignorant) toolshed. I'm probably still a pain in the butt, but at least now I know what I don't know. I also have quite a few extra skills that I never would have picked up on my own because they just didn't sound interesting. Finally, I actually got enough of a liberal arts education along the way to understand a little more about the world around me than I would have otherwise. I can flat-out guarantee you that I never would have cracked a poli-sci or economics textbook if it hadn't been required in order for me to get a diploma.
If someone's been telling you that college is all about learning things in the classroom of your major, then they're lying to you.
Cite?
9. Check those checkboxes and make sure that you will not receive Spam from them they may be worded funny so that you will check yes to them.
Rule #1: Spammers lie
If a website is going to collection your personal information to sell to third parties, they're going to do so regardless of whether they have a nice privacy notice. Put another way, these people make their living my lying and stealing, but you expect their privacy notice to be an accurate reflection of their real intent?
Disregard privacy notices. If they're an honest company, then they won't need one. If they're spam-friendly, then they won't care about adding one more lie to the mix.
By the way, I find it interesting that your homepage is a link into an MLM website. I clicked the link, added a random junk item to my shopping cart, and proceeded to checkout. When it asked for my "advisor number", I followed the link to their "Finding your Advisor" search. I typed in "fras" (based on the "advno" parameter in your URL) and determined that your name is Todd Fraser, and you live in Troy, NY.
That's about as far as I'm interested in fleshing out your personal information that you posted to the Internet. I'd call you to talk about it in person at the number Google returned when I searched for "todd fraser troy, ny" (you just live a block from a golf course - is it a nice one?) but I'm still at work.
For trying your hardest to protect your email address, you're awfully eager to give away your real name, address, and phone number. I've given up even attempting to hide mine, but I also post to Slashdot with my real email address so I tend not to worry about such things.
...but does nothing at all to reduce an ISP's bandwidth, storage, and tech support costs. As such, "just convert everyone to Thunderbird" is more or less useless as a first-line response against spam.
The real payoff is in blocking spam before it ever gets into the system. This is where greylisting, RHSBLs, and server-side spam filtering can save a bundle of cash, both in hardware and reduced administration time.
Disclaimer: I'm in the process of writing a magazine article on exactly this subject, so I might be a little biased.
She's pretty good looking, even if she wasn't a female hard-core geek who designs and fabricates CPUs for the hell of it.
True. The people who use Access know that they're newbies using entry-level tools.
Dang. Couldn't resist. Oh, and Abiword and Kword are better than OpenOffice, KDE rocks, and Mozilla is better than Firefox. Did I forget anything?
In the same way, HBO is currently broadcast to millions of hotel guests who aren't directly subscribing to HBO, but who have access to that service due to arrangements that the hotel has made for them.
I guess that when you're getting desperate, every crackpot theory seems pretty reasonable.
Perhaps, but those are the people who typically have the least strong ties to a community. Maybe it's because I moved a lot in the military and on my own, but I've just never understood how people can get stuck in a place they hate. I know that there are special circumstances (sick family member, custody issues, etc.) but without those restrictionss, I think it's only good and healthy to explore those options.
There's also the point that it's unfair to penalize the victim of mistreatment by putting the burden on them to move away, get a new job, leave friends and possibly family behind, etc.
Sure, but how much suffering are you willing to put up with in the name of fairness? It's not fair that my wife and I had to move several hundred miles to honor her non-compete agreement, but that was better than the alternative of insisting on our right to stay put (and go jobless).
That isn't the definition of a cult, its just kind of standard fanatical Christian especially in rural areas where mainstream Christian churches have a high propensity to develop extreme intolerance (doubt its anything like you'll find in urban California if thats where you live).
Actually, I live in rural Nebraska.
To put it another way, I'm not sure exactly how strongly your congregation is against homosexuality but what would they do if you came to church with your arms around a gay lover and kissed in the pews.
They'd react with the same distaste as if I was kissing on my straight lover in church. Well, a bit more, sure, but I don't think it'd be radically different than the reaction of the general population.
Well fact is most churches try to shape how you think whether you admit it or not.
I guess I just don't see the alternative. Of course they try to influence how you think; that's why you go there. That's like saying that a doctor tries to influence your health, or a mechanic tries to influence your transmission.
Nope - far north of it, but quite a bit west. I live in northeast Nebraska (within 30 miles of being as far north as Buffalo, NY). The South doesn't have a monopoly on hospitality. :-)
I really have to disagree with your overall sentiment. I know exactly the sorts of people you're talking about, but I honestly believe (and hope) that they're the vocal minority.