In quoting from the Pirhana Brothers sketch, you inadvertantly support the timelessness of the comedy.
How many Americans are aware that the "Pirhana Brothers" are actually based on the real-life British criminals the Cray brothers? I didn't when I first saw the sketch on a PBS broadcast in the '70s, but several years later I was reading a book about famous British criminals & almost did a spit take when reading about the Crays...
Minor quibble -- Brooks was from the 20's and early 30's.
I'd have picked one of the hotties of that era, such as Evelyn Nesbitt (the "Gibson Girl", involved in a murder scandal about 3 to 5 years after the Wright Brothers' original flight), or Lillian Russell (more from the 1890's, but still prominent in the decade of 1900).
You said:
"they can track what stories I read while logged in and send me special email offers that they consider "helpful." Like my favorite on how I can add 4 inches to my... well you get it."
Funny, I keep getting those emails and I didn't even register....
You said:
The real estate situation around DC can't be that bad, so I figure you ought to do nicely on $2,000 a month.
Yes, it's that bad. I think it reasonable to allow for a one-bedroom apartment in a non-deluxe building in the District of Columbia. Such an apartment will go for about $1200 to $2400 a month.
This from someone who just moved to Montgomery County MD because I couldn't afford to stay in the District even though I wanted to.
You said:
That's even lamer than "Come here watson, I need you."
The quote was actually "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you". Bell had just spilled battery acid on himself, and was calling out for help. The phone happened to be set up correctly to work, and Watson heard the plea for help over the phone. Hence, the first phone call was a "911" call, and I can't think of anything less lame.
My only question is whether the actual call was something more along the lines of "@$%$#@%! Watson! Get your ass in here NOW!". Those were different days, though, and a level of decorum unimagineable to us was commonplace then among certain classes of society.
"Back in the 1800's they did it because no one else could."
I'd have to disagree with that. There was a whole group of "local carriers" (the colorfully-named Blood's Local Post in Philadelphia, Hussey's in New York City, and countless others) that provided door-to-door service when the PO only delivered to a PO Box in their offices. Several had started to compete in inter-city delivery as well, until the PO had Congress pass a law which killed competition just before the Civil War. Several of these companies tried to slip through loopholes and it was only in the 1880s that they were finally completely suppressed.
Back in the late '80s, I earned my living as a Clipper programmer. There was a program called "Pocket Dot", which was a Clipper interpreter that gave you an environment like dBase III, but that understood Clipper indexes and memo fields.
If, at the dot prompt, you typed "xyzzy", you got back:
You are in a cluttered room, staring at a computer screen. You hear faint, rustling noises behind you.
If you typed "plugh", you got back:
Nothing happens
I just went looking, and I can hardly beleve it, but I've actually still got this still installed on my machine, about 8 systems later. Then, I just saw "New Sweep" in the same directory -- CP/M lives!
Is it only me, or is it a reaction to the recent Microsoft chest-beating? Monday and yesterday, I was getting "unable to connect", timeouts, etc. while attempting to access the site usimg MS Explorer 4.01, (and on the two occasions when the front page came up, none of the internal links to slashdot-hosted content worked) but the Netscape Beta worked first time, every time. Of course, the Netscape/Mozilla memory leak eventually ate all of the resources on my system...
Was this related to the DDOS or was it something else? Anyone else experience this?
I've seen reports that your position on "GNU/Linux" versus "Linux" goes farther than the temperate and informative essay linked to above -- for example refusing to answer questions at press conferences/public Q&A sessions/etc. about "Linux" until the question was rephrased to use "GNU/Linux" or () "Lignux".
How is this insistence different from the "obnoxious advertising clause" that you so rightfully object to in the classic BSD license?
Anyone here remember Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series? In this science fiction series, the basic premise was that everyone who had ever lived on earth woke up after death on the banks of a giant river. Their food and clothing were provided at "grails", located at regular intervals along the river, which dispensed their bounty at regular intervals.
The interesting thing is that in the novel, people behave exactly like the folks described "camping" in the game world. I'm not a gamer, and I'm not sure why I started reading this article, but I find the behavior caused by a non-random distribution of the game goodies to be far more interesting from a social point of view than what would result from random distribution.
BTW, I highly recommend the early books in Farmer's series, but was extremely disappointed in the conclusion -- a melange of cosmic bushwa.
Thanks for a very well-thought-out aand expressed answer. I'd have e-mailed you to express this, but you'd posted as an AC...
Just as an aside, we have tried to get consulting help from Sendmail, Inc., but they don't seem to want the business --- its three weeks since we sent them a proposal, and we haven't heard back, except "its going to a different group & you'll be hearing soon". Numerous phone calls remain unreturned. If they act like this when a potential customer is standing outside their door waving money, how responsive are they going to be when its time to do the work?
Can you (or anyone else) recommend someone who actually *wants* consulting business and who knows sendmail? I'm thinking about VA Systems (since it'll run on their hardware), but I'm open to suggestions.
This may be mildly off-topic, but it's a genuine plea for help -- see if you can recognize the symptoms and propose a solution. I thank you in advance.
I'm in charge of a system which sends out approximately 50,000 emails a day to a list of subscribers.
We were running this on a dedicated box. When I built it, this Pentium 120 with 128 megs of RAM and IDE drives was a fairly happenin' machine. It was running Red Hat Linux 5.2 and sendmail 8.8. The system queues outgoing mail into one of about 40 queues, depending on destination domain. A cron job runs sendmail against each one of the queues (the relevant invocation is:
/usr/sbin/sendmail -OQueueDirectory=name of directory -OQueueLA=24 -OQueueSortOrder=host -OTimeout.connect=1m -OTimeout.helo=1m -q ).
We were getting peak throughput as high as 20,000 messages delivered per hour.
Due to the relaying holes in old versions of Sendmail, I wanted to upgrade to the then-current 8.9.3 Because of the Great C Library Change, the sendmail rpm available from redhat didn't want to work. So I upgraded the entire box to Red Hat 6.1. (please redirect all comments about the evils of RedHat, the rpm format, or how I should have compiled it myself from a tarball to/dev/nul).
Now, the same volume of mail takes 6 times longer than before the sendmail 8.8->8.9.3, RHL 5.2->6.1 upgrade. Moreover, it takes the same time on a VA Linux Full-On rack system, so hardware isn't an issue.
Does anyone have a theory? Will upgrading to 8.10 help/hurt/be neutral?
Eric_Wright wrote: Yes, we need newbies (ie. more users, who will all be newbies for a time) for the Linux movement to progress, but the last thing we need is a dumbing down of Linux to this level!!!
I disagree with you on this. If AOL should happen to port their software to Linux, there is absolutely nothing which forces you to install it. Each of us makes the Linux system we want. It's a "movement" only in the sense that there are a lot of people who, for their own separate reasons, have chosen to use Linux.
Some people use Linux for ideological reasons -- the folks who agree with Stallman. Good for them.
Some people use Linux for the stability and reliability that comes from the Open Source development model. Good for them, too.
Some people use Linux because they are dissatisfied with the quality of Microsoft's product offerings. Good for them, as well.
Some people use Linux because it's "free as in beer", or because it lets them make use of hardware that would otherwise be populating a landfill. Good for them, also.
Some people, who would like to use Linux, are prevented from doing so by the barriers which are described in the article. The many comments which I have read in this thread about how it is terrible if Linux is "dumbed down", or how it is essential for all Linux users to learn about system administration do this particular group of potential users a great disservice. Adding the ease of use functionality that this group wants does nothing to take away from any other group that is using Linux. The fact that there's an AOL client doesn't keep you from connecting to any other ISP by whatever means you choose. The fact that a "newbie install" has a flashy GUI, limited options visible, almost no daemons installed, doesn't make vi the default text editor, or other "blasphemous" features has no impact on any person who is running a different style of Linux system.
I've been running one or more production Linux servers since I set up a DNS server on a 386SX-20 with an 80mb hard drive and 8 megs of RAM running kernel version 0.99pl15 (I forget whether it was Slackware or SLS). I don't need a huge amount of hand-holding for myself anymore, and I act as a "linux friend" (to use the article author's phrase), but just because I had to "gut it" and learn a huge amount to get to where I am today doesn't mean that I think new folks should have to do the same.
Had I invested the time I spent learning Linux into learning how to play the guitar, I'd be a fair guitarist by now. Instead, when I want to hear guitar music, I play a John Fahey or Andres Segovia or whomever CD. Yet I don't get hate mail from subscribers to Guitar Player magazine because I chose to put my efforts into learning an operating system instead of learning to play the guitar.
To coin a phrase: "Can't we all just get along?"
Re:Katz is onto something...
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 2
You said:
That's the joy of controlling the market, the consumer CAN'T go someplace else. Don't like CNN, try Headline News, oops same company, how about MSNBC, doh!, how about FoxNews, hmmm, new bikinis.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, read the article again and you'll see they are running Word Perfect from an SCO Unix server....
In quoting from the Pirhana Brothers sketch, you inadvertantly support the timelessness of the comedy.
How many Americans are aware that the "Pirhana Brothers" are actually based on the real-life British criminals the Cray brothers? I didn't when I first saw the sketch on a PBS broadcast in the '70s, but several years later I was reading a book about famous British criminals & almost did a spit take when reading about the Crays...
What's a "USian"?
"Louise Brooks naked and petrified! "
Minor quibble -- Brooks was from the 20's and early 30's.
I'd have picked one of the hotties of that era, such as Evelyn Nesbitt (the "Gibson Girl", involved in a murder scandal about 3 to 5 years after the Wright Brothers' original flight), or Lillian Russell (more from the 1890's, but still prominent in the decade of 1900).
You said:
"they can track what stories I read while logged in and send me special email offers that they consider "helpful." Like my favorite on how I can add 4 inches to my... well you get it."
Funny, I keep getting those emails and I didn't even register....
Be happy that Microsoft hasn't obtained a business practices patent on "embrace, extend and extinguish".
Godwin's Law!
You said:
The real estate situation around DC can't be that bad, so I figure you ought to do nicely on $2,000 a month.
Yes, it's that bad. I think it reasonable to allow for a one-bedroom apartment in a non-deluxe building in the District of Columbia. Such an apartment will go for about $1200 to $2400 a month.
This from someone who just moved to Montgomery County MD because I couldn't afford to stay in the District even though I wanted to.
You said:
That's even lamer than "Come here watson, I need you."
The quote was actually "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you". Bell had just spilled battery acid on himself, and was calling out for help. The phone happened to be set up correctly to work, and Watson heard the plea for help over the phone. Hence, the first phone call was a "911" call, and I can't think of anything less lame.
My only question is whether the actual call was something more along the lines of "@$%$#@%! Watson! Get your ass in here NOW!". Those were different days, though, and a level of decorum unimagineable to us was commonplace then among certain classes of society.
Katz sayeth:
"sparked by astonishingly inventive new technologies like the PS 2."
I thought that the PS/2 croaked in the '80's. Good keyboard/mouse connector, though...
In your message, you said:
"Back in the 1800's they did it because no one else could."
I'd have to disagree with that. There was a whole group of "local carriers" (the colorfully-named Blood's Local Post in Philadelphia, Hussey's in New York City, and countless others) that provided door-to-door service when the PO only delivered to a PO Box in their offices. Several had started to compete in inter-city delivery as well, until the PO had Congress pass a law which killed competition just before the Civil War. Several of these companies tried to slip through loopholes and it was only in the 1880s that they were finally completely suppressed.
Now if only we could find someone who uses potatos to power the printers...
How soon are any of these ideas going to make it to Linux distributions?
In particular, I think it'd be great to have ssh ship with every Linux distribution.
I don't think I'm paranoid enough to encrypt my swap, though....
Back in the late '80s, I earned my living as a Clipper programmer. There was a program called "Pocket Dot", which was a Clipper interpreter that gave you an environment like dBase III, but that understood Clipper indexes and memo fields.
If, at the dot prompt, you typed "xyzzy", you got back:
You are in a cluttered room, staring at a computer screen.
You hear faint, rustling noises behind you.
If you typed "plugh", you got back:
Nothing happens
I just went looking, and I can hardly beleve it, but I've actually still got this still installed on my machine, about 8 systems later. Then, I just saw "New Sweep" in the same directory -- CP/M lives!
Is it only me, or is it a reaction to the recent Microsoft chest-beating? Monday and yesterday, I was getting "unable to connect", timeouts, etc. while attempting to access the site usimg MS Explorer 4.01, (and on the two occasions when the front page came up, none of the internal links to slashdot-hosted content worked) but the Netscape Beta worked first time, every time. Of course, the Netscape/Mozilla memory leak eventually ate all of the resources on my system...
Was this related to the DDOS or was it something else? Anyone else experience this?
First, congratulations and thank you. I remeber reading the GNU Manifesto in Dr. Dobbs' back in the 80's and being totally blown away.
I've just returned from rereading the essay on the GNU site concerning the BSD license . In it, you refer to the "obnoxious BSD advertising clause".
Subsequent to the publication of this essay, you went on record asking the community not to refer to a Linux system as just "Linux"
I've seen reports that your position on "GNU/Linux" versus "Linux" goes farther than the temperate and informative essay linked to above -- for example refusing to answer questions at press conferences/public Q&A sessions/etc. about "Linux" until the question was rephrased to use "GNU/Linux" or () "Lignux".
How is this insistence different from the "obnoxious advertising clause" that you so rightfully object to in the classic BSD license?
Anyone here remember Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series? In this science fiction series, the basic premise was that everyone who had ever lived on earth woke up after death on the banks of a giant river. Their food and clothing were provided at "grails", located at regular intervals along the river, which dispensed their bounty at regular intervals.
The interesting thing is that in the novel, people behave exactly like the folks described "camping" in the game world. I'm not a gamer, and I'm not sure why I started reading this article, but I find the behavior caused by a non-random distribution of the game goodies to be far more interesting from a social point of view than what would result from random distribution.
BTW, I highly recommend the early books in Farmer's series, but was extremely disappointed in the conclusion -- a melange of cosmic bushwa.
Thanks for a very well-thought-out aand expressed answer. I'd have e-mailed you to express this, but you'd posted as an AC...
Just as an aside, we have tried to get consulting help from Sendmail, Inc., but they don't seem to want the business --- its three weeks since we sent them a proposal, and we haven't heard back, except "its going to a different group & you'll be hearing soon". Numerous phone calls remain unreturned. If they act like this when a potential customer is standing outside their door waving money, how responsive are they going to be when its time to do the work?
Can you (or anyone else) recommend someone who actually *wants* consulting business and who knows sendmail? I'm thinking about VA Systems (since it'll run on their hardware), but I'm open to suggestions.
Will the new release of sendmail perform faster?
/dev/nul).
This may be mildly off-topic, but it's a genuine plea for help -- see if you can recognize the symptoms and propose a solution. I thank you in advance.
I'm in charge of a system which sends out approximately 50,000 emails a day to a list of subscribers.
We were running this on a dedicated box. When I built it, this Pentium 120 with 128 megs of RAM and IDE drives was a fairly happenin' machine. It was running Red Hat Linux 5.2 and sendmail 8.8. The system queues outgoing mail into one of about 40 queues, depending on destination domain. A cron job runs sendmail against each one of the queues (the relevant invocation is:
/usr/sbin/sendmail -OQueueDirectory=name of directory -OQueueLA=24 -OQueueSortOrder=host -OTimeout.connect=1m -OTimeout.helo=1m -q
).
We were getting peak throughput as high as 20,000 messages delivered per hour.
Due to the relaying holes in old versions of Sendmail, I wanted to upgrade to the then-current 8.9.3 Because of the Great C Library Change, the sendmail rpm available from redhat didn't want to work. So I upgraded the entire box to Red Hat 6.1.
(please redirect all comments about the evils of RedHat, the rpm format, or how I should have compiled it myself from a tarball to
Now, the same volume of mail takes 6 times longer than before the sendmail 8.8->8.9.3, RHL 5.2->6.1
upgrade. Moreover, it takes the same time on a VA Linux Full-On rack system, so hardware isn't an issue.
Does anyone have a theory? Will upgrading to 8.10 help/hurt/be neutral?
Again, thanks in advance
Eric_Wright wrote:
Yes, we need newbies (ie. more users, who will all be newbies for a time) for the Linux movement to progress, but the last thing we need is a dumbing down of Linux to this level!!!
I disagree with you on this. If AOL should happen to port their software to Linux, there is absolutely nothing which forces you to install it. Each of us makes the Linux system we want. It's a "movement" only in the sense that there are a lot of people who, for their own separate reasons, have chosen to use Linux.
Some people use Linux for ideological reasons -- the folks who agree with Stallman. Good for them.
Some people use Linux for the stability and reliability that comes from the Open Source development model. Good for them, too.
Some people use Linux because they are dissatisfied with the quality of Microsoft's product offerings. Good for them, as well.
Some people use Linux because it's "free as in beer", or because it lets them make use of hardware that would otherwise be populating a landfill. Good for them, also.
Some people, who would like to use Linux, are prevented from doing so by the barriers which are described in the article. The many comments which I have read in this thread about how it is terrible if Linux is "dumbed down", or how it is essential for all Linux users to learn about system administration do this particular group of potential users a great disservice. Adding the ease of use functionality that this group wants does nothing to take away from any other group that is using Linux. The fact that there's an AOL client doesn't keep you from connecting to any other ISP by whatever means you choose. The fact that a "newbie install" has a flashy GUI, limited options visible, almost no daemons installed, doesn't make vi the default text editor, or other "blasphemous" features has no impact on any person who is running a different style of Linux system.
I've been running one or more production Linux servers since I set up a DNS server on a 386SX-20 with an 80mb hard drive and 8 megs of RAM running kernel version 0.99pl15 (I forget whether it was Slackware or SLS). I don't need a huge amount of hand-holding for myself anymore, and I act as a "linux friend" (to use the article author's phrase), but just because I had to "gut it" and learn a huge amount to get to where I am today doesn't mean that I think new folks should have to do the same.
Had I invested the time I spent learning Linux into learning how to play the guitar, I'd be a fair guitarist by now. Instead, when I want to hear guitar music, I play a John Fahey or Andres Segovia or whomever CD. Yet I don't get hate mail from subscribers to Guitar Player magazine because I chose to put my efforts into learning an operating system instead of learning to play the guitar.
To coin a phrase: "Can't we all just get along?"
You said:
That's the joy of controlling the market, the consumer CAN'T go someplace else. Don't like CNN, try Headline News, oops same company, how about MSNBC, doh!, how about FoxNews, hmmm, new bikinis.
I say:
Don't like those -- try the BBC or the Washington Post or the New York Times or just hit Yahoo or Google and find any of thousands of other sources.
I don't see the problem...
Tadas