I don't think this is the case. Adobe are saying what is blatantly obvious to anyone who has every owned or used a macintosh.
Macs are slower.
Well, of course they are. My Powerbook G4, which is only a year old, has only an 800Mhz CPU. My Athlon XP 2200+ kicks the hell out of it in gaming and heavy processing tasks, such as recompiling linux kernels, etc.
This is not to say that Macs are useless to do work on - quite the contrary. I use mine for all manner of daily work, writing scripts, running xterms, writing documentation, browsing the web, whatever. It's perfectly fine.
All adobe are saying that is on computationally expensive tasks, the PC platform is currently faster. This is correct and accurate. I also believe this is an intential rocket up Apple's backside to try and encourage Apple to design some faster hardware.
Read about a method to get SpamAssassin to execute at SMTP time in exim (I'm about to impliment this on my own mailserver) and read about teergrubing which is basically the same idea as a tarpit.
Unlike the original post, Marc seems to have a stable working version of this right now.
That said, this is probably the most realistic method of causing spammers pain that we have right now, short of changing the way mail works in a fundamental manner.
I'll definately be implimenting teergrubing/tarpitting. I might even impliment it on the multi-user hosting system that I helped to build. It probably wouldn't scale too well on a busy site though;)
I really don't care. Buffy is yet another one of those shows that I'll never mourn of it's passing.
Maybe it is because I never 'got' the show. I mean, the bad acting, the convoluted plot, the bad acting, the excessive special (and not very special, at that) effects, the bad acting...
Did I mention the bad acting?
Sorry, but this show never rated for me. I'd rather watch japanese comedy shows...
Ok, so this IT manager would want to do the following things:
1) Enter the bios and only allow boot from internal disk. 2) Set a bios password. 3) Buy locks for his cabinets. 4) Buy swipecard entry readers for the server room.
Under linux, you could set a GRUB password. Etc.
I'm sorry, but I don't see this recovery mode thing as an issue.
In other news, Linux was found to have the same flaw as Windows XP this week, after Jimmy Costain, a four year old boy, hacked into his father's Linux machine with a RedHat recovery disk.
"It was quite easy. I just booted the floppy, mounted the root filesystem, and zeroed the root password from the/etc/passwd file."
Linus Torvalds was available for comment.
"Well, of course, you idiot, if you have physical access, anything is open."
Linus went on further to say that booting a floppy to wipe a password from the/etc/passwd file is an old Unix recovery technique, used since the dawn of time, and that he's happy to see Windows XP finally catching up on the feature list.
"I wish people would stop trying to find lame security flaws which are not security flaws at all and actually concentrate on the serious ones" mused Linus.
As someone who has worked for large ISPs in England, Japan and Australia, I've seen the dramatic increase in spam over the last five or six years or so.
It seems to me that the current internet mail infrastructure is simply not designed to provide for any form of accountability and it is this that enables the spammers to so easily ride freely on our infrastructure.
What do you feel will be the future for the internet mail system? Will it be replaced (or gradually improved) with something that has more controls, or will the community band together strongly enough to deal with the problem with technological 'band-aids' on the problem?
IRC is owned by all the people and companies that put forward the hardware and bandwidth to host the servers.
IRC servers on big networks don't come free, they cost a substantial amount of money, both in physical resources and in human resources. Today, it's not as simple as plugging a box in and forgetting about it.
If you think IRC is some communist/hippy/free world whatever pot-smoking flowery analogue you can think of, you're deluded.
It's not. And if the owners don't want you doing something on a particular network, you either abide by that request, or you MOVE to a different network.
The latency is too high. I usually get around 11ms to my wireless 11mbit network at home. Had the same on my apple airport (actually, a bit slower, 15ms).
Might be that 54mbit wireless has good latency though.
One thing that annows me about the main post is the statement that Magic will 'force' people into digital. This is nonsense of course.
From the article: Those initial Magic guitars will also have traditional analog pickups. "It will essentially be two guitars in one: You don't have to go digital if you don't want to," said Arora.
Think of it as the first MMOS (Massively-Multiplayer Office Suite):-)
Hahaha. I like that:)
Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head there. It's a system to remove the need for all the fileswapping that goes on, as well as the need to actually *install* applications on your local machine. Who needs to have the stuff installed locally when you can run it over a 12mbit ADSL line just as quickly?
Hell, that was the plan with Java, wasn't it? Network computer? What happened to that thing... oh thats right;)
Dodgy patents aside, these guys seem to have a solid suite of apps there. The big attractiveness of ASP solutions to large companies is that the costs for this kind of software boils down to a very small (in comparison to MS software) monthly fee.
They don't have to worry about upgrades or patches, or support, the apps will work just fine.
Coupled with very strict desktop computer policies, they shouldn't need many sysadmins/desktop support heads at all. Just people to build new machines and replace broken mice.
It's very cost effective.
Of course, there is nothing stopping the Open Source community from coming out with something like this.
We have most of the apps. We know linux can do the automatic application delivery. All we need to do is kill Exchange and we're home and hosed.
Does anyone know of any Exchange server killers under an Open Source license?
Pretty much most of it for the past 4 and a half years... I think I joined back in december, or january... and I've enjoyed every minute using slashdot.
Thanks for all your hard work - slashdot is now truly entrenched as part of the heart of the online techy community. (Or at least, it's screaming vocal cords).
Oh, and next time you're filling up your cars petrol tank, ask the attendant about their unlimited petrol plans.
This argument is fundamentally flawed. Oil is a limited resource. It costs a certain amount for every barrel that is pumped out of the ground and refined into petrol.
Bandwidth, however, is a LOT cheaper. The only ongoing cost for the provider is the electricity to run the equipment, support contracts, wages etc. This is more than covered by line rental fees. Especially when you reach a certain number of customers.
The only reason flat-rate un-metered internet access is not 'viable' in australia is the limited number of customers that sign onto the service. If more people were to sign on, then its more likely the big providers would be able to break even.
Unless, of course, they are just after more money. Hmm, a company wanting to make money. gosh, golly gee, who would have thought.
In the UK, we pay for a pipe. Then we use it for whatever we like, as much as we like. Sure, the line rental isn't cheap, but I don't have to worry about how much I download this week.
Flat-rate internet access is viable, the UK market is slowly beginning to prove this.
Its really sad to see actually. Australia had one of the best internet industries in the world... and now its being overtaken by the UK?!? Wow. How dumb is that?
I've spent about 8 or 9 years on IRC. Something like that. I can't remember.
The one thing I see time and time again, is parents using the computer and the internet as some kind of babysitter - like parents have been doing with television for the past thirty years.
And what amazes me every single time, is when the parent becomes concerned and contacts the provider of the chat service, or the ISP, to control their kid!
I kid you not.
The internet is not a babysitter. Its a lot of things, but it's not a babysitter. If you want to use it as such, do as suggested and *educate* your child before letting them roam free on the net. And for gods sake, monitor their activity!
How many people out there know of teenage kids who do carding for a hobby?:) I'm sure there is a few. And the parents usually don't have a clue until the police show up on the front doorstep.
"My Johnny? But he's a good boy! He just plays that Quake thing on the net!"
I think the issue is not simply protecting children from pedo's, or whatever. I think it's about educating them as to what is socially acceptable behaviour on the net, and what isn't.
Anyway.
[/rant]
Re:There really needs to be some kind of hold ..
on
First Cloned Human Embryo
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm no bible thumper. (Quite the opposite, actually)
But I'm a moral person, or at least, I try to be, and I find the amount of experimentation on the actual human building blocks of life to be outstripping what anyone in the public expects or even realises what can be done.
Already you can select a child that won't have a certain genetic disease - how long is it before you can select a child that has higher intelligence? Greater athleticism? Both?
Most people don't even realise that the above level of selection is not only possible, but there are people out there researching as hard as they can to try and *do* it - to be the first company to genetically engineer a "better" human.
And what will we call these new children? Gods?
And what will they call us?
Unevolved Humans? Not much better than intelligent monkeys?
And how do you suppose *they* will treat us? Wrath of Khan anyone?;)
This all really, really scares me, and I'm sorry if expressing my fears is considered 'trolling';)
Re:There really needs to be some kind of hold ..
on
First Cloned Human Embryo
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I'd really love to know how my comment was 'trolling'.
put on this stuff for a while until some proper legislation can happen.
It'll be a lot harder to fix all the legal and moral problems if they just start going ahead and cloning/selecting embryos as much as they like.
What are the politicians waiting for? Some massive backlash? They have to stop this stuff right *now* and stop and think about the moral implications of what is being done, and legislate for it.
If I can take a toilet, stick it in an "Art" museum, put a glass box around it and call it "Art", then it's "Art".
"Art" is anything that an "Artist" wants it to be.
As "Art" can be made by anyone, anyone can be an "Artist", and therefore everyone is creating "Art" every day of their lives without knowing it. Putting a box down, picking up the remote, holding it in a certain way, going to the toilet - all "Art".
As much as I hate to recommend a microsoft product, if all your documentation (or most of it) is being written with MS tools, then use the Tahoe document management system to store it. It is *really* good. Use the custom attributes in your documents to handle the categorisation.
We have a Part/Section number for each document which is stored in the extra attributes for each document, and the tahoe server uses it to file everything into the correct place.
I have a friend at work here who loves it, thinks it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. It can do threading and all the other kinds of tricks you would expect a modern scripting language to have, but its syntax and keywords are confusing to say the least.
I don't see why any company would introduce Ruby as their scripting environment since everyone else knows perl? You'd have to train everyone up on Ruby.
I think it's too late to bring in a new scripting language unless its *lightyears* ahead of anything else, and Ruby is not lightyears ahead of Perl.
Slashdot Mirror
This is kind of interesting --- when you will look where IPv6 was started to be adopted, first you will see Asia, mainly Japan.
Yup,
Japan already uses IPv6 for it's keitei (mobile phone) network. All the phones connect to the net via IPv6 to IPv4 NAT gateway.
"... this seems like a bad move on Adobe's part."
I don't think this is the case. Adobe are saying what is blatantly obvious to anyone who has every owned or used a macintosh.
Macs are slower.
Well, of course they are. My Powerbook G4, which is only a year old, has only an 800Mhz CPU. My Athlon XP 2200+ kicks the hell out of it in gaming and heavy processing tasks, such as recompiling linux kernels, etc.
This is not to say that Macs are useless to do work on - quite the contrary. I use mine for all manner of daily work, writing scripts, running xterms, writing documentation, browsing the web, whatever. It's perfectly fine.
All adobe are saying that is on computationally expensive tasks, the PC platform is currently faster. This is correct and accurate. I also believe this is an intential rocket up Apple's backside to try and encourage Apple to design some faster hardware.
Read about a method to get SpamAssassin to execute at SMTP time in exim (I'm about to impliment this on my own mailserver) and read about teergrubing which is basically the same idea as a tarpit.
Unlike the original post, Marc seems to have a stable working version of this right now.
That said, this is probably the most realistic method of causing spammers pain that we have right now, short of changing the way mail works in a fundamental manner.
I'll definately be implimenting teergrubing/tarpitting. I might even impliment it on the multi-user hosting system that I helped to build. It probably wouldn't scale too well on a busy site though
I'm going back to splinter cell.
I really don't care. Buffy is yet another one of those shows that I'll never mourn of it's passing.
...
...
Maybe it is because I never 'got' the show. I mean, the bad acting, the convoluted plot, the bad acting, the excessive special (and not very special, at that) effects, the bad acting
Did I mention the bad acting?
Sorry, but this show never rated for me. I'd rather watch japanese comedy shows
Ok, so this IT manager would want to do the following things:
1) Enter the bios and only allow boot from internal disk.
2) Set a bios password.
3) Buy locks for his cabinets.
4) Buy swipecard entry readers for the server room.
Under linux, you could set a GRUB password. Etc.
I'm sorry, but I don't see this recovery mode thing as an issue.
In other news, Linux was found to have the same flaw as Windows XP this week, after Jimmy Costain, a four year old boy, hacked into his father's Linux machine with a RedHat recovery disk.
/etc/passwd file."
/etc/passwd file is an old Unix recovery technique, used since the dawn of time, and that he's happy to see Windows XP finally catching up on the feature list.
"It was quite easy. I just booted the floppy, mounted the root filesystem, and zeroed the root password from the
Linus Torvalds was available for comment.
"Well, of course, you idiot, if you have physical access, anything is open."
Linus went on further to say that booting a floppy to wipe a password from the
"I wish people would stop trying to find lame security flaws which are not security flaws at all and actually concentrate on the serious ones" mused Linus.
You are a wise man.
...
The easiest way to not get upset at losing data is not to care about it that much.
Back up what is important to you, sure, and if your disk melts, shrug, thank the gods you still have your good health, re-install and keep going.
Agonizing over lost data is pointless
But then, I never was one to cry over spilt milk.
Barry,
As someone who has worked for large ISPs in England, Japan and Australia, I've seen the dramatic increase in spam over the last five or six years or so.
It seems to me that the current internet mail infrastructure is simply not designed to provide for any form of accountability and it is this that enables the spammers to so easily ride freely on our infrastructure.
What do you feel will be the future for the internet mail system? Will it be replaced (or gradually improved) with something that has more controls, or will the community band together strongly enough to deal with the problem with technological 'band-aids' on the problem?
I have never gotten any karma out of having a low user number on slashdot. Usually, I've just been flamed!
Damn newbs! Don't they know I was on the internet back when it ran over tin cans and string!?
You're wrong.
IRC is owned by all the people and companies that put forward the hardware and bandwidth to host the servers.
IRC servers on big networks don't come free, they cost a substantial amount of money, both in physical resources and in human resources. Today, it's not as simple as plugging a box in and forgetting about it.
If you think IRC is some communist/hippy/free world whatever pot-smoking flowery analogue you can think of, you're deluded.
It's not. And if the owners don't want you doing something on a particular network, you either abide by that request, or you MOVE to a different network.
The latency is too high. I usually get around 11ms to my wireless 11mbit network at home. Had the same on my apple airport (actually, a bit slower, 15ms).
Might be that 54mbit wireless has good latency though.
One thing that annows me about the main post is the statement that Magic will 'force' people into digital. This is nonsense of course.
From the article: Those initial Magic guitars will also have traditional analog pickups. "It will essentially be two guitars in one: You don't have to go digital if you don't want to," said Arora.
Think of it as the first MMOS (Massively-Multiplayer Office Suite) :-)
:)
... oh thats right ;)
Hahaha. I like that
Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head there. It's a system to remove the need for all the fileswapping that goes on, as well as the need to actually *install* applications on your local machine. Who needs to have the stuff installed locally when you can run it over a 12mbit ADSL line just as quickly?
Hell, that was the plan with Java, wasn't it? Network computer? What happened to that thing
Dodgy patents aside, these guys seem to have a solid suite of apps there. The big attractiveness of ASP solutions to large companies is that the costs for this kind of software boils down to a very small (in comparison to MS software) monthly fee.
They don't have to worry about upgrades or patches, or support, the apps will work just fine.
Coupled with very strict desktop computer policies, they shouldn't need many sysadmins/desktop support heads at all. Just people to build new machines and replace broken mice.
It's very cost effective.
Of course, there is nothing stopping the Open Source community from coming out with something like this.
We have most of the apps. We know linux can do the automatic application delivery. All we need to do is kill Exchange and we're home and hosed.
Does anyone know of any Exchange server killers under an Open Source license?
Pretty much most of it for the past 4 and a half years ... I think I joined back in december, or january ... and I've enjoyed every minute using slashdot.
Thanks for all your hard work - slashdot is now truly entrenched as part of the heart of the online techy community. (Or at least, it's screaming vocal cords).
May there be many happy returns!
Oh, and next time you're filling up your cars petrol tank, ask the attendant about their unlimited petrol plans.
... and now its being overtaken by the UK?!? Wow. How dumb is that?
This argument is fundamentally flawed. Oil is a limited resource. It costs a certain amount for every barrel that is pumped out of the ground and refined into petrol.
Bandwidth, however, is a LOT cheaper. The only ongoing cost for the provider is the electricity to run the equipment, support contracts, wages etc. This is more than covered by line rental fees. Especially when you reach a certain number of customers.
The only reason flat-rate un-metered internet access is not 'viable' in australia is the limited number of customers that sign onto the service. If more people were to sign on, then its more likely the big providers would be able to break even.
Unless, of course, they are just after more money. Hmm, a company wanting to make money. gosh, golly gee, who would have thought.
In the UK, we pay for a pipe. Then we use it for whatever we like, as much as we like. Sure, the line rental isn't cheap, but I don't have to worry about how much I download this week.
Flat-rate internet access is viable, the UK market is slowly beginning to prove this.
Its really sad to see actually. Australia had one of the best internet industries in the world
I've spent about 8 or 9 years on IRC. Something like that. I can't remember.
:) I'm sure there is a few. And the parents usually don't have a clue until the police show up on the front doorstep.
The one thing I see time and time again, is parents using the computer and the internet as some kind of babysitter - like parents have been doing with television for the past thirty years.
And what amazes me every single time, is when the parent becomes concerned and contacts the provider of the chat service, or the ISP, to control their kid!
I kid you not.
The internet is not a babysitter. Its a lot of things, but it's not a babysitter. If you want to use it as such, do as suggested and *educate* your child before letting them roam free on the net. And for gods sake, monitor their activity!
How many people out there know of teenage kids who do carding for a hobby?
"My Johnny? But he's a good boy! He just plays that Quake thing on the net!"
I think the issue is not simply protecting children from pedo's, or whatever. I think it's about educating them as to what is socially acceptable behaviour on the net, and what isn't.
Anyway.
[/rant]
I'm no bible thumper. (Quite the opposite, actually)
;)
;)
But I'm a moral person, or at least, I try to be, and I find the amount of experimentation on the actual human building blocks of life to be outstripping what anyone in the public expects or even realises what can be done.
Already you can select a child that won't have a certain genetic disease - how long is it before you can select a child that has higher intelligence? Greater athleticism? Both?
Most people don't even realise that the above level of selection is not only possible, but there are people out there researching as hard as they can to try and *do* it - to be the first company to genetically engineer a "better" human.
And what will we call these new children? Gods?
And what will they call us?
Unevolved Humans? Not much better than intelligent monkeys?
And how do you suppose *they* will treat us? Wrath of Khan anyone?
This all really, really scares me, and I'm sorry if expressing my fears is considered 'trolling'
I'd really love to know how my comment was 'trolling'.
put on this stuff for a while until some proper legislation can happen.
It'll be a lot harder to fix all the legal and moral problems if they just start going ahead and cloning/selecting embryos as much as they like.
What are the politicians waiting for? Some massive backlash? They have to stop this stuff right *now* and stop and think about the moral implications of what is being done, and legislate for it.
With
It will even work on solaris. Quite scary how many roosters I have behind my sofa!
No problems with ADSL here in the UK. I just wish the prices would come down.
Well, other than the fact that BT like to turn you off for a few hours every week, without telling you, OR your ISP.
Probably the cleaner come in to do some vacuuming in the server farm and unplugging some equipment to plug in the vacuum cleaner.
If I can take a toilet, stick it in an "Art" museum, put a glass box around it and call it "Art", then it's "Art".
"Art" is anything that an "Artist" wants it to be.
As "Art" can be made by anyone, anyone can be an "Artist", and therefore everyone is creating "Art" every day of their lives without knowing it. Putting a box down, picking up the remote, holding it in a certain way, going to the toilet - all "Art".
Ipso facto, "Art" is bunk, and so are "Artists".
Farewell Doug. Thanks for all the laughs.
You will be sorely missed.
A day of mourning has been called in this house.
go here
As much as I hate to recommend a microsoft product, if all your documentation (or most of it) is being written with MS tools, then use the Tahoe document management system to store it. It is *really* good. Use the custom attributes in your documents to handle the categorisation.
We have a Part/Section number for each document which is stored in the extra attributes for each document, and the tahoe server uses it to file everything into the correct place.
It even integrates nicely with win2k. Groovy.
I'm not sure about ruby.
I have a friend at work here who loves it, thinks it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. It can do threading and all the other kinds of tricks you would expect a modern scripting language to have, but its syntax and keywords are confusing to say the least.
I don't see why any company would introduce Ruby as their scripting environment since everyone else knows perl? You'd have to train everyone up on Ruby.
I think it's too late to bring in a new scripting language unless its *lightyears* ahead of anything else, and Ruby is not lightyears ahead of Perl.