But anti-piracy measures don't reduce the price of software. They never have. Companies charge the same amount they always did. CD-ROM games, when they first came out, weren't copyable. There was plenty of shovelware that cost no more to develop than the floppy versions, and prices didn't come down even a little.
If game companies make more money by preventing piracy, they keep the money. The claims that prices would drop if only piracy were curtailed are outright lies. That has never happened. Ever. Games with highly effective copy protection cost just as much or more than games without.
The only reason they'll cut prices if if people aren't buying enough games. Prices go down when supply exceeds demand. Piracy reduces demand... ergo, it should reduce prices.
Reiterating: the only reason game companies will cut prices is if they feel they aren't selling enough games.
Sennheiser's higher-end cans are also really, REALLY good. The specific models that I know are good (because I have owned them) are the HD580s and HD600s. The 650s are also reputed to be great, but I haven't heard them myself.
Personally, I think the 580s are one of the better buys in headphones. You can usually pick them up at around $150 on Ebay, and they sound AMAZING. They are extremely comfortable. You can literally put them on in the morning and wear them all day, to the point that you'll forget they're on. Part of that comfort comes from the fact that they are "open" headphones, meaning they don't close you off from the outside world. Closed headphones seal the world out and your music in, but they're usually less comfortable to wear for long periods.
The 600s and 650s are better, but they're enormously more expensive for a much lower quality jump. Bang per buck on the 580s is really extraordinary. All of these cans are built with modular parts, so you can order any piece you need a replacement for. With reasonable care, they'll literally last a lifetime.
The only real downside to all three of these is that they are 'high impedance' headphones, meaning you need a strong output to drive them well. They'll still sound good from a normal output, like an iPod's, but on an amplifier they will sit up and truly sing. I have a Total Airhead (heh) from HeadRoom. A better choice (which didn't exist when I bought mine) might be a Bithead or a Total Bithead, because they come with a USB connection and onboard, high-quality DACs. This gives you both the amplification of the Airhead and the ability to function as a good soundcard, which will let you get really high-quality sound off your PC. (All Creative cards, except possibly the X-Fi, do an internal resample to 48khz, which just butchers the treble. Most motherboard soundcards use such horrible DACs that they sound even worse. PC sound, in general, is terrible).
You could also use it as a laptop soundcard, but note that the Senns aren't particularly portable; they're very large, and you will look rather dorky wearing them in public.:) I'm just suggesting the Bithead because it's small, reasonably priced, and also solves the bad soundcard problem. Envy24 soundcards (like the Audiotrak Prodigy and M-Audio Revolution 7.1) usually have good DACs, so that'd be another way to solve the soundcard issue.
Sennheiser has a lot of different model numbers, and they're definitely not all the same. I know these are good. I've seen quite mixed reviews on many of the other (mostly lower-end) choices. If you don't like other Sennheisers, but haven't tried these specific ones, give them a shot.
As far as I know, the computational overhead of the higher-bit keys isn't that significant, so it's probably not doing any actual harm. It'll slow down initial key negotiation and session setup, but it shouldn't affect traffic overhead, because that's encrypted with a symmetric cipher that was negotiated with the (very slow) public-key protocol. You'd probably only notice the overhead if you were running a server with many, many session setups. If it impacted you, generating a smaller key would be trivial.
The larger key will make your data more secure on the wire, in transit, but the weakest point has always been the key's passphrase. A 32768-bit key is just as crackable as a 256-bit key if you have physical access to the encrypted keyfile.
Improving transit security isn't an inherently bad idea, but it's making the strongest link in the chain even stronger. It probably won't do that much to increase overall security.
That's why I was suggesting setting up Coral cache links, but not using them in the default submission. If the remote site chokes, then substitute the Coral link. That gives them, I'd think, a pretty much bulletproof defense..."We TRIED to link to you, your site melted, so we were polite and pointed to a cache instead." I can't see a judge flipping out about this. Who has been damaged?
A person or corporation with a high asshole quotient is just as likely to get upset about the link in the first place, which CAN be construed as a DOS. They could sue for that too, you know. And they could probably win. God knows there's a lot of documentation on the Web about the Slashdot effect... it's not like the lawyers can argue "we didn't know that would happen!". Yet, mysteriously, nobody sues. And I bet nobody would sue Coral for caching, either.
Of course, the counter-argument is that an opportunistic, sue-happy asshole would have a hard time proving damages from a DOS of a small website, but damages from 'copyright infringement' are obscenely high. That said, I still can't see a judge ruling against either Slashdot or Coral in the example above. As long as they made a good-faith effort to link to the site to begin with, and only substituted the cache link after failure, there just isn't much to complain about.
re: your PS.... I'm not familiar with the Chips 'n Dips reference, so apparently you were earlier than I was. I thought I found the site within the first 90 days or so of launch, but perhaps not, if I don't know about the predecessor(?). I was definitely reading well before user accounts were implemented. When they did get them going, I didn't bother creating an account for a long time. I didn't have anything to say at the time, being too stupid to post amidst such luminaries.
You could make, in fact, a very strong argument that I still am, but we seem to have a lot fewer luminaries these days.
My home page is now Metafilter. That is not, however, a geek site *at all*... it's very intelligent and very good, but it's NOT techy.
My primary source of tech news is probably Ars Technica. They don't have anywhere near the volume that Slashdot does, at least on the main page, but the stuff that goes up is very, very well-done.
They have a new sidebar with blog-style entries that reminds me a bit of Slashdot.... this was just added. Even when the main page is static for a couple of days (not at all uncommon), there's a stream of little blurbs in the sidebar. And their forums are quite good.
On the whole, I'd call it at least an adequate replacement.... it's very strong in areas that Slashdot is very weak (original content, editorial quality), and with their bloggish thing, they're fair to middling where Slashdot is very strong (lots and lots of links.)
If all you want is quantity, Ars won't hold up to Slashdot, but in many other areas, it's better.
Thanks for posting your thoughts on how to be an editor. I disagree with them, and I'm going to tell you why (of course), but it was nice of you to take the time to post them. It's *extremely* difficult to have a conversation ABOUT slashdot ON slashdot; this website is probably the least-reachable and most insulated from its users of any I read. It used to be my homepage, and I used to be a subscriber; neither of these are true any longer.
First, this particular article is fine. The writeup may be wrong, but it also may be right. It's arguable, so it's a good post. My criticism isn't pointed at this specific submission, but rather many others.... a pattern, not a specific incident.
I think, as an editor, you should be using your brain. That means... read the submitted article(s), and make sure the blurb is actually correct. You're an editor. If you're just passing through things verbatim, without even checking them, you're not editing. I'm not sure what you'd call that process, but I'm sure 'editing' is the wrong word.
I think you guys have a responsibility to be sure that the blurbs on Slashdot are more or less correct. I don't mean perfect. But it is very obvious, sometimes, that the editor who posted a given article didn't even bother to READ or THINK about it in any way, shape, or form. Your supposition that the submitter knows more than you do is WRONG. You should be supposing exactly the opposite... assume they are idiots until they prove othrwise. You'll be right a lot more often than you'll be wrong.
You also, I think, have a responsibility to pass through the original meaning of someone's post, and to correct it if the original submitter complains. I've seen at least one case where the submitter was furious, because the editor (I think it was Michael) removed a word or two, and completely changed the meaning of what he or she had written. It made it look like the submitter was arguing an exceptionally stupid position, and it was never corrected.
Finally, and this is the reason I stopped subscribing and switched my homepage, Slashdot needs to come up with some kind or mirroring system. The Slashdot effect isn't as bad as it used to be, but it's still a deliberate denial of service when it's pointed at small sites. At the VERY least, you should be getting the site preloaded into Coral, and monitoring the remote webserver... if it chokes, then swap the main links to the Coral cache to give the poor sap time to recover. You have a responsibility with where you aim your readership, and all I have ever seen is weaseling and moaning about how it's a hard problem. And in all the years I've been reading this site... almost since the very start (I got an account quite late)... that has never changed. It was crap then and it's REALLY crap now, with Coral having solved 99% of the problem for you already.
If and when you guys come up with a system to be sure that you don't take out small sites more than briefly, and when you're showing some better editorial abilities, I'll cheerfully subscribe again. And yes, I realize I'm just one guy, and it'd be like twenty bucks a year. But right now, I am just barely hanging on here... very, very nearly ready to give up on the site completely. I don't see the quality of posts here anymore, and haven't for years. I am morally certain the reason you're not attracting as many smart posters is because you're posting stupid articles. If you guys use your brains, and expect the same of your submitters, then I believe the posters will, over time, do likewise.
Make the stories smarter, and expect intelligent behavior from your editors. The readership will follow.
My experience, around the time of RH 7.2, was basically the same... it's really not that hard. Unlike real life, the questions are fundamentally 'fair'... there's always enough data to determine what the problem is. Real life doesn't work like that.
However, I'd think anyone who could pass RHCE would be a competent junior admin.. I don't think I'd want one in charge of a big network based on that certificate alone, but you can be pretty sure they know how to install, configure, and repair a single Linux box. I'd be perfectly content to send an RHCE off to fix a mysteriously broken Linux machine in another building... chances are pretty good that they'll be able to fix it. If they can't, I'd probably have trouble with it too.
If they can get that good, they can probably get better still. RHCE most emphatically doesn't mean world class, but I think it's a good foundation... it means someone has at least a clue. They won't be a complete chowderhead.
I took the class about four years ago, so exactly what's covered has probably changed. I'm sure it hasn't gotten any worse, though.
It would have been more interesting to link to this page AFTER the week has passed, so that we could read everything all at once. As is, the coverage is incomplete, so many of us will miss the later entries.
If the purpose in all these links is to drive traffic to 1up, rather than to link Slashdot readers to complete and interesting coverage, then by all means, continue what you're doing. I, however, would feel better-served if the link was posted after all the content was actually there to read.
The Soekris Net4801 might possibly work for you, but be prepared to put in some learning time to get one going. The board, case, and power supply are about $250... you'd have to add a laptop-style drive from there.
They are completely headless AMD Geode machines... 266mhz Pentium class, with 128mb of RAM. They're primarily meant as routing devices for wireless networks (they have three network ports, and 1 3.3v PCI and 1 miniPCI slot). They are completely fanless, and have a socket for a Compact Flash, which is the normal boot device. They also have a connection for a laptop-style hard drive, and a USB 1.1 port.
Now, these little guys can really be a chore to get set up, because they have no true video... they route the BIOS text-display calls out through the serial port. And they have no floppy to boot from, so you must either set up a PXE boot environment (what I did the first time... NOT a trivial process for someone who isn't very familiar with Linux and/or the BSDs), or build a bootable CF or laptop drive on another system.
If you can muscle past the installation difficulty, the boards themselves are absolutely silent, with no moving parts at all. For your application, you'd probably boot off a laptop IDE drive. Most of these small drives aren't designed to be on 24x7, so be sure to look around for one that supports a long duty cycle, and even at that, take regular backups.
This would give you a small, very low-power solution. The Geode is extremely efficient. I'd have to look it up, but from memory I think it's like 7.5 watts. You could spend more running a nightlight. The drive will add some to that, but it'll definitely stay under 15w, and maybe under 10. It's reasonably powerful, with a decent amount of RAM, and will make very little noise and take up very little space.
I'm using one of these boxes as a router/firewall, and I like it very much. I hate noise, and with a CF, it is both silent and should last many, many years... no moving parts at all. Folks on the mailing list have claimed that it can sustain 10 megabits comfortably with moderately complex firewalling, and as much as 30 megabits if it's just routing between interfaces. It's not a speed demon, but it's really not bad.
Another possibility might be the Linksys NSLU2, which is a NAS device that runs Linux, and is apparently pretty hackable. It would be even harder than the Soekris to get going, though...and it's not X86, if that matters. I don't know much about them, but others may chime in with more data.
Sure, but you're talking about a teacher that has to teach 50 kids at a time, and gets a new set of 50 kids every year. He or she will need a wide variety of teaching methods to reach all the different learning styles.
A homeschool teacher would very rarely have more than two or three students, and what with the living together constantly thing, it's likely that the kid would adapt to nearly any teaching style. Kids are like that. And, even if the kid can't adapt, a teacher with so few students can spent a lot more time adapting his or her style to suit.
Teaching is not some deep mystery that only the Privileged Few are able to do. At one time in this country, nearly everyone was homeschooled.... the idea of regimented public school was bitterly, bitterly fought in some places.
Parents have been teaching their children since the Stone Age. Now, I'm not saying modern parents should be doing it without outside help. I'd strongly suggest reviewing a professional curriculum to at least familiarize oneself with what's being taught in public schools. But, overall, I see no reason to doubt that most parents could do a fine job of educating their kids.
And, let me tell you, they sure couldn't do a lot worse than a lot of the public schools. You just would not believe how ignorant these supposedly 'educated' children often are. Stone Age all over again.
It may be redundancy, but it's not a BACKUP. A backup is a complete copy. Only RAID-1, 10, and 50 could be considered to have backups in any sense of the word... and 10 and 50 are very, very uncommon. Calling a RAID a backup is true only for a very limited subset of the ideas behind both words. Most RAIDs are not backups, and most backups are stored on separate media and filesystems.
Only RAID-1 is a backup in any sense of the word. Your claim that RAID is a backup is true only in that one specific case. The other, much more common, RAID variants don't make complete copies of the data; they instead generate enough parity bits to survive the loss of one drive.
The two words have a slight intersection, but it's just a bad idea to use them in the same context.
A backup is a COPY. Copying data and storing it offsite, if your backup medium is good, protects against virtually any failure.
RAID is designed to protect against one and only one thing: downtime from drive failure. It has the happy knock-on effect of sometimes preserving data that would otherwise be lost, but in no way should it be treated as a backup substitute. Drive failure is a very common reason for data loss, but it is FAR from the only one.
Whoever modded you insightful should be shot. The first thing you say is true (that we've seen both warmer and colder temperatures over relatively short terms), but the rest is pretty much bunk.
Did it ever occur to you that not all the carbon was in the atmosphere *at the same time*? And you seem to think there was some big 'magic' event that buried all those fossils and coal *all at once*? Clue: it wasn't a 'sudden burial'. It's not like ravening hordes of topsoil threw themselves screaming on the dinosaurs.
Things in nature happen slowly, over thousands or millions of years. Our digging up huge quantities of carbon and dumping them into the atmosphere all at once, over a mere century or two is probably an event that's entirely unprecedented in the planet's history. How it will adapt is unknown, but it's entirely likely that we won't like it much; we are fond of stability, while being a profound destabilizing influence.
And you say 'no fossils are being made now', which has got to be among the dumbest assertions I've heard recently. Here's another clue: right now, somewhere in the world, there's a corpse of a seagull that has been buried and is starting to fossilize. If there are intelligent beings in fifty million years, perhaps they'll discover a bizarre strata, deeply buried. If so, they'll eventually figure out that it's a great treasure, a landfill of the Ancients. And, perhaps, they'll realize that poor dead Jonathan is an ancestor of whatever flying scavengers they have at the time.
The natural processes of the earth are slow. Just because they're happening too slowly for you to perceive in your own short lifetime doesn't mean they stopped.
"The low weight of the mouse allows fast moves and zero inertia[....]"
In other words, they've quietly developed an inertialess mouse. The biggest physics breakthrough ever, and they're wasting it on a stupid gaming mouse. Quick, somebody call NASA!
If all you're doing is mail and a simple website, it's easier and much cheaper to host a vanity domain with Namecheap, a DNS registrar. They can provide you POP3 service for like $25/year, 10 mailboxes. Or, for part of the basic $8 registration, you can set up mailforwards. I don't know if there's any limit to how many you can do, but you can forward arbitrary addresses in your domain to some other mailbox. If you're hosting example.com with them, you can point astrashe@example.com to, say, astrashe@gmail.com. Each address can go to a different target, so you can provide vanity email addresses for your friends, too.
You can also redirect a web site in one of two ways. You can either do an outright redirect to www.astrashe.com, or you can have it forward in a frame, so that the address bar still says 'www.example.com', but the content is coming from 'www.astrashe.com'.
Namecheap's servers are likely to be very, very robust... you don't lightly get into the registrar business.
Overall, this is a very cheap, very solid solution, and requires just about zero administration time, once it's set up.
Yes, but if the attacker can trick one of your internal-services machine into doing a lookup on a domain he owns, you're hosed. If he's authoritative, for instance, in a reverse zone, all he has to do is hit your webserver and you're poisoned... most webservers do reverse DNS lookups automatically. He just configures his extra payload in the reverse domain instead of the forward.
I'm confused about this one too. This is what I THINK is going on with this exploit. Hopefully, someone who ACTUALLY knows will correct my mistakes.:)
One of the possible ways to set up a DNS server is as a 'forwarder'. This means that it doesn't do lookups itself, but rather passes all DNS requests to another machine, gets replies, and then sends replies to the clients. One reason you might do this would be to distribute DNS load in a big ISP; you have a few machines that do the actual outbound DNS determination, and then the cache ripples back to the servers that are actually talking directly to the clients. DNS is fairly low-load, relatively speaking... this architecture would date from when everyone was deploying 50Mhz machines as servers. I'll call the local BINDs 'caching' servers, and the one doing the actual lookups on the internet the 'point' server.
So in and of itself, this architecture isn't a problem. But one of the features of the DNS protocol is that any server can send back more data than what was actually asked for, even data that is totally unrelated to the main query. Caching BIND servers by default trust their point server. And, when functioning as a point forwarder, BIND4 and BIND8 apparently just pass along queries they receive without checking them. The point BIND assumes that the caching BINDs are checking, while the caching BINDs assume the point BIND is checking, and the packet never gets checked for sanity at all.
So Joe Hacker snoops around... he tries to find DNS servers on your network. Once he finds one, he queries it for a name in a domain he controls. (or he initiates a connection to a webserver on the same machine, which may cause the same DNS lookup). He watches for the request to his DNS server coming from a DIFFERENT machine. That often indicates a forwarder configuration.
So he waits for his cached info to expire, and does it again... except this time, his reply packet includes extra information, "Oh, by the way, www.microsoft.com is on joes.evil.server.here." If BIND4 or BIND8 is the functioning as the master lookup in a forward configuration, it just passes along the packets it receives. And when BIND is in a SLAVE configuration, it just trusts what it gets from the forwarder. So suddenly, your whole network is connecting to joes.evil.server.here instead of www.microsoft.com. And if it doesn't work, oh well, next DNS server... this is a very low-profile attack. You have to really be LOOKING for it to be able to see it.
Apparently, the workarounds are A) don't use a forwarder configuration. There's no real need for this anymore, even a cheap 1ghz machine with a gig or so of ram will serve tens of thousands of clients. B) if you MUST use a forwarder, use BIND9 (or, presumably, DJBDNS) as your 'point' machine. BIND9 does sanity checking when it's on point.
Hopefully I got this right. I haven't been paying much attention to this before, because I (rightly) didn't think it affected me. If I'm wrong, PLEASE correct me, I hate to spread misinformation.
Chrono Trigger was absolutely one of the best games ever made. I didn't find it until very late, sometime around 2001... just screwing around with SNES9X. I was absolutely hooked. This was when Counterstrike was out, mind you, one of the most fiendishly addictive games ever. My Counterstrike habit came to a screeching halt for awhile.
At the time, SNES9X didn't handle the multilayered transparency effects used about halfway in, so when I got to that stage, I immediately eBayed a used SNES and cart. The SNES was about $50.... the cart was $70, more than the console. Worth every cent.
To this day, I remain absolutely floored at the sheer amount of depth they fit into that adventure. You are bouncing around through time, and most things you do in the past will carry over into the future. It just keeps opening up and expanding into new areas. And each area is *fun*... I don't remember ever being annoyed with tedium. As enormous as it is (and it is a huge game), and with its very complex plotting, they fit the entire thing into FOUR MEGABYTES. There are probably TETRIS games bigger than four megabytes.
I STRONGLY urge folks to check out this game. If you haven't seen it yet, you really should. It reached a level of sheer brilliance that no other game ever has. I'm glad IGN had it on their list, but I think it should have been higher, based on technical achievement alone. After you've finished, you just flat won't believe they fit it into four megs. They must have been counting their RAM usage down to the individual bit. There's so much in here that I can easily see someone, during the development process, as being very proud of freeing up 16 entire bytes for someone else.
If you're not grabbed by the game right away, stick with it until you finish 'the trial'. (You'll know it when you see it.) If you get through the trial and aren't enjoying it yet, then you probably won't. You're also an ingrate, and please mark yourself as a foe so I know to ignore you forever.:-)
I'm sure the terrorists felt extra-terrible about the several hundred people on the planes, as opposed to the thousands and thousands in the giant skyscrapers they were crashing into.
Are you kidding? The terrorists spent a couple years planning their op, and spent 19 lives (and plane tickets) to take out the towers.
Let's ignore the direct casualties and property damage, and instead look at the whole picture.
In response to what twenty people did, we have, in response, killed tens of thousands of people, lost about twenty thousand of our own soldiers (dead and wounded), and have spent nearly two hundred billion dollars in a War On Terror, with no end in sight. For the money we're paying, we could lose a World Trade Center EVERY OTHER WEEK and STILL be ahead on costs.
Our first war front, Afghanistan, at least isn't a complete disaster. The government is not in tight control, but we could 'win' there, where 'win' is defined as leaving behind a stable, democratic government. Now, we probably won't LIKE a stable, democratic Afghan government very much, nor they us (if they're free, one of their fervently-exercised freedoms will be to dislike us), but we don't have to like them... we just have to be reasonably sure they won't bomb us. That's still possible.
Iraq, on the other hand, was completely and totally bungled. It IS a total disaster. We have created the world's best training center for terrorists, where disaffected Iraqis can learn to fight Americans in the comfort of their own homes.... we'll break right in! We face escalating violence in that country, to the point that some people are starting to talk 'civil war' instead of 'insurgency'. The American-intalled government is looking very shaky indeed. The problems there are getting worse, not better. We lost that war at Abu Ghraib; we showed the Iraqis just what kind of people run our country. The Iraqis will never, not EVER, accept any government we impose. It's just a matter of how many body bags we choose to fill before bailing out and watching that place turn into a firestorm.
Back at home, we have lost rights by the score. The government now has many, many powers to intrude into our lives that it has wanted for years, but which we (rightly) refused them. We have few protections against unreasonable search. We are building a surveillance society, the thing we feared most as a country for so many years. We are IN a police state, it's just not one that has shown its fangs very much yet.
We have lost habeas corpus. The government can call you an enemy combatant and disappear you.
Win? The terrorists didn't "win". They hit the FUCKING JACKPOT.
Trying to plan a console to last ten years is ridiculous. Yes, the rate of change has slowed. No, it hasn't slowed that much.
How can any company even remotely guess what will be current and popular in ten years? FIVE years is stretching it. The PS2 was released in late 2000, and it was really obsolete by early 2004. You can (obviously) still get games for it here in 2005, but pretty much everything else on the market was consistently better by then.
If you assume a generation time of 2 years (shorter than the commonly-accepted 18 months, but computers aren't speeding up as quickly anymore), each additional 2 years of lifespan will make the initial console twice as expensive. Microsoft is obviously planning for 5 years, and they're launching at around $300-ish. If Sony wants to last 10, they'd basically have to add two and a half generations' worth more hardware.... they'd probably have to ship at around $1800. And they'd have to guess everything PERFECTLY.
In other words, Sony is hoping for no unpredictable innovations in the next ten years. Hey, that's a bet I'd put billions on!
The PS3 is looking rather like the Itanic, er, Itanium. Sony has spent untold billions on development. Their product will do some things a lot better, but it's not as good at general purpose processing. They can't ship anywhere near the same price point. They're trying to predict the future ten years out, and it doesn't look like they can accurately predict their own ability to ship their product. (They're still dropping features, so they're probably not seven months from putting product on shelves). March 2006 is very likely marketing spin to hurt Microsoft.
Guesses: Sony will ship late (VERY late) and too expensive for the mass market. By the time they get the price to the level that Joe Sixpack will buy their hardware, it will be firmly and permanently in second place. Possibly even in third. It will still be a viable platform, but the XBox will have enormous momentum by then. Sony will never make back what they spent on Cell.
My really daring prediction: Microsoft will actually make money on their console division.
Slashdot Mirror
But anti-piracy measures don't reduce the price of software. They never have. Companies charge the same amount they always did. CD-ROM games, when they first came out, weren't copyable. There was plenty of shovelware that cost no more to develop than the floppy versions, and prices didn't come down even a little.
If game companies make more money by preventing piracy, they keep the money. The claims that prices would drop if only piracy were curtailed are outright lies. That has never happened. Ever. Games with highly effective copy protection cost just as much or more than games without.
The only reason they'll cut prices if if people aren't buying enough games. Prices go down when supply exceeds demand. Piracy reduces demand... ergo, it should reduce prices.
Reiterating: the only reason game companies will cut prices is if they feel they aren't selling enough games.
Definitely correct, but you only do that once, normally. Is an extra five minutes at server build really that big a deal?
Sennheiser's higher-end cans are also really, REALLY good. The specific models that I know are good (because I have owned them) are the HD580s and HD600s. The 650s are also reputed to be great, but I haven't heard them myself.
:) I'm just suggesting the Bithead because it's small, reasonably priced, and also solves the bad soundcard problem. Envy24 soundcards (like the Audiotrak Prodigy and M-Audio Revolution 7.1) usually have good DACs, so that'd be another way to solve the soundcard issue.
Personally, I think the 580s are one of the better buys in headphones. You can usually pick them up at around $150 on Ebay, and they sound AMAZING. They are extremely comfortable. You can literally put them on in the morning and wear them all day, to the point that you'll forget they're on. Part of that comfort comes from the fact that they are "open" headphones, meaning they don't close you off from the outside world. Closed headphones seal the world out and your music in, but they're usually less comfortable to wear for long periods.
The 600s and 650s are better, but they're enormously more expensive for a much lower quality jump. Bang per buck on the 580s is really extraordinary. All of these cans are built with modular parts, so you can order any piece you need a replacement for. With reasonable care, they'll literally last a lifetime.
The only real downside to all three of these is that they are 'high impedance' headphones, meaning you need a strong output to drive them well. They'll still sound good from a normal output, like an iPod's, but on an amplifier they will sit up and truly sing. I have a Total Airhead (heh) from HeadRoom. A better choice (which didn't exist when I bought mine) might be a Bithead or a Total Bithead, because they come with a USB connection and onboard, high-quality DACs. This gives you both the amplification of the Airhead and the ability to function as a good soundcard, which will let you get really high-quality sound off your PC. (All Creative cards, except possibly the X-Fi, do an internal resample to 48khz, which just butchers the treble. Most motherboard soundcards use such horrible DACs that they sound even worse. PC sound, in general, is terrible).
You could also use it as a laptop soundcard, but note that the Senns aren't particularly portable; they're very large, and you will look rather dorky wearing them in public.
Sennheiser has a lot of different model numbers, and they're definitely not all the same. I know these are good. I've seen quite mixed reviews on many of the other (mostly lower-end) choices. If you don't like other Sennheisers, but haven't tried these specific ones, give them a shot.
As far as I know, the computational overhead of the higher-bit keys isn't that significant, so it's probably not doing any actual harm. It'll slow down initial key negotiation and session setup, but it shouldn't affect traffic overhead, because that's encrypted with a symmetric cipher that was negotiated with the (very slow) public-key protocol. You'd probably only notice the overhead if you were running a server with many, many session setups. If it impacted you, generating a smaller key would be trivial.
The larger key will make your data more secure on the wire, in transit, but the weakest point has always been the key's passphrase. A 32768-bit key is just as crackable as a 256-bit key if you have physical access to the encrypted keyfile.
Improving transit security isn't an inherently bad idea, but it's making the strongest link in the chain even stronger. It probably won't do that much to increase overall security.
That's why I was suggesting setting up Coral cache links, but not using them in the default submission. If the remote site chokes, then substitute the Coral link. That gives them, I'd think, a pretty much bulletproof defense..."We TRIED to link to you, your site melted, so we were polite and pointed to a cache instead." I can't see a judge flipping out about this. Who has been damaged?
A person or corporation with a high asshole quotient is just as likely to get upset about the link in the first place, which CAN be construed as a DOS. They could sue for that too, you know. And they could probably win. God knows there's a lot of documentation on the Web about the Slashdot effect... it's not like the lawyers can argue "we didn't know that would happen!". Yet, mysteriously, nobody sues. And I bet nobody would sue Coral for caching, either.
Of course, the counter-argument is that an opportunistic, sue-happy asshole would have a hard time proving damages from a DOS of a small website, but damages from 'copyright infringement' are obscenely high. That said, I still can't see a judge ruling against either Slashdot or Coral in the example above. As long as they made a good-faith effort to link to the site to begin with, and only substituted the cache link after failure, there just isn't much to complain about.
re: your PS.... I'm not familiar with the Chips 'n Dips reference, so apparently you were earlier than I was. I thought I found the site within the first 90 days or so of launch, but perhaps not, if I don't know about the predecessor(?). I was definitely reading well before user accounts were implemented. When they did get them going, I didn't bother creating an account for a long time. I didn't have anything to say at the time, being too stupid to post amidst such luminaries.
You could make, in fact, a very strong argument that I still am, but we seem to have a lot fewer luminaries these days.
My primary source of tech news is probably Ars Technica. They don't have anywhere near the volume that Slashdot does, at least on the main page, but the stuff that goes up is very, very well-done.
They have a new sidebar with blog-style entries that reminds me a bit of Slashdot. ... this was just added. Even when the main page is static for a couple of days (not at all uncommon), there's a stream of little blurbs in the sidebar. And their forums are quite good.
On the whole, I'd call it at least an adequate replacement.... it's very strong in areas that Slashdot is very weak (original content, editorial quality), and with their bloggish thing, they're fair to middling where Slashdot is very strong (lots and lots of links.) If all you want is quantity, Ars won't hold up to Slashdot, but in many other areas, it's better.
Thanks for posting your thoughts on how to be an editor. I disagree with them, and I'm going to tell you why (of course), but it was nice of you to take the time to post them. It's *extremely* difficult to have a conversation ABOUT slashdot ON slashdot; this website is probably the least-reachable and most insulated from its users of any I read. It used to be my homepage, and I used to be a subscriber; neither of these are true any longer.
... almost since the very start (I got an account quite late) ... that has never changed. It was crap then and it's REALLY crap now, with Coral having solved 99% of the problem for you already.
First, this particular article is fine. The writeup may be wrong, but it also may be right. It's arguable, so it's a good post. My criticism isn't pointed at this specific submission, but rather many others.... a pattern, not a specific incident.
I think, as an editor, you should be using your brain. That means... read the submitted article(s), and make sure the blurb is actually correct. You're an editor. If you're just passing through things verbatim, without even checking them, you're not editing. I'm not sure what you'd call that process, but I'm sure 'editing' is the wrong word.
I think you guys have a responsibility to be sure that the blurbs on Slashdot are more or less correct. I don't mean perfect. But it is very obvious, sometimes, that the editor who posted a given article didn't even bother to READ or THINK about it in any way, shape, or form. Your supposition that the submitter knows more than you do is WRONG. You should be supposing exactly the opposite... assume they are idiots until they prove othrwise. You'll be right a lot more often than you'll be wrong.
You also, I think, have a responsibility to pass through the original meaning of someone's post, and to correct it if the original submitter complains. I've seen at least one case where the submitter was furious, because the editor (I think it was Michael) removed a word or two, and completely changed the meaning of what he or she had written. It made it look like the submitter was arguing an exceptionally stupid position, and it was never corrected.
Finally, and this is the reason I stopped subscribing and switched my homepage, Slashdot needs to come up with some kind or mirroring system. The Slashdot effect isn't as bad as it used to be, but it's still a deliberate denial of service when it's pointed at small sites. At the VERY least, you should be getting the site preloaded into Coral, and monitoring the remote webserver... if it chokes, then swap the main links to the Coral cache to give the poor sap time to recover. You have a responsibility with where you aim your readership, and all I have ever seen is weaseling and moaning about how it's a hard problem. And in all the years I've been reading this site
If and when you guys come up with a system to be sure that you don't take out small sites more than briefly, and when you're showing some better editorial abilities, I'll cheerfully subscribe again. And yes, I realize I'm just one guy, and it'd be like twenty bucks a year. But right now, I am just barely hanging on here... very, very nearly ready to give up on the site completely. I don't see the quality of posts here anymore, and haven't for years. I am morally certain the reason you're not attracting as many smart posters is because you're posting stupid articles. If you guys use your brains, and expect the same of your submitters, then I believe the posters will, over time, do likewise.
Make the stories smarter, and expect intelligent behavior from your editors. The readership will follow.
My experience, around the time of RH 7.2, was basically the same... it's really not that hard. Unlike real life, the questions are fundamentally 'fair'... there's always enough data to determine what the problem is. Real life doesn't work like that.
However, I'd think anyone who could pass RHCE would be a competent junior admin.. I don't think I'd want one in charge of a big network based on that certificate alone, but you can be pretty sure they know how to install, configure, and repair a single Linux box. I'd be perfectly content to send an RHCE off to fix a mysteriously broken Linux machine in another building... chances are pretty good that they'll be able to fix it. If they can't, I'd probably have trouble with it too.
If they can get that good, they can probably get better still. RHCE most emphatically doesn't mean world class, but I think it's a good foundation... it means someone has at least a clue. They won't be a complete chowderhead.
I took the class about four years ago, so exactly what's covered has probably changed. I'm sure it hasn't gotten any worse, though.
It would have been more interesting to link to this page AFTER the week has passed, so that we could read everything all at once. As is, the coverage is incomplete, so many of us will miss the later entries.
If the purpose in all these links is to drive traffic to 1up, rather than to link Slashdot readers to complete and interesting coverage, then by all means, continue what you're doing. I, however, would feel better-served if the link was posted after all the content was actually there to read.
They are completely headless AMD Geode machines... 266mhz Pentium class, with 128mb of RAM. They're primarily meant as routing devices for wireless networks (they have three network ports, and 1 3.3v PCI and 1 miniPCI slot). They are completely fanless, and have a socket for a Compact Flash, which is the normal boot device. They also have a connection for a laptop-style hard drive, and a USB 1.1 port.
Now, these little guys can really be a chore to get set up, because they have no true video... they route the BIOS text-display calls out through the serial port. And they have no floppy to boot from, so you must either set up a PXE boot environment (what I did the first time... NOT a trivial process for someone who isn't very familiar with Linux and/or the BSDs), or build a bootable CF or laptop drive on another system.
If you can muscle past the installation difficulty, the boards themselves are absolutely silent, with no moving parts at all. For your application, you'd probably boot off a laptop IDE drive. Most of these small drives aren't designed to be on 24x7, so be sure to look around for one that supports a long duty cycle, and even at that, take regular backups.
This would give you a small, very low-power solution. The Geode is extremely efficient. I'd have to look it up, but from memory I think it's like 7.5 watts. You could spend more running a nightlight. The drive will add some to that, but it'll definitely stay under 15w, and maybe under 10. It's reasonably powerful, with a decent amount of RAM, and will make very little noise and take up very little space.
I'm using one of these boxes as a router/firewall, and I like it very much. I hate noise, and with a CF, it is both silent and should last many, many years... no moving parts at all. Folks on the mailing list have claimed that it can sustain 10 megabits comfortably with moderately complex firewalling, and as much as 30 megabits if it's just routing between interfaces. It's not a speed demon, but it's really not bad.
Another possibility might be the Linksys NSLU2, which is a NAS device that runs Linux, and is apparently pretty hackable. It would be even harder than the Soekris to get going, though...and it's not X86, if that matters. I don't know much about them, but others may chime in with more data.
Sure, but you're talking about a teacher that has to teach 50 kids at a time, and gets a new set of 50 kids every year. He or she will need a wide variety of teaching methods to reach all the different learning styles.
A homeschool teacher would very rarely have more than two or three students, and what with the living together constantly thing, it's likely that the kid would adapt to nearly any teaching style. Kids are like that. And, even if the kid can't adapt, a teacher with so few students can spent a lot more time adapting his or her style to suit.
Teaching is not some deep mystery that only the Privileged Few are able to do. At one time in this country, nearly everyone was homeschooled.... the idea of regimented public school was bitterly, bitterly fought in some places.
Parents have been teaching their children since the Stone Age. Now, I'm not saying modern parents should be doing it without outside help. I'd strongly suggest reviewing a professional curriculum to at least familiarize oneself with what's being taught in public schools. But, overall, I see no reason to doubt that most parents could do a fine job of educating their kids.
And, let me tell you, they sure couldn't do a lot worse than a lot of the public schools. You just would not believe how ignorant these supposedly 'educated' children often are. Stone Age all over again.
It may be redundancy, but it's not a BACKUP. A backup is a complete copy. Only RAID-1, 10, and 50 could be considered to have backups in any sense of the word... and 10 and 50 are very, very uncommon. Calling a RAID a backup is true only for a very limited subset of the ideas behind both words. Most RAIDs are not backups, and most backups are stored on separate media and filesystems.
Only RAID-1 is a backup in any sense of the word. Your claim that RAID is a backup is true only in that one specific case. The other, much more common, RAID variants don't make complete copies of the data; they instead generate enough parity bits to survive the loss of one drive.
The two words have a slight intersection, but it's just a bad idea to use them in the same context.
A backup is a COPY. Copying data and storing it offsite, if your backup medium is good, protects against virtually any failure.
RAID is designed to protect against one and only one thing: downtime from drive failure. It has the happy knock-on effect of sometimes preserving data that would otherwise be lost, but in no way should it be treated as a backup substitute. Drive failure is a very common reason for data loss, but it is FAR from the only one.
Wow. That's beastly fast.
Whoever modded you insightful should be shot. The first thing you say is true (that we've seen both warmer and colder temperatures over relatively short terms), but the rest is pretty much bunk.
Did it ever occur to you that not all the carbon was in the atmosphere *at the same time*? And you seem to think there was some big 'magic' event that buried all those fossils and coal *all at once*? Clue: it wasn't a 'sudden burial'. It's not like ravening hordes of topsoil threw themselves screaming on the dinosaurs.
Things in nature happen slowly, over thousands or millions of years. Our digging up huge quantities of carbon and dumping them into the atmosphere all at once, over a mere century or two is probably an event that's entirely unprecedented in the planet's history. How it will adapt is unknown, but it's entirely likely that we won't like it much; we are fond of stability, while being a profound destabilizing influence.
And you say 'no fossils are being made now', which has got to be among the dumbest assertions I've heard recently. Here's another clue: right now, somewhere in the world, there's a corpse of a seagull that has been buried and is starting to fossilize. If there are intelligent beings in fifty million years, perhaps they'll discover a bizarre strata, deeply buried. If so, they'll eventually figure out that it's a great treasure, a landfill of the Ancients. And, perhaps, they'll realize that poor dead Jonathan is an ancestor of whatever flying scavengers they have at the time.
The natural processes of the earth are slow. Just because they're happening too slowly for you to perceive in your own short lifetime doesn't mean they stopped.
Oops, sorry, I should have included a link to the press release on this amazing new technology.
From the writeup on the new mice:
"The low weight of the mouse allows fast moves and zero inertia[....]"
In other words, they've quietly developed an inertialess mouse. The biggest physics breakthrough ever, and they're wasting it on a stupid gaming mouse. Quick, somebody call NASA!
If all you're doing is mail and a simple website, it's easier and much cheaper to host a vanity domain with Namecheap, a DNS registrar. They can provide you POP3 service for like $25/year, 10 mailboxes. Or, for part of the basic $8 registration, you can set up mailforwards. I don't know if there's any limit to how many you can do, but you can forward arbitrary addresses in your domain to some other mailbox. If you're hosting example.com with them, you can point astrashe@example.com to, say, astrashe@gmail.com. Each address can go to a different target, so you can provide vanity email addresses for your friends, too.
You can also redirect a web site in one of two ways. You can either do an outright redirect to www.astrashe.com, or you can have it forward in a frame, so that the address bar still says 'www.example.com', but the content is coming from 'www.astrashe.com'.
Namecheap's servers are likely to be very, very robust... you don't lightly get into the registrar business.
Overall, this is a very cheap, very solid solution, and requires just about zero administration time, once it's set up.
Yes, but if the attacker can trick one of your internal-services machine into doing a lookup on a domain he owns, you're hosed. If he's authoritative, for instance, in a reverse zone, all he has to do is hit your webserver and you're poisoned... most webservers do reverse DNS lookups automatically. He just configures his extra payload in the reverse domain instead of the forward.
I'm confused about this one too. This is what I THINK is going on with this exploit. Hopefully, someone who ACTUALLY knows will correct my mistakes. :)
One of the possible ways to set up a DNS server is as a 'forwarder'. This means that it doesn't do lookups itself, but rather passes all DNS requests to another machine, gets replies, and then sends replies to the clients. One reason you might do this would be to distribute DNS load in a big ISP; you have a few machines that do the actual outbound DNS determination, and then the cache ripples back to the servers that are actually talking directly to the clients. DNS is fairly low-load, relatively speaking... this architecture would date from when everyone was deploying 50Mhz machines as servers. I'll call the local BINDs 'caching' servers, and the one doing the actual lookups on the internet the 'point' server.
So in and of itself, this architecture isn't a problem. But one of the features of the DNS protocol is that any server can send back more data than what was actually asked for, even data that is totally unrelated to the main query. Caching BIND servers by default trust their point server. And, when functioning as a point forwarder, BIND4 and BIND8 apparently just pass along queries they receive without checking them. The point BIND assumes that the caching BINDs are checking, while the caching BINDs assume the point BIND is checking, and the packet never gets checked for sanity at all.
So Joe Hacker snoops around... he tries to find DNS servers on your network. Once he finds one, he queries it for a name in a domain he controls. (or he initiates a connection to a webserver on the same machine, which may cause the same DNS lookup). He watches for the request to his DNS server coming from a DIFFERENT machine. That often indicates a forwarder configuration.
So he waits for his cached info to expire, and does it again... except this time, his reply packet includes extra information, "Oh, by the way, www.microsoft.com is on joes.evil.server.here." If BIND4 or BIND8 is the functioning as the master lookup in a forward configuration, it just passes along the packets it receives. And when BIND is in a SLAVE configuration, it just trusts what it gets from the forwarder. So suddenly, your whole network is connecting to joes.evil.server.here instead of www.microsoft.com. And if it doesn't work, oh well, next DNS server... this is a very low-profile attack. You have to really be LOOKING for it to be able to see it.
Apparently, the workarounds are A) don't use a forwarder configuration. There's no real need for this anymore, even a cheap 1ghz machine with a gig or so of ram will serve tens of thousands of clients. B) if you MUST use a forwarder, use BIND9 (or, presumably, DJBDNS) as your 'point' machine. BIND9 does sanity checking when it's on point.
Hopefully I got this right. I haven't been paying much attention to this before, because I (rightly) didn't think it affected me. If I'm wrong, PLEASE correct me, I hate to spread misinformation.
Chrono Trigger was absolutely one of the best games ever made. I didn't find it until very late, sometime around 2001... just screwing around with SNES9X. I was absolutely hooked. This was when Counterstrike was out, mind you, one of the most fiendishly addictive games ever. My Counterstrike habit came to a screeching halt for awhile.
:-)
At the time, SNES9X didn't handle the multilayered transparency effects used about halfway in, so when I got to that stage, I immediately eBayed a used SNES and cart. The SNES was about $50.... the cart was $70, more than the console. Worth every cent.
To this day, I remain absolutely floored at the sheer amount of depth they fit into that adventure. You are bouncing around through time, and most things you do in the past will carry over into the future. It just keeps opening up and expanding into new areas. And each area is *fun*... I don't remember ever being annoyed with tedium. As enormous as it is (and it is a huge game), and with its very complex plotting, they fit the entire thing into FOUR MEGABYTES. There are probably TETRIS games bigger than four megabytes.
I STRONGLY urge folks to check out this game. If you haven't seen it yet, you really should. It reached a level of sheer brilliance that no other game ever has. I'm glad IGN had it on their list, but I think it should have been higher, based on technical achievement alone. After you've finished, you just flat won't believe they fit it into four megs. They must have been counting their RAM usage down to the individual bit. There's so much in here that I can easily see someone, during the development process, as being very proud of freeing up 16 entire bytes for someone else.
If you're not grabbed by the game right away, stick with it until you finish 'the trial'. (You'll know it when you see it.) If you get through the trial and aren't enjoying it yet, then you probably won't. You're also an ingrate, and please mark yourself as a foe so I know to ignore you forever.
I'm sure the terrorists felt extra-terrible about the several hundred people on the planes, as opposed to the thousands and thousands in the giant skyscrapers they were crashing into.
Are you kidding? The terrorists spent a couple years planning their op, and spent 19 lives (and plane tickets) to take out the towers.
Let's ignore the direct casualties and property damage, and instead look at the whole picture.
In response to what twenty people did, we have, in response, killed tens of thousands of people, lost about twenty thousand of our own soldiers (dead and wounded), and have spent nearly two hundred billion dollars in a War On Terror, with no end in sight. For the money we're paying, we could lose a World Trade Center EVERY OTHER WEEK and STILL be ahead on costs.
Our first war front, Afghanistan, at least isn't a complete disaster. The government is not in tight control, but we could 'win' there, where 'win' is defined as leaving behind a stable, democratic government. Now, we probably won't LIKE a stable, democratic Afghan government very much, nor they us (if they're free, one of their fervently-exercised freedoms will be to dislike us), but we don't have to like them... we just have to be reasonably sure they won't bomb us. That's still possible.
Iraq, on the other hand, was completely and totally bungled. It IS a total disaster. We have created the world's best training center for terrorists, where disaffected Iraqis can learn to fight Americans in the comfort of their own homes.... we'll break right in! We face escalating violence in that country, to the point that some people are starting to talk 'civil war' instead of 'insurgency'. The American-intalled government is looking very shaky indeed. The problems there are getting worse, not better. We lost that war at Abu Ghraib; we showed the Iraqis just what kind of people run our country. The Iraqis will never, not EVER, accept any government we impose. It's just a matter of how many body bags we choose to fill before bailing out and watching that place turn into a firestorm.
Back at home, we have lost rights by the score. The government now has many, many powers to intrude into our lives that it has wanted for years, but which we (rightly) refused them. We have few protections against unreasonable search. We are building a surveillance society, the thing we feared most as a country for so many years. We are IN a police state, it's just not one that has shown its fangs very much yet.
We have lost habeas corpus. The government can call you an enemy combatant and disappear you.
Win? The terrorists didn't "win". They hit the FUCKING JACKPOT.
Trying to plan a console to last ten years is ridiculous. Yes, the rate of change has slowed. No, it hasn't slowed that much.
How can any company even remotely guess what will be current and popular in ten years? FIVE years is stretching it. The PS2 was released in late 2000, and it was really obsolete by early 2004. You can (obviously) still get games for it here in 2005, but pretty much everything else on the market was consistently better by then.
If you assume a generation time of 2 years (shorter than the commonly-accepted 18 months, but computers aren't speeding up as quickly anymore), each additional 2 years of lifespan will make the initial console twice as expensive. Microsoft is obviously planning for 5 years, and they're launching at around $300-ish. If Sony wants to last 10, they'd basically have to add two and a half generations' worth more hardware.... they'd probably have to ship at around $1800. And they'd have to guess everything PERFECTLY.
In other words, Sony is hoping for no unpredictable innovations in the next ten years. Hey, that's a bet I'd put billions on!
The PS3 is looking rather like the Itanic, er, Itanium. Sony has spent untold billions on development. Their product will do some things a lot better, but it's not as good at general purpose processing. They can't ship anywhere near the same price point. They're trying to predict the future ten years out, and it doesn't look like they can accurately predict their own ability to ship their product. (They're still dropping features, so they're probably not seven months from putting product on shelves). March 2006 is very likely marketing spin to hurt Microsoft.
Guesses: Sony will ship late (VERY late) and too expensive for the mass market. By the time they get the price to the level that Joe Sixpack will buy their hardware, it will be firmly and permanently in second place. Possibly even in third. It will still be a viable platform, but the XBox will have enormous momentum by then. Sony will never make back what they spent on Cell.
My really daring prediction: Microsoft will actually make money on their console division.