I use Mandrake on my desktops and Debian on my servers. I run quite a number of servers, so I speak with some experience here.
Debian excels at remote management. Everything is tuned that way. Everything (EVERYTHING) is administered from the command prompt. (There may be graphical tools as well, but I never install those...I just configure in text.) Want to upgrade packages on a server 5000 miles away? Debian makes that trivial. And you never have to reinstall the OS (barring major catastrophe), so you can maintain remote servers over a long period (years) comfortably, without ever needing to touch them. RPM-based distros simply don't work like that... you can do maintenance updates remotely (except possibly SSH), but to upgrade to a newer release you have to do it from the console.
Where Mandrake is really good is in desktop presentation. They have a lot of very nice tools to administer things with. I'm running on a freshly-installed 9.2, and it's very, very nice. It is a completely functional desktop that's comfortable and easy to use. I run Mandrake 100% of the time as my desktop here at work, and fire up VMWare to support the Windows questions. It's gotten good enough that I'm seriously considering switching my main machine at home to Mandrake as well, and just keeping Windows around for gaming. It has come that far. (I particularly like Konqueror, which is an outstanding web browser.)
But both distros have problems. Mandrake's makes it harder to use, IMO, for servers.... it has to be reinstalled with every new release. I realize it has an 'upgrade' option, but this A) requires that you take the server offline for a couple of hours; B) RPM-based distros just don't upgrade well; (Admittedly, I haven't tried this since about RedHat 8.0, so it may have improved... treat this as an old data point that needs confirmation.) C) You have to be physically at the machine to upgrade it, which makes true remote management very difficult; and a related D) it used to be hard or impossible to upgrade SSH over an SSH connection using RPM. This may be fixed by now.
Mandrake's model is much like Windows... each new iteration is a significant jump forward, and most of the new improvements are not backported to the old versions, unless you use an outside RPM source like the Penguin Liberation Front. This model fits some IT shops very well... it doesn't suit my style as much.
As an aside, be a little careful with the PLF packages. My work system seems to suffer from significant bitrot; each installation has developed problems, after six or nine months, that required a reinstall. Most recently I had a runaway KDE artsd demon that was causing me all kinds of problems, and then suddenly my font antialiasing stopped working. Ended up wiping the system and upgrading to 9.2.... which, btw, is very nice, now that they've got the kinks out.
Anyway, getting back to compare/contrast: Debian's three-tiered system provides finer granularity. They have "stable", which is old but very proven software, "testing", which is where they hammer out the next stable release, and "unstable", which is where all the bleeding-edge stuff goes. The release process is continuous and ongoing, and upgrades generally involve a few minutes of downtime instead of hours; the granularity is much finer. You can choose to upgrade, say, just Apache or just Samba and leave everything else untouched, should you choose. However, this incremental upgrade process does come with a cost... you can find out too late that the most recent package breaks something. They had a nasty bug in LILO awhile back that broke all our SCSI-based Intel SRMK2s... after an apt-get dist-ugprade, the machines were no longer able to reboot. This was Not Good, and required a rush trip to the colo to fix. It's a little more chaotic, a little less controlled.... but of course, if you want pure stability, there's always "stable".
The Debian project itself seems to be suffering from some burnout too..
It's worth pointing out that the whole GPL system is based on copyright, so if you abolish copyright, the entire GPL library becomes free for anyone to take and abuse as they wish.
Strikes me that making copyrights somewhat shorter, abolishing retroactive copyright extensions, and simply letting the free market work are all better solutions. Eventually, some record companies will figure out that sharing helps them more than it hurts them; they will prosper. Some will continue to be draconian about fair use of their work; they won't do as well.
The free market will win this battle. It may take awhile (a decade?) but it will win.
I've been running a Soekris net4801 for a few weeks as a firewall. I'm very happy with it. It's not intended specifically as a firewall, you just buy the basic computer from Soekris and then install what you want. Getting it going can be quite involved, as it has no VGA circuitry; you have to administer everything over a serial cable. This is almost exactly the opposite target market from Smoothwall; the Soekris products are meant for people who know that the heck they're doing.
The 4801 I bought is a Pentium/266 with 128 megs of RAM, 3 network ports, a mini-IDE port (used for 2.5" hard drives [notebook style]), a compact flash port, a mini-PCI slot, and a 3.3v (only) regular PCI slot. This chipset has several known bugs, including a bad data-corruption bug with DMA mode hard drives that has not yet been worked around in Linux, to my knowledge. It's better to use it with a CF card (which can't do DMA) because of this, at least until they get that bug fixed. You can find some patches for the kernel via links off the main Soekris page, but I don't think there are any patches yet for the HD bug.
After about a week of futzing around with it, I finally got it running. Much of the pain was learning how PXE booting works. At this point, I have a Debian firewall with one external and two internal ports, and a 256MB internal "hard drive" (compact flash card). Everything is set up to log to RAM (instead of writing to the CF card, which is bad). The neatest part is that the machine is about the size of a trade paperback (it would be even smaller if they hadn't left room for a PCI card in the case), is absolutely silent, takes about ten watts of power, and has NO moving parts, so flinging it about isn't a problem. The chip is passively cooled, and doesn't even need a heat sink; the case gets mildly warm but never really gets hot. One of the neater gadgets I've played with recently.
Total net cost, including the CF card, was about $375, so it's not for the poor, and it's definitely not for the Smoothwall crowd. But if you're looking for a very sweet solution to the space-and-noise problem with a good, Linux-based firewall, this is a great solution.
As an aside, OpenBSD has patches to run with the net4801. I was having trouble getting OpenBSD's boot program to read the CF properly, and then suddenly ran short on time because my old P133 firewall started losing its hard drive. Pressed for time, I gave up on OpenBSD and installed Linux.... but, at least in theory, it should run well. OpenBSD also has support for hardware crypto accelerators, which you'll need if you want to do VPN with a box this slow. (that's one good use for the expansion slots.) I only saw one Linux hardware crypto driver, and it looked unfinished and primitive. Definitely a spot where OpenBSD looks to be ahead.
The thing is, the Democrats may never get the chance. The whole point of redistricting is to reassign power. Redistricting NOW, between normal cycles, is a blatant power grab, and it will permanently upset the balance in the states going through it. The parties currently in power are setting it up so that they cannot lose power again.
I truly hope the courts can fix this... if they can't, the only other likely way that this will get fixed is via revolution, and those are devoutly to be avoided. They almost always result in a government that's worse than the one it replaced. The American Revolution was a happy exception, as was the French Revolution that followed (patterned on ours), but the vast majority of them are dismal failures from the perspective of everyone but the people taking power. (the multiple Communist revolutions come to mind.)
Getting a really good government set up is very difficult. The fundamental system we have is amazingly well-designed, and having it be hijacked like this should have people screaming from all directions. But there is, by and large, total indifference.... which pushes the party in power to larger and larger power grabs. The conservative voters are HAPPY about this, but they shouldn't be.... they are very into individual liberty, and they're sacrificing their own freedom just to tell liberals how they can have sex.
The ONLY thing that stops these abuses is voter squawking, and considering how bad gerrymandering is getting, soon they won't even care about that. That won't leave the people very many options. We *really* don't want that to happen.
Great... so instead of posting a mirror, they make ABSOLUTELY SURE that Groklaw melts down.
I'm sorry, guys, but I really think this is crappy. You cry about how it's hard to mirror stuff, because it would require *gasp* permission. So instead of taking a little extra time, particularly when you know that the remote server ALREADY can't handle the load, you aim tens of thousands of hits at them.
I'm sure this isn't the intention, but it is essentially a deliberate DoS.
Enough excuses, already.... the prior permission thing just doesn't work anymore. Google mirrors practically EVERYTHING and they don't have specific permission. You can live by the same rules they do.
At the VERY least, in cases where the server is already obviously choking, post a synopsis without a link.
For years, Bubble Memory was *the* hot future technology. Everyone talked about it, everyone wrote about it, and yet I don't think anyone ever actually bought it.
The fundamental idea, from what I recall, was creating tiny bubbles in a viscous fluid, and then rotating the fluid around and reading the bubbles again. I think the read process destroyed the bubble, and the bubbles drifted over time into the wrong places, so the whole media had to be constantly rotated, read, and recreated. (which actually isn't too much different from DRAM, which constantly leaks charge and must be refreshed with new current.)
This sounds absolutely ridiculous now, but I can't tell you how many breathless articles I read about how bubble memory would offer the ability to store *megabytes* in tiny devices, no bigger than a small refrigerator. (Okay, okay, I'm exaggerating a bit there, mostly because I don't remember size clearly. I think the pictures showed devices about the size of a 15" monitor, but I'm really not sure anymore. )
Being young and not knowing any better, I read all the articles and waited impatiently for these huge storage devices to appear. I'm confused about timeframes and would have to research to be sure, but I think what eventually killed off the idea of bubble memory was the first hard disks.... the Winchester drives.
Just think...ten megabytes in under a cubic foot of space!:-)
The only computer engineer joke I know goes like this, in the Reader's Digest version:
4 engineers on train, train breaks down. Mechanical engineer: "I felt a strange vibration, perhaps there's something wrong with the propulsion." Chemical engineer: "The exhaust smells a little off, it could be a bad fuel mixture." Civil engineer: "I also felt the vibration, perhaps the tracks are damaged." Finally, they turn to the computer engineer for his opinion.
"Well, I'm not really sure, but we could have everyone get off the train and get back on."
Everyone knows partnering with Microsoft is suicide. It's great to see Gamespy getting into bed with them. I was soooo pissed when I paid for the client they were using last year, based on how much I'd liked the client several years ago... what a steaming pile of excrement that turned out to be. I don't usually say this sort of thing about companies, but Gamespy deserves everything Microsoft will give them.
BTW, if you're one of the two or three remaining people who hasn't already switched, check out the All Seeing Eye from UDPSoft. It's constantly updated with new games and is just generally excellent. It does exactly what it's supposed to do without all the bloatware useless crap that Gamespy shoves down your throat.
Overall, money invested in science has historically paid off at better than 10-1. You see a lot of projects that dead-end or don't produce all that much of value, but every once in awhile you get a major, bonanza strike. Problem is, you can't tell which projects will be the big hits until afterward, so it looks like a big waste of money.
It isn't. We're still benefiting (enormously!) from the basic research done in the 1950s; they had ideas back then we still haven't fully tapped. Every time someone looks back at one of those obscure reports and says "hey, wait a minute!".... it's a payoff. We have long, long since paid off the money we invested in the 1950s, and made a handsome profit to boot. Everything after that is gravy.
Coke can say that, but they can't say "Pepsi tastes like ass because cats piss in it." You can state opinions about competitors' products. You can also state facts, but they must be true.
SCO, in other words, has crossed the damp little line in the sand.....
Well, if it does port forwarding, why not? I haven't looked at it in ages, I use SecureCRT on Windows, but that's a good idea.
One reason to go ahead and use Cygwin is the Socks 4 proxy mode in OpenSSH. I didn't get into that in the first message because I haven't used it much and can't be as specific about my instructions, but from what I understand, you can tunnel any Socks-4 aware application through SSH by using this option. (I think it's invoked with -D... search the man page.) You connect locally and the connections are initiated from the remote host. On OSX, this is especially useful, because there's an OS-level setting for proxies that applications are supposed to use automatically. (I don't know whether or not they actually do, yet... I believe that's a new feature in Panther.) On Windows and Linux, you have to do manual configuration still.
I f you have a Linux firewall, just add another network card and move the wireless traffic off onto its own segment. Tunnel the laptop to either the firewall or a desktop machine behind it; one easy way is by running squid on a Linux box, connecting to it with SSH, and routing local port 3128 to remote port 3128. Then configure IE to use 127.0.0.1:3128 as your proxy port. Disallow all traffic except SSH to your LInux server, make sure you run a firewall on your laptop, and disallow wireless administration of the access point. This should give you a fairly secure wireless network.
If you need additional services, you can tunnel those too; ssh can do it for free via Cygwin, but it takes a little time to set up. (each port requires a separate ssh command; you can script them if you always need several). You can also use a payware program like SecureCRT to forward multiple ports with a nice GUI interface.
With this kind of setup, WEP becomes essentially irrelevant. In fact, it may be a detriment, simply because you may get sloppy about not setting up your tunnels if you think maybe you're not being watched.
You can also do IPSEC, which will work with anything and won't require specific tunneled ports, but that's a lot more complex. SSH is simple, fast, easy, and pretty secure.
Actually, that was the first thing I checked. Netcraft says it's on Windows Server 2003 running IIS. I was bummed, figured I could really blast him.:-)
... but it occurs to me that many of you youngsters may never have worked with Novell products at all.
If they have preserved their technical culture through the last eight or ten years, then Novell is likely to be a very, very good fit with Linux. Netware was always clumsy and arcane to administer, at least at first; the learning curve was steep. (sound familiar?) But once you understood it, you could see WHY they had done it the way they did, and their solutions were often brilliant. In exchange for up-front learning curve, you got power under the hood. (sound familiar?)
Windows was all sexy and nice-looking, and it was a lot easier to administer up front, but it didn't have anywhere NEAR the depth of thought behind it. As of NT 4.0, Microsoft's first real competition to Netware, things like print services were a joke. You could share a printer, sure, but what if you wanted to share a pool of printers? What if you wanted an automatic fallback to a backup printer that wasn't ordinarily in the pool? What if you wanted to share the same printer across several print queues? Even several print POOLS? With Novell, any of these things were easily possible, though they did take some time to get set up. (arcane, remember?) Things like this were just flat not possible on NT 4. I'm not sure they're doable even NOW, to be honest. And Microsoft introduced Active Directory, to great fanfare, with Windows 2000; Novell had Novell Directory Services something like FIVE YEARS BEFORE. It seemed to me that NDS was, as usual, better thought out and more powerful, but when I was looking at AD, my NDS experience was several years out of date, so that could be mistaken. (I never got much past beginner-level with either directory service, FWIW.)
At any rate, the buzz in the NT 4.0 timeframe was all about "application services". This was shorthand for "you can write and run your own server software", which was very difficult to do on Netware. Netware was an EXTREMELY closed architecture. If they have retained that mindset, that's going to be the biggest likely sticking point. Windows was more open and cheaper, so it prospered, just as Linux is completely open and cheaper still. Novell may have a hard time with this issue.
At any rate, Netware servers were nearly uncrashable. It could happen: I had one customer who could crash his server just by running a particular application. But by and large, you could literally install Netware on a PC, put it in the closet, and forget about it for five years. Or longer. It would just run and run and run and always work and never break. I'm DEAD SERIOUS when I say "five years uptime"; Novell reliability made even Linux look kind of amateurish. You could pretty much expect that once you turned off the monitor and left the room, that the server would continue to run until the hardware broke. It was that good.
Assuming they've preserved their technical culture , Novell probably knows more about reliability than any other living x86 software company. And they had this directory services stuff figured out six or eight years ago. They've had a lot of time to think about that problem. I've also heard good things about ZenWorks, though I haven't touched it myself.
This could be very good indeed. I'm seriously thinking about downloading SuSE now; I know it's not going to change over the short term, but if the marriage comes off (and, mind you, MOST tech company takeovers fail), LinuxWorks could become the de facto standard within a few years.
Be sure to check out the game "Viewtiful Joe". You may want to rent it first if you're a serious PC gamer, as it's a (brilliant) semi-3d take on 2-d platformers, and you may not like that style if you're not used to it. It's incredibly good, but very difficult. I think it's the best game on the Cube, except possibly Wind Waker.
Metroid Prime is very good; if you played the original you'll particularly enjoy it.
I really like my Cube. I own all three consoles, so I don't care which one does best. Right now I have two favorite games: Voodoo Vince on the XBox, and Viewtiful Joe on the Cube. On the PC, I just ordered Silent Storm from gogamer.com; it's not out in the US yet, and I didn't want to wait. The demo was awesome! They may finally have bested Jagged Alliance 2.
The rest of the year has kinda sucked, but the holiday releases so far are GREAT!
One thing that I'm really enjoying about the solar flares, unlike most Earthly climate events, is that we can be absolutely certain we didn't cause it via pollution or global warming or what have you. When I see the hurricanes and tornadoes and big wildfires, there's always this nagging worry in the back of my mind that it might not be happening if we weren't spitting out all the pollution.
But we have no effect whatsoever on the Sun, so I can sit back and watch the show guilt-free.:-)
Just one small addendum -- it's worth pointing out that NAT alone isn't very secure protection; most NAT-only devices will freely pass packets that are addressed to their private network range. (ie, you're NATting from 10.0.0.0/24 to your external ip; if packets show up at that IP aimed at 10.0.0.22, the NAT device will route them.)
This isn't necessarily a big issue, but employees have been known to go bad at ISPs, and you have no protection against them with a NAT-only device. A true stateful firewall is much better.
Just don't think that a firewall alone is a panacea. If, for instance, you run a virus out of email, or if a service you're offering (Kazaa is a possibility) has an exploitable hole, your firewall doesn't help. Firewalls and NAT devices prevent a large percentage of possible security breaches, but they are far from foolproof.
I went back and looked, and I don't see that there's any evidence that fat is specially stored on a normal carb diet, so I may just have been flat wrong there; it may have been a projection on my part that was mistaken, my apologies.
However, I stand behind the remainder of my comments. Remember that they probably don't apply to everyone; people who are healthy and thin don't have the metabolic problems that we fatties do. People like me who have struggled with their weight have a metabolic problem, pretty much by definition; if the body isn't maintaining itself at a fairly normal weight, even with reasonable eating, something is amiss. What I am describing to you may or may not be true for everyone, but it IS often (almost always??) true for us heavy people.
Atkins believes the fundamental metabolic problem of most chronically heavy people is hyperinsulinism. The body secretes too much insulin in the presence of refined carbs, which causes a blood-sugar crash, and results in hunger much sooner than would be normal. The high insulin levels also result in fat being stored; the body's reaction to insulin is to convert sugars into fats to decrease the blood sugar level. So the fat cells suck the carbs into themselves, drop the blood sugar, and the end result is a hungry, fatter person, who then eats more carbs and starts the process again. Over time, the body releases more and more insulin; eventually, the body starts to becomes resistant to insulin, and that's how Type 2 diabetes often starts. Simple weight loss will often bring Type 2 diabetes under control, but the carb and blood sugar problem makes weight loss very difficult for people with this problem.
The Atkins diet switches the body into fat-burning mode. He likes to call it "lipolysis" (fat burning), because "ketosis", the real term, is sometimes confused with diabetic acidosis (I hope I have that term right) , which is VERY VERY bad for you; it's a life-threatening ailment that diabetics get. So he avoids the term "ketosis", even though it's technically more accurate. This is a VERY different metabolic pathway, and you will KNOW you have switched after doing it.
Also, a calorie is not always a calorie; in lipolysis, the body is less efficient about extracting calories, and you excrete a pretty good chunk (as high as 30%) of the calories you take in without metabolizing them. If I understood his book correctly, this is only true when you're truly in lipolysis; if you're burning carbs for energy, the body will convert fats and proteins with very high efficiency.
You can generally eat more on Atkins than you ordinarily would, but pleasantly, you are also much less hungry than normal, and in general you have more energy to boot. I've dropped 30lbs with practically no effort.
There are some drawbacks, however. The one I dislike most is that I smell strange while in ketosis, so I drink tons and tons of water, which helps a lot (means the byproducts of ketosis, ketones, go into the urine instead of sweat or the breath.) Meals are kinda boring, although if you are a good cook (I'm not), I don't think that would be a problem. Social meals can be a little awkward, but low-carbers are becoming common enough that there's often something on the menu nowadays. If all else fails, you can always suggest a steakhouse.
On the whole, despite drawbacks, it's great to see that little needle dropping instead of climbing, without hunger and without much effort. It takes some strong focus when you're starting, to switch habit patterns, but once you've settled in, it takes almost no work at all. I've dropped 30lbs so far myself, and I don't feel like I'm suffering to do it.
I'd actually suggest eating more fat. If you eat fat, the body is more willing to burn fat; the absolute fastest fat-loss diet (according to Dr. Atkins, anyway) is about 1000 calories per day of fat, with nothing else. You shold not, nowever, do a diet that drastic without medical supervision.
Fat is NOT EVIL.... as long as you're on a low-carb diet. If you are getting lots of carbs, the body burns carbs first and stores fat... so the traditional wisdom of low-fat diets *in the presence of carbs* is true. But on a low-carb diet, the conventional wisdom is wrong. In fact, conventional wisdom is just simply wrong in general about dieting; why else would we, as a country, spend SO MUCH money on low-fat goods, but get fatter every year?
If you're eating mostly protein, the body tends to burn protein. This means it will cannibalize your muscles, which is Not Good. The high-protein diets are what actually gave Atkins a bad rep, back in the 70s... some people were trying pure liquid-protein diets, so their bodies burned protein only -- and eventually they keeled over and died of heart attacks after their hearts had been too badly cannibalized to function anymore.
If, on the other hand, you're eating lots of fat, the body burns fat. This is what you WANT. You will probably lose fat (not necessarily weight) faster if you increase your fat intake. Muscle weighs more than fat, so your pounds-lost on the scale will slow, but your fat percentage should drop much faster. With a good, healthy, low-carb diet that's high in fat, you should lose almost 100% fat and leave your muscle essentially untouched. You may actually gain muscle mass if you are exercising steadily (as you should).
Atkins warns VERY SPECIFICALLY in his book not to avoid fat. In fact, Atkins is best described as a high-FAT diet, not a high-PROTEIN one.
Also, oils are very important; most Americans are badly, badly depleted of what are called "essential fatty acids", which are necessary to good health but which we cannot synthesize ourselves. You can get oil blends at most health food stores that are very good for you, and help you both nutritionally and calorically.
I have also personally had very good luck with MSM, which is a form of bio-available sulfur. In almost all of its forms, sulfur is very, very bad for the body, because it's so aggressive about combining with almost anything. Yet, a healthy body has something like 3% sulfur in it. Normally, apparently, we get sulfur (via MSM) through rainwater, but we don't drink rainwater anymore; instead, all our water is heavily processed, and we simply don't get as much as we need.
I have never before reacted to a supplement like I did to MSM when I first took it; my stomach felt incredibly GOOD (normally I only notice my stomach if something is *wrong* with it.), and I absolutely craved the stuff and ate it like candy for several weeks. I'm down to a capsule a day now and have no reaction to it or craving for it at all, so it's not like it's addictive... I was, I believe, just desperately short of it. I also note that my brain feels a lot more fluid and flexible as long as I keep taking it -- I've stopped a few times, and after a week or two I start to feel a little mentally sluggish. It's not expensive, so I just added it to the daily regimen.
If you're an over-30 techie who's been feeling kinda slow and stupid, I'd suggest trying it out for a couple weeks. Sure helps me.
I don't seem to have anything called "updatemenus" installed on my system, and urpmi knows nothing about it either. Are you sure you got that command right?
Slashdot Mirror
I use Mandrake on my desktops and Debian on my servers. I run quite a number of servers, so I speak with some experience here.
... treat this as an old data point that needs confirmation.) C) You have to be physically at the machine to upgrade it, which makes true remote management very difficult; and a related D) it used to be hard or impossible to upgrade SSH over an SSH connection using RPM. This may be fixed by now.
Debian excels at remote management. Everything is tuned that way. Everything (EVERYTHING) is administered from the command prompt. (There may be graphical tools as well, but I never install those...I just configure in text.) Want to upgrade packages on a server 5000 miles away? Debian makes that trivial. And you never have to reinstall the OS (barring major catastrophe), so you can maintain remote servers over a long period (years) comfortably, without ever needing to touch them. RPM-based distros simply don't work like that... you can do maintenance updates remotely (except possibly SSH), but to upgrade to a newer release you have to do it from the console.
Where Mandrake is really good is in desktop presentation. They have a lot of very nice tools to administer things with. I'm running on a freshly-installed 9.2, and it's very, very nice. It is a completely functional desktop that's comfortable and easy to use. I run Mandrake 100% of the time as my desktop here at work, and fire up VMWare to support the Windows questions. It's gotten good enough that I'm seriously considering switching my main machine at home to Mandrake as well, and just keeping Windows around for gaming. It has come that far. (I particularly like Konqueror, which is an outstanding web browser.)
But both distros have problems. Mandrake's makes it harder to use, IMO, for servers.... it has to be reinstalled with every new release. I realize it has an 'upgrade' option, but this A) requires that you take the server offline for a couple of hours; B) RPM-based distros just don't upgrade well; (Admittedly, I haven't tried this since about RedHat 8.0, so it may have improved
Mandrake's model is much like Windows... each new iteration is a significant jump forward, and most of the new improvements are not backported to the old versions, unless you use an outside RPM source like the Penguin Liberation Front. This model fits some IT shops very well... it doesn't suit my style as much.
As an aside, be a little careful with the PLF packages. My work system seems to suffer from significant bitrot; each installation has developed problems, after six or nine months, that required a reinstall. Most recently I had a runaway KDE artsd demon that was causing me all kinds of problems, and then suddenly my font antialiasing stopped working. Ended up wiping the system and upgrading to 9.2.... which, btw, is very nice, now that they've got the kinks out.
Anyway, getting back to compare/contrast: Debian's three-tiered system provides finer granularity. They have "stable", which is old but very proven software, "testing", which is where they hammer out the next stable release, and "unstable", which is where all the bleeding-edge stuff goes. The release process is continuous and ongoing, and upgrades generally involve a few minutes of downtime instead of hours; the granularity is much finer. You can choose to upgrade, say, just Apache or just Samba and leave everything else untouched, should you choose. However, this incremental upgrade process does come with a cost... you can find out too late that the most recent package breaks something. They had a nasty bug in LILO awhile back that broke all our SCSI-based Intel SRMK2s... after an apt-get dist-ugprade, the machines were no longer able to reboot. This was Not Good, and required a rush trip to the colo to fix. It's a little more chaotic, a little less controlled.... but of course, if you want pure stability, there's always "stable".
The Debian project itself seems to be suffering from some burnout too..
It's worth pointing out that the whole GPL system is based on copyright, so if you abolish copyright, the entire GPL library becomes free for anyone to take and abuse as they wish.
Strikes me that making copyrights somewhat shorter, abolishing retroactive copyright extensions, and simply letting the free market work are all better solutions. Eventually, some record companies will figure out that sharing helps them more than it hurts them; they will prosper. Some will continue to be draconian about fair use of their work; they won't do as well.
The free market will win this battle. It may take awhile (a decade?) but it will win.
I've been running a Soekris net4801 for a few weeks as a firewall. I'm very happy with it. It's not intended specifically as a firewall, you just buy the basic computer from Soekris and then install what you want. Getting it going can be quite involved, as it has no VGA circuitry; you have to administer everything over a serial cable. This is almost exactly the opposite target market from Smoothwall; the Soekris products are meant for people who know that the heck they're doing.
The 4801 I bought is a Pentium/266 with 128 megs of RAM, 3 network ports, a mini-IDE port (used for 2.5" hard drives [notebook style]), a compact flash port, a mini-PCI slot, and a 3.3v (only) regular PCI slot. This chipset has several known bugs, including a bad data-corruption bug with DMA mode hard drives that has not yet been worked around in Linux, to my knowledge. It's better to use it with a CF card (which can't do DMA) because of this, at least until they get that bug fixed. You can find some patches for the kernel via links off the main Soekris page, but I don't think there are any patches yet for the HD bug.
After about a week of futzing around with it, I finally got it running. Much of the pain was learning how PXE booting works. At this point, I have a Debian firewall with one external and two internal ports, and a 256MB internal "hard drive" (compact flash card). Everything is set up to log to RAM (instead of writing to the CF card, which is bad). The neatest part is that the machine is about the size of a trade paperback (it would be even smaller if they hadn't left room for a PCI card in the case), is absolutely silent, takes about ten watts of power, and has NO moving parts, so flinging it about isn't a problem. The chip is passively cooled, and doesn't even need a heat sink; the case gets mildly warm but never really gets hot. One of the neater gadgets I've played with recently.
Total net cost, including the CF card, was about $375, so it's not for the poor, and it's definitely not for the Smoothwall crowd. But if you're looking for a very sweet solution to the space-and-noise problem with a good, Linux-based firewall, this is a great solution.
As an aside, OpenBSD has patches to run with the net4801. I was having trouble getting OpenBSD's boot program to read the CF properly, and then suddenly ran short on time because my old P133 firewall started losing its hard drive. Pressed for time, I gave up on OpenBSD and installed Linux.... but, at least in theory, it should run well. OpenBSD also has support for hardware crypto accelerators, which you'll need if you want to do VPN with a box this slow. (that's one good use for the expansion slots.) I only saw one Linux hardware crypto driver, and it looked unfinished and primitive. Definitely a spot where OpenBSD looks to be ahead.
Nice little box. I'm very fond of mine.
The thing is, the Democrats may never get the chance. The whole point of redistricting is to reassign power. Redistricting NOW, between normal cycles, is a blatant power grab, and it will permanently upset the balance in the states going through it. The parties currently in power are setting it up so that they cannot lose power again.
I truly hope the courts can fix this... if they can't, the only other likely way that this will get fixed is via revolution, and those are devoutly to be avoided. They almost always result in a government that's worse than the one it replaced. The American Revolution was a happy exception, as was the French Revolution that followed (patterned on ours), but the vast majority of them are dismal failures from the perspective of everyone but the people taking power. (the multiple Communist revolutions come to mind.)
Getting a really good government set up is very difficult. The fundamental system we have is amazingly well-designed, and having it be hijacked like this should have people screaming from all directions. But there is, by and large, total indifference.... which pushes the party in power to larger and larger power grabs. The conservative voters are HAPPY about this, but they shouldn't be.... they are very into individual liberty, and they're sacrificing their own freedom just to tell liberals how they can have sex.
The ONLY thing that stops these abuses is voter squawking, and considering how bad gerrymandering is getting, soon they won't even care about that. That won't leave the people very many options. We *really* don't want that to happen.
Great... so instead of posting a mirror, they make ABSOLUTELY SURE that Groklaw melts down.
I'm sorry, guys, but I really think this is crappy. You cry about how it's hard to mirror stuff, because it would require *gasp* permission. So instead of taking a little extra time, particularly when you know that the remote server ALREADY can't handle the load, you aim tens of thousands of hits at them.
I'm sure this isn't the intention, but it is essentially a deliberate DoS.
Enough excuses, already.... the prior permission thing just doesn't work anymore. Google mirrors practically EVERYTHING and they don't have specific permission. You can live by the same rules they do.
At the VERY least, in cases where the server is already obviously choking, post a synopsis without a link.
For years, Bubble Memory was *the* hot future technology. Everyone talked about it, everyone wrote about it, and yet I don't think anyone ever actually bought it.
:-)
The fundamental idea, from what I recall, was creating tiny bubbles in a viscous fluid, and then rotating the fluid around and reading the bubbles again. I think the read process destroyed the bubble, and the bubbles drifted over time into the wrong places, so the whole media had to be constantly rotated, read, and recreated. (which actually isn't too much different from DRAM, which constantly leaks charge and must be refreshed with new current.)
This sounds absolutely ridiculous now, but I can't tell you how many breathless articles I read about how bubble memory would offer the ability to store *megabytes* in tiny devices, no bigger than a small refrigerator. (Okay, okay, I'm exaggerating a bit there, mostly because I don't remember size clearly. I think the pictures showed devices about the size of a 15" monitor, but I'm really not sure anymore. )
Being young and not knowing any better, I read all the articles and waited impatiently for these huge storage devices to appear. I'm confused about timeframes and would have to research to be sure, but I think what eventually killed off the idea of bubble memory was the first hard disks.... the Winchester drives.
Just think...ten megabytes in under a cubic foot of space!
The only computer engineer joke I know goes like this, in the Reader's Digest version:
4 engineers on train, train breaks down. Mechanical engineer: "I felt a strange vibration, perhaps there's something wrong with the propulsion." Chemical engineer: "The exhaust smells a little off, it could be a bad fuel mixture." Civil engineer: "I also felt the vibration, perhaps the tracks are damaged." Finally, they turn to the computer engineer for his opinion.
"Well, I'm not really sure, but we could have everyone get off the train and get back on."
BTW, if you're one of the two or three remaining people who hasn't already switched, check out the All Seeing Eye from UDPSoft. It's constantly updated with new games and is just generally excellent. It does exactly what it's supposed to do without all the bloatware useless crap that Gamespy shoves down your throat.
"You want to play chess professionally? Son, you need your head examined!" :-)
Naw, strange is next week. This week it's beauty. :-)
Overall, money invested in science has historically paid off at better than 10-1. You see a lot of projects that dead-end or don't produce all that much of value, but every once in awhile you get a major, bonanza strike. Problem is, you can't tell which projects will be the big hits until afterward, so it looks like a big waste of money.
:-)
It isn't. We're still benefiting (enormously!) from the basic research done in the 1950s; they had ideas back then we still haven't fully tapped. Every time someone looks back at one of those obscure reports and says "hey, wait a minute!".... it's a payoff. We have long, long since paid off the money we invested in the 1950s, and made a handsome profit to boot. Everything after that is gravy.
Research... the gift that keeps on giving.
Coke can say that, but they can't say "Pepsi tastes like ass because cats piss in it." You can state opinions about competitors' products. You can also state facts, but they must be true.
SCO, in other words, has crossed the damp little line in the sand.....
Well, if it does port forwarding, why not? I haven't looked at it in ages, I use SecureCRT on Windows, but that's a good idea.
... search the man page.) You connect locally and the connections are initiated from the remote host. On OSX, this is especially useful, because there's an OS-level setting for proxies that applications are supposed to use automatically. (I don't know whether or not they actually do, yet... I believe that's a new feature in Panther.) On Windows and Linux, you have to do manual configuration still.
One reason to go ahead and use Cygwin is the Socks 4 proxy mode in OpenSSH. I didn't get into that in the first message because I haven't used it much and can't be as specific about my instructions, but from what I understand, you can tunnel any Socks-4 aware application through SSH by using this option. (I think it's invoked with -D
I f you have a Linux firewall, just add another network card and move the wireless traffic off onto its own segment. Tunnel the laptop to either the firewall or a desktop machine behind it; one easy way is by running squid on a Linux box, connecting to it with SSH, and routing local port 3128 to remote port 3128. Then configure IE to use 127.0.0.1:3128 as your proxy port. Disallow all traffic except SSH to your LInux server, make sure you run a firewall on your laptop, and disallow wireless administration of the access point. This should give you a fairly secure wireless network.
If you need additional services, you can tunnel those too; ssh can do it for free via Cygwin, but it takes a little time to set up. (each port requires a separate ssh command; you can script them if you always need several). You can also use a payware program like SecureCRT to forward multiple ports with a nice GUI interface.
With this kind of setup, WEP becomes essentially irrelevant. In fact, it may be a detriment, simply because you may get sloppy about not setting up your tunnels if you think maybe you're not being watched.
You can also do IPSEC, which will work with anything and won't require specific tunneled ports, but that's a lot more complex. SSH is simple, fast, easy, and pretty secure.
Didn't particularly enjoy the original?? Blasphemy! Soneone ban this man from the gaming boards! :-)
Actually, I never played the truly original Metroid. I was referring to Super Metroid, which I thought was one of the best games on the SNES.
Argh, brainfart... I meant to say "LinuxWare". Doh. *slaps self*
Actually, that was the first thing I checked. Netcraft says it's on Windows Server 2003 running IIS. I was bummed, figured I could really blast him. :-)
... but it occurs to me that many of you youngsters may never have worked with Novell products at all.
If they have preserved their technical culture through the last eight or ten years, then Novell is likely to be a very, very good fit with Linux. Netware was always clumsy and arcane to administer, at least at first; the learning curve was steep. (sound familiar?) But once you understood it, you could see WHY they had done it the way they did, and their solutions were often brilliant. In exchange for up-front learning curve, you got power under the hood. (sound familiar?)
Windows was all sexy and nice-looking, and it was a lot easier to administer up front, but it didn't have anywhere NEAR the depth of thought behind it. As of NT 4.0, Microsoft's first real competition to Netware, things like print services were a joke. You could share a printer, sure, but what if you wanted to share a pool of printers? What if you wanted an automatic fallback to a backup printer that wasn't ordinarily in the pool? What if you wanted to share the same printer across several print queues? Even several print POOLS? With Novell, any of these things were easily possible, though they did take some time to get set up. (arcane, remember?) Things like this were just flat not possible on NT 4. I'm not sure they're doable even NOW, to be honest. And Microsoft introduced Active Directory, to great fanfare, with Windows 2000; Novell had Novell Directory Services something like FIVE YEARS BEFORE. It seemed to me that NDS was, as usual, better thought out and more powerful, but when I was looking at AD, my NDS experience was several years out of date, so that could be mistaken. (I never got much past beginner-level with either directory service, FWIW.)
At any rate, the buzz in the NT 4.0 timeframe was all about "application services". This was shorthand for "you can write and run your own server software", which was very difficult to do on Netware. Netware was an EXTREMELY closed architecture. If they have retained that mindset, that's going to be the biggest likely sticking point. Windows was more open and cheaper, so it prospered, just as Linux is completely open and cheaper still. Novell may have a hard time with this issue.
At any rate, Netware servers were nearly uncrashable. It could happen: I had one customer who could crash his server just by running a particular application. But by and large, you could literally install Netware on a PC, put it in the closet, and forget about it for five years. Or longer. It would just run and run and run and always work and never break. I'm DEAD SERIOUS when I say "five years uptime"; Novell reliability made even Linux look kind of amateurish. You could pretty much expect that once you turned off the monitor and left the room, that the server would continue to run until the hardware broke. It was that good.
Assuming they've preserved their technical culture , Novell probably knows more about reliability than any other living x86 software company. And they had this directory services stuff figured out six or eight years ago. They've had a lot of time to think about that problem. I've also heard good things about ZenWorks, though I haven't touched it myself.
This could be very good indeed. I'm seriously thinking about downloading SuSE now; I know it's not going to change over the short term, but if the marriage comes off (and, mind you, MOST tech company takeovers fail), LinuxWorks could become the de facto standard within a few years.
Be sure to check out the game "Viewtiful Joe". You may want to rent it first if you're a serious PC gamer, as it's a (brilliant) semi-3d take on 2-d platformers, and you may not like that style if you're not used to it. It's incredibly good, but very difficult. I think it's the best game on the Cube, except possibly Wind Waker.
Metroid Prime is very good; if you played the original you'll particularly enjoy it.
I really like my Cube. I own all three consoles, so I don't care which one does best. Right now I have two favorite games: Voodoo Vince on the XBox, and Viewtiful Joe on the Cube. On the PC, I just ordered Silent Storm from gogamer.com; it's not out in the US yet, and I didn't want to wait. The demo was awesome! They may finally have bested Jagged Alliance 2.
The rest of the year has kinda sucked, but the holiday releases so far are GREAT!
Wow. I guess 2/3 of the Web *IS* wrong. I'm sorry, Microsoft. I should have listened.
One thing that I'm really enjoying about the solar flares, unlike most Earthly climate events, is that we can be absolutely certain we didn't cause it via pollution or global warming or what have you. When I see the hurricanes and tornadoes and big wildfires, there's always this nagging worry in the back of my mind that it might not be happening if we weren't spitting out all the pollution.
:-)
But we have no effect whatsoever on the Sun, so I can sit back and watch the show guilt-free.
Just one small addendum -- it's worth pointing out that NAT alone isn't very secure protection; most NAT-only devices will freely pass packets that are addressed to their private network range. (ie, you're NATting from 10.0.0.0/24 to your external ip; if packets show up at that IP aimed at 10.0.0.22, the NAT device will route them.)
This isn't necessarily a big issue, but employees have been known to go bad at ISPs, and you have no protection against them with a NAT-only device. A true stateful firewall is much better.
Just don't think that a firewall alone is a panacea. If, for instance, you run a virus out of email, or if a service you're offering (Kazaa is a possibility) has an exploitable hole, your firewall doesn't help. Firewalls and NAT devices prevent a large percentage of possible security breaches, but they are far from foolproof.
I went back and looked, and I don't see that there's any evidence that fat is specially stored on a normal carb diet, so I may just have been flat wrong there; it may have been a projection on my part that was mistaken, my apologies.
However, I stand behind the remainder of my comments. Remember that they probably don't apply to everyone; people who are healthy and thin don't have the metabolic problems that we fatties do. People like me who have struggled with their weight have a metabolic problem, pretty much by definition; if the body isn't maintaining itself at a fairly normal weight, even with reasonable eating, something is amiss. What I am describing to you may or may not be true for everyone, but it IS often (almost always??) true for us heavy people.
Atkins believes the fundamental metabolic problem of most chronically heavy people is hyperinsulinism. The body secretes too much insulin in the presence of refined carbs, which causes a blood-sugar crash, and results in hunger much sooner than would be normal. The high insulin levels also result in fat being stored; the body's reaction to insulin is to convert sugars into fats to decrease the blood sugar level. So the fat cells suck the carbs into themselves, drop the blood sugar, and the end result is a hungry, fatter person, who then eats more carbs and starts the process again. Over time, the body releases more and more insulin; eventually, the body starts to becomes resistant to insulin, and that's how Type 2 diabetes often starts. Simple weight loss will often bring Type 2 diabetes under control, but the carb and blood sugar problem makes weight loss very difficult for people with this problem.
The Atkins diet switches the body into fat-burning mode. He likes to call it "lipolysis" (fat burning), because "ketosis", the real term, is sometimes confused with diabetic acidosis (I hope I have that term right) , which is VERY VERY bad for you; it's a life-threatening ailment that diabetics get. So he avoids the term "ketosis", even though it's technically more accurate. This is a VERY different metabolic pathway, and you will KNOW you have switched after doing it.
Also, a calorie is not always a calorie; in lipolysis, the body is less efficient about extracting calories, and you excrete a pretty good chunk (as high as 30%) of the calories you take in without metabolizing them. If I understood his book correctly, this is only true when you're truly in lipolysis; if you're burning carbs for energy, the body will convert fats and proteins with very high efficiency.
You can generally eat more on Atkins than you ordinarily would, but pleasantly, you are also much less hungry than normal, and in general you have more energy to boot. I've dropped 30lbs with practically no effort.
There are some drawbacks, however. The one I dislike most is that I smell strange while in ketosis, so I drink tons and tons of water, which helps a lot (means the byproducts of ketosis, ketones, go into the urine instead of sweat or the breath.) Meals are kinda boring, although if you are a good cook (I'm not), I don't think that would be a problem. Social meals can be a little awkward, but low-carbers are becoming common enough that there's often something on the menu nowadays. If all else fails, you can always suggest a steakhouse.
On the whole, despite drawbacks, it's great to see that little needle dropping instead of climbing, without hunger and without much effort. It takes some strong focus when you're starting, to switch habit patterns, but once you've settled in, it takes almost no work at all. I've dropped 30lbs so far myself, and I don't feel like I'm suffering to do it.
I'd actually suggest eating more fat. If you eat fat, the body is more willing to burn fat; the absolute fastest fat-loss diet (according to Dr. Atkins, anyway) is about 1000 calories per day of fat, with nothing else. You shold not, nowever, do a diet that drastic without medical supervision.
Fat is NOT EVIL.... as long as you're on a low-carb diet. If you are getting lots of carbs, the body burns carbs first and stores fat... so the traditional wisdom of low-fat diets *in the presence of carbs* is true. But on a low-carb diet, the conventional wisdom is wrong. In fact, conventional wisdom is just simply wrong in general about dieting; why else would we, as a country, spend SO MUCH money on low-fat goods, but get fatter every year?
If you're eating mostly protein, the body tends to burn protein. This means it will cannibalize your muscles, which is Not Good. The high-protein diets are what actually gave Atkins a bad rep, back in the 70s... some people were trying pure liquid-protein diets, so their bodies burned protein only -- and eventually they keeled over and died of heart attacks after their hearts had been too badly cannibalized to function anymore.
If, on the other hand, you're eating lots of fat, the body burns fat. This is what you WANT. You will probably lose fat (not necessarily weight) faster if you increase your fat intake. Muscle weighs more than fat, so your pounds-lost on the scale will slow, but your fat percentage should drop much faster. With a good, healthy, low-carb diet that's high in fat, you should lose almost 100% fat and leave your muscle essentially untouched. You may actually gain muscle mass if you are exercising steadily (as you should).
Atkins warns VERY SPECIFICALLY in his book not to avoid fat. In fact, Atkins is best described as a high-FAT diet, not a high-PROTEIN one.
Also, oils are very important; most Americans are badly, badly depleted of what are called "essential fatty acids", which are necessary to good health but which we cannot synthesize ourselves. You can get oil blends at most health food stores that are very good for you, and help you both nutritionally and calorically.
I have also personally had very good luck with MSM, which is a form of bio-available sulfur. In almost all of its forms, sulfur is very, very bad for the body, because it's so aggressive about combining with almost anything. Yet, a healthy body has something like 3% sulfur in it. Normally, apparently, we get sulfur (via MSM) through rainwater, but we don't drink rainwater anymore; instead, all our water is heavily processed, and we simply don't get as much as we need.
I have never before reacted to a supplement like I did to MSM when I first took it; my stomach felt incredibly GOOD (normally I only notice my stomach if something is *wrong* with it.), and I absolutely craved the stuff and ate it like candy for several weeks. I'm down to a capsule a day now and have no reaction to it or craving for it at all, so it's not like it's addictive... I was, I believe, just desperately short of it. I also note that my brain feels a lot more fluid and flexible as long as I keep taking it -- I've stopped a few times, and after a week or two I start to feel a little mentally sluggish. It's not expensive, so I just added it to the daily regimen.
If you're an over-30 techie who's been feeling kinda slow and stupid, I'd suggest trying it out for a couple weeks. Sure helps me.
I don't seem to have anything called "updatemenus" installed on my system, and urpmi knows nothing about it either. Are you sure you got that command right?