Ok, lets step back and take a look at what you just said.
*insert a "god" here* creates the universe.
*extremely long drawn out silence*
Billions of years later someone writes a book about it.
Billions of people believe the story. No one has any proof.
Hmmm, there's a mysterious absence in the timeline of oh, say, billions of years where no onee mentioned "god." I wonder why that is. It it because the inhabitants of the planet at that point in time were more or less stupid and exercised control over one another with sheer brute strength (think cave men and women)? I doubt there was much in the way of politics in early cave dwellings. Lets rephrase these events to be a little more accurate.
*extremely long drawn out silence*
Someone puts a collection of stories about why things are the way they are into a book.
More people add their own stories to this book.
Some people read into the stories in the book a little too much and start whorshiping it.
The book is changed by politics and greed over the years to maintain control of the people. The people are forced to whorship in a way described by people in control. Others are born into this practice and it continues to this day.
The people are suckers, let this happen, and still take the book for gospel even though any reasonable person would not believe King So and So are making these changes on behalf of "god" but instead are doing it for their own purposes.
What else. Oh yeah, Profit!
IMHO that would be a much more likely version of the events. Religion convienently saying "god created the universe" is like me saying "I created oxygen; Hand over my royalties!" Gee, I can't prove that and of course science proves otherwise but I still claim it anyway.
I don't think anyone wants to tread on another's right to practice (or not practice) religion as they see fit (except George Jr). Society at large should be mature enough to reasonably discuss the issue when it comes up with fact and to not take another's views personally. Unfortunately we don't yet live in a mature society.
Don't keep this conflict from your userbase. They should be aware of the issue and what your stance is. This is a matter of perception and in a way politics. Telling your userbase about the problem will be seen by your userbase as being upfront about the problem. Not saying anything about it will make it appear as if you are trying to hide something, even if all you really intended to do was ignore the other party. Other open source project leaders/teams have come forward at one time or another to tell their userbase about similar problems. You should too. Don't be pissy in your message to your users. Don't try to blame the other party for their interpretations of the GPL or what the conflict that drove them away to begin with. You should simply be concise and factful. Don't go into a lot of detail. Just get to the point.
You shouldn't hide this problem from your userbase or the other contributing developers. It will be worse for you and your project in the end if you don't go public.
IMHO the imperial system is more useful than the metric system. The imperial system is the only system that relates to people and society. The metric system is only meaningful to chemists, engineers, programmers, etc that want a simple way to build on increments that are ultra easy to explain. That ignores the human element though. Explain a bushell to a computer. Describe a fathom to a land lubber. How many hands tall is your ride? The imperial system is based in humans and society. It's a system with individual elements that mean something to somebody. The imperial system will never go away because it's quite useful. DST on the otherhand is no longer useful.
Seriously, it needs to go. It's an absolute waste, even for a person like myself who has actually had jobs that required me to be working outside all day long. It's a royal pain in the ass for everyone. It's not even used everywhere in the US. Daylight savings time and it's variants are used in a seemingly random manner across the globe. This page has some good info on it. I don't care if an ancestor of mine was the first to suggest it's use. IMHO the cost and energy savings today are not worth the sheer hassle of it all. DST should go.
If your employer can't pull their heads out of their asses long enough to comprehend how much security lapses costs them each year then you need to find a better place to work. It's as simple as that. I don't care what the job market is like. Staying in a position like that is tantamount to continuing to working for someone that asks you to do a job knowing you'll have to break the law to do it (not saying that lax security is against the law (perhaps it should be) but I am saying that the effects are of an equivalent degree IMHO).
That said security initiatives must be supported from the top down. Your university president must understand the financial hit lax security is to the university. He must support a security initiative and push it down to the provost and deans' council. It must be made absolutely clear through all deans down to the people that work beneath them that there is a university security policy in effect and it will be followed. Violation of which will result in repremand, possible loss of network privileges, and can ultimately result in termination. This is the only way to get the message across. I worked the helpdesk as a fairly large unversity for 3 years and have seen it all (or pretty damned close). Whenever an employee becomes beligerent you pass the person up the food chain to your supervisor or another full-timer. We full-timers aren't there to take any guff off other bitchy employees (whereas students are much less likely to defend themselves against a verbally abusive professor; students are also much more likely to be walked upon by professors than full-timers). "We don't make the official campus security policy. The university president and his advisors do. We're here to enforce it. Now do you want to pick your password within the established security parameters or would you like me to generate a random one for you?" I can't recall how many times I had to do that or saw it done myself. If you couldn't get through their thick skulls you called your IT department's director who in turn called the provost who in turn called the dean over that professor department who in turn called that department head who told the professor what for and why not. Let the chain of command fight the battles for you when the combatant is equal to or above you. It might as well be useful for something.
That university established basic security procedures for changing passwords. It was a mandatory password change every 6 months for faculty/staff and every 12 months for students. If the passwords weren't changed by the well-advertised cut-off day then the accounts were locked. The first couple of times the cut-off date was passed we had lines out the door, across the library and down the stairs. That didn't last for very long though. Sure people bitched and moaned about the inconvienance for a while but they soon grew accustomed to it. Likewise sharing passwords violated both our security policy and our campus network AUP. Violating that got the user a royal reaming by a sysadm or full-timer.
I worked for a second university later where I was the netadm. Napster was a big problem for us at that point and time. A handful of users consumed all available inbound bandwidth. Staff weren't excluded. After bringing this to the attention of our dept director a few times I ultimately got the go ahead to shut off the port of any staffer previously warned about using P2P applications on their office machines. One guy in particular had a very thick skull and I shut him off numerous times. Each time I'd let the director know; he would in turn call that person's super and let them know what the problem was and what was needed to correct it. I'd get a call a while later asking me to enable the switch port because the problem was fixed. Simple as that. The chain of command fixed the problem. All I was effectively was a tool, the way it should be.
What all of this boils down to is that it is possible to get security on your campus. I've seen it done. First and forem
Wouldn't you know it. Something that's funnier than hell (all my friends have laughed their asses off at it) gets modded "troll" by of course a troll for a moderator. Go figure.
"The side effects of these sorts of drugs are not yet fully known, although many neuroscientists think that they may lead to 'mental clutter' or 'task-obsessiveness'."
You mean it will make me think like a woman?!
Sorry, I couldn't resist. No offense to all you lovely geek ladys out there.
I *think* it is 180 seconds... probably enough time
Actually it's longer. The minimum set in RFC 2821 with strong wording (SHOULD) but not as a strict requirement) is 5 minutes per required command on the server side. The client side is also specified with strong wording and is set at a minimum of 30 minutes and optionally much longer in 3 minute increments while waiting for the completion of each TCP SEND call. RFC 2821 talks about this at 4.5.3.2. "SHOULD" is defined in section 2.3 as:
"SHOULD -- This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course."
In plain english it says don't mess with these values unless you have a damned good reason and know what you're doing. Sendmail's default will cause Sendmail wait up to a minimum of 372 minutes.
180 seconds is nearly enough in many circumstances including when receiving a message from a lareg mailing list.
It's certainly true that in a stand-up fight, rebels with deer rifles wouldn't have a prayer against a modern military force, but there are two fallacious assumptions here. First, that rebels would choose (or be forced to accept) a stand-up fight and second, that they would be facing a modern military force.
I'm sure your voice would have been redundant in Great Britain in the early 1770s. You would best hope however that you weren't still voicing that opinion there a decade later.
Hmm. I'm using Moz 1.7.3 and FF 1.0. I assume I'm using the latest greatest. Adobe isn't much of a fan of MS so I doubt they'd anchor you to IE. I want to figure out how to remove IE completely. That way I can eliminate popups from various apps I run.
Ah ha! It is selectable but isn't searchable. I've tried searching for my whole name, my last name, even my first name. The only hits on any of them came from the text at the end of the page 2 (the readable stuff). I've found my name anyway (who'd have thought it was in alphabetical order?;-) ). However I can't search for it.
Well, I've got time to kill. I wonder where my name ended up at in the image.... Too bad it wasn't actually text and not a picture of text or I could search for it.:-(
I dropped Calc I the first time I took it (too many 4hr classes my first semester in college). Any how the professor was a wee bit nutty. He never wore shoes or pants. He always wore a plain blue long-sleezed shirt and shorts of varying types (khaki, Hawaiian-print, etc). The only time I ever saw him wear anything on his feet (which were normally blue; I suppose from them being cold?) was when he was learning to rollerblade. I'd see him often roller blading between the math building and the computer science building. It was hilarious to watch, almost like a cartoon. He come flying down the sidewalk unable to stop, barely able to steer and he'd say "excuse me!" as he darted past people and apologize over his shoulder if someone lost their books or something. It was a hilarious sight to see. I'm not really sure how he stopped. I imagine he either hit something or aimed for grass and scooted to a stop on his face.;-)
Well I'm getting off-topic, just a little bit. I dropped the Calc I course a couple weeks into the semester. Many of the guys from my dorm floor stayed in the course. In the end this nutty Calc I professor drove off 75% of the class. Of the 25% that stayed in it, 50% failed. So basically about 12.5% of the class passed. The rest dropped out or failed. Last I heard he wasn't teaching Calc I anymore. Turns out he was a Calc II or III professor that had to fill in for Calc I at the last minute, or so I was told.
Anyhow, my story doesn't much help the article poster but I thought it was funny. Cherio
I generally install it, even on servers, and even though I don't plan on using it. On a rare as hell occasion I sometimes find myself sitting in a server farm performing some critical maintenance and without a function laptop or desktop. On these extremely rare occasions I may be forced to fire up X to go after a patch or check on the status of a trouble ticket (which can't always be done with Lynx). That and I'm pretty sure I've run into dependancies where I had to install some X library to get some software package to compile or install, even though I only intended on using the CLI version. I'm trying to think of specific names but none are jumping out at me. Installing the individual X-specific library usually isn't an option because they tend to require more X libraries. I liken it to breeding rabbits. The point is I found it was easier to let the installer waste my drivespace with all the various X fluff than spend more time trying to work around the lack of the X fluff. I used X about a month ago for the first time in probably 2 years. I wonder what version it will be on the next time I have to use it....
Interesting. I'll have to remember that. I don't have any RH boxes with heads at the moment. All of my servers are headless. I don't even export X.;-) I'll keep this in mind anyhow. Thanks
LOL. I wish I had the time. I'm wiring a house at the moment and will jump into plumbing, laying down hardwood floors, sheetrocking, painting, and anything else that's required as soon as the wiring is done. Another poster's comment I read seems to be on track though. One of the other repliers also pointed me to it. It's a paper called "Boot Linux Faster" by James Hunt of IBM UK. He used make to speed up his boot time. Good read if that's something you're going to do. He seems to be of a mind to just let the distro makers decide what loads in what order. I think I'd rather see an open source collaborative effort to decide what the default boot order will be. Still I'd rather see the hardcore fundamentals like network, NFS, and syslog brought up first because so many different processes depend on each of them. Beyond that I'd break it down to the individual application level. Have OpenLDAP? Load if after MySQL and/or PgSQL. Have MIMEDefang? Load it before Sendmail. Have ClamAV? Load it before MIMEDefang. Stuff like that. I think this is the most simple way to speed up the boot process. Put the CPU to work and get the box up quicker.
I never used Deja so I don't know what it was like before. It redirects to Google Groups now though. The first page looks normal but the following pages are completely useless. I don't know if you noticed the two ACs' comments or not but they pointed to Google Groups Beta and Google Groups UK as possible workarounds. There's a link at the bottom for Browse all of Usenet.... So the link to NANAS would be this. That also has set the option of "Viewing titles only." Boy, they really screwed the pooch on their newsgroup archive. I don't know what the hell they were thinking.
I still think I want a better newsgroup archiving site. I never have liked Google Group's searching abilities, or lackthereof. You can search for a string with a period it in, no matter how you quote or escape it. That's a real pain when searching for IPs or domains with common words in them.
I saw that comment (and the one after it with a working link) after my network connection came back to life. That's a hellva good idea. I never thought of using make in such a way. I hardly ever use make. Maybe once or twice a year I spend a few days playing with it. I'll use it to make a series simple tasks easier and then I'll promptly forget about it. That's a fine idea though.
Haha. Yeah, I can imagine your surprise. That reminds me of the joke a few friends of mine and I used to play in college when we worked the helpdesk. We'd take a picture of someone's desktop complete with the desktop icons and Start menu (Apple menu on my case). We'd make that image be the desktop background of course and hide all the menus. There was one guy, Dan, who was quite passionate about his hate for a particular nutty candybar. I don't remember what it was called but it was Nutty Something or Something Nutty. Anyhow someone scanned the wrapper of that candy bar and made it his desktop background. Then they made all the desktop icons look like peanuts. Ah. The good ole days of really stupid pranks.:-)
I reboot because I miss all the red and green (SUCCESS and FAIL) bootup colors. If only someone would make a screensaver of them I could be happy and not reboot.;-)
Seriously though I have only one Linux box I shutdown when not in use because it's in my second bedroom and is loud and produces a lot of heat. If it wasn't for that I'd have it on 24/7.
I can think of a number of examples where this would fail but on the average desktop I don't think this would be much of a problem. Servers on the otherhand have to have certain processes started for others to start correctly. MIMEDefang and Sendmail for example. Sendmail and OpenLDAP. PgSQL and OpenLDAP. All the various NFS goodies and any server processes that require something off one of the NFS-mounted volumes. Still I can think of dozens that can and should be started in parallel. I can't think of any ill-effects of starting a number of processes that come to mind in simultaneously. I'll have to give that a try sometime. Maybe the init process should have a Next Generation version that allows you to specify what is absolutely required by a process to start correctly. init-ng can then decide what it can start in parallel based on that. Sounds like a project to me.:-)
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Hmmm, there's a mysterious absence in the timeline of oh, say, billions of years where no onee mentioned "god." I wonder why that is. It it because the inhabitants of the planet at that point in time were more or less stupid and exercised control over one another with sheer brute strength (think cave men and women)? I doubt there was much in the way of politics in early cave dwellings. Lets rephrase these events to be a little more accurate.
IMHO that would be a much more likely version of the events. Religion convienently saying "god created the universe" is like me saying "I created oxygen; Hand over my royalties!" Gee, I can't prove that and of course science proves otherwise but I still claim it anyway.
I don't think anyone wants to tread on another's right to practice (or not practice) religion as they see fit (except George Jr). Society at large should be mature enough to reasonably discuss the issue when it comes up with fact and to not take another's views personally. Unfortunately we don't yet live in a mature society.
You shouldn't hide this problem from your userbase or the other contributing developers. It will be worse for you and your project in the end if you don't go public.
IMHO the imperial system is more useful than the metric system. The imperial system is the only system that relates to people and society. The metric system is only meaningful to chemists, engineers, programmers, etc that want a simple way to build on increments that are ultra easy to explain. That ignores the human element though. Explain a bushell to a computer. Describe a fathom to a land lubber. How many hands tall is your ride? The imperial system is based in humans and society. It's a system with individual elements that mean something to somebody. The imperial system will never go away because it's quite useful. DST on the otherhand is no longer useful.
Seriously, it needs to go. It's an absolute waste, even for a person like myself who has actually had jobs that required me to be working outside all day long. It's a royal pain in the ass for everyone. It's not even used everywhere in the US. Daylight savings time and it's variants are used in a seemingly random manner across the globe. This page has some good info on it. I don't care if an ancestor of mine was the first to suggest it's use. IMHO the cost and energy savings today are not worth the sheer hassle of it all. DST should go.
That said security initiatives must be supported from the top down. Your university president must understand the financial hit lax security is to the university. He must support a security initiative and push it down to the provost and deans' council. It must be made absolutely clear through all deans down to the people that work beneath them that there is a university security policy in effect and it will be followed. Violation of which will result in repremand, possible loss of network privileges, and can ultimately result in termination. This is the only way to get the message across. I worked the helpdesk as a fairly large unversity for 3 years and have seen it all (or pretty damned close). Whenever an employee becomes beligerent you pass the person up the food chain to your supervisor or another full-timer. We full-timers aren't there to take any guff off other bitchy employees (whereas students are much less likely to defend themselves against a verbally abusive professor; students are also much more likely to be walked upon by professors than full-timers). "We don't make the official campus security policy. The university president and his advisors do. We're here to enforce it. Now do you want to pick your password within the established security parameters or would you like me to generate a random one for you?" I can't recall how many times I had to do that or saw it done myself. If you couldn't get through their thick skulls you called your IT department's director who in turn called the provost who in turn called the dean over that professor department who in turn called that department head who told the professor what for and why not. Let the chain of command fight the battles for you when the combatant is equal to or above you. It might as well be useful for something.
That university established basic security procedures for changing passwords. It was a mandatory password change every 6 months for faculty/staff and every 12 months for students. If the passwords weren't changed by the well-advertised cut-off day then the accounts were locked. The first couple of times the cut-off date was passed we had lines out the door, across the library and down the stairs. That didn't last for very long though. Sure people bitched and moaned about the inconvienance for a while but they soon grew accustomed to it. Likewise sharing passwords violated both our security policy and our campus network AUP. Violating that got the user a royal reaming by a sysadm or full-timer.
I worked for a second university later where I was the netadm. Napster was a big problem for us at that point and time. A handful of users consumed all available inbound bandwidth. Staff weren't excluded. After bringing this to the attention of our dept director a few times I ultimately got the go ahead to shut off the port of any staffer previously warned about using P2P applications on their office machines. One guy in particular had a very thick skull and I shut him off numerous times. Each time I'd let the director know; he would in turn call that person's super and let them know what the problem was and what was needed to correct it. I'd get a call a while later asking me to enable the switch port because the problem was fixed. Simple as that. The chain of command fixed the problem. All I was effectively was a tool, the way it should be.
What all of this boils down to is that it is possible to get security on your campus. I've seen it done. First and forem
Wouldn't you know it. Something that's funnier than hell (all my friends have laughed their asses off at it) gets modded "troll" by of course a troll for a moderator. Go figure.
LOL! Good one. I missed that hole in the theory. ;-) I've known some pretty damned smart women in my time too.
I've never come across any with timeouts less than 5 minutes for the major commands. I've been administrating mail systems for a long time now.
You mean it will make me think like a woman?!
Sorry, I couldn't resist. No offense to all you lovely geek ladys out there.
Actually it's longer. The minimum set in RFC 2821 with strong wording (SHOULD) but not as a strict requirement) is 5 minutes per required command on the server side. The client side is also specified with strong wording and is set at a minimum of 30 minutes and optionally much longer in 3 minute increments while waiting for the completion of each TCP SEND call. RFC 2821 talks about this at 4.5.3.2. "SHOULD" is defined in section 2.3 as:
In plain english it says don't mess with these values unless you have a damned good reason and know what you're doing. Sendmail's default will cause Sendmail wait up to a minimum of 372 minutes.
180 seconds is nearly enough in many circumstances including when receiving a message from a lareg mailing list.
I'm sure your voice would have been redundant in Great Britain in the early 1770s. You would best hope however that you weren't still voicing that opinion there a decade later.
LOL. Good one. I wished I'd known that one when I was in elementary school. I could have had some fun with that one!
Hmm. I'm using Moz 1.7.3 and FF 1.0. I assume I'm using the latest greatest. Adobe isn't much of a fan of MS so I doubt they'd anchor you to IE. I want to figure out how to remove IE completely. That way I can eliminate popups from various apps I run.
Hmmm... I was wondering where the extra vowel came from. It's not part of the alphabet that I've been reciting for a good long while.
Ah ha! It is selectable but isn't searchable. I've tried searching for my whole name, my last name, even my first name. The only hits on any of them came from the text at the end of the page 2 (the readable stuff). I've found my name anyway (who'd have thought it was in alphabetical order? ;-) ). However I can't search for it.
Well, I've got time to kill. I wonder where my name ended up at in the image.... Too bad it wasn't actually text and not a picture of text or I could search for it. :-(
Well I'm getting off-topic, just a little bit. I dropped the Calc I course a couple weeks into the semester. Many of the guys from my dorm floor stayed in the course. In the end this nutty Calc I professor drove off 75% of the class. Of the 25% that stayed in it, 50% failed. So basically about 12.5% of the class passed. The rest dropped out or failed. Last I heard he wasn't teaching Calc I anymore. Turns out he was a Calc II or III professor that had to fill in for Calc I at the last minute, or so I was told.
Anyhow, my story doesn't much help the article poster but I thought it was funny. Cherio
I generally install it, even on servers, and even though I don't plan on using it. On a rare as hell occasion I sometimes find myself sitting in a server farm performing some critical maintenance and without a function laptop or desktop. On these extremely rare occasions I may be forced to fire up X to go after a patch or check on the status of a trouble ticket (which can't always be done with Lynx). That and I'm pretty sure I've run into dependancies where I had to install some X library to get some software package to compile or install, even though I only intended on using the CLI version. I'm trying to think of specific names but none are jumping out at me. Installing the individual X-specific library usually isn't an option because they tend to require more X libraries. I liken it to breeding rabbits. The point is I found it was easier to let the installer waste my drivespace with all the various X fluff than spend more time trying to work around the lack of the X fluff. I used X about a month ago for the first time in probably 2 years. I wonder what version it will be on the next time I have to use it....
Interesting. I'll have to remember that. I don't have any RH boxes with heads at the moment. All of my servers are headless. I don't even export X. ;-) I'll keep this in mind anyhow. Thanks
LOL. I wish I had the time. I'm wiring a house at the moment and will jump into plumbing, laying down hardwood floors, sheetrocking, painting, and anything else that's required as soon as the wiring is done. Another poster's comment I read seems to be on track though. One of the other repliers also pointed me to it. It's a paper called "Boot Linux Faster" by James Hunt of IBM UK. He used make to speed up his boot time. Good read if that's something you're going to do. He seems to be of a mind to just let the distro makers decide what loads in what order. I think I'd rather see an open source collaborative effort to decide what the default boot order will be. Still I'd rather see the hardcore fundamentals like network, NFS, and syslog brought up first because so many different processes depend on each of them. Beyond that I'd break it down to the individual application level. Have OpenLDAP? Load if after MySQL and/or PgSQL. Have MIMEDefang? Load it before Sendmail. Have ClamAV? Load it before MIMEDefang. Stuff like that. I think this is the most simple way to speed up the boot process. Put the CPU to work and get the box up quicker.
I still think I want a better newsgroup archiving site. I never have liked Google Group's searching abilities, or lackthereof. You can search for a string with a period it in, no matter how you quote or escape it. That's a real pain when searching for IPs or domains with common words in them.
I saw that comment (and the one after it with a working link) after my network connection came back to life. That's a hellva good idea. I never thought of using make in such a way. I hardly ever use make. Maybe once or twice a year I spend a few days playing with it. I'll use it to make a series simple tasks easier and then I'll promptly forget about it. That's a fine idea though.
Haha. Yeah, I can imagine your surprise. That reminds me of the joke a few friends of mine and I used to play in college when we worked the helpdesk. We'd take a picture of someone's desktop complete with the desktop icons and Start menu (Apple menu on my case). We'd make that image be the desktop background of course and hide all the menus. There was one guy, Dan, who was quite passionate about his hate for a particular nutty candybar. I don't remember what it was called but it was Nutty Something or Something Nutty. Anyhow someone scanned the wrapper of that candy bar and made it his desktop background. Then they made all the desktop icons look like peanuts. Ah. The good ole days of really stupid pranks. :-)
Seriously though I have only one Linux box I shutdown when not in use because it's in my second bedroom and is loud and produces a lot of heat. If it wasn't for that I'd have it on 24/7.
I can think of a number of examples where this would fail but on the average desktop I don't think this would be much of a problem. Servers on the otherhand have to have certain processes started for others to start correctly. MIMEDefang and Sendmail for example. Sendmail and OpenLDAP. PgSQL and OpenLDAP. All the various NFS goodies and any server processes that require something off one of the NFS-mounted volumes. Still I can think of dozens that can and should be started in parallel. I can't think of any ill-effects of starting a number of processes that come to mind in simultaneously. I'll have to give that a try sometime. Maybe the init process should have a Next Generation version that allows you to specify what is absolutely required by a process to start correctly. init-ng can then decide what it can start in parallel based on that. Sounds like a project to me. :-)