I have a BS in electrical engineering, and was doing circuit design years ago when we started using Unix ('89 or '90). I had used it elsewhere and liked it so I learned as much as I could. One thing led to another, and I was spending more time admining and coding than anything else.
Then an opening appeared in the official admin group here, I applied, was accepted, the rest is history.
I'd happily donate to slashdot on occasion, it's one of the three websites I make a point to read every day.
But I sure would not pay $2.00 per week, or any required payment for any web site. There's just too much free information out there, and I'm certain that it will stay that way. Too many people enjoy giving to the community (yes, I run several free web sites myself), and when they get tired, others will be glad to take over.
I tried this for BBSspot, and it was quite easy, I'll be inclined to do so at any web site I like, but probably only a few times a year. --
Jim Buchanan
> Even if you don't donate, Amazon will know you
> were viewing a page with the donation button
Despite their mediocre privacy policy, I tend to believe their statement that they discard these logs. I would not be surprised if they changed that policy in the future though. They have a record.:-)
I've got very mixed feelings about this sort of thing. One part ofme agrees with the popular attitude that this is a serious privacy concern, and I don't want greedy corporations collecting files on me.
OTOH, when I first gt on the 'net back in the '80s my "Mentor" explained to me that once you left the local network, anything you did/wrote was at least possible to observe. Remember, this was back in the '80s!
I took that to heart, and have always assumed this was possible, so now that we know it's happening, I'm not too surprised. I'm not happy, but it has not changed my notions of the 'net at all.
BTW, I donated $2.00 to BBSspot, I really like their site. I discovered it a few weeks ago and was laughing for hours. I intend to do this at any site I like a lot which uses this "tip jar".
> I for one am heading over to Amazon right now to
> check this out
Check out their affiliate program too. It's the *only* thing I've made money worth speaking about on my several web sites recently. (No I won't list them here! (you can find one really easily, it's the personal one)
I'm thinking of dumping the other ads, they don't really do squat anymore. My sites do seem to attract people who like to buy books, and someone bought a VCR last week!
Their 1 Click patent does bother me though, but I'm not quite as against such things as the average slashdot reader, I only feel that they went a bit too far with that one.:-)
> Software you always have to install by hand
> Postfix, or something easier to configure than
> Sendmail
I have become a postfix convert after experiencing it under Mandrake. Since then, I've had to install RedHat 6.2 on some machines at work, and found that the Mandrake 7.1 postfix rpm works quite well. The compatibility goes both ways...
This bothered me a lot in the past, now I find that I don't notice it. Even worse, a few days ago a co-worker was mistaking a cracker for a hacker, and I did not even notice until he'd said it several times.
I understand where you're coming from, but I like to use the oldest, lowest level of technology that will do a good job, and this conservative philosophy does seem to be shared by many in the free software field.
Remember that Linus didn't start out to write an innovative new kernel, he set out to write a free version of something that was already around twenty years old at the time. I think that this was a good decision.
Of coure, if a new aproach is *needed* to get a job done, either from a technical standpoint, or a legal one, then it should be used.
That sounds rather like what the "sticky bit" in the Unix file permissions used to do, it would cause the program to stay in memory so that it would seem to execute faster the next time.
I've heard two reasons why this was changed:
More efficient handling of memory made it unnecessary, and/or, commercial application vendors abused the sticky bit to make their apps start faster.
I do not vouch for either of those reasons myself, but they do sound plausible.
I have an AMD K62-450 with 256M of memory. vmware is useful, so long as I only run one or two applications in the foreground. If I let install scripts launch lots of stuff at startup, it rapidly becomes uselessly slow.
It's great for checking web pages with IE, it runs Word OK (I usually use StarOffice under Linux), and my scanner and digital camera software work great under it as well.
I've had a few cases recently where what sounded like real humans left telamarketing messages. I laughed, thinking that they were pretty stupid expecting a response.
Now I wonder if they called intending to leave an advertising message.
Well, about I ever use the land-line phone for anymore is 'net access, when the cable modems make I to my neighborhood, it might go.
When the telemarketers get a hold of my cell phone number (I don't even let the people at work know *that*), then I'm going to scream.
> > Can you make a Unix systems administrator into > > a fictional character who people will find > > compelling? > > Oooh, maybe it'll transfer over into real life > and I'll have wild exciting adventures with > beautiful women and car chases.
It hasn't already? The rest of us have been enjoying these perks ever since the book came out...
Seriously, a few years ago I decided to leave electronics and get a job in a more computer-replated field. I chose sysadmin over programming because I was in my mid '30s at the time, and not getting any younger...
I suspect that, in practice, such an implanted tag would never communicate directly with a satalite.
The range would probably be 5 to 10 feet, and they would be activated by earthbound "location transceivers". These would talk to the sattilites (or maybe just use phone lines if they had a fixed position).
They would be located at the entrances to public (and many orivate) buidings, all over at airports, eventually at streetcorners, in your car (the bait would be the convenience of no car keys, but the police would love this as well...), police cars, probably in your house as part of the security system, and so on.
Whenever you passed near one of these stations, it would activate your implant, read your code, combine it with the ground stations known location, and transmit it back to the central database, maybe using a satalite, maybe not. GPS would likely only be used on those groundstations that are mobil, such as cars.
That's a likely start. Then they'll insist on them in people serving in the military, then government employees. Then people who work at corporations that deal with the governement.
During this time they will be pushed at ordinary citizens for convenience reasons. No need for car keys. No need to remember your computer passwords. Go to the head of the line at sporting events.
At some point it will become very inconvenient not to have an ID implant. Perhaps a generation later, they will be implanted at birth.
I've been expecting this for about 10 years now.
The abuse of this scares me about as much as anything in the future. If I believed that it would not be abused, then I'd move it down several notches into the "irritation" catagory. But we all know it will be misused, and worse, at some point, there will be no practical "opt-out" (that would be abuse right there).
The Netscape 4.61 that came with Mandrake 6.1 was fairly stable, but had a horrible memory leak. I upgraded to 4.7, it does not have a bad memory leak, but it crashes several time a night for me.
Slashdot Mirror
The Tyro: ...]
[... bipolar stuff
> (manics are the most dangerous of all
> psychiatric patients).
As someone with bipolar disorder, I find this offensive.
A good place to get solid information on bipolar disorder is: http://www.dbsalliance.org/ the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance
Sunlight?
Is that from the big bright light in the big blue room?
I have a BS in electrical engineering, and was doing circuit design years ago when we started using Unix ('89 or '90). I had used it elsewhere and liked it so I learned as much as I could. One thing led to another, and I was spending more time admining and coding than anything else.
Then an opening appeared in the official admin group here, I applied, was accepted, the rest is history.
> But why in every review he does of every movie is he downing it?
Trust me, he's right on this. It's a very bad movie, only worth seeing for the excellent ape-makeup/suits.
--
Jim Buchanan
> 'I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo bought Google,'
Try signing up for their "Friends of Google" list. Yahoo Groups...
--
Jim Buchanan
I'd happily donate to slashdot on occasion, it's one of the three websites I make a point to read every day.
But I sure would not pay $2.00 per week, or any required payment for any web site. There's just too much free information out there, and I'm certain that it will stay that way. Too many people enjoy giving to the community (yes, I run several free web sites myself), and when they get tired, others will be glad to take over.
I tried this for BBSspot, and it was quite easy, I'll be inclined to do so at any web site I like, but probably only a few times a year.
--
Jim Buchanan
> Even if you don't donate, Amazon will know you
:-)
> were viewing a page with the donation button
Despite their mediocre privacy policy, I tend to believe their statement that they discard these logs. I would not be surprised if they changed that policy in the future though. They have a record.
I've got very mixed feelings about this sort of thing. One part ofme agrees with the popular attitude that this is a serious privacy concern, and I don't want greedy corporations collecting files on me.
OTOH, when I first gt on the 'net back in the '80s my "Mentor" explained to me that once you left the local network, anything you did/wrote was at least possible to observe. Remember, this was back in the '80s!
I took that to heart, and have always assumed this was possible, so now that we know it's happening, I'm not too surprised. I'm not happy, but it has not changed my notions of the 'net at all.
BTW, I donated $2.00 to BBSspot, I really like their site. I discovered it a few weeks ago and was laughing for hours. I intend to do this at any site I like a lot which uses this "tip jar".
--
Jim Buchanan
> I for one am heading over to Amazon right now to
:-)
> check this out
Check out their affiliate program too. It's the *only* thing I've made money worth speaking about on my several web sites recently. (No I won't list them here! (you can find one really easily, it's the personal one)
I'm thinking of dumping the other ads, they don't really do squat anymore. My sites do seem to attract people who like to buy books, and someone bought a VCR last week!
Their 1 Click patent does bother me though, but I'm not quite as against such things as the average slashdot reader, I only feel that they went a bit too far with that one.
--
Jim Buchanan
> Software you always have to install by hand
> Postfix, or something easier to configure than
> Sendmail
I have become a postfix convert after experiencing it under Mandrake. Since then, I've had to install RedHat 6.2 on some machines at work, and found that the Mandrake 7.1 postfix rpm works quite well. The compatibility goes both ways...
--
Jim Buchanan
This bothered me a lot in the past, now I find that I don't notice it. Even worse, a few days ago a co-worker was mistaking a cracker for a hacker, and I did not even notice until he'd said it several times.
:-)
Perhaps media brainwashing is getting to me?
--
Jim Buchanan
> but nobody seems to know whether they're in the
> wild yet.
As h2odragon pointed out below, it seems to be in the wild. In fact I noticed a large increase in attempts on port 53 over the weekend myself.
--
Jim Buchanan
My first Unix experience was with SCO running on a network (UUCP) of '286 machines. The admin used a card that connected to a VCR for backups.
It sort of worked, but was very unreliable.
I suspect that the meia would be fine, but VCR's aren't really designed for data.
I understand where you're coming from, but I like to use the oldest, lowest level of technology that will do a good job, and this conservative philosophy does seem to be shared by many in the free software field.
Remember that Linus didn't start out to write an innovative new kernel, he set out to write a free version of something that was already around twenty years old at the time. I think that this was a good decision.
Of coure, if a new aproach is *needed* to get a job done, either from a technical standpoint, or a legal one, then it should be used.
That sounds rather like what the "sticky bit" in the Unix file permissions used to do, it would cause the program to stay in memory so that it would seem to execute faster the next time.
I've heard two reasons why this was changed:
More efficient handling of memory made it unnecessary, and/or, commercial application vendors abused the sticky bit to make their apps start faster.
I do not vouch for either of those reasons myself, but they do sound plausible.
A google search for css-descramble.h finds it. At least for the moment... :-)
http://cubicmetercr ystal.com/decss/source/css-descramble.h.html
I have an AMD K62-450 with 256M of memory. vmware is useful, so long as I only run one or two applications in the foreground. If I let install scripts launch lots of stuff at startup, it rapidly becomes uselessly slow.
It's great for checking web pages with IE, it runs Word OK (I usually use StarOffice under Linux), and my scanner and digital camera software work great under it as well.
I've had a few cases recently where what sounded like real humans left telamarketing messages. I laughed, thinking that they were pretty stupid expecting a response.
Now I wonder if they called intending to leave an advertising message.
Well, about I ever use the land-line phone for anymore is 'net access, when the cable modems make I to my neighborhood, it might go.
When the telemarketers get a hold of my cell phone number (I don't even let the people at work know *that*), then I'm going to scream.
If my memory is any good, Asimov wrote a story called "The Dead past", which covered this subject fairly well.
> > Can you make a Unix systems administrator into > > a fictional character who people will find
> > compelling?
>
> Oooh, maybe it'll transfer over into real life > and I'll have wild exciting adventures with > beautiful women and car chases.
It hasn't already? The rest of us have been enjoying these perks ever since the book came out...
> boonehead sysadmins...
:-)
Hey, I resent that!
Seriously, a few years ago I decided to leave electronics and get a job in a more computer-replated field. I chose sysadmin over programming because I was in my mid '30s at the time, and not getting any younger...
I suspect that, in practice, such an implanted tag would never communicate directly with a satalite.
The range would probably be 5 to 10 feet, and they would be activated by earthbound "location transceivers". These would talk to the sattilites (or maybe just use phone lines if they had a fixed position).
They would be located at the entrances to public (and many orivate) buidings, all over at airports, eventually at streetcorners, in your car (the bait would be the convenience of no car keys, but the police would love this as well...), police cars, probably in your house as part of the security system, and so on.
Whenever you passed near one of these stations, it would activate your implant, read your code, combine it with the ground stations known location, and transmit it back to the central database, maybe using a satalite, maybe not. GPS would likely only be used on those groundstations that are mobil, such as cars.
That's a likely start. Then they'll insist on them in people serving in the military, then government employees. Then people who work at corporations that deal with the governement.
During this time they will be pushed at ordinary citizens for convenience reasons. No need for car keys. No need to remember your computer passwords. Go to the head of the line at sporting events.
At some point it will become very inconvenient not to have an ID implant. Perhaps a generation later, they will be implanted at birth.
I've been expecting this for about 10 years now.
The abuse of this scares me about as much as anything in the future. If I believed that it would not be abused, then I'd move it down several notches into the "irritation" catagory. But we all know it will be misused, and worse, at some point, there will be no practical "opt-out" (that would be abuse right there).
The Netscape 4.61 that came with Mandrake 6.1 was fairly stable, but had a horrible memory leak. I upgraded to 4.7, it does not have a bad memory leak, but it crashes several time a night for me.
"The story of Mel, the real programmer"
From ESR's Jargon File and "The New Hacker's Dictionary"
The GPL should definately be on this list.