Uh, use you "brain"... *smacks chest*
on
Textmode Quake 2
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· Score: 5, Flamebait
First of all, let's figure out how big a frame is. If you have a matrix, like in a terminal, which consists of rows and columns, there is a powerful technique called "multiplication" that will allow you to calculate how many elements there are in this matrix. So, we compute the width (w) by the height (h) to get a product (p), in the form: w*h=p. Whew! That was tricky, but it gets more complicated! Consider that each character on the terminal (for ASCII, not Unicode) is one byte. That is eight bits. Since bandwidth is measured in bits, this what we're interested in. So, we take our product (p) and do that crazy "multiplication" thing again in: p*8. WOW! But let's not slow down there!! We're almost near the end! The result of p*8 (which is actually (w*h)*8, surprisingly) is only for one frame! So what do we do? Think that maybe the average number of frames we'll get per second is 20. That means, that every second, 20 frames of p*8 bits passes through the wire. You know what that means, MORE multiplication! p*8*20, crazy, isn't it? It comes down to (w*h)*160 bits per second. So now, all YOU gotta do is figure out how big your terminal is, and that's now many bits/second it costs! Isn't math fun? (DISCLAIMER: this does not take into account compression, or encoding scemes used to reduce the number of characters sent/received.)
You're a meta-moderation terrorist. Not to mention a complete fucking cocksmoking fuckwad. I mean, where the FUCK do you get off meta-moderating negative ratings as unfair? Are you saying things like Klerck's page-lengthening posts should be left at a default posting level of 1 (which it would be, if nobody moderated down).
And the risk of feeding a hungry troll, let me justify why I don't give credit to moderators who waste their points on people like you.
First of all, take your average/. story submission. After the first 24 hours, you're probably looking at a ballpark figure of 200-400 replies. Often in this range, you'll get anywhere between 0 and 10 posts that get moderated up to a score 4 or 5. By this time, the default reading level collapses posts of 3 points or less, and filters AC's who have start with a score of 0.
Now, given that when you are chosen to do a moderation on this system, you get five points. If you pick 5 good posts, you can raise all 5 of them above the cacophony of the discussion. However, if you take your 5 points, and find 5 trolls out of hundreds, you accomplish absolutely nothing but indirectly censor 5 people who deserve to have their comments read.
I've seen dozens of really awesome, insightful posts that only made it to 3, and thus get collapsed (making reading more of a hassle), but in the same forum, there are some trolls with a whole lot of negative moderations. (They ONLY have to be modded down ONCE people, and they don't lose more karma after they've hit -1.) So, as you can see, moderating ANYONE down is inherently unfair because it only hurts the people who post intelligent comments.
Yes, I definitely agree that SGI has done some killer things. They revolutionized the graphics industry and demonstrated that computers can be made to do visual effects never dreamed of. Their systems are powerful tools for research. All in all, they've been quite swell.
But, we don't need them anymore. Nor do we want them.
SGI offers big, expensive, proprietary solutions, that like Microsoft, lock you into their product line with little or no hope of escape. Let's discuss the reasons.
1. Lack of extensibility. SGI boxen typically do not scale well, and if they do, much of your hardware has to be replaced to accomplish any scaling. Ever try to upgrade an Indy? And O2!? I certainly understand that in any upgrade, sacrifices of existing hardware must be made, but they are no champions of modularity.
2. Proprietary hardware. SGI hardware, for its consumer price-level equivalents is not all that great. You can spend $16,000 on one or maybe two decent SGI systems, or you can buy 10-15 high-powered PC's and cluster them. You get the advantages of redundancy too. Another problem here is repair work. Nobody but SGI and SGI certified technicians can repair their hardware. Worse still, only SGI and a few licensed vendors manufacture SGI hardware replacements. More money here. And then there is Irix...
3. Proprietary OS and software. Irix is a disgrace. Certainly, it's a great performer, but because it's geared specifically to SGI hardware. Take Linux and optimise it to the same level and write good drivers, and you'd have not just a strong contender, but a superior OS. However, it's just not there and SGI doesn't want it to be. They're too proud of their OS and they want Irix tools to remain Irix-only so SGI software vendors can't take their products to other markets without tough costs. Since everyone does servers these days, SGI doesn't mind having Linux run on Challenge or other volume servers. Besides, everyone who wants Big Iron for www.hugefuckingcompany.com uses Sun anyway.
All in all, what SGI does for huge costs can be done in the PC scene with a fraction of the price. Perhaps not in Linux yet, but certainly in Windows with products from NewTek and ReelMagic for example. With nVidia around pumping out killer graphics hardware, what do we really need SGI for? I guess the only reason I can see is that they produce big solutions (who else will build a C.A.V.E. for you?). Can anyone clue me in on what it is exactly SGI does that we can't do everywhere else these days?
What's a good reason that companies should care any further than what is necessary to restore the site to working order. The amount of revenue lost due to a defaced web site is probably so small that it cannot be calculated. Why waste all the man hours and money to seek out and prosecute web bandits? The real money wasted would be in the legal proceedings, and then the company would become its own worst enemy. They spend money on an IT staff to handle these things... might as well get the mileage out of the people they've hired.
As players jump off the memory bandwagon, competition will decrease. When that happens, surviving manufacturers will have no reason to keep the prices low. I suppose it'd be a good idea to buy up RAM now.
In some systems, more points of failure is good.
on
Wriggling Heat Sinks
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· Score: 2
Multiple points of failure in a system without cycles, such as A->B->C->D->E are bad. If you're going from A->E, B, C, or D could fail and ruin the whole thing. However, if you had A->B & A->C & A->D, etc... then more points of failure are a Good Thing. Now look at another case. If you have a device A that does 100% of the work, and it fails, than you have 100% failure. If you have devices A, B, C, and D, each doing 25% of the work, and one fails, you only have 25% failure. More points of failure is good in this case. With a ton of these tiny fans, if some fail, the system continues to work without damage. Think, write, read, think, rewrite, think, preview, post. Try it.
Direct quote from Jackson's production notes...
on
The Hype of the Rings
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· Score: 2
13, June, 1999 "Where there's a whip, there's a way...
"Where there's a whip, there's a way!
"The cast says they don't want to go to war today!
"But, you know that I'll say, 'nay, Nay, NAY!'
"They're gonna march! All day, all day!
"They're just slaves of New Line's war.!"
Why? Are 18 years NOT adults? They are, they should have all the privelages and all the responsibilities of the rest of the world. You admitted you broke the rules. You should be punished under the law when you break the rules. Can 18 years old not understand that? I am 20, and I can understand that. Why are you so different (well, back then, why were you so different?).
Yes, I certainly agree that a person should be punished if they break the law. I am not an anarchist. If you had actually read my post, you would have realized that I am talking about the punishment not fitting the crime. The punishment for computer crime is far overblown, I suspect because people (read: lawmakers) are still afraid of it. They do not understand it. We see countless other severe offenders like murderers and rapists get off their crimes with on average 1.5-2.5 year sentences. Many computer crimes see offenders get as many as five years or more! Is that justice? I think you oughta rethink your blind faith in supporting our justice system. Murder deserves jail time and a lot of it. Harmlessly poking around in a system does not. And again, maybe one day you'll understand, and perhaps even think for yourself without believing what the Man tells you verbatim. (News Flash! Computer crime is not worse than killing someone!)
You deserve it. You admit that it was wrong. You admit that you shouldn't have done it. Yet you suffered no consequences. Therefore no justice was served.
I never said it was wrong. I performed a valuable service to my university by informing them of a serious problem. I did say I was stupid because at the time, I thought my actions would be recognized as useful. As for suffeirng no consequences, you're full of it. I got fined out the ass and served probation for a year. Not to mention having my computer equipment destroyed (several thousand dollars worth was shipped back to me in boxes w/o any packaging). I was punished, but in great excess. Do you understand what it means to do something to excess?
I said before and I said now: I do not care the end result of the punishment. Whether or not your life is ruined after accepting the consequences is irrelevant to me. That is entirely up to you. Punishments hurt. Thats the name of the game.
Yes, punishment hurts, but punishment is useless if it ruins the potential your life holds. Did your parents, when they spanked you, intend for your future career options to be eliminated? No. They wanted to correct your ways to keep you on a path of success. By going so overboard, the FBI would have ruined my academic and professional careers if we hadn't gotten the offense reduced. What good would that have done? Our country doesn't need more burger flippers or uneducated people. It needs less of both! You still miss the point! YOU DON'T EXECUTE SOMEONE FOR STEALING A LOAF OF BREAD!
Again, what a load of crap. To begin, being a paying student is irrelevant. Can I hack the public utilities since they are public? Could my father kill me because he created me, and paid for me to be raised, and raised me? That is no mitigation. That actually makes it worse: you admit you had a vested interest yet you still acted poorly; it was community property (paid for in part by thousands of other students! what about their interests!) and you mistreated it.
First off, you're still blowing this out of proportion. I compromised a few non-vital systems on a college network of a school I attended, and let the admins know how I did it and how to fix it to boot. This is not on the same grounds as a father murdering his own son. Repeat after me: "computer cracking is not as bad as murder". It is not even close. If a parent murders their own child, that's a criminal act and should be severely punished because it is a severe offense. Duh. If a student cracks a system belonging to his university, he at worst, deserves a small fine and his network access pivaledge revoked. That would have been more than enough punishment. Ending my academic career and spoiling mine, or anyone's professional possiblities over such a small matter is absurd.
Well, this is a waste of time and I am going to end it here. Continuing to read your post, it's clear that you either didn't read what I wrote, or you are unable to comprehend it. I don't care what the law says, I'm talking about the absurdity of it! The law is wrong. It was made by people who are afraid of computer technology and think that "hackers" will bring down our nation if they go unchecked. Sorry, but that is completely wrong. Crimes that hurt people are wrong. Computer crimes that take down networks and cause extensive outages are also wrong. Neither of these are things I did. I didn't write Red Code and prevent thousands of people from gaining network access. I didn't prevent network access for anyone! No harm done. The university would have saved a LOT time and money if they would have just fixed the problem and talked to me about it. Addressing me on the issue in a civilized and appropriate manner would not only have corrected my ways, it would have made me retain respect for the university and the legal system. Plus, I probably would have gotten to interact with some really bright techies. Instead, I got to interact with two FBI agents bent on ending me. But that won't convince you, I'm sure.
You're more interested in seeing lives destroyed than seeing people learn. Punishment is meaningless if it doesn't teach someone something about what they've done. If you're going to punish someone so severely that they cannot continue to function in any positive sense afterwards, you might as well have killed them in the first place.
I'm sorry, doing something stupid when you're 18 does not justify academic and professional murder nor is it suicide in those respects. You're going way too far overboard in your idea of what consitutes punishment for my offenses.
First of all, I was a paying student. The money I put into the university system there made those machines run. I had vested interest, so that lessens the severity of the intrusion. If you trespass somewhere on a college campus, as a student, they don't convict you of a felony. They realize you're a college student and you're not only stupid, you're probably just goofing around. They slap you on the wrist, send you home. End of story. They do not kick you out then tell the rest of the world what you did so that no other schools accept you.
Your opinion here is so utterly absurd that it baffles me how someone so intelligent would believe that it makes sense to destroy a person's entire life over a minor offense. Punishment is supposed to correct someone's way to conforming their behavior within the laws. Punishment is not supposed to ruin a person. I suppose your parent's never said "it's for your own good" when they administered a spanking?
The FBI was poised to destroy my life in countless conceivable ways. If I cannot acquire an education and hence live a professional career as a computer scientist, there's not much else I could do at this point. The life I have always wanted would be unreachable. So I cost the university a few man hours patching a few systems that had obvious security holes. I'm sure they made some student do the patching (which I informed the admins needed to be done, which is how I got caught - go benevolence) for free.
The justice system is supposed to balance the punishment with the offense because it is supposed to (as I previously mention) help offenders correct their ways. You do not execute someone for stealing a loaf of bread.
Maybe if you had the experiences I had in the whole situation, you would not hold this silly right-wing extremist viewpoint that believes punishment for every crime is death by sodomy. What I ended up getting was still too much to fit the crime, in not only my opinion, but in the opinions of people much more rational than yourself. (One of my laywers included, who managed to get one of the guys the university to admit, over the phone, that they wanted to make an example out of me by going overboard.)
Oh well... there's just too much I can say here and I know this is a lost cause. I should quit before I fall too far behind in the face of ignorance. Since you show me the discourtesy of defending injustice, I can only respond with the hope that one day you find yourself on the wrong end of an FBI prosecution. Maybe then you'll understand.
That would have been the IT services at the college I was attending (OTC if it gives any particular people a clue). And in my opinion, it was not that much of a problem for them or anyone involved. I didn't disrupt any systems, just sort of got a little too eager to see if I could do... things. *sheepish look* Come to think of it, this is a pretty pathetic thing to have to defend on Slashdot. I think everyone here knows very well that in under some circumstances, organizations severely overreact when they've been "hacked". Look at my case. I was a student of a university and I broke into some systems on that very university network. Do you honestly think they had real cause for concern? None of the proverbial, "oh, you've got some talent, but must be bored... what can we do to enrich your experience?" Instead, it was two mean agents hauling off my equipment one day when I got back from a physics class (noting as I came home a car with gov't plates sitting on the front lawn of my dorm;).
The kids face up to five years, of course since they aren't in the US, they might actually be punished.
Computer crimes are MORE than sufficiently punished in the US, thank you very much. I don't know where you get off implying that the US goes easy on computer "crime". I had a little incident during my freshman year of college. The FBI was very determined to get me jail time for a ridiculously minor offense. It was only through sheer wit and creativity of my laywers that we got the offense down to a misdemeanor and a lousy 600$US fine. That was the most hellish time of my entire life and could have ruined my career forever. All over a tiny little deal (no damage was done).
Imagine what these kids would get in the US for writing such a worm. It'd be a helluva lot worse than 5 years in prison. So put your pro-punishment attitudes away and get real. Remember what our government does to computer criminals.
``The amazing thing about Quicktime is that there was nothing like it before, and everything has been like it since,'' notes PBS commentator Robert X. Cringley. ``Look at the guts of Real Player or Windows Media Player, and you'll see structural copies of QuickTime.''
Aside from the overblown technological utopianism in this article that would make Theodore Roszak (The Cult of Information) physically ill, we have this man's opinion. Robert X. Cringley, self declared cyber evangelist telling us that QuickTime is the end-all, be-all of ALL multimedia formats. Aside from the fact that he's always prone to blow things out of proportion, Cringley has very little technical knowledge, let alone an understanding of software strucutre (or "guts" as he puts it). (Note he completely ignores that most features found in QuickTime today such as streaming capability and portal functionality were derived from RealMedia's software.) Oh yes, QuickTime has brought about a revolution in digital media! It brought democracy to the web! And nobody has ever duplicated it or surpassed it since! Nonsense.
This is all just foolishness and people need to calm down. It's a media format wrapper (not a codec like MPEG as most of these Slashfools are contending). That's all. QuickTime didn't start a revolution. It didn't change the world. And it certainly isn't the greatest thing in multimedia today. Similar technologies were being developed by a number of groups at the same time and we have equivalent if not better tools for producing and converging digital media today.
The Debian installer IMHO, is very elegant, smooth, and has a near perfect balance of functionality for power users and entry level users alike. Power users generally get the flexability they need, and entry level users only need to contribute a little bit more thought than say, RedHat's installer. I say, KISS, and hang onto this installer for a little while longer. The only real problem I've ever seen with Debian's installer was the dselect stage, where most users choke completely. That however, has become an option and users may now run the simple and straight foward tasksel util. If the Debian people are going to try and replace this installer, I certainly hope they keep the existing paradigms around for those of us who love Debian as it is (it's the only perfect distro in my book).
On the other hand, what Debian really needs to do is enhance and extend the aforementions tasksel utility. Tasksel has the right idea, but it doesn't go far enough. It's not very extensive and it'd be nice to break things down into smaller groups without having to jump all the way over to dselect. For example, from tasksel, installing the TeX packages is clear, but maybe I want all the immediately necessary LaTeX components and not all the utilities that convert TeX to every other format imaginable for documents. But make this a hierarchial option that's hidden in tree form under this task. That'll give us more middle ground between tasksel and dselect.
What software and codecs are being used for playback? Are they something that's already public domain or are they being developed specifically for this box? Much media playback software for Linux currently is "OKay", but with frequent crashes, poor features, and artifacts, it's got a long way to go. If this is going to be a consumer product, I imagine the software will be a little more polished, or at the very least, provide decent functionality in the form of front-ends that users of other platforms have expected. Is this software to be available to us or will it have to be hacked mercilessly out of the box and liberated from a restrictive license?
As I already wrote in another post, I didn't do extensive testing to compare patch-int and cryptoapi, but I *did* have lost data with patch-int: some files got garbled beyond repair (to quantify, I'd say less than 1% of them). I was using twofish.
I had this problem once or twice, but using either serpent or blowfish. It happened after typing a bad passphrase... and e2fsck kicked in and complained about fs errors. Of course, I've gone a little crazy with my set up. I have two hard disks, each encrypted with a different algorithm, that are then interleaved using RAID0. I love it.:) But it's trouble prone.
Now I'm using cryptoapi, and I didn't have any trouble (at least not yet).
Got any links or should I just look in standard locations? (Kernel archives, freshmeat?)
Another point: you may have troubles with losetup/mount, depending on the distribution you use. In that case, download util-linux from the kernel site, apply the patches and recompile. I keep two separate copies (called losetup-crypto and (u)mount-crypto) of the utilities.
That's one reason I mentioned having the latest utilities. Older versions don't support crypto stuff (obviously). But there's really nothing wrong with making hte latest util-linux package your primary. Why do you keep separate binaries?
I don't think I agree with the the suggestion about reiserfs. ReiserFS has no trouble with fsck simply because it doesn't do fsck... I'd suggest use whatever you want but disable auto-checking or, even better, modify the startup scripts to make sure that the passphrase is good (just try to mount the fs) before attempting a fsck.
Well, I suggested Reiser because in light of things not being set up properly, I think it's a little more careful before it goes and tries to replay a journal on a corrupted fs. That may actually be a positive fault here, as giving up early protects your data. In general though, I prefer a journaled fs so I'm boasting some advocacy here.:)
Sorry to everyone who was offended by my last comment in this post. I did in fact mean to help, but I just though that the original submitter of this Ask/. question could have done a little more work figuring this out. Hell, even I managed to get my file systems encrypted with that outdated HOWTO.
Nonetheless, I'm sorry for spoiling something informative with some elitist babble. It's just a knee-jerk reaction from time to time.
The kernel patch you refer to is not outdated. There just is no reason to release new versions. Here's how you patch your kernel with the international patch.
One level up from your Linux source tree (typically/usr/src), do...
zcat ~/patch-int-2.4.3.1.gz | patch -p0 -E
You'll notice a chunk fails. The ONLY problem here is patching the root Makefile. Look at the file/usr/src/linux/Makefile.rej. It shows you what lines failed. You can easily fix this by adding (under the DRIVERS line)
CRYPTO = crypto/crypto.o
And changing the line
SUBDIRS = kernel drivers mm fs net ipc lib
to...
SUBDIRS = kernel drivers mm fs net ipc lib crypto
Now your kernel should be properly patched. Make it mrproper, then configure as needed. Add the proper cyphers (I'm sure you can figure this out). Typically, serpent and blowfish are the best choices. Also, build them as modules so you can harvest a little extra entropy.:) Also, make sure you build the loopback device as a module, and then add crypto support. I assume you know how to load modules
Now for the easy part. Once you have the kernel modules built and loaded, make sure you have the latest mount tools (including losetup). Pick the device file you want to use as an encrypted file system. For this example, I'm going to use hda3 with 256 bit serpent encryption for shits & giggles.
It will prompt you for a pass phrase. Use a PHRASE and REMEMBER this. You cannot change the passphrase of an encrypted fs after you set it. Get it right. Next, format the device/dev/loop0 with your favorite file system (I prefer ReierFS because I've had trouble with ext2 fscking of encrypted file systems -- data loss most notably whenever I mistyped my passphrase). Do something like
Now, every time you boot or mount that file system, it will ask you for the key length and the pass phrase. And there you go. Encrypted file system. Yea.
You can see how trivially easy that was and if you had put about half an hour's thought into it, you could have realized that the "outdated" howto hasn't been updated because the process is pretty much unchanged and you would not have wasted our time with yet another linux newbie Ask/. question. But that's just my opinion.
Next time you ship a computer with UPS, label the box with "BIOHAZARD" (with that nifty, sharp, menacing logo). Chances are, shippers won't want to break it open, exposing themselves to strange, white powder. Of course, they may call the FBI... which would only lend more scrutiny to the package care... and if it's damaged, you could sue both the FBI & UPS. Right?
Maybe it would help our troubled friend in winning compensation if we wrote little notes that he could attach to letters destined for UPS. UPS just might react to having its name widely tarnished and many voices speaking out for an ill-treated customer. Even if Jutus is from Canada, I think this is the least we as a community could do to help him out.:)
To Whom It May Concern,
This kind of service is an outrage, and it has now become a powerful public warning to the rest of us who ship computer hardware and other sensitive equipment. Typically, I've used UPS to move my machines around over long distances (Pitt, PA to Coos Bay, OR). I've almost always used UPS when ordering PC components off the Internet.
If this is how fragile packages are treated by UPS in shipment, I feel they are no longer a sufficient carrier for electronic goods. Furthermore, the action or lack thereof, to resolve the situation this young man experienced in a satisfactory fashion, shows that UPS has no good faith whatsoever towards providing good value for their customers or well being for the packages they ship.
I'm afraid it would be foolish and unwise for myself or anyone else to use such an unreliable and irresponsible delivery service. I'm sure if UPS would be willing to fully compensate individuals for destroyed packages and destroyed contents, this attitude could be easily changed. Until then, UPS must remain a service to be avoided.
I hope you are willing to correct your mistakes in this case so that myself and others may resume use of your services. Thank you.
This memo talks about "winning" customers from one platform or another. Reading through the posts here, I see lots of people saying how they got "wins" by switching some server to Linux from Windows or UNIX or whatever.
This is the wrong strategy. This is playing by the rules Microsoft want to set. How about we follow the lead Linus sets and just do our thing and improve over ourselves, and not worry about what MS think.
If peoeple are wise and insightful enough to use Linux over other solutions, let them reap the benefits. Otherwise, lets not waste our efforts cramming success down peoples' throats. If they want to suffer with Windows, let them. We'll still have the superior operating system, and their increased costs will enact Darwin's laws.
We will lose if we play Microsoft's game. They have it rigged against us. Concentrate on code... write software, not marketing pamphlets.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, let's figure out how big a frame is. If you have a matrix, like in a terminal, which consists of rows and columns, there is a powerful technique called "multiplication" that will allow you to calculate how many elements there are in this matrix. So, we compute the width (w) by the height (h) to get a product (p), in the form: w*h=p. Whew! That was tricky, but it gets more complicated! Consider that each character on the terminal (for ASCII, not Unicode) is one byte. That is eight bits. Since bandwidth is measured in bits, this what we're interested in. So, we take our product (p) and do that crazy "multiplication" thing again in: p*8. WOW! But let's not slow down there!! We're almost near the end! The result of p*8 (which is actually (w*h)*8, surprisingly) is only for one frame! So what do we do? Think that maybe the average number of frames we'll get per second is 20. That means, that every second, 20 frames of p*8 bits passes through the wire. You know what that means, MORE multiplication! p*8*20, crazy, isn't it? It comes down to (w*h)*160 bits per second. So now, all YOU gotta do is figure out how big your terminal is, and that's now many bits/second it costs! Isn't math fun? (DISCLAIMER: this does not take into account compression, or encoding scemes used to reduce the number of characters sent/received.)
You're a meta-moderation terrorist. Not to mention a complete fucking cocksmoking fuckwad. I mean, where the FUCK do you get off meta-moderating negative ratings as unfair? Are you saying things like Klerck's page-lengthening posts should be left at a default posting level of 1 (which it would be, if nobody moderated down).
/. story submission. After the first 24 hours, you're probably looking at a ballpark figure of 200-400 replies. Often in this range, you'll get anywhere between 0 and 10 posts that get moderated up to a score 4 or 5. By this time, the default reading level collapses posts of 3 points or less, and filters AC's who have start with a score of 0.
And the risk of feeding a hungry troll, let me justify why I don't give credit to moderators who waste their points on people like you.
First of all, take your average
Now, given that when you are chosen to do a moderation on this system, you get five points. If you pick 5 good posts, you can raise all 5 of them above the cacophony of the discussion. However, if you take your 5 points, and find 5 trolls out of hundreds, you accomplish absolutely nothing but indirectly censor 5 people who deserve to have their comments read.
I've seen dozens of really awesome, insightful posts that only made it to 3, and thus get collapsed (making reading more of a hassle), but in the same forum, there are some trolls with a whole lot of negative moderations. (They ONLY have to be modded down ONCE people, and they don't lose more karma after they've hit -1.) So, as you can see, moderating ANYONE down is inherently unfair because it only hurts the people who post intelligent comments.
Think about it.
Yes, I definitely agree that SGI has done some killer things. They revolutionized the graphics industry and demonstrated that computers can be made to do visual effects never dreamed of. Their systems are powerful tools for research. All in all, they've been quite swell.
But, we don't need them anymore. Nor do we want them.
SGI offers big, expensive, proprietary solutions, that like Microsoft, lock you into their product line with little or no hope of escape. Let's discuss the reasons.
1. Lack of extensibility. SGI boxen typically do not scale well, and if they do, much of your hardware has to be replaced to accomplish any scaling. Ever try to upgrade an Indy? And O2!? I certainly understand that in any upgrade, sacrifices of existing hardware must be made, but they are no champions of modularity.
2. Proprietary hardware. SGI hardware, for its consumer price-level equivalents is not all that great. You can spend $16,000 on one or maybe two decent SGI systems, or you can buy 10-15 high-powered PC's and cluster them. You get the advantages of redundancy too. Another problem here is repair work. Nobody but SGI and SGI certified technicians can repair their hardware. Worse still, only SGI and a few licensed vendors manufacture SGI hardware replacements. More money here. And then there is Irix...
3. Proprietary OS and software. Irix is a disgrace. Certainly, it's a great performer, but because it's geared specifically to SGI hardware. Take Linux and optimise it to the same level and write good drivers, and you'd have not just a strong contender, but a superior OS. However, it's just not there and SGI doesn't want it to be. They're too proud of their OS and they want Irix tools to remain Irix-only so SGI software vendors can't take their products to other markets without tough costs. Since everyone does servers these days, SGI doesn't mind having Linux run on Challenge or other volume servers. Besides, everyone who wants Big Iron for www.hugefuckingcompany.com uses Sun anyway.
All in all, what SGI does for huge costs can be done in the PC scene with a fraction of the price. Perhaps not in Linux yet, but certainly in Windows with products from NewTek and ReelMagic for example. With nVidia around pumping out killer graphics hardware, what do we really need SGI for? I guess the only reason I can see is that they produce big solutions (who else will build a C.A.V.E. for you?). Can anyone clue me in on what it is exactly SGI does that we can't do everywhere else these days?
What's a good reason that companies should care any further than what is necessary to restore the site to working order. The amount of revenue lost due to a defaced web site is probably so small that it cannot be calculated. Why waste all the man hours and money to seek out and prosecute web bandits? The real money wasted would be in the legal proceedings, and then the company would become its own worst enemy. They spend money on an IT staff to handle these things... might as well get the mileage out of the people they've hired.
Hou..., uh, Redmond, we have a problem.
As players jump off the memory bandwagon, competition will decrease. When that happens, surviving manufacturers will have no reason to keep the prices low. I suppose it'd be a good idea to buy up RAM now.
Multiple points of failure in a system without cycles, such as A->B->C->D->E are bad. If you're going from A->E, B, C, or D could fail and ruin the whole thing. However, if you had A->B & A->C & A->D, etc... then more points of failure are a Good Thing. Now look at another case. If you have a device A that does 100% of the work, and it fails, than you have 100% failure. If you have devices A, B, C, and D, each doing 25% of the work, and one fails, you only have 25% failure. More points of failure is good in this case. With a ton of these tiny fans, if some fail, the system continues to work without damage. Think, write, read, think, rewrite, think, preview, post. Try it.
Is this a joke? Seriously.
13, June, 1999
"Where there's a whip, there's a way...
"Where there's a whip, there's a way!
"The cast says they don't want to go to war today!
"But, you know that I'll say, 'nay, Nay, NAY!'
"They're gonna march! All day, all day!
"They're just slaves of New Line's war.!"
Why? Are 18 years NOT adults? They are, they should have all the privelages and all the responsibilities of the rest of the world. You admitted you broke the rules. You should be punished under the law when you break the rules. Can 18 years old not understand that? I am 20, and I can understand that. Why are you so different (well, back then, why were you so different?).
Yes, I certainly agree that a person should be punished if they break the law. I am not an anarchist. If you had actually read my post, you would have realized that I am talking about the punishment not fitting the crime. The punishment for computer crime is far overblown, I suspect because people (read: lawmakers) are still afraid of it. They do not understand it. We see countless other severe offenders like murderers and rapists get off their crimes with on average 1.5-2.5 year sentences. Many computer crimes see offenders get as many as five years or more! Is that justice? I think you oughta rethink your blind faith in supporting our justice system. Murder deserves jail time and a lot of it. Harmlessly poking around in a system does not. And again, maybe one day you'll understand, and perhaps even think for yourself without believing what the Man tells you verbatim. (News Flash! Computer crime is not worse than killing someone!)
You deserve it. You admit that it was wrong. You admit that you shouldn't have done it. Yet you suffered no consequences. Therefore no justice was served.
I never said it was wrong. I performed a valuable service to my university by informing them of a serious problem. I did say I was stupid because at the time, I thought my actions would be recognized as useful. As for suffeirng no consequences, you're full of it. I got fined out the ass and served probation for a year. Not to mention having my computer equipment destroyed (several thousand dollars worth was shipped back to me in boxes w/o any packaging). I was punished, but in great excess. Do you understand what it means to do something to excess?
I said before and I said now: I do not care the end result of the punishment. Whether or not your life is ruined after accepting the consequences is irrelevant to me. That is entirely up to you. Punishments hurt. Thats the name of the game.
Yes, punishment hurts, but punishment is useless if it ruins the potential your life holds. Did your parents, when they spanked you, intend for your future career options to be eliminated? No. They wanted to correct your ways to keep you on a path of success. By going so overboard, the FBI would have ruined my academic and professional careers if we hadn't gotten the offense reduced. What good would that have done? Our country doesn't need more burger flippers or uneducated people. It needs less of both! You still miss the point! YOU DON'T EXECUTE SOMEONE FOR STEALING A LOAF OF BREAD!
Again, what a load of crap. To begin, being a paying student is irrelevant. Can I hack the public utilities since they are public? Could my father kill me because he created me, and paid for me to be raised, and raised me? That is no mitigation. That actually makes it worse: you admit you had a vested interest yet you still acted poorly; it was community property (paid for in part by thousands of other students! what about their interests!) and you mistreated it.
First off, you're still blowing this out of proportion. I compromised a few non-vital systems on a college network of a school I attended, and let the admins know how I did it and how to fix it to boot. This is not on the same grounds as a father murdering his own son. Repeat after me: "computer cracking is not as bad as murder". It is not even close. If a parent murders their own child, that's a criminal act and should be severely punished because it is a severe offense. Duh. If a student cracks a system belonging to his university, he at worst, deserves a small fine and his network access pivaledge revoked. That would have been more than enough punishment. Ending my academic career and spoiling mine, or anyone's professional possiblities over such a small matter is absurd.
Well, this is a waste of time and I am going to end it here. Continuing to read your post, it's clear that you either didn't read what I wrote, or you are unable to comprehend it. I don't care what the law says, I'm talking about the absurdity of it! The law is wrong. It was made by people who are afraid of computer technology and think that "hackers" will bring down our nation if they go unchecked. Sorry, but that is completely wrong. Crimes that hurt people are wrong. Computer crimes that take down networks and cause extensive outages are also wrong. Neither of these are things I did. I didn't write Red Code and prevent thousands of people from gaining network access. I didn't prevent network access for anyone! No harm done. The university would have saved a LOT time and money if they would have just fixed the problem and talked to me about it. Addressing me on the issue in a civilized and appropriate manner would not only have corrected my ways, it would have made me retain respect for the university and the legal system. Plus, I probably would have gotten to interact with some really bright techies. Instead, I got to interact with two FBI agents bent on ending me. But that won't convince you, I'm sure.
You're more interested in seeing lives destroyed than seeing people learn. Punishment is meaningless if it doesn't teach someone something about what they've done. If you're going to punish someone so severely that they cannot continue to function in any positive sense afterwards, you might as well have killed them in the first place.
I'm sorry, doing something stupid when you're 18 does not justify academic and professional murder nor is it suicide in those respects. You're going way too far overboard in your idea of what consitutes punishment for my offenses.
First of all, I was a paying student. The money I put into the university system there made those machines run. I had vested interest, so that lessens the severity of the intrusion. If you trespass somewhere on a college campus, as a student, they don't convict you of a felony. They realize you're a college student and you're not only stupid, you're probably just goofing around. They slap you on the wrist, send you home. End of story. They do not kick you out then tell the rest of the world what you did so that no other schools accept you.
Your opinion here is so utterly absurd that it baffles me how someone so intelligent would believe that it makes sense to destroy a person's entire life over a minor offense. Punishment is supposed to correct someone's way to conforming their behavior within the laws. Punishment is not supposed to ruin a person. I suppose your parent's never said "it's for your own good" when they administered a spanking?
The FBI was poised to destroy my life in countless conceivable ways. If I cannot acquire an education and hence live a professional career as a computer scientist, there's not much else I could do at this point. The life I have always wanted would be unreachable. So I cost the university a few man hours patching a few systems that had obvious security holes. I'm sure they made some student do the patching (which I informed the admins needed to be done, which is how I got caught - go benevolence) for free.
The justice system is supposed to balance the punishment with the offense because it is supposed to (as I previously mention) help offenders correct their ways. You do not execute someone for stealing a loaf of bread.
Maybe if you had the experiences I had in the whole situation, you would not hold this silly right-wing extremist viewpoint that believes punishment for every crime is death by sodomy. What I ended up getting was still too much to fit the crime, in not only my opinion, but in the opinions of people much more rational than yourself. (One of my laywers included, who managed to get one of the guys the university to admit, over the phone, that they wanted to make an example out of me by going overboard.)
Oh well... there's just too much I can say here and I know this is a lost cause. I should quit before I fall too far behind in the face of ignorance. Since you show me the discourtesy of defending injustice, I can only respond with the hope that one day you find yourself on the wrong end of an FBI prosecution. Maybe then you'll understand.
That would have been the IT services at the college I was attending (OTC if it gives any particular people a clue). And in my opinion, it was not that much of a problem for them or anyone involved. I didn't disrupt any systems, just sort of got a little too eager to see if I could do... things. *sheepish look* Come to think of it, this is a pretty pathetic thing to have to defend on Slashdot. I think everyone here knows very well that in under some circumstances, organizations severely overreact when they've been "hacked". Look at my case. I was a student of a university and I broke into some systems on that very university network. Do you honestly think they had real cause for concern? None of the proverbial, "oh, you've got some talent, but must be bored... what can we do to enrich your experience?" Instead, it was two mean agents hauling off my equipment one day when I got back from a physics class (noting as I came home a car with gov't plates sitting on the front lawn of my dorm ;).
The kids face up to five years, of course since they aren't in the US, they might actually be punished.
Computer crimes are MORE than sufficiently punished in the US, thank you very much. I don't know where you get off implying that the US goes easy on computer "crime". I had a little incident during my freshman year of college. The FBI was very determined to get me jail time for a ridiculously minor offense. It was only through sheer wit and creativity of my laywers that we got the offense down to a misdemeanor and a lousy 600$US fine. That was the most hellish time of my entire life and could have ruined my career forever. All over a tiny little deal (no damage was done).
Imagine what these kids would get in the US for writing such a worm. It'd be a helluva lot worse than 5 years in prison. So put your pro-punishment attitudes away and get real. Remember what our government does to computer criminals.
See first hand this woman's opinion of the Good Morning, America TV program. I think most /. readers will find her reasons difficult to dismiss.
``The amazing thing about Quicktime is that there was nothing like it before, and everything has been like it since,'' notes PBS commentator Robert X. Cringley. ``Look at the guts of Real Player or Windows Media Player, and you'll see structural copies of QuickTime.''
Aside from the overblown technological utopianism in this article that would make Theodore Roszak (The Cult of Information) physically ill, we have this man's opinion. Robert X. Cringley, self declared cyber evangelist telling us that QuickTime is the end-all, be-all of ALL multimedia formats. Aside from the fact that he's always prone to blow things out of proportion, Cringley has very little technical knowledge, let alone an understanding of software strucutre (or "guts" as he puts it). (Note he completely ignores that most features found in QuickTime today such as streaming capability and portal functionality were derived from RealMedia's software.) Oh yes, QuickTime has brought about a revolution in digital media! It brought democracy to the web! And nobody has ever duplicated it or surpassed it since! Nonsense.
This is all just foolishness and people need to calm down. It's a media format wrapper (not a codec like MPEG as most of these Slashfools are contending). That's all. QuickTime didn't start a revolution. It didn't change the world. And it certainly isn't the greatest thing in multimedia today. Similar technologies were being developed by a number of groups at the same time and we have equivalent if not better tools for producing and converging digital media today.
The Debian installer IMHO, is very elegant, smooth, and has a near perfect balance of functionality for power users and entry level users alike. Power users generally get the flexability they need, and entry level users only need to contribute a little bit more thought than say, RedHat's installer. I say, KISS, and hang onto this installer for a little while longer. The only real problem I've ever seen with Debian's installer was the dselect stage, where most users choke completely. That however, has become an option and users may now run the simple and straight foward tasksel util. If the Debian people are going to try and replace this installer, I certainly hope they keep the existing paradigms around for those of us who love Debian as it is (it's the only perfect distro in my book).
On the other hand, what Debian really needs to do is enhance and extend the aforementions tasksel utility. Tasksel has the right idea, but it doesn't go far enough. It's not very extensive and it'd be nice to break things down into smaller groups without having to jump all the way over to dselect. For example, from tasksel, installing the TeX packages is clear, but maybe I want all the immediately necessary LaTeX components and not all the utilities that convert TeX to every other format imaginable for documents. But make this a hierarchial option that's hidden in tree form under this task. That'll give us more middle ground between tasksel and dselect.
What software and codecs are being used for playback? Are they something that's already public domain or are they being developed specifically for this box? Much media playback software for Linux currently is "OKay", but with frequent crashes, poor features, and artifacts, it's got a long way to go. If this is going to be a consumer product, I imagine the software will be a little more polished, or at the very least, provide decent functionality in the form of front-ends that users of other platforms have expected. Is this software to be available to us or will it have to be hacked mercilessly out of the box and liberated from a restrictive license?
As I already wrote in another post, I didn't do extensive testing to compare patch-int and cryptoapi, but I *did* have lost data with patch-int: some files got garbled beyond repair (to quantify, I'd say less than 1% of them). I was using twofish.
:) But it's trouble prone.
:)
I had this problem once or twice, but using either serpent or blowfish. It happened after typing a bad passphrase... and e2fsck kicked in and complained about fs errors. Of course, I've gone a little crazy with my set up. I have two hard disks, each encrypted with a different algorithm, that are then interleaved using RAID0. I love it.
Now I'm using cryptoapi, and I didn't have any trouble (at least not yet).
Got any links or should I just look in standard locations? (Kernel archives, freshmeat?)
Another point: you may have troubles with losetup/mount, depending on the distribution you use. In that case, download util-linux from the kernel site, apply the patches and recompile. I keep two separate copies (called losetup-crypto and (u)mount-crypto) of the utilities.
That's one reason I mentioned having the latest utilities. Older versions don't support crypto stuff (obviously). But there's really nothing wrong with making hte latest util-linux package your primary. Why do you keep separate binaries?
I don't think I agree with the the suggestion about reiserfs. ReiserFS has no trouble with fsck simply because it doesn't do fsck... I'd suggest use whatever you want but disable auto-checking or, even better, modify the startup scripts to make sure that the passphrase is good (just try to mount the fs) before attempting a fsck.
Well, I suggested Reiser because in light of things not being set up properly, I think it's a little more careful before it goes and tries to replay a journal on a corrupted fs. That may actually be a positive fault here, as giving up early protects your data. In general though, I prefer a journaled fs so I'm boasting some advocacy here.
Sorry to everyone who was offended by my last comment in this post. I did in fact mean to help, but I just though that the original submitter of this Ask /. question could have done a little more work figuring this out. Hell, even I managed to get my file systems encrypted with that outdated HOWTO.
Nonetheless, I'm sorry for spoiling something informative with some elitist babble. It's just a knee-jerk reaction from time to time.
Holy shit, this is funny as hell. :)
The kernel patch you refer to is not outdated. There just is no reason to release new versions. Here's how you patch your kernel with the international patch.
/usr/src), do...
/usr/src/linux/Makefile.rej. It shows you what lines failed. You can easily fix this by adding (under the DRIVERS line)
:) Also, make sure you build the loopback device as a module, and then add crypto support. I assume you know how to load modules
/dev/loop0 /dev/hda3
/dev/loop0 with your favorite file system (I prefer ReierFS because I've had trouble with ext2 fscking of encrypted file systems -- data loss most notably whenever I mistyped my passphrase). Do something like
/dev/loop0
/dev/loop0
/etc/fstab
/mountpoint reiserfs defaults,loop,auto,encryption=serpent 0 0
/. question. But that's just my opinion.
One level up from your Linux source tree (typically
zcat ~/patch-int-2.4.3.1.gz | patch -p0 -E
You'll notice a chunk fails. The ONLY problem here is patching the root Makefile. Look at the file
CRYPTO = crypto/crypto.o
And changing the line
SUBDIRS = kernel drivers mm fs net ipc lib
to...
SUBDIRS = kernel drivers mm fs net ipc lib crypto
Now your kernel should be properly patched. Make it mrproper, then configure as needed. Add the proper cyphers (I'm sure you can figure this out). Typically, serpent and blowfish are the best choices. Also, build them as modules so you can harvest a little extra entropy.
Now for the easy part. Once you have the kernel modules built and loaded, make sure you have the latest mount tools (including losetup). Pick the device file you want to use as an encrypted file system. For this example, I'm going to use hda3 with 256 bit serpent encryption for shits & giggles.
losetup --keybits 256 --encryption serpent
It will prompt you for a pass phrase. Use a PHRASE and REMEMBER this. You cannot change the passphrase of an encrypted fs after you set it. Get it right. Next, format the device
mkreiserfs
Now, destroy the loopback device...
losetup -d
And add the following line to your
/dev/hda3
Now, every time you boot or mount that file system, it will ask you for the key length and the pass phrase. And there you go. Encrypted file system. Yea.
You can see how trivially easy that was and if you had put about half an hour's thought into it, you could have realized that the "outdated" howto hasn't been updated because the process is pretty much unchanged and you would not have wasted our time with yet another linux newbie Ask
Next time you ship a computer with UPS, label the box with "BIOHAZARD" (with that nifty, sharp, menacing logo). Chances are, shippers won't want to break it open, exposing themselves to strange, white powder. Of course, they may call the FBI... which would only lend more scrutiny to the package care... and if it's damaged, you could sue both the FBI & UPS. Right?
:)
Maybe it would help our troubled friend in winning compensation if we wrote little notes that he could attach to letters destined for UPS. UPS just might react to having its name widely tarnished and many voices speaking out for an ill-treated customer. Even if Jutus is from Canada, I think this is the least we as a community could do to help him out. :)
To Whom It May Concern,
This kind of service is an outrage, and it has now become a powerful public warning to the rest of us who ship computer hardware and other sensitive equipment. Typically, I've used UPS to move my machines around over long distances (Pitt, PA to Coos Bay, OR). I've almost always used UPS when ordering PC components off the Internet.
If this is how fragile packages are treated by UPS in shipment, I feel they are no longer a sufficient carrier for electronic goods. Furthermore, the action or lack thereof, to resolve the situation this young man experienced in a satisfactory fashion, shows that UPS has no good faith whatsoever towards providing good value for their customers or well being for the packages they ship.
I'm afraid it would be foolish and unwise for myself or anyone else to use such an unreliable and irresponsible delivery service. I'm sure if UPS would be willing to fully compensate individuals for destroyed packages and destroyed contents, this attitude could be easily changed. Until then, UPS must remain a service to be avoided.
I hope you are willing to correct your mistakes in this case so that myself and others may resume use of your services. Thank you.
Sincerely,
siliconNO@SPAM.compsci.duq.edu
an engine fell from the plane some distance from the fuselage.
Uuhh... clear this up?
This memo talks about "winning" customers from one platform or another. Reading through the posts here, I see lots of people saying how they got "wins" by switching some server to Linux from Windows or UNIX or whatever.
This is the wrong strategy. This is playing by the rules Microsoft want to set. How about we follow the lead Linus sets and just do our thing and improve over ourselves, and not worry about what MS think.
If peoeple are wise and insightful enough to use Linux over other solutions, let them reap the benefits. Otherwise, lets not waste our efforts cramming success down peoples' throats. If they want to suffer with Windows, let them. We'll still have the superior operating system, and their increased costs will enact Darwin's laws.
We will lose if we play Microsoft's game. They have it rigged against us. Concentrate on code... write software, not marketing pamphlets.