I hope I don't meet you in EQ, I'm afraid you're one of those dudes who starts a character and expects to get power-levelled by the first 30+ they can find.
I've not played a huge amount of DAoC, but I discovered pretty quickly that power-leveling doesn't work there. The XP earned for killing a creature while in a party of near-equals is much, much greater than the XP earned by killing things in a very off-balance party.
Don't forget, that DS1 (Which is simply the term for the line, T1 being the service) [...]
Actually, a physical DS1 (a fiber connection) is distinct from a physical T1 (basically, a synchronous serial connection). However, they have the same bandwidth, DS1 is slightly more reliable, and DS1 is easier to implement because there's usually plenty of dark fiber already laid somewhere near the customer's site.
[...] has an SLA (which cable doesn't) guaranteed response time from the telco(Which cable doesn't), a dedicated port on a big Cisco router on their end(which cable doesn't), guaranteed bandwidth (Which cable doesn't), [...]
Yep. This is exactly the sort of stuff I wouldn't mind paying, oh say, $500/month for. The problem is, if asking the phone company to lay a T1 between two sites of your own costs $500/month and includes the same guarantees of service, reliability, and bandwidth, where does the extra $1000/month cost come from to attach it to the Internet? Surely that's not THEIR price for the bandwidth, or even a reasonable markup thereof. Prices are inflated unnaturally, therefore it's a racket.
[...] and an engineered circuit (which usually requires laying cable).
Actually, the amount of cable laid for a DS1 is normally tiny compared to the entire run, since the phone company probably has a good size chunk of dark fiber spiderwebbed all over the city. Besides, that's an INSTALL TIME cost, not a RECURRING COST, and has (or at least, should have) nothing to do with the monthly bill.
[...] In other words: You get what you pay for.
In a monopoly situation, you NEVER get what you pay for. Make no mistake about it, the AT&T breakup just turned one big monopoly into lots of regional monopolies, and customers are still losing out.
For those of you who, like me, could only vaguely remember that Mozilla introduced some nifty popup-nuking setting but couldn't remember how to turn it on, here it is:
* It is now possible to disable the JavaScript window.open() method during page load and unload events. When the dom.disable_open_during_load pref is set to "true", window.open will fail when called during an onload or onunload event, from top level script, or as part of a setTimeout or setInterval script. Setting this pref (instructions
here) should turn off most pop-up and pop-under ads that appear when you load a new page. (Bug 92955)
If you want bidirectional bandwidth, you can get it. Get a T1 or SDSL at home. It costs more? Of course it does!
The problem is, it's a racket. Less than a year ago, I tried pricing a T1 for the website of my family business, thinking I could probably pay for it by offering hosting services locally. Wow, was I ever wrong.
Southwestern Bell wanted $1500 PER MONTH for that T1 line: $500/month just for the priviledge of having a T1 (actually, a DS1, but it's the same bandwidth) running between the office and SWBell's site, plus another $1000/month "ISP" fee that included tons of crap that we didn't even need due to the fact that we were getting a T1 in the first place! At that price, I'd need to find 75 customers just to break even.
Needless to say, I said "Fuck you!" (albeit in more polite words) to Bell and got a cable modem from Cox/RoadRunner. For a little under $100/month we get ~650kbit upstream on a *bad* day, and approach 800kbit routinely. AFAIK we have infinite downstream: I have yet to see a downstream transfer that was slowed by RR's end. The downtime's not wonderful but acceptable (less than 2 hours per month on average, most of it at the dead of night or after storms).
In contrast, a co-worker was stuck living in a "Bell community" for a while and had ADSL. He had the entry level service, 128k/384k for ~$40/month; the prices for more bandwidth were at least double those of cable, all the way up the scale. His connection flaked out for a few minutes and resynchronized several times daily, and friends of his that also had DSL reported similar behavior. Worst of all, the average downtime approached a full 24 hours per month, literally an order of magnitude worse than cable. At the first chance he got, he moved elsewhere and signed up for cable modem service, and hasn't looked back since.
Red Hat, Inc. will provide free of charge the open-source Red Hat Linux operating system, office applications and associated capabilities to any school system in the United States.
Red Hat will provide online support for the software through the Red Hat Network.
I know, it's not the same as unlimited telephone support, but still considerably more than what Microsoft was offering.
Actually, if you actually READ Red Hat's proposal , they actually offered to provide both the software and the support completely gratis. IOW, a much better deal than Microsoft offering $900 million in funny-money CDs plus zero support since Windows is "so easy to use."
Luckily, since Win2k, they have been doing a *great* job of testing and working with service packs. Basically now they are just big security fixes (which is great!).
Well, almost. In particular, scroll down to the Samba 2.2.1 release notes (about 60% down the page) where it says this:
5). Fixes to allow Windows 2000 SP2 clients to join a Samba PDC.
This is just the tip of the story, actually. Microsoft used Win2K SP2 to intentionally introduce a bug (or perhaps more properly, a wart) that would break compatibility with a Samba PDC while not breaking a genuine NT 4.0 PDC (which Samba emulates with a good deal of success). It did this by sending a bogus opcode to the server and expecting a very specific error reply.
I do have to admit, however, that MS has been doing much better at keeping the quality of the Win2K service packs much greater than those for previous versions of WinNT.
Unless, of course, the first thing that Amazing Lightbulb does is shut off all run anti-virus software and delete the executables to prevent them from running later.
Or, better yet, replace them with do-nothing executables that LOOK like they're scanning for viruses. It actually shouldn't be too hard to grind out some dialog resources in MSVC++'s ResEdit (or whatever it's called these days, I last touched MSVC++ at version 4.0 many moons ago) to make a very hard to distinguish clone of the interface.
There really isn't any good Sci-Fi out there, except perhaps Stargate-SG1 and The Outer Limits.
I'll vouch for that, particularly Stargate SG-1. They do a pretty good job of making the on-show physics a superset of known real-world physics (not perfect, mind you, but it beats the hell out of even ST:TNG, the one Trek series that even came close). Plus, they have actual, honest to goodness, continuity! No reset buttons! People (even major plot-related civilizations, like the Tollen) occasionally die! I almost didn't recognize it when I first started watching, since I hadn't seen it for years since Babylon 5 ended. It was like meeting up with an old friend after years of not hearing from them!
No one, least of all me, said that a non-exec stack was all you needed to keep a box safe.
Cool. It's just that there are quite a few people out there who think that having a non-exec stack is some sort of magic pixie dust that will guard against all buffer overflows, and I felt obliged to point it out in case you were one of them (which you obviously aren't).
According to openwall, the non-exec stack and other security patches so useful in 2.0.x and 2.2.x are finally on the way to 2.4.x, giving you that extra bit of protection.
These days, many writers of buffer overflow exploits (the *only* exploit that a non-exec stack could possibly save you from, in case you didn't know) assume that vulnerable software is running with a non-exec stack, and code around it. Non-exec stack patches may have saved you from the 'kiddies in the past, but they afford no protection in 2001, although it certainly doesn't hurt your security so long as Assumption #0 is that the 'kiddies won't even be slowed down by it.
Why is it not acceptable? He wants a standard distribution of files across the various *nix directory layouts; OS and vendor agnostic.
It's not acceptable because he expects you to put BINARIES in/var! I don't know about your system, but my system has about 64MB of total space in/var, and it's there to keep archives of logfiles. I'll be damned if some prick wants to LEGALLY FORCE PEOPLE to put binaries in any particular place, DOUBLY SO if that place isn't even located on the/usr partition.
Have you ever heard of Einstien? Maybe you should label him a "megalomaniac" too. He knew he was right no matter what anyone else said. Especially little pricks like you. Was he wrong. NO.
YES. He died knowing that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were mutually incompatible, but both "right". Worse yet, he believed in the Hidden Variable flavor of QM ("God does not play dice with the Universe"), although the Copenhagen Interpretation ("spooky action at a distance") is generally accepted as being the "real" QM (look up Bell's Inequality for more info). Even geniuses and visionaries make mistakes; only megalomaniacs refuse to acknowledge their own fallibility.
Re:I like this quote from the FAQ...
on
Shared Source?
·
· Score: 1
Makes you wonder what would have happened had someone gone back in time and kept Gates from entering the software industry. Sort of like the "What if someone went back in time and killed Hitler?" question. Would we live in a world where Free software dominated, would programs come with source code under a Sun-style "community license", or would somebody else have popularized closed-source software?
Note: this is in no way an attempt to claim that Gates is as evil as Hitler was.
X files has sucked from season 5 and after. I'm sorry but you can only re-hash the same over and over and over and over.
I'm glad I'm not alone in that boat. The series has pretty much sucked since the movie (which itself wasn't too bad other than being an overlong episode with a big effects budget). I used to catch X-Files regularly, but now I'm pondering whether to catch the season finale or floss my cat.
I'm afraid someone here doesn't have full comprehension of the real world here. The entire usefulness of a computer comes from the fact that it can communicate with other computers. If MS has the 100% (minus one person) market share claimed, interoperability would be destroyed. Note: This is not a flame, this is a reality check.
I connect to the NET.
Will you still be able to connect when web pages are entirely MS-HTML 2005, ActiveX applets, and MS.NET?
I share files using Samba.
MS already has broken compatibility with Samba several times, and it took time to reverse engineer the changes and get Samba to work again. If.NET gets implemented, who's to say that MS can't just roll out a new version of SMB overnight?
I open/save/share Office docs with StarOffice.
This week. The exact problems that apply to Samba also apply here.
I view web pages with Mozilla
Then you're already familiar with the "You need Internet Explorer 7.5 Beta to view this site" phenomenon. In an MS-dominated world, this would only get worse with time.
I've never written a lick of code, let alone a device driver or modified a network protocol. I've never written a patch for an application.
Because someone else already wrote the code for you. If Linux has a "market"share of one person, that one person had better damn well be a skilled programmer.
I chat on AOL IM and Yahoo! Messenger as well as IRC.
But since in our little nightmare world, MS has 100% marketshare, there aren't any Unix servers to run those open source IRC servers on. AOL could shut down the TOC protocol and button up Oscar any day. You'll be very, very lonely.
My whole life is outside of programming.
Except that you'd be back to the stone knives and bearskins of computing without other people to be the programmers. Sort of like being a Telephone Sanitizer in a rural, agrarian society.
IANAQP, but you've glossed over an important point: the hidden-variables theory and the spooky-action-at-a-distance theory are statistically distinguishable, and not just a point of philosophy. Here's a link to an introduction to Bell's Inequality, which is widely accepted as proof of spooky-action-at-a-distance theory.
Nope. You still have the options of an external modem (pricey, but guaranteed to work) or a PCI controller-based modem (hard to find if you don't know what to look for). If you specifically look around for that magic phrase, most stores selling modems will carry at least one line of real modems.
<sarcasm>I've been using Slackware for two whole years. Yep, I'm really an old timer when it comes to Linux.</sarcasm>
Seriously, though, I like Slackware because it gets in the way less often than any other Linux distro. Sometimes the best way to learn to swim is to dive right in, and Slackware is the perfect distro for diving in to Linux. No flashy-pointy-clicky bits to keep you from using your brain, but a fairly novice-friendly install (compared to Debian or, worse, FreeBSD) that encourages self-education.
We tolerate skill-related licensing (eg, drivers' licenses) because unskilled users are a public danger. I don't think the computer illiterate are a public danger if they break their machines; they are dangerous if they vote and consume in ways that encourage things like unrestricted government surveillance. And licensing won't help that, because it is precisely the government that would take on any educational role (just like it now decides what is required in driver's ed).
There's a flaw in your argument, namely that unskilled computer users are a public danger. Can you say DDoS?
It's downright disgusting, actually. Just do a portscan for 137/udp on a cable modem or DSL netblock sometime. About 2/3 or so of them probably have a share named "C" with no password on it -- and that's just Windoze. It doesn't even touch on all the Linux boxes vulnerable to RPC or BIND exploits...
You are, of course, correct that government licensing wouldn't help the situation much. Most politicians can't tell MHz from DMCA, much less pass sane legislation regarding computers.
If you thought that the cold war with atomic weapons would leave the Earth cold and desolate, try sending an asteroid of any size to impact. According to the people they don't let out too often, a water hit is worse than a land hit as well.
Just something to think about before people get too happy about this as a defensive/offensive device.
IANAP, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong about water hits being worse. A water hit results in a lot of water vapor in the atmosphere; nuclear winter sets in, the vapor cools and condenses, you get a lot of snow and rain. The skies are nearly back to normal within two years. A land hit, however, kicks up dust. Dust doesn't condense -- the only thing that can get it out of the atmosphere quickly is to wash it out with rain. But the temperature has dropped, so new cloud formation slows, and the Earth does nothing. The nuclear winter drags on for decades.
Of course, this is talking about a planet-killer size asteroid impact. The asteroids that would be used in this technique would actually be 100m, about 1/5 the size of the smallest asteroid that would cause a global effect.
Please tell me I'm not the only one who finds it irritating when Katz writes "l997" instead of "1997". They're not the same character! In any sane font, ASCII 49 != ASCII 108, they look entirely different. Katz, don't be a script kiddie. $DIETY knows we have enough already posting to Slashdot...
Slashdot Mirror
I've not played a huge amount of DAoC, but I discovered pretty quickly that power-leveling doesn't work there. The XP earned for killing a creature while in a party of near-equals is much, much greater than the XP earned by killing things in a very off-balance party.
Some people's tastes take a somewhat different direction. :-)
Actually, a physical DS1 (a fiber connection) is distinct from a physical T1 (basically, a synchronous serial connection). However, they have the same bandwidth, DS1 is slightly more reliable, and DS1 is easier to implement because there's usually plenty of dark fiber already laid somewhere near the customer's site.
Yep. This is exactly the sort of stuff I wouldn't mind paying, oh say, $500/month for. The problem is, if asking the phone company to lay a T1 between two sites of your own costs $500/month and includes the same guarantees of service, reliability, and bandwidth, where does the extra $1000/month cost come from to attach it to the Internet? Surely that's not THEIR price for the bandwidth, or even a reasonable markup thereof. Prices are inflated unnaturally, therefore it's a racket.
Actually, the amount of cable laid for a DS1 is normally tiny compared to the entire run, since the phone company probably has a good size chunk of dark fiber spiderwebbed all over the city. Besides, that's an INSTALL TIME cost, not a RECURRING COST, and has (or at least, should have) nothing to do with the monthly bill.
In a monopoly situation, you NEVER get what you pay for. Make no mistake about it, the AT&T breakup just turned one big monopoly into lots of regional monopolies, and customers are still losing out.
For those of you who, like me, could only vaguely remember that Mozilla introduced some nifty popup-nuking setting but couldn't remember how to turn it on, here it is:
[From the Release Notes for Mozilla 0.9.4]
The problem is, it's a racket. Less than a year ago, I tried pricing a T1 for the website of my family business, thinking I could probably pay for it by offering hosting services locally. Wow, was I ever wrong.
Southwestern Bell wanted $1500 PER MONTH for that T1 line: $500/month just for the priviledge of having a T1 (actually, a DS1, but it's the same bandwidth) running between the office and SWBell's site, plus another $1000/month "ISP" fee that included tons of crap that we didn't even need due to the fact that we were getting a T1 in the first place! At that price, I'd need to find 75 customers just to break even.
Needless to say, I said "Fuck you!" (albeit in more polite words) to Bell and got a cable modem from Cox/RoadRunner. For a little under $100/month we get ~650kbit upstream on a *bad* day, and approach 800kbit routinely. AFAIK we have infinite downstream: I have yet to see a downstream transfer that was slowed by RR's end. The downtime's not wonderful but acceptable (less than 2 hours per month on average, most of it at the dead of night or after storms).
In contrast, a co-worker was stuck living in a "Bell community" for a while and had ADSL. He had the entry level service, 128k/384k for ~$40/month; the prices for more bandwidth were at least double those of cable, all the way up the scale. His connection flaked out for a few minutes and resynchronized several times daily, and friends of his that also had DSL reported similar behavior. Worst of all, the average downtime approached a full 24 hours per month, literally an order of magnitude worse than cable. At the first chance he got, he moved elsewhere and signed up for cable modem service, and hasn't looked back since.
Specifically, here are some excerpts from the actual proposal:
I know, it's not the same as unlimited telephone support, but still considerably more than what Microsoft was offering.
Actually, if you actually READ Red Hat's proposal , they actually offered to provide both the software and the support completely gratis. IOW, a much better deal than Microsoft offering $900 million in funny-money CDs plus zero support since Windows is "so easy to use."
Well, almost. In particular, scroll down to the Samba 2.2.1 release notes (about 60% down the page) where it says this:
5). Fixes to allow Windows 2000 SP2 clients to join a Samba PDC.This is just the tip of the story, actually. Microsoft used Win2K SP2 to intentionally introduce a bug (or perhaps more properly, a wart) that would break compatibility with a Samba PDC while not breaking a genuine NT 4.0 PDC (which Samba emulates with a good deal of success). It did this by sending a bogus opcode to the server and expecting a very specific error reply.
I do have to admit, however, that MS has been doing much better at keeping the quality of the Win2K service packs much greater than those for previous versions of WinNT.
Or, better yet, replace them with do-nothing executables that LOOK like they're scanning for viruses. It actually shouldn't be too hard to grind out some dialog resources in MSVC++'s ResEdit (or whatever it's called these days, I last touched MSVC++ at version 4.0 many moons ago) to make a very hard to distinguish clone of the interface.
I'll vouch for that, particularly Stargate SG-1. They do a pretty good job of making the on-show physics a superset of known real-world physics (not perfect, mind you, but it beats the hell out of even ST:TNG, the one Trek series that even came close). Plus, they have actual, honest to goodness, continuity! No reset buttons! People (even major plot-related civilizations, like the Tollen) occasionally die! I almost didn't recognize it when I first started watching, since I hadn't seen it for years since Babylon 5 ended. It was like meeting up with an old friend after years of not hearing from them!
Cool. It's just that there are quite a few people out there who think that having a non-exec stack is some sort of magic pixie dust that will guard against all buffer overflows, and I felt obliged to point it out in case you were one of them (which you obviously aren't).
These days, many writers of buffer overflow exploits (the *only* exploit that a non-exec stack could possibly save you from, in case you didn't know) assume that vulnerable software is running with a non-exec stack, and code around it. Non-exec stack patches may have saved you from the 'kiddies in the past, but they afford no protection in 2001, although it certainly doesn't hurt your security so long as Assumption #0 is that the 'kiddies won't even be slowed down by it.
It's not acceptable because he expects you to put BINARIES in /var! I don't know about your system, but my system has about 64MB of total space in /var, and it's there to keep archives of logfiles. I'll be damned if some prick wants to LEGALLY FORCE PEOPLE to put binaries in any particular place, DOUBLY SO if that place isn't even located on the /usr partition.
Have you ever heard of Einstien? Maybe you should label him a "megalomaniac" too. He knew he was right no matter what anyone else said. Especially little pricks like you. Was he wrong. NO.
YES. He died knowing that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were mutually incompatible, but both "right". Worse yet, he believed in the Hidden Variable flavor of QM ("God does not play dice with the Universe"), although the Copenhagen Interpretation ("spooky action at a distance") is generally accepted as being the "real" QM (look up Bell's Inequality for more info). Even geniuses and visionaries make mistakes; only megalomaniacs refuse to acknowledge their own fallibility.
Makes you wonder what would have happened had someone gone back in time and kept Gates from entering the software industry. Sort of like the "What if someone went back in time and killed Hitler?" question. Would we live in a world where Free software dominated, would programs come with source code under a Sun-style "community license", or would somebody else have popularized closed-source software?
Note: this is in no way an attempt to claim that Gates is as evil as Hitler was.
X files has sucked from season 5 and after. I'm sorry but you can only re-hash the same over and over and over and over.
I'm glad I'm not alone in that boat. The series has pretty much sucked since the movie (which itself wasn't too bad other than being an overlong episode with a big effects budget). I used to catch X-Files regularly, but now I'm pondering whether to catch the season finale or floss my cat.
Here, kitty, kitty...
I'm afraid someone here doesn't have full comprehension of the real world here. The entire usefulness of a computer comes from the fact that it can communicate with other computers. If MS has the 100% (minus one person) market share claimed, interoperability would be destroyed. Note: This is not a flame, this is a reality check.
I connect to the NET.
Will you still be able to connect when web pages are entirely MS-HTML 2005, ActiveX applets, and MS.NET?
I share files using Samba.
MS already has broken compatibility with Samba several times, and it took time to reverse engineer the changes and get Samba to work again. If .NET gets implemented, who's to say that MS can't just roll out a new version of SMB overnight?
I open/save/share Office docs with StarOffice.
This week. The exact problems that apply to Samba also apply here.
I view web pages with Mozilla
Then you're already familiar with the "You need Internet Explorer 7.5 Beta to view this site" phenomenon. In an MS-dominated world, this would only get worse with time.
I've never written a lick of code, let alone a device driver or modified a network protocol. I've never written a patch for an application.
Because someone else already wrote the code for you. If Linux has a "market"share of one person, that one person had better damn well be a skilled programmer.
I chat on AOL IM and Yahoo! Messenger as well as IRC.
But since in our little nightmare world, MS has 100% marketshare, there aren't any Unix servers to run those open source IRC servers on. AOL could shut down the TOC protocol and button up Oscar any day. You'll be very, very lonely.
My whole life is outside of programming.
Except that you'd be back to the stone knives and bearskins of computing without other people to be the programmers. Sort of like being a Telephone Sanitizer in a rural, agrarian society.
IANAQP, but you've glossed over an important point: the hidden-variables theory and the spooky-action-at-a-distance theory are statistically distinguishable, and not just a point of philosophy. Here's a link to an introduction to Bell's Inequality, which is widely accepted as proof of spooky-action-at-a-distance theory.
Nope. You still have the options of an external modem (pricey, but guaranteed to work) or a PCI controller-based modem (hard to find if you don't know what to look for). If you specifically look around for that magic phrase, most stores selling modems will carry at least one line of real modems.
Too bad Slack ships with telnet (ugh), LPD (ick), and RPC (ack!) open by default.
<sarcasm>I've been using Slackware for two whole years. Yep, I'm really an old timer when it comes to Linux.</sarcasm>
Seriously, though, I like Slackware because it gets in the way less often than any other Linux distro. Sometimes the best way to learn to swim is to dive right in, and Slackware is the perfect distro for diving in to Linux. No flashy-pointy-clicky bits to keep you from using your brain, but a fairly novice-friendly install (compared to Debian or, worse, FreeBSD) that encourages self-education.
There's a flaw in your argument, namely that unskilled computer users are a public danger. Can you say DDoS?
It's downright disgusting, actually. Just do a portscan for 137/udp on a cable modem or DSL netblock sometime. About 2/3 or so of them probably have a share named "C" with no password on it -- and that's just Windoze. It doesn't even touch on all the Linux boxes vulnerable to RPC or BIND exploits...
You are, of course, correct that government licensing wouldn't help the situation much. Most politicians can't tell MHz from DMCA, much less pass sane legislation regarding computers.
Blech. The whole situation stinks.
If you thought that the cold war with atomic weapons would leave the Earth cold and desolate, try sending an asteroid of any size to impact. According to the people they don't let out too often, a water hit is worse than a land hit as well.
Just something to think about before people get too happy about this as a defensive/offensive device.
IANAP, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong about water hits being worse. A water hit results in a lot of water vapor in the atmosphere; nuclear winter sets in, the vapor cools and condenses, you get a lot of snow and rain. The skies are nearly back to normal within two years. A land hit, however, kicks up dust. Dust doesn't condense -- the only thing that can get it out of the atmosphere quickly is to wash it out with rain. But the temperature has dropped, so new cloud formation slows, and the Earth does nothing. The nuclear winter drags on for decades.
Of course, this is talking about a planet-killer size asteroid impact. The asteroids that would be used in this technique would actually be 100m, about 1/5 the size of the smallest asteroid that would cause a global effect.
Please tell me I'm not the only one who finds it irritating when Katz writes "l997" instead of "1997". They're not the same character! In any sane font, ASCII 49 != ASCII 108, they look entirely different. Katz, don't be a script kiddie. $DIETY knows we have enough already posting to Slashdot...