I think a lot of people are failing to understand how the BSA operates.
I see post after post complaining that the BSA does not have the "right" to search people's computers. Well, no, of course they can walk in off the street and start searching hard drives. They don't have that right.
What they have is a giant gawddamn bankroll from the big software companies (and previous victims), and a pack of lawyers. They have a lot of power.
They do not claim to have the right to take any action other than suing the shit out of you. This is the sort of lawsuit, which could cost a big university millions of dollars to win. And you wouldn't win. You would loose. Any office with more than three (proprietary OS) computers has a piece of BSA software for which they haven't submitted the registration. I guarantee it.
Did you catch that? OWNING a copy of the software is not sufficient? No, showing them the box won't cover it, since you could have bought it when you learned on their intention to audit. You need to have every piece of software *registered* with the publisher, prior to the BSA contacting you. Otherwise, you will pay purchase price plus punitive damages.
They have no right to search your computers. They seem to have every right to threaten you with NASTY litigation, until you give in and allow them to search your computers.
Damn, there is a sad willingness by people here to forfeit their rights in the workplace. Would you allow your employer to search your person?
I guess this is what 20 years of near ubiquitous piss-testing has reduced us to.
Re:The open relay testers send me unsolicited e-ma
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
·
· Score: 1
Well, I guess that came off jerky, and since there's no more ORBZ mailing list archive, I can't point out the extended discussion on the subject, so...I'll let it go and hope you enjoy your double-bounces I guess.:)
Re:The open relay testers send me unsolicited e-ma
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
·
· Score: 2, Informative
So fix your broken (almost certainly qmail) server.
And FWIW, one of the best things about ORBZ was how professionally it was run. They generally tried to error on the side of caution. For instance, addressing your strawman argument, the ORBZ test messages described exactly what they were, and provided links for more info.
Wait, You caught MS doing something anti-competitive? Well holy shit, let's take them to court!
Hahahahahahaha....oh yeah, that doesn't work, huh? They can do whatever they want..
Seriously, I doubt there would be a Mac verion at all if MS hadn't settled a big list of lawsuits by agreeing to produce office for a set number of years.
I use Analog and ReportMagic for my reports. Analog is super-detailed, extremely fast, reliable, and generally very cool. If you are a nerdy webmaster type that needs stats to track server usage and such, you can stop right here.
Since I want web reports to show to VHost clients, I added ReportMagic, which builds out a great looking, graph-laden, generally beautiful HTML stats. Indeed, I think the ReportMagic graphs are considerably more readable than WebTrends'. As a bonus, RM is written is Perl and it's very hackable.
I have beautiful stats run on over 100 web sites, every single night, and archived every month. I am very happy with the results, and I keep finding cool new features in the docs to add in all the time.
However...WebTends is the de facto web report standard. Having used WebTrends, I know what a painful piece of shit it is to use. I often use it as an example of what is wrong with winduhs programming. Every feature you could ever want, none of it works right, moronic interface, breaks constantly, worthless tech support, frequent payware upgrades to keep it running. I just can't adequately express how much I hate it.
However...WebTends is the de facto web report standard. And after about 400 times explaining how fallacious reports like, "paths through site" and "visitors" and such are, and pointing clients here: http://www.analog.cx/docs/webworks.html, I had to give up. The boss is suffering through doing monthly WebTrends reports for the dozen or so customers who whine.
I have actually had this conversation:
<Digger>...so you can see how those reports are BS and what looks like a "trend" might just be a change in the way AOL handles it's proxying scheme...
<Luser> Right. So can we get you to do a WebTrends report too? Cause we base our business plan on them.
Seriously. I might as well be telling people to stop using winduhs as their desktop OS. I might as well be tilting at windmills. It's neigh hopeless. I would rather have a userbase that knows not to double-click on any old attachment they get in the mail, but since I am stuck in the real world, I have added scanning software to the mail server.
Analog stats are certainly more than sufficient for me. Adding ReportMagic should make the output sufficient for anyone else, but it doesn't. Stephen has stated quite clearly that he has no intention of adding reports that offend his statistical sensibilities. I certainly understand the position he has taken, and since he is doing all the hard work, it is his right to take it. It is just a shame that most of the world is stuck having to run WebTrends, or some similar crapola commercial product as a result.
Maybe Stephen would like to respond, or point to one of the relevant mailing list posts. What about cookieing solutions? I have custom-built a few of these, and cookie-enabled browsers have been about 99% or so. Is 1% still significant?
I don't know if that is typical. When MAPS closed up, I had about 500 mail accounts and I was blocking about 100 messages per day.
More importantly perhaps, when I first turned MAPS (RBL + RSS) I had about 200 accounts, and I was blocking about 1000/day. After about a week with MAPS lookups on, it trailed off as the spammers realized they were RBLed, and gave up trying, I would assume.
I'd really like to find a reasonable replacement. Not only is MAPS priced a bit beyond my budget, but how current are their lists going to be now that no one actually uses their service?
Does anyone else find it completely annoying that these things, which neither MOdulate nor DEModulate, are getting called modems? It even says "DSL modem" on my Alcatel box. Aren't these things bridges? If you need a device to convert digital networking to analog, you don't have DSL!
Not only was this the best talk that I attended at the Con, But I have been slowly working my way through the paper one point at a time, tightening up my mail servers. It's really an outstanding resource.
Adding RSS lookups has been the biggest spam killer so far. The first week I had it enabled I was rejecting about 1200 spams a day. Now that the bigger spammers know they can't steal from me so easily, it's down under 100 per day.
Installing a BSD is merely better, it's not a panacea for lazy administration. Getting all your security alerts from one place certainly makes things easier, but if you don't pay attention, you're just gonna get hacked again
> 1. The current set of mac users are the folks who are most resistant to change. Otherwise they would have left the platform
Yeah, or maybe it's because once you grok the subtlety, depth, and coherency of the "Classic" Mac UI, everything else is a clumsy, hackish, inconsistent mess. Maybe we put up with crappy memory mgt and such because of the UI, not because of familiarity... The poster at the top of this thread got it exactly right.
> 2. Apple is not going to care if these folks hack their OS this way. The folks with the beta now are either developers (not Apples real target market), or pirates (not Apples real target market).
Uh...Did you notice that Apple is selling the betas to anyone with $30? I'm certainly not an Apple developer, but I used my copy of OSX until I had some real work to do. 9 is just much faster - in the get-out-of-my-way-I-have-shit-to-do sense of "faster".
When I talked to the Apple developers at the BSDCon they said they were expecting the UI criticisms they got, and gave me the impression that they were trying to fix things, but then Apple has a LONG history of ignoring user feedback, and letting the shareware community fix their problem parts
Laz,
You should also mention to the home audience that 'pkg_version -c' will actually print out the commands required to upgrade your installed packages. the output looks like this:
#
# ncftp3
# needs updating (index has 3.0.2)
#
cd/usr/ports/ftp/ncftp3
make && pkg_delete -f ncftp3-3.0.1
make install
You could easily cron that to automatically update things, but of course that would be a really bad idea...
A more usefull trick would be to throw it in the weeklies so it would alert you to a package that may need upgrading.
Flash "movies" do not HAVE to be big and clunky, they just usually are. Flash is a lot of rope with which the FrontPage/GoLive crowd out there hangs itself. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Used judiciously, it is the fairly light weight vector format for which you are looking.
Absolutely! If you are gonna spend that kind of dough on hardware, get a Sun box, or a fridge sized AIX beast. Get real heavy iron. Who buys the giant intel boxes except ZDNet for an NT test?
Damnit! That wasn't a troll! That was damn funny. Especially the,
Their current version, 5.0, is not their release version; their released versions have frequently in the past not been stable; and their stable versions are not current.
There is no such thing as a $500 Sparc, unless you are using an old Sparc 5/10, circa 1995.
That is one of the best things about this comparison: it's in crappy hardware. I am sick to death of these useless 4CPU, 4G of RAM, 12 disk RAID array tests that just have no bearing on reality. Give me $500 of intel crap, load it with pr0n, and see which one the 'net kills first. THAT would be a test!
Well...my point was actually that it is untrue that you don't have to be an expert to run a winders server. But I'm happy to address your command-line complaints because it's just the sort of argument I used to make. I wish I could go back in time and explain this to myself about 10 years ago.
After 1984 (Macintosh debut) why would anyone USE, much less maintain the old CLI garbage? GUI was obviously better! And it is. For a desktop machine, doing desktop-type stuff. But for servers, CLI is better, faster, more stable more dependable, and dare I say, easier! Here's why...
"Memorizing commands" is harder than snooping your way through a GUI. Yes, at first. Gawd I hated it at first! It seemed like I was memorizing and endless string of arcane, unguessable commands. Unix machines have a horrible learning curve when you are getting started. But you get to a point where it all starts clicking. All the tools are just text input and output (nothing more basic in UI than that) and they all fit together. One program's output gets sent to another's input seamlessly. Save the commands you typed into a text file, and now you have a script you can run with one simple command. With a little experience, you find that new commands work the way you expect, for the most part.
GUIs just don't belong on servers! They suck up CPU and RAM. On busy servers they can slow to a crawl. On busy servers a few hundred miles away in some busy colo, they can be completely unusable. Unix CLIs are very light weight, and they run over protocols like telnet and SSH, which are pretty low overhead themselves. For instance, using PCAnywhere to log in to a remote system that's bogging down, booting up IIS's big management program, and stopping and restarting the server. Compare that to: ssh servername 'apachectl restart'
for remotely restarting apache. That is just one trivial example, but you can apply it to just about any aspect of server administration.
The commandline isn't the only game in town. I'm much happier using a GUI on my desktop machines, but CLIs are irreplaceable for servers, especially remote ones. It's well worth your time to get aquainted.
Alas, I know and use NT everyday. I should be coding ASP in another window instead of ranting on slashdot right now.:)
You have pretty much recapitulated my point for me here. I didn't say that NT admins are idiots. I said that most of the NT good admins I know tell me that it requires just as much expertise to admin as anything else. Pretty much the same thing you have stated. So if it is NOT trivial to admin, as we both point out, and technically inferior, as we both point out...what is the point of using it?
Well, you bring up the idea that NT is quicker to set up, with which I must disagree. NT + Service packs, + Option Packs + don't forget to install the latest version of IE at the right moment...yuck, two floppies and I'll have FreeBSD installed in an hour. Yes, this is just my own anecdotal experience, but I just seem to see fewer showstopping disasters durring unix installs, but your milliage may vary.:)
Yes...this is one of the essential fallacies of winders servers: You don't have to be an expert to admin it. This widespread belief is the reason I have NEVER seen a successful restore from a backed up entee system. As I am fond of saying, "I do believe that it is possible, I just don't think it's a coincidence that I have never seen it."
If you talk to a skilled entee admin (ie, someone who can keep one running for a whole week at a time) they generally complain that it isn't the OS's fault for being crash-happy and hackable, it's just stupid administration. To my mind, this eliminates the last possible argument for running this technically inferior, overpriced...poo.
Moreover...learning to admin a winders machine, for most people, means learning which buttons to click for the desired effect, "Only took a couple hours and I have the entee database running." Whereas I'm spending all this time chewing through 5000 pages of ORA books. Who's better off here? You are an expert in which buttons to click for a specific app on this year's version of winders. I have milk in my fridge right now that's going to have a longer shelf life than that skill set. Meanwhile I'm becomming a database expert. I'm going to able to easily translate that to whatever the Next Thing is in databases.
My point is that paying for winders gets you a winders system. Paying for good tech books gets you a unix system, and real skills.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah,
It's just a *coincidence* that every communist country ever instituted has been an oppressive, murderous, soul crushing disaster. Next time for sure.
"Government lies, and newspapers lie, but in a democracy at least they are different lies."
-- Unknown
One of the first things I install on a new system is always xtail.
It has nothing to do with X Windows.
It works just like 'tail -f' but it can watch multiple files. You can even watch whole directories and it will notice when new files are created.
http://www.unicom.com/sw/xtail/
Very handy tool.
Hey, that works in tcsh too. Keen.
- H
I think Mac users feel attacked enough by the rest of the world, to bother with attacking each other. :)
As I am fond of saying, I believe it's possible, I just don't think it's a coincidence that I've never seen it.
- H
I think a lot of people are failing to understand how the BSA operates.
I see post after post complaining that the BSA does not have the "right" to search people's computers. Well, no, of course they can walk in off the street and start searching hard drives. They don't have that right.
What they have is a giant gawddamn bankroll from the big software companies (and previous victims), and a pack of lawyers. They have a lot of power.
They do not claim to have the right to take any action other than suing the shit out of you. This is the sort of lawsuit, which could cost a big university millions of dollars to win. And you wouldn't win. You would loose. Any office with more than three (proprietary OS) computers has a piece of BSA software for which they haven't submitted the registration. I guarantee it.
Did you catch that? OWNING a copy of the software is not sufficient? No, showing them the box won't cover it, since you could have bought it when you learned on their intention to audit. You need to have every piece of software *registered* with the publisher, prior to the BSA contacting you. Otherwise, you will pay purchase price plus punitive damages.
They have no right to search your computers. They seem to have every right to threaten you with NASTY litigation, until you give in and allow them to search your computers.
- H
Damn, there is a sad willingness by people here to forfeit their rights in the workplace. Would you allow your employer to search your person?
I guess this is what 20 years of near ubiquitous piss-testing has reduced us to.
Well, I guess that came off jerky, and since there's no more ORBZ mailing list archive, I can't point out the extended discussion on the subject, so...I'll let it go and hope you enjoy your double-bounces I guess. :)
So fix your broken (almost certainly qmail) server.
And FWIW, one of the best things about ORBZ was how professionally it was run. They generally tried to error on the side of caution. For instance, addressing your strawman argument, the ORBZ test messages described exactly what they were, and provided links for more info.
Hahahahahahaha....oh yeah, that doesn't work, huh? They can do whatever they want..
Seriously, I doubt there would be a Mac verion at all if MS hadn't settled a big list of lawsuits by agreeing to produce office for a set number of years.
Hey, this one actually looks legit: Urban Legends Piece on the topic.
I use Analog and ReportMagic for my reports. Analog is super-detailed, extremely fast, reliable, and generally very cool. If you are a nerdy webmaster type that needs stats to track server usage and such, you can stop right here.
...so you can see how those reports are BS and what looks like a "trend" might just be a change in the way AOL handles it's proxying scheme...
Since I want web reports to show to VHost clients, I added ReportMagic, which builds out a great looking, graph-laden, generally beautiful HTML stats. Indeed, I think the ReportMagic graphs are considerably more readable than WebTrends'. As a bonus, RM is written is Perl and it's very hackable.
I have beautiful stats run on over 100 web sites, every single night, and archived every month. I am very happy with the results, and I keep finding cool new features in the docs to add in all the time.
However...WebTends is the de facto web report standard. Having used WebTrends, I know what a painful piece of shit it is to use. I often use it as an example of what is wrong with winduhs programming. Every feature you could ever want, none of it works right, moronic interface, breaks constantly, worthless tech support, frequent payware upgrades to keep it running. I just can't adequately express how much I hate it.
However...WebTends is the de facto web report standard. And after about 400 times explaining how fallacious reports like, "paths through site" and "visitors" and such are, and pointing clients here: http://www.analog.cx/docs/webworks.html, I had to give up. The boss is suffering through doing monthly WebTrends reports for the dozen or so customers who whine.
I have actually had this conversation:
<Digger>
<Luser> Right. So can we get you to do a WebTrends report too? Cause we base our business plan on them.
Seriously. I might as well be telling people to stop using winduhs as their desktop OS. I might as well be tilting at windmills. It's neigh hopeless. I would rather have a userbase that knows not to double-click on any old attachment they get in the mail, but since I am stuck in the real world, I have added scanning software to the mail server.
Analog stats are certainly more than sufficient for me. Adding ReportMagic should make the output sufficient for anyone else, but it doesn't. Stephen has stated quite clearly that he has no intention of adding reports that offend his statistical sensibilities. I certainly understand the position he has taken, and since he is doing all the hard work, it is his right to take it. It is just a shame that most of the world is stuck having to run WebTrends, or some similar crapola commercial product as a result.
Maybe Stephen would like to respond, or point to one of the relevant mailing list posts. What about cookieing solutions? I have custom-built a few of these, and cookie-enabled browsers have been about 99% or so. Is 1% still significant?
More importantly perhaps, when I first turned MAPS (RBL + RSS) I had about 200 accounts, and I was blocking about 1000/day. After about a week with MAPS lookups on, it trailed off as the spammers realized they were RBLed, and gave up trying, I would assume.
I'd really like to find a reasonable replacement. Not only is MAPS priced a bit beyond my budget, but how current are their lists going to be now that no one actually uses their service?
- H
Does anyone else find it completely annoying that these things, which neither MOdulate nor DEModulate, are getting called modems? It even says "DSL modem" on my Alcatel box. Aren't these things bridges? If you need a device to convert digital networking to analog, you don't have DSL!
Adding RSS lookups has been the biggest spam killer so far. The first week I had it enabled I was rejecting about 1200 spams a day. Now that the bigger spammers know they can't steal from me so easily, it's down under 100 per day.
The next step is procmail for filtering malware.
. Thanks
- H
Installing a BSD is merely better, it's not a panacea for lazy administration. Getting all your security alerts from one place certainly makes things easier, but if you don't pay attention, you're just gonna get hacked again
Yeah, or maybe it's because once you grok the subtlety, depth, and coherency of the "Classic" Mac UI, everything else is a clumsy, hackish, inconsistent mess. Maybe we put up with crappy memory mgt and such because of the UI, not because of familiarity... The poster at the top of this thread got it exactly right.
> 2. Apple is not going to care if these folks hack their OS this way. The folks with the beta now are either developers (not Apples real target market), or pirates (not Apples real target market).
Uh...Did you notice that Apple is selling the betas to anyone with $30? I'm certainly not an Apple developer, but I used my copy of OSX until I had some real work to do. 9 is just much faster - in the get-out-of-my-way-I-have-shit-to-do sense of "faster".
When I talked to the Apple developers at the BSDCon they said they were expecting the UI criticisms they got, and gave me the impression that they were trying to fix things, but then Apple has a LONG history of ignoring user feedback, and letting the shareware community fix their problem parts
- H
You could easily cron that to automatically update things, but of course that would be a really bad idea...
A more usefull trick would be to throw it in the weeklies so it would alert you to a package that may need upgrading.
- H
Very good defence of Flash.
Flash "movies" do not HAVE to be big and clunky, they just usually are. Flash is a lot of rope with which the FrontPage/GoLive crowd out there hangs itself. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Used judiciously, it is the fairly light weight vector format for which you are looking.
Absolutely! If you are gonna spend that kind of dough on hardware, get a Sun box, or a fridge sized AIX beast. Get real heavy iron. Who buys the giant intel boxes except ZDNet for an NT test?
There is no such thing as a $500 Sparc, unless you are using an old Sparc 5/10, circa 1995.
That is one of the best things about this comparison: it's in crappy hardware. I am sick to death of these useless 4CPU, 4G of RAM, 12 disk RAID array tests that just have no bearing on reality. Give me $500 of intel crap, load it with pr0n, and see which one the 'net kills first. THAT would be a test!
There were top geeks from the MacOS X project at the last Con. They even gave a talk and handed out CDs.
After 1984 (Macintosh debut) why would anyone USE, much less maintain the old CLI garbage? GUI was obviously better! And it is. For a desktop machine, doing desktop-type stuff. But for servers, CLI is better, faster, more stable more dependable, and dare I say, easier! Here's why...
"Memorizing commands" is harder than snooping your way through a GUI. Yes, at first. Gawd I hated it at first! It seemed like I was memorizing and endless string of arcane, unguessable commands. Unix machines have a horrible learning curve when you are getting started. But you get to a point where it all starts clicking. All the tools are just text input and output (nothing more basic in UI than that) and they all fit together. One program's output gets sent to another's input seamlessly. Save the commands you typed into a text file, and now you have a script you can run with one simple command. With a little experience, you find that new commands work the way you expect, for the most part.
GUIs just don't belong on servers! They suck up CPU and RAM. On busy servers they can slow to a crawl. On busy servers a few hundred miles away in some busy colo, they can be completely unusable. Unix CLIs are very light weight, and they run over protocols like telnet and SSH, which are pretty low overhead themselves. For instance, using PCAnywhere to log in to a remote system that's bogging down, booting up IIS's big management program, and stopping and restarting the server. Compare that to:
ssh servername 'apachectl restart'
for remotely restarting apache. That is just one trivial example, but you can apply it to just about any aspect of server administration.
The commandline isn't the only game in town. I'm much happier using a GUI on my desktop machines, but CLIs are irreplaceable for servers, especially remote ones. It's well worth your time to get aquainted.
- H
You have pretty much recapitulated my point for me here. I didn't say that NT admins are idiots. I said that most of the NT good admins I know tell me that it requires just as much expertise to admin as anything else. Pretty much the same thing you have stated. So if it is NOT trivial to admin, as we both point out, and technically inferior, as we both point out...what is the point of using it?
Well, you bring up the idea that NT is quicker to set up, with which I must disagree. NT + Service packs, + Option Packs + don't forget to install the latest version of IE at the right moment...yuck, two floppies and I'll have FreeBSD installed in an hour. Yes, this is just my own anecdotal experience, but I just seem to see fewer showstopping disasters durring unix installs, but your milliage may vary. :)
- H
If you talk to a skilled entee admin (ie, someone who can keep one running for a whole week at a time) they generally complain that it isn't the OS's fault for being crash-happy and hackable, it's just stupid administration. To my mind, this eliminates the last possible argument for running this technically inferior, overpriced...poo.
Moreover...learning to admin a winders machine, for most people, means learning which buttons to click for the desired effect, "Only took a couple hours and I have the entee database running." Whereas I'm spending all this time chewing through 5000 pages of ORA books. Who's better off here? You are an expert in which buttons to click for a specific app on this year's version of winders. I have milk in my fridge right now that's going to have a longer shelf life than that skill set. Meanwhile I'm becomming a database expert. I'm going to able to easily translate that to whatever the Next Thing is in databases.
My point is that paying for winders gets you a winders system. Paying for good tech books gets you a unix system, and real skills.
- H