At an automotive shop I used to pseudo-work at, they used to joke about taking the capacitor from old distributors, and just tossing them to newbie mechanics, teaching them not to ever catch something thrown at them.:)
The disposable camera route seems kind of silly. Most people who would attempt this should have enough parts laying around their house to build one. I believe an old PC power supply would have the required components, or it should only cost a couple bucks at Radio Shack to build one.
I like your softball idea, but it would seem to pose too much of a chance of not hitting the electrodes correctly. There's so much chance they'd catch the ball wrong, and both electrodes would hit one hand and they'd only say "Ow!" before beating the crap out of you.
Legand has it that it references the place where "the holy grail" is, so mix in the possibility of any number of those words being the names of people or cities anywhere in Europe or Asia, from any number of centuries ago. It could even be a city that was completely destroyed in any number of wars, forgotten, and now the new home of Austria's newest Super-WalMart.
In a few thousand more years, people may not even know where Austria or England are, it may simply be referenced as the possible home of the empire previously known as Erope. (mispelled on purpose). It happens. Ask the residents or descendents of Petra
You saw jehovah in an anus? I'm not sure the Vatican would be happy to know that, unless it was a little boy's butt?
Damn, if the Christian god is real, I'm in trouble.
"My son, we've been recording your sins. This will take a while to review with you, unless you'd like to simply go to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200."
I looked at this for a few minutes. The chances of decyphering the meaning is very very (VERY) slim, unless you find a good reference from the period about it.
The "D.M." aparently has to do with a funeral right, in Latin, of course. I'd have to assume the rest is in Latin too. The number of latin words that the phrase could match are huge. Even if you did find a match for the phrase, which shouldn't be all that hard, it may or may not be right, without some other reference.
Our
Utterance
Omits
Some
Valuable
Assertation
Validating
Vexation
Think of the phrase (and rather obnoxious to non-christians) WWJD.
Where Would Joseph Drive?
Why Would Josie Drink?
Would Willy Just Die?
White Water Jewish Dancing.
From what I hear, it doesn't really mean any of those. Ask a Christian for the right answer.
I considered finding a latin dictionary file, and having a program run through all the possible combinations, but since I don't read latin, it wouldn't make too much sense, now would it? If it is a reference to "the holy grail", that means some of those letters probably represent cities or countries somewhere in Europe or Asia, with their name from several centuries ago.
For all we know, it's a tribute to all of someone's illigitimate children.
Took me a minute to find the corrected title. In the past I've also read that it was a short story, but I can't remember who wrote it. I've never actually seen the story.
Amazon has the CD set, which aparently has this epsiode on it.
Ah ha! Found it!
It was written by Damon Night as a short story, and produced by Rod Serling as a Twilight Zone episode, which aired on March 2, 1962!
I can just imagine the general population (i.e., us) having this kind of discussion in say the 1940's. People were absolutely terrified of the prospect that there could be life on other planets. Take the War of the Worlds radio show as a prime example of this.
Say even a small percentage of the UFO sightings have been real, I don't blame any government for covering it up. It would be mass hysteria if it got out that a civilization of obviously vastly superior technology had come here.
Now we're a post-Star-Trek civilization. We've learned (through entertainment) that there can be good and evil out there. We're just taking the gamble of if they're friendly or not. Are they here to help us advance, to just explore, or eat us.:)
I suspect if we did make contact with a sufficiently advanced race, who had any sort of written language (that we could see, I hope) we'd have a chance of translating and eventually communicating with them. I'm sure they'd be trying to communicate with us too. Well, assuming they aren't here to eat us.
The religion debate may be moot. Religion may be a human thing that we've invented to comfort ourselves regarding things we don't understand. They may actually be a bit peeved that we try to push our primitive concept on them.
Re:Cellophane reality (was Re:Tron Woods)
on
Privacy in the Woods?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Actually, every time I go out in the woods, I go out far enough where cell phones don't work. I can't imagine getting lost in the woods where your phone still works. That means you're within a few miles of the nearest tower, which must be near a road. They only put up cell towers where they'll be used, and people sure as hell don't go far from their cars. Humans are very lazy animals.
Don't believe me? When's the last time you were more than a few hundred feet away from your car? When's the last time you walked 10 miles?
People get lost too easily. Hell, they'd get lost on a straight road between point A and point B.. Survival of the fittest, I say. If you don't come back alive, then maybe you shouldn't. It's not a tragic loss, it's population control.
Hmmm.. Linksys and D-Link have both been guilty of that, as I recall. I'm sure there have been plenty of others...
I was really surprised to find how many wireless networks there were around Tampa, Florida. We went for a drive, and found hospitals using 802.11b for point to point communications between branch locations, and Ybor city (the party district) with AP's all through the place. Fire up kismet, wellenreiter, or netstumber (depending on your platform), and look around a little.:)
I have a little 4.5dBi antenna stuck to the top of my laptop, that follows me everywhere.:) It's very useful in one of the colo's, where we have a WAP11. There's lots of electrical noise, and the metal cabinets and battery room don't exactly help the signal pass. I can go anywhere in the facility and stay online, which is very useful. Some days I may be working on several different customers equipment, and it's nice to bring my laptop to each cabinet/cage and stay online the whole time.
For Linux, I've been very fond of the "Orinoco Gold" card. They're fairly easy to get online, work very well, and allow external antennas to be attached. I put an Orinoco Gold card in a Netgear PCIPCMCIA adapter (which is incorrectly marked that it only works with Netgear PCMCIA cards), and use that in my home machine now.
My newest love for wireless cards are the Senao "NL-2511 Plus EXT2" card. If you search for the model number, you'll find it sold under other names. Mine came in a white box, with no name, and room for a brand name sticker.:) This card has two antenna jacks on it. I have a whole collection of antennas and adapters that I've used with it. It's kinda fun to sit in a high place with a high gain antenna and slowly turn the antenna picking up different access points every few degrees. It's not really necessary, as with just a little 4dB antenna, I hear plenty of stuff.:)
I hate all the USB adapters. I've never bothered getting them to work on Linux, and with Windows or Mac they suck. Well, they're fine unless you want the connection to stay up. Some of them make Windows hang at boot time if they're attached.
For the card impared, the Linksys WET11 works great. You just attack it to an ethernet jack (or hub), and away you go.:)
I've ordered most of the wireless gear I have on the Internet, so it really doesn't matter that you're in a small town, you can still get it.
If you feel ambitious, there's a small shop in Florida that sells *GREAT* antennas. They're fab-corp.com.
I use an 18dB panel and a 24dB parabolic antenna attached to a pair of Linksys WAP11's as a bridge, for my come connectivity, over a 1/2 mile 802.11b link. You can see pictures here.
The WAP11's have a PCMCIA card built in, which tends to overheat if the location gets hot, so I disassembled one and put a fan on it (see the pic). It's not pretty, but works very well. I've been using it exclusively at home for several months. Occasionally, I'll loose my link, if it's windy, because the parabolic antenna is mounted to a very poor mast, but that's my own fault for not putting up a better mast on the house. It'll get blown about 10 to 15 degrees off, and receive no signal.
When I first set up the wireless link, I brought my laptop to the roof, and it reported 100% signal strength using the parabolic antenna. With a 4dB antenna, I had absolutely no signal. Makes it kind of hard for someone to evesdrop on my signal, unless they also have a high gain antenna and happen to be directly between the two points.
You (and others) are right, Microsoft has licensed some great hardware over the years.
I've used plenty of different WiFi products, and was curious to what Microsoft had licensed, but never saw the killer deal on them to encourage me to buy any to find out. Other brands were always at a lower price, every time I went shopping. It seems that everyone in the WiFi business buys someone elses product and sticks their own label on it. I'm sure if you cracked open any Microsoft WiFi product and looked inside, the chipset wouldn't say "Microsoft" on it.
This, of course, has been Microsoft's way with everything, including many of their software products. They buy out a company, change the names, and sell it as Microsoft. The biggest example I can think of off-hand (at 1am, mind you) was Microsoft SQL, but throughout their lines, it's something they've bought (or stolen) over the years. What was the case they lost a year or so ago, where they had been distributing someone elses code as a Microsoft product, and finally lost in court?
I was expecting, if I ever got my hands on some Microsoft WiFi equipment, that I'd find a decent brand inside. Too bad that won't be happening now. If I get one, it'll be used junk someone is throwing away.
Almost everyone I know is using Linksys or Netgear wireless stuff. Even across all the wireless equipment I've heard (carefully not admitting to anything potentially illegal), I've never run across any Microsoft gear.
Well, they don't explicity say it, but it seems to be true.
What was most evident to me was that they always linked wrong page on my site. Well, it was accurate for getting to a story, but not the best choice.
I just searched for slashdot.org on news.google.com, and sorted it by date. The most recent story they had was: "More Light Shed on Project David"
news.google.com showed: More Light Shed on Project David Slashdot - 12 hours ago Sun writes "Flexbeta.net received from Specops Labs screenshots "proving" that project David (previously covered here) is a real thing. The demo....... http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/02/03/0140215. shtml ?tid=99
But Slashdot has this link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/09 /134253 &mode=nested&tid=125&tid=185
Which is consistant with what Slashdot has in their RSS feed.
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?content_type=rss
It's not just a straight RSS feed. For FreeInternetPress.com, they let the majority of the stories show up somewhere in their searches. Good stories make it to their front page, if there are lots of other sites covering the same story (funny that). I'd think their front page decision is a formula derived by the number of sites containing similiar words. Sometimes we've had stories listed on their front page with others, that didn't have anything to do with the title story.. Human error??
Google News soemtimes changes our titles, and a few times has taken pictures from our stories, and put them with other news outlets text. But, they're careful to attribute where everything came from.
They don't always post our stories. If they story is a rant (which happens from time to time), or very contriversial, it won't be picked up by Google News, so submissions aren't completely automated. There's some sort of human intervention in the middle.
Funny, handling of Slashdot.org by Google News seems very hit and miss. Maybe there's some fans there, that approve everything, and then some who could care less.
Radio Shack used to sell a chip that did that. I don't think it was 90 seconds of recording. I've been searching for about 10 minutes, and didn't run across anything. Of course, I was looking for something that handled more time.:) But hey, maybe it'll give him a starting point.
It'd still probably be cheaper and easier to buy 10 little portable CD players in bulk somewhere, and rig up a little rod to hit the "play" button.:)
If the site looks like news, and has an RSS feed, they put it up quickly. Google News was ignoring FreeInternetPress.com , but once we put up the link for the RSS feeds, they picked us up. Now just about every story we publish gets posted.
And this looks like a good place to tell you about The Nigritude Ultramarine attack submarine. I'd laugh if I even show up in the top 100.
Ya, I was aware that the Virtual machine is completely virtual.:) I've played with them quite a bit over the years. I have to say, VMWare is a lot better then when I first started playing with it.
I was just hoping that they would have put in something to identify that is was a virtual machine on the same hardware, somehow.. There's no way I'm paying for a second license to put it on the same physical computer, especially where I didn't even want to buy the first copy.:)
This is America. You sue Ford for building defective vehioles. The other driver(s) sue you for driving a dangerous vehicle. The power company sues you for the power pole you hit (they do, seriously).
One of my ex-girlfriends was driving down Bayshore Blvd in Tampa, when a genius ran a stop sign from a side street, went straight across the road, and continued across to the opposite lane of traffic. She braked, but only managed to slow down enough to miss the side of the car, but still clipped the back end. That sent her spinning. She stopped with a tree embedded about 2 feet into the front of her Jeep Cherokee, and the back bumper firmly placed against a raised driveway
Luckly for her, she was in the Air Force, and there were plenty of Air Force personnel driving to work on the same road, who stopped to help her. From what I understand it looked like a full fledged military maneuver getting her out of the jeep and transported to a hospital.
It was the fault of the guy who ran the stop sign, who didn't stop. There were plenty of witnesses who all reported seeing the same thing.
So what happened? The guy who ran the stop sign was never caught. No one got a tag number, only a good description of a common vehicle. The apartment building sued her for damage to the tree, driveway, and grass, all of which were on the public right-of-way of the road.
The Air Force surgeon who stopped to help, didn't sue.:) He actually stopped by the hospital (a civilian hospital) a few times to check up on her. The hospital staff said to me it was wierd, I was the only person in civilian clothes to come by.
The apartment building's management continued the lawsuit, until the insurance company finally paid. Why? Because here in America, everyone sues for everything, no matter who's at fault. I'd blame them for planting a large (30' palm tree) on the right of way of the road. If it hadn't been there, she wouldn't have crashed, she would have continued driving. More than that though, I blame the driver who ran the stop sign, causing the whole mess. I definately can't imagine blaming her, as all she was doing was driving to work.
Should she have sued Jeep, because with stock equipment (stock tires in good condition, stock brakes in good condition), she wasn't able to stop the vehicle or stay in control after the hit? Nope. In my TransAm with much better braking, traction, and anti-lock brakes, she would have probably been able to stay in control. So do we blame Jeep, (or Ford for the Ford XP in your case) because it doesn't handle in the rain like a sports car?
General Motors has the technology to help prevent a car from spinning. It's in the newer Corvettes. Does every other car owner sue if they get in an accident where that feature could have prevented a crash?
Actually, a friend was driving one of my cars, and got carjacked. The carjacker wrecked my car into three parked cars, incurring over $10,000 damage to just my car. My insurance company says the other car's owners need to be paid by their insurance company, or wait for the police to find the driver. They then warned me that a couple of the other insurance companies have threatened to sue *ME*, becase it was my car.. My car, with a thief driving it. That's far from my responsibility. I was just as financially damaged as they were. It's my auto insurance that's going to go up, because my vehicle had to be repaired.
If I ever get lawsuit #1, I'll show up to court, and testify that I was at home, asleep, when the unauthorized driver, who I don't know the identity of, stole my car and crashed it.
So aparently yes, if someone steals your bicycle, and rides in front of a car and gets hit, you can end up with a lawsuit against yourself. But here in America, land of the lawsuits, anyone can sue anyone for anything, claiming almost anything is your fault. It's my fault that car was on the road, because I bought it. But it's the auto manufacturer's fault for build it so I could buy it.:)
If I go to your house, and cut your brake lines, because they're easily accessable (most cars are), and you drive off a cliff because you couldn't slow down, is it your fault for driving the car? The auto manufacturers fault for giving me the ability to reach the brake lines? Nope, my fault for cutting your brake lines.
It probably wasn't the choice of the IT managers. The decision could have been passed down by anyone higher in the chain of command. I'll use American examples, because I don't know the English chain of command. If you're a low ranking officer, in charge of all the technical equipment, you may have been told by the base commander "We will use Windows servers", who had the mandate passed down by Congress. They may have signed a budget specifically saying to use Microsoft, even though the officers who are doing the actual work would have seriously prefered Linux (or some other *nix).
But turn it around. If a new exploit was found for the particular *nix that they were using, they'd still be in the same situation. If the laptops were running *nix, one got rooted while on an open network, and the intruder put a script on the laptop to propogate to all other *nix machines it encountered, they'd still be just as screwed. More than likely in a command, they'd all be mandated to use the same OS, so it would be that much easier for the intruders scripting to break plenty of machines.
The network security should have been in place to prevent this. No matter how exploitable the infrastructure servers were, there should have been no way for the potentially exploited machines to get to them.
That reminds me of something I saw in high school. When soda machines first started accepting bills, kids would squirt water in the bill slot with a water pistol, shorting out the electronics, and it would dispense as many soda's as you'd like.
Do you blame the soda vending company for the kid stealing the soda? No. They improved the design, and the kids caught stealing sodas were still treated as theives. A few got caught, and many got away with it.
Actually, a car manufacturer would be irresponsible for making car windows that couldn't be broken out. Think of an accident scenerio. You're in a car crash, the doors are locked from inside, and the windows are up. If the car is on fire (or whatever, to shorten the timeframe for fire/rescue to act in), if they can't break the windows, you may just die. Then they could be considered responsible for inhibiting the fire/rescue team from saving your life.
"Sorry, we coudn't save little Timmy from the burning car, the doors were locked, the windows were unbreakable, and there was no time to open the doors with the jaws of life."
You're absolutely right. I fired a pistol, which the previous shooter had some sort of snake/bird shot in it (38 cal round resembling a shotgun round). When I fired my first shot, it didn't hit the target, and I very very rarely miss (like, only if I'm doing rapid fire practice). I stopped, and checked the weapon. The round I fired was still in the barrel. If I had fired a second round, something would have to give, and it probably wouldn't have been pretty.
Aparently, a piece of the shot stayed in the barrel, and lodged next round in the barrel. It took a gunsmith to fix it.
That was well beyond the scope of what the manufacturer would be responsible for, or even the ammunition manufacturer. It was the fault of the previous shooter, as well as my own fault for not carefully checking the weapon before firing myself.
Shouldn't there be a bit better security in an essential service such as that? Why are people allowed to bring insecure machines in, and plug them into the network? Shouldn't they have 24/7 administration? Shouldn't someone have seen a report about Sasser, and patched their machines? We're not talking about Mom & Pop ISP here, we're talking about a branch of a nations military. Why are people coming in with laptops from home, and being allowed on the same network with an essential infrastructure? Haven't their admins read any books on secure networking? What about firewalls between the essential infrastructure machines, and the compromisable network? The way the story sounds, people take their laptops home, browse the Internet, and come to work and plug in pretty much anywhere. I suppose there's more than one CCSP on staff saying "hey boss, told you so" err, maybe "Sir, remember those security recommendations I made last year? May we implement those now?"
You're right, you can compile anything on anything. But there are frequently problems. I was doing work on a Debian box a few days ago, and spent the first 15 minutes installing packages that weren't included with the default install, that were needed.
When it really comes down to it, as long as the libraries and compiling tools are in place, you can treat any *nix just about the same.
My biggest gripes are with the init structures. Try adding say 20 IP's to most distro's or *nix's, or an advanced networking structure. There was a guy with some variant of BSD a few years ago that hosted with us, and it would let a few IP's work, and not the rest, pretty much randomly. I ended up making him a fake rc.inet1, which worked perfectly.
Slackware has had it's problems, but with the 8.x and 9.x releases, things have been very smooth. Patrick has done a great job with it, and there's great support at linuxpackages.net. Not support, exactly, you can just download whatever you want precompiled, and install it.
But hey, everyone likes their own distro. I'm happy to hear about anyone running a *nix, be it a Linux distro or whatever.
No all the management data is kept on a dev server, for the web site and package delivery server to access. There's no real need to distribute the whole database to the users.. They way we see it, the single request to download the full lists would be much easier if it was a single request to the database to ask for an answer. And if you don't have connectivity, you can still just browse the package web pages, and download as needed.
We'll use ifconfig for an example, since I myself didn't know where it came from.
--- SELECT * FROM `packages` WHERE files LIKE '%ifconfig%' ---
SELECT * FROM `packages` WHERE files LIKE '%ifconfig%'
And voila, you now know you need package net-tools. Obviously the output would be formatted better for readability, I just copied that out of the database.
It would be a simple matter to make a URL on the web server, which searched for it for you. `lynx --dump "http://lmlinux.com/search_packages.php?search=ifc onfig"` (slashdot induced the space, but this URL doesn't exist, so don't worry about it.)
Of course, if you're downloading to another machine (your machine doesn't yet have connectivity or whatever), there would be the handy-dandy search page to do the same thing via web browser.
Definately nothing new, but it seems like a very simple way to do something complex.
It isn't exactly necessary, since we plan on having everything on the ISO, which would be built every time we make changes. Ahhh, a nightly ISO, that would be so much fun.:)
We're making the whole build process fairly automated. I rebuilt all of the packages last night in under an hour. That's compiling everything from source, and making the packages. So, if a new change occurs, we can have a current ISO out in an hour. Say someone found some nasty exploit for anything compiled with gcc or linked to glibc, we could have it cleaned up and ready to fix in an hour. Well, maybe a couple hours, once there are more packages in there, but the idea is still sound. You could either let the package manager download and upgrade, or download and burn the ISO, stick it in the machine, and update from there.
Myself, I'm big into ISO's, but I know it's not reasonable for end users. On our internal server distribution, that we've been doing for a few years now, each new release is done via ISO. You download and burn it, and away you go..
For comparison, give me the warm fuzzy method for transfering all the data from two hard drives, one containing the OS, the other containing all the user files, with only say 10 minutes of downtime, on Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
At an automotive shop I used to pseudo-work at, they used to joke about taking the capacitor from old distributors, and just tossing them to newbie mechanics, teaching them not to ever catch something thrown at them. :)
The disposable camera route seems kind of silly. Most people who would attempt this should have enough parts laying around their house to build one. I believe an old PC power supply would have the required components, or it should only cost a couple bucks at Radio Shack to build one.
I like your softball idea, but it would seem to pose too much of a chance of not hitting the electrodes correctly. There's so much chance they'd catch the ball wrong, and both electrodes would hit one hand and they'd only say "Ow!" before beating the crap out of you.
Legand has it that it references the place where "the holy grail" is, so mix in the possibility of any number of those words being the names of people or cities anywhere in Europe or Asia, from any number of centuries ago. It could even be a city that was completely destroyed in any number of wars, forgotten, and now the new home of Austria's newest Super-WalMart.
In a few thousand more years, people may not even know where Austria or England are, it may simply be referenced as the possible home of the empire previously known as Erope. (mispelled on purpose). It happens. Ask the residents or descendents of Petra
You saw jehovah in an anus? I'm not sure the Vatican would be happy to know that, unless it was a little boy's butt?
Damn, if the Christian god is real, I'm in trouble.
"My son, we've been recording your sins. This will take a while to review with you, unless you'd like to simply go to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200."
I looked at this for a few minutes. The chances of decyphering the meaning is very very (VERY) slim, unless you find a good reference from the period about it.
The "D.M." aparently has to do with a funeral right, in Latin, of course. I'd have to assume the rest is in Latin too. The number of latin words that the phrase could match are huge. Even if you did find a match for the phrase, which shouldn't be all that hard, it may or may not be right, without some other reference.
Our
Utterance
Omits
Some
Valuable
Assertation
Validating
Vexation
Think of the phrase (and rather obnoxious to non-christians) WWJD.
Where Would Joseph Drive?
Why Would Josie Drink?
Would Willy Just Die?
White Water Jewish Dancing.
From what I hear, it doesn't really mean any of those. Ask a Christian for the right answer.
I considered finding a latin dictionary file, and having a program run through all the possible combinations, but since I don't read latin, it wouldn't make too much sense, now would it? If it is a reference to "the holy grail", that means some of those letters probably represent cities or countries somewhere in Europe or Asia, with their name from several centuries ago.
For all we know, it's a tribute to all of someone's illigitimate children.
A 1962 Twilight Zone epsiode, "How To Serve Man".
Took me a minute to find the corrected title. In the past I've also read that it was a short story, but I can't remember who wrote it. I've never actually seen the story.
Amazon has the CD set, which aparently has this epsiode on it.
Ah ha! Found it!
It was written by Damon Night as a short story, and produced by Rod Serling as a Twilight Zone episode, which aired on March 2, 1962!
The whole Story
Damn, that Internet is a wonderful thing. hehe
I can just imagine the general population (i.e., us) having this kind of discussion in say the 1940's. People were absolutely terrified of the prospect that there could be life on other planets. Take the War of the Worlds radio show as a prime example of this.
:)
Say even a small percentage of the UFO sightings have been real, I don't blame any government for covering it up. It would be mass hysteria if it got out that a civilization of obviously vastly superior technology had come here.
Now we're a post-Star-Trek civilization. We've learned (through entertainment) that there can be good and evil out there. We're just taking the gamble of if they're friendly or not. Are they here to help us advance, to just explore, or eat us.
I suspect if we did make contact with a sufficiently advanced race, who had any sort of written language (that we could see, I hope) we'd have a chance of translating and eventually communicating with them. I'm sure they'd be trying to communicate with us too. Well, assuming they aren't here to eat us.
The religion debate may be moot. Religion may be a human thing that we've invented to comfort ourselves regarding things we don't understand. They may actually be a bit peeved that we try to push our primitive concept on them.
Actually, every time I go out in the woods, I go out far enough where cell phones don't work. I can't imagine getting lost in the woods where your phone still works. That means you're within a few miles of the nearest tower, which must be near a road. They only put up cell towers where they'll be used, and people sure as hell don't go far from their cars. Humans are very lazy animals.
Don't believe me? When's the last time you were more than a few hundred feet away from your car? When's the last time you walked 10 miles?
People get lost too easily. Hell, they'd get lost on a straight road between point A and point B.. Survival of the fittest, I say. If you don't come back alive, then maybe you shouldn't. It's not a tragic loss, it's population control.
(ya, ya, cold and heartless.)
Hmmm.. Linksys and D-Link have both been guilty of that, as I recall. I'm sure there have been plenty of others...
:)
:) It's very useful in one of the colo's, where we have a WAP11. There's lots of electrical noise, and the metal cabinets and battery room don't exactly help the signal pass. I can go anywhere in the facility and stay online, which is very useful. Some days I may be working on several different customers equipment, and it's nice to bring my laptop to each cabinet/cage and stay online the whole time.
I was really surprised to find how many wireless networks there were around Tampa, Florida. We went for a drive, and found hospitals using 802.11b for point to point communications between branch locations, and Ybor city (the party district) with AP's all through the place. Fire up kismet, wellenreiter, or netstumber (depending on your platform), and look around a little.
I have a little 4.5dBi antenna stuck to the top of my laptop, that follows me everywhere.
Thanks for the info. Now we know that the Microsoft cards are yet another Prism card. :)
:)
:) This card has two antenna jacks on it. I have a whole collection of antennas and adapters that I've used with it. It's kinda fun to sit in a high place with a high gain antenna and slowly turn the antenna picking up different access points every few degrees. It's not really necessary, as with just a little 4dB antenna, I hear plenty of stuff. :)
:)
Here is a nice comparison page on wireless gear.
I can give you my opinions too.
For Linux, I've been very fond of the "Orinoco Gold" card. They're fairly easy to get online, work very well, and allow external antennas to be attached. I put an Orinoco Gold card in a Netgear PCIPCMCIA adapter (which is incorrectly marked that it only works with Netgear PCMCIA cards), and use that in my home machine now.
My newest love for wireless cards are the Senao "NL-2511 Plus EXT2" card. If you search for the model number, you'll find it sold under other names. Mine came in a white box, with no name, and room for a brand name sticker.
I hate all the USB adapters. I've never bothered getting them to work on Linux, and with Windows or Mac they suck. Well, they're fine unless you want the connection to stay up. Some of them make Windows hang at boot time if they're attached.
For the card impared, the Linksys WET11 works great. You just attack it to an ethernet jack (or hub), and away you go.
I've ordered most of the wireless gear I have on the Internet, so it really doesn't matter that you're in a small town, you can still get it.
If you feel ambitious, there's a small shop in Florida that sells *GREAT* antennas. They're fab-corp.com.
I use an 18dB panel and a 24dB parabolic antenna attached to a pair of Linksys WAP11's as a bridge, for my come connectivity, over a 1/2 mile 802.11b link. You can see pictures here.
The WAP11's have a PCMCIA card built in, which tends to overheat if the location gets hot, so I disassembled one and put a fan on it (see the pic). It's not pretty, but works very well. I've been using it exclusively at home for several months. Occasionally, I'll loose my link, if it's windy, because the parabolic antenna is mounted to a very poor mast, but that's my own fault for not putting up a better mast on the house. It'll get blown about 10 to 15 degrees off, and receive no signal.
When I first set up the wireless link, I brought my laptop to the roof, and it reported 100% signal strength using the parabolic antenna. With a 4dB antenna, I had absolutely no signal. Makes it kind of hard for someone to evesdrop on my signal, unless they also have a high gain antenna and happen to be directly between the two points.
You (and others) are right, Microsoft has licensed some great hardware over the years.
I've used plenty of different WiFi products, and was curious to what Microsoft had licensed, but never saw the killer deal on them to encourage me to buy any to find out. Other brands were always at a lower price, every time I went shopping. It seems that everyone in the WiFi business buys someone elses product and sticks their own label on it. I'm sure if you cracked open any Microsoft WiFi product and looked inside, the chipset wouldn't say "Microsoft" on it.
This, of course, has been Microsoft's way with everything, including many of their software products. They buy out a company, change the names, and sell it as Microsoft. The biggest example I can think of off-hand (at 1am, mind you) was Microsoft SQL, but throughout their lines, it's something they've bought (or stolen) over the years. What was the case they lost a year or so ago, where they had been distributing someone elses code as a Microsoft product, and finally lost in court?
I was expecting, if I ever got my hands on some Microsoft WiFi equipment, that I'd find a decent brand inside. Too bad that won't be happening now. If I get one, it'll be used junk someone is throwing away.
Almost everyone I know is using Linksys or Netgear wireless stuff. Even across all the wireless equipment I've heard (carefully not admitting to anything potentially illegal), I've never run across any Microsoft gear.
Yup.
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Well, they don't explicity say it, but it seems to be true.
What was most evident to me was that they always linked wrong page on my site. Well, it was accurate for getting to a story, but not the best choice.
I just searched for slashdot.org on news.google.com, and sorted it by date. The most recent story they had was: "More Light Shed on Project David"
news.google.com showed:
More Light Shed on Project David
Slashdot - 12 hours ago
Sun writes "Flexbeta.net received from Specops Labs screenshots "proving" that project David (previously covered here) is a real thing. The demo....
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/02/03/0140215
But Slashdot has this link:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/0
Which is consistant with what Slashdot has in their RSS feed.
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?content_type=rss
It's not just a straight RSS feed. For FreeInternetPress.com, they let the majority of the stories show up somewhere in their searches. Good stories make it to their front page, if there are lots of other sites covering the same story (funny that). I'd think their front page decision is a formula derived by the number of sites containing similiar words. Sometimes we've had stories listed on their front page with others, that didn't have anything to do with the title story.. Human error??
Google News soemtimes changes our titles, and a few times has taken pictures from our stories, and put them with other news outlets text. But, they're careful to attribute where everything came from.
They don't always post our stories. If they story is a rant (which happens from time to time), or very contriversial, it won't be picked up by Google News, so submissions aren't completely automated. There's some sort of human intervention in the middle.
Funny, handling of Slashdot.org by Google News seems very hit and miss. Maybe there's some fans there, that approve everything, and then some who could care less.
Radio Shack used to sell a chip that did that. I don't think it was 90 seconds of recording. I've been searching for about 10 minutes, and didn't run across anything. Of course, I was looking for something that handled more time.
It'd still probably be cheaper and easier to buy 10 little portable CD players in bulk somewhere, and rig up a little rod to hit the "play" button.
If the site looks like news, and has an RSS feed, they put it up quickly. Google News was ignoring FreeInternetPress.com , but once we put up the link for the RSS feeds, they picked us up. Now just about every story we publish gets posted.
And this looks like a good place to tell you about The Nigritude Ultramarine attack submarine. I'd laugh if I even show up in the top 100.
Ya, I was aware that the Virtual machine is completely virtual.
I was just hoping that they would have put in something to identify that is was a virtual machine on the same hardware, somehow.. There's no way I'm paying for a second license to put it on the same physical computer, especially where I didn't even want to buy the first copy.
This is America. You sue Ford for building defective vehioles. The other driver(s) sue you for driving a dangerous vehicle. The power company sues you for the power pole you hit (they do, seriously).
/road\
:) He actually stopped by the hospital (a civilian hospital) a few times to check up on her. The hospital staff said to me it was wierd, I was the only person in civilian clothes to come by.
One of my ex-girlfriends was driving down Bayshore Blvd in Tampa, when a genius ran a stop sign from a side street, went straight across the road, and continued across to the opposite lane of traffic. She braked, but only managed to slow down enough to miss the side of the car, but still clipped the back end. That sent her spinning. She stopped with a tree embedded about 2 feet into the front of her Jeep Cherokee, and the back bumper firmly placed against a raised driveway
[apartments]
| |
()[jeep]| |
- - - - - -
[road]
- - - - - -
Luckly for her, she was in the Air Force, and there were plenty of Air Force personnel driving to work on the same road, who stopped to help her. From what I understand it looked like a full fledged military maneuver getting her out of the jeep and transported to a hospital.
It was the fault of the guy who ran the stop sign, who didn't stop. There were plenty of witnesses who all reported seeing the same thing.
So what happened? The guy who ran the stop sign was never caught. No one got a tag number, only a good description of a common vehicle. The apartment building sued her for damage to the tree, driveway, and grass, all of which were on the public right-of-way of the road.
The Air Force surgeon who stopped to help, didn't sue.
The apartment building's management continued the lawsuit, until the insurance company finally paid. Why? Because here in America, everyone sues for everything, no matter who's at fault. I'd blame them for planting a large (30' palm tree) on the right of way of the road. If it hadn't been there, she wouldn't have crashed, she would have continued driving. More than that though, I blame the driver who ran the stop sign, causing the whole mess. I definately can't imagine blaming her, as all she was doing was driving to work.
Should she have sued Jeep, because with stock equipment (stock tires in good condition, stock brakes in good condition), she wasn't able to stop the vehicle or stay in control after the hit? Nope. In my TransAm with much better braking, traction, and anti-lock brakes, she would have probably been able to stay in control. So do we blame Jeep, (or Ford for the Ford XP in your case) because it doesn't handle in the rain like a sports car?
General Motors has the technology to help prevent a car from spinning. It's in the newer Corvettes. Does every other car owner sue if they get in an accident where that feature could have prevented a crash?
Actually, a friend was driving one of my cars, and got carjacked. The carjacker wrecked my car into three parked cars, incurring over $10,000 damage to just my car. My insurance company says the other car's owners need to be paid by their insurance company, or wait for the police to find the driver. They then warned me that a couple of the other insurance companies have threatened to sue *ME*, becase it was my car.. My car, with a thief driving it. That's far from my responsibility. I was just as financially damaged as they were. It's my auto insurance that's going to go up, because my vehicle had to be repaired.
:)
If I ever get lawsuit #1, I'll show up to court, and testify that I was at home, asleep, when the unauthorized driver, who I don't know the identity of, stole my car and crashed it.
So aparently yes, if someone steals your bicycle, and rides in front of a car and gets hit, you can end up with a lawsuit against yourself. But here in America, land of the lawsuits, anyone can sue anyone for anything, claiming almost anything is your fault. It's my fault that car was on the road, because I bought it. But it's the auto manufacturer's fault for build it so I could buy it.
Exactly.
If I go to your house, and cut your brake lines, because they're easily accessable (most cars are), and you drive off a cliff because you couldn't slow down, is it your fault for driving the car? The auto manufacturers fault for giving me the ability to reach the brake lines? Nope, my fault for cutting your brake lines.
It probably wasn't the choice of the IT managers. The decision could have been passed down by anyone higher in the chain of command. I'll use American examples, because I don't know the English chain of command. If you're a low ranking officer, in charge of all the technical equipment, you may have been told by the base commander "We will use Windows servers", who had the mandate passed down by Congress. They may have signed a budget specifically saying to use Microsoft, even though the officers who are doing the actual work would have seriously prefered Linux (or some other *nix).
But turn it around. If a new exploit was found for the particular *nix that they were using, they'd still be in the same situation. If the laptops were running *nix, one got rooted while on an open network, and the intruder put a script on the laptop to propogate to all other *nix machines it encountered, they'd still be just as screwed. More than likely in a command, they'd all be mandated to use the same OS, so it would be that much easier for the intruders scripting to break plenty of machines.
The network security should have been in place to prevent this. No matter how exploitable the infrastructure servers were, there should have been no way for the potentially exploited machines to get to them.
That reminds me of something I saw in high school. When soda machines first started accepting bills, kids would squirt water in the bill slot with a water pistol, shorting out the electronics, and it would dispense as many soda's as you'd like.
Do you blame the soda vending company for the kid stealing the soda? No. They improved the design, and the kids caught stealing sodas were still treated as theives. A few got caught, and many got away with it.
Actually, a car manufacturer would be irresponsible for making car windows that couldn't be broken out. Think of an accident scenerio. You're in a car crash, the doors are locked from inside, and the windows are up. If the car is on fire (or whatever, to shorten the timeframe for fire/rescue to act in), if they can't break the windows, you may just die. Then they could be considered responsible for inhibiting the fire/rescue team from saving your life.
"Sorry, we coudn't save little Timmy from the burning car, the doors were locked, the windows were unbreakable, and there was no time to open the doors with the jaws of life."
You're absolutely right. I fired a pistol, which the previous shooter had some sort of snake/bird shot in it (38 cal round resembling a shotgun round). When I fired my first shot, it didn't hit the target, and I very very rarely miss (like, only if I'm doing rapid fire practice). I stopped, and checked the weapon. The round I fired was still in the barrel. If I had fired a second round, something would have to give, and it probably wouldn't have been pretty.
Aparently, a piece of the shot stayed in the barrel, and lodged next round in the barrel. It took a gunsmith to fix it.
That was well beyond the scope of what the manufacturer would be responsible for, or even the ammunition manufacturer. It was the fault of the previous shooter, as well as my own fault for not carefully checking the weapon before firing myself.
Not to skip the M$ Bashing, but....
Shouldn't there be a bit better security in an essential service such as that? Why are people allowed to bring insecure machines in, and plug them into the network? Shouldn't they have 24/7 administration? Shouldn't someone have seen a report about Sasser, and patched their machines? We're not talking about Mom & Pop ISP here, we're talking about a branch of a nations military. Why are people coming in with laptops from home, and being allowed on the same network with an essential infrastructure? Haven't their admins read any books on secure networking? What about firewalls between the essential infrastructure machines, and the compromisable network? The way the story sounds, people take their laptops home, browse the Internet, and come to work and plug in pretty much anywhere. I suppose there's more than one CCSP on staff saying "hey boss, told you so" err, maybe "Sir, remember those security recommendations I made last year? May we implement those now?"
You're right, you can compile anything on anything. But there are frequently problems. I was doing work on a Debian box a few days ago, and spent the first 15 minutes installing packages that weren't included with the default install, that were needed.
When it really comes down to it, as long as the libraries and compiling tools are in place, you can treat any *nix just about the same.
My biggest gripes are with the init structures. Try adding say 20 IP's to most distro's or *nix's, or an advanced networking structure. There was a guy with some variant of BSD a few years ago that hosted with us, and it would let a few IP's work, and not the rest, pretty much randomly. I ended up making him a fake rc.inet1, which worked perfectly.
Slackware has had it's problems, but with the 8.x and 9.x releases, things have been very smooth. Patrick has done a great job with it, and there's great support at linuxpackages.net. Not support, exactly, you can just download whatever you want precompiled, and install it.
But hey, everyone likes their own distro. I'm happy to hear about anyone running a *nix, be it a Linux distro or whatever.
No all the management data is kept on a dev server, for the web site and package delivery server to access. There's no real need to distribute the whole database to the users.. They way we see it, the single request to download the full lists would be much easier if it was a single request to the database to ask for an answer. And if you don't have connectivity, you can still just browse the package web pages, and download as needed.
./sbin/arp /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40027000) | /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
c onfig"`
:)
We'll use ifconfig for an example, since I myself didn't know where it came from.
---
SELECT *
FROM `packages`
WHERE files LIKE '%ifconfig%'
---
SELECT *
FROM `packages`
WHERE files LIKE '%ifconfig%'
| id | generic_name | archive_name | homepage | software_version | internal_version | create_time | files | deps | builder | orig_archive |
| 9 | net-tools | net-tools-1.60-1-i686-lmpkg.tgz | | 1.60 | 1 | 1083588127 |
./sbin/ifconfig
./sbin/nameif
[snip files list]
|./sbin/arp: libc.so.6 =>
[snip ldd output]
| -pv | net-tools-1.60.tar.bz2 |
And voila, you now know you need package net-tools. Obviously the output would be formatted better for readability, I just copied that out of the database.
It would be a simple matter to make a URL on the web server, which searched for it for you. `lynx --dump "http://lmlinux.com/search_packages.php?search=if
(slashdot induced the space, but this URL doesn't exist, so don't worry about it.)
Of course, if you're downloading to another machine (your machine doesn't yet have connectivity or whatever), there would be the handy-dandy search page to do the same thing via web browser.
Definately nothing new, but it seems like a very simple way to do something complex.
It isn't exactly necessary, since we plan on having everything on the ISO, which would be built every time we make changes. Ahhh, a nightly ISO, that would be so much fun.
We're making the whole build process fairly automated. I rebuilt all of the packages last night in under an hour. That's compiling everything from source, and making the packages. So, if a new change occurs, we can have a current ISO out in an hour. Say someone found some nasty exploit for anything compiled with gcc or linked to glibc, we could have it cleaned up and ready to fix in an hour. Well, maybe a couple hours, once there are more packages in there, but the idea is still sound. You could either let the package manager download and upgrade, or download and burn the ISO, stick it in the machine, and update from there.
Myself, I'm big into ISO's, but I know it's not reasonable for end users. On our internal server distribution, that we've been doing for a few years now, each new release is done via ISO. You download and burn it, and away you go..
For comparison, give me the warm fuzzy method for transfering all the data from two hard drives, one containing the OS, the other containing all the user files, with only say 10 minutes of downtime, on Windows.