When I was at the University of Edinburgh back in the 1980's, I seem to remember the CS workstations being named after pubs in the city. That worked since there are so many pubs in Edinburgh - practically one on every street corner. It worked pretty well because the names were distinctive and recognizable, and it was at least a little humorous. I think it's better to use a set names that people already recognize, since the brain is really good at recognition. Abstract names are not so great, since they require conscious effort to memorize.
Bots should adhere to the robots.txt rules. That is how webmasters "give permission" to bots such as Googlebot to crawl their website. If a bot doesn't bother reading robots.txt, then it qualifies as abusive, in my book.
I only give permission to googlebot in my robots.txt, and disallow everybody else. Thus AVG does not have permission to do this, no.
I hate the RIAA as much as anyone, I think they are a bunch of scumbags. But people need to realize that this is not simply a case of someone ripping CDs for their own personal use; according to the supplemental brief (pdf) (see page 12,13 etc), the guy apparently was using KazAa and had the files into the shared directory. Now I am not making any judgement on the legality or morality of doing this; it's simply worth noting that this is not a simple case of "now it's illegal to even rip your own CDs (SHOCK! HORROR!)". This is more a case of the same-old, same-old RIAA going after someone who seemed to be sharing the files over a peer-to-peer network. I know the article quotes them as saying scary and insane stuff about it not being legal to even make copies of your own CDs, but didn't the Audio Home Recording Act take care of making copies for your own use a while back? I think it's pretty easy to convince any jury that making copies of CDs and distributing them over the internet is "wrong", but they'd have a hard time convincing any sane person that ripping mp3 versions of your own, legally purchased CDs, for your own use, is in any wrong.
Your reply might have prompted a reaction from me of "Hey, that's interesting, thanks for the tip". However the shrill and overly aggressive tone of it just left me cold, instead thinking "Wow, what an asshole" regardless of any actual points you might have had.
Here's a clue: You don't convince people by shouting at them, telling them they are completely, utterly, totally wrong (especially when the world really isn't as black and white as you are suggesting). I'm guessing you might the the type of person who would also try to tell me I'm completely, utterly wrong for using MySQL at all. I've long given up trying to reason with zealots.
In point of fact, your post is a good example of why I don't post all that much on slashdot or reddit any more. It seems that many people who "debate" online have given up on civilized discussion and instead jump straight to the kind of cut-throat, over-the-top, spittle-flying shouting match that typifies television "news" these days.
See, we could be talking about the technical merits of your argument, but instead you got me going on how you come across like a total dick.
Could the job be done using ssh tunneling? Probably, undoubtedly so. Does my setup work just fine for what it's doing? Absolutely, for the last eight years in fact. For me, the MySQL security model works just fine. As I said, I'll be using the SSL feature anyway as soon as I can get around to rebuilding MySQL with SSL enabled.
I have a LAMP server in colo which is running a fair sized community site, and I use MySQL replication for instant backup of data updates to my home workstation. I can't afford to run redundant servers at the moment, so this is a nice "poor man's backup" (not hot spare, just a relative guarantee that if the server or colo center blew up suddenly then I'd at least have a copy of the data on my home box, losing at most a millisecond or so of updates).
Since my home is on cable, there isn't any static IP address to put in the server's iptables rules, and so I need to leave the mysql port on the server open. For security I use MySQL grant tables to specify that from outside only the restricted 'replication' user can have password access. Even if someone managed to guess the password for that user, the grants say that all they can do is replicate (and then they'd have issues because they wouldn't have any initial copy of the database). Since I don't store passwords in the db at all, it's fairly secure. Sure, it's not bulletproof, but as long as you're aware of the issues and take reasonable steps, it's very possible to have a database server intentionally open to the internet.
Even better, run the replication over ssl, then nobody can sniff anything from the stream. I haven't done that yet (until recently I was running an older version that didn't support ssl) but it is on my to-do list.
Another small thing you can do is to change the port that MySQL is listening on, but haven't bothered to go that far yet - the existing security seems to have been pretty solid.
I have never heard a clear explanation of exactly why Pelosi and Reid are so against the concept of impeachment. I mean, they actually seem hostile to it. Why is this? The only argument I've seen is that they are somehow "afraid of a backlash" but that seems like a very flimsy reason given the obvious sentiment rising in this country. It seems almost as if the Democrats are somehow actually on Bush's side in some way, and not on the side of "the people" any more. It's almost like the "Opposition party" got taken over by a bunch of Republicans who now take great pains to squelch anything that feels like actual opposition. And they make noises about stopping Bush, but then roll over at every opportunity and give him exactly what he asked for.
I really, really dislike Bush, Cheney & Co. But I am truthfully starting to dislike the Democrats even more, if that's even possible - because it's somehow even worse to be stabbed in the back by a supposed friend than it is to be kicked in the face by your enemy (which you kind of expect). I feel like this country is now being betrayed just as much by the inaction of the Democrats as by the actions of the Republicans.
I have suggested this before and always got shouted down for it... but as a web developer, I really wish they had simply implemented tags like 'date', which the browser would automatically know about as a date field and have its own built-in popup calendar for browsing dates, rather than having to either rely on plain text, lame dropdown menus, or else implementing yet another date popup javascript library (or including yet another javascript library which slows down the user experience even more).
There are so many things that could be included in the html language if it weren't for the purists - dates, columns, real collapsable tree controls, counters, AJAXified controls that work without all the crap you have to do today to detect browsers... but no, the purists say "you can do it in this (incredible convoluted) css" or "you can implement this in javascript" (cue long convoluted "obvious" solution).
Geeks are notorious for generalising and making everything nice and orthogonal, but they often forget that sometimes it's worth having something that makes life easier 90% of the time, even if it's technically possible to reduce it to a set of other constructs that already exist.
Remember lisp, nobody uses it for real-world programming even though it's incredibly powerful. No, we use other languages that have lots of useless and redundant and inflexible syntax that makes the act of everyday programming easier and more straightforward most of the time. Are these inferior languages as powerful, expressive and all-encompassing as lisp? No. Are they easier for 99% of mere mortals to comprehend and use? Yes. If we had tags for controls that reflected the more dynamic nature of the Web today, even if many of those tags could be implemented in javascript, it would make pages smaller and faster 90% of the time (you could still implement it yourself if you really needed additional functionality).
But, as usual, the purists are in control. We're not supposed to use tables for arranging pages; no, we have to use CSS to do that. So now we have a bunch of pages that don't render properly. But do they admit that it was a bad idea? No, it's the browsers' faults for crappy implementations. I don't get it, this religious mindset that says "You must do it one way, our way is the only way". "The TABLE tag is for tabular data only, don't use it for arranging the page". What crap. The table tag is amazingly useful, it works in all browsers, and no I don't mind in the least typing TR and TD everywhere. It's simple and it works. Yes, it's more verbose perhaps than the CSS version but at least it works in all browsers and doesn't end up with overlapping crappy text all over the place.
I think the main reason "Web 2.0" has taken hold as a buzzword is the crash of 2000. There was a huge ramp-up in internet hype all the way from 1994 to around 2000 or so, driven largely (in the popular consciousness) by Netscape. Then came the stock market crash, and along with it came down all the dot-coms. Then we had a nuclear winter, where online advertising was officially dead, and nobody could get a job, and there was no startup funding for anything "fun" any more.
Then the new phase gradually started, with Google leading the way toward cool AJAX applications that actually worked (Google Maps being the prime example, for me anyway, that made me go "wow! cool!"). AJAX basically enabled more interactive applications where you could click on something and something would happen without a whole new page being loaded. So stuff like rating posts and moving maps became much easier and more desktop-like.
Basically, Web 2.0 is an expression of the first big wave (1990's) followed by the crash, followed by the second wave. I don't think it's really about any particular technology or social networking (we had that before, just in slightly more basic form); it's more about the second wind, the second chance, the second go around the hype machine. So now we again start to have companies that have lots of users, but no revenue to speak of, being bought for billions of dollars. And so it goes.
Web 3.0 will not come until there has been another crash, and another nuclear winter, and another resurgance on the back of some new, apparently minor tweak that makes people go "wow! cool!" all over again.
The thing the academics who push the semantic web fail to consider (most of the time) is that the Real World does not function like their Ideal World. In the Ideal World, everybody cooperates and works together to produce something of value for all mankind. So we get lots of correctly and appropriately marked up pages that give useful information on what's stored therein.
But in the Real World, any online system that is used by a large enough number of people will eventually become attractive for spammers and scammers to defile and twist to their own purposes. So you'll get a deluge of pages that appear to be useful reviews of digital cameras (and are marked up as such) but in fact simply go to a useless "search" page that has lots of link farm references.
And if you say "Ok, so we don't trust the author of the page, we have someone else do it"... then who? Who's going to do all the work? Answer: Nobody. AI is nowhere near being smart enough for this. Keyword searching is, unfortunately, here to stay. If you trust the author to do the markup, then the spammers have a field day. If you say "Only trusted authors" then the system will still fail, due to laziness on most people's part - if a system isn't trivial to implement and involves some kind of "authentication" or "authorization" then nobody will use it, period. The Web succeeded in the first place because anybody anywhere could just stick up a Web server and publish pages, and it was immediately visible to the whole world.
The Semantic Web will fail for the same reason that the "meta" tag failed in HTML: Any system that can be abused by spammers, will be abused.
So, the Semantic Web, which is all about helping people find stuff, will fail. Not because of any technological shortcomings (it's all very nice in theory), but simply because we as people won't work together to make it work. Well, a small number of people could work together, but as that number got larger, until it reaches the point of being useful, it will automatically get to the tipping point where it becomes worthwhile for the spammers to jump in and foul it all up.
You are twisting reality around in a truly bizarre fashion. Doesn't truth matter any more? You appear to be hung up on some kind of abstract concept ("credentials" and whether they matter or not) while holding your fingers in your ears and saying "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" with respect to the giant elephant in the room - which is the simple fact that what this admin did was unethical, manipulative and just plain WRONG, and moreover Larry probably knew this, and didn't seem to care. It's quite amazing the mental contortions people will go through (calling all of this "disinformation" or "misinformation" rather than LIES) in order to convince themselves that they are in the right and ok. These are traits of truly mentally disturbed people, when they can't even admit to themselves that they deceived everybody. It's not about credentials, man, it's about right and wrong in the most fundamental sense.
Anybody know if SHA-512 is mathematically vulnerable to the same kind of attack as SHA-1 (only presumably requiring more computing power)? Or is it really a different kind of beast?
Actually, I had always used POST on my contact form. Simply adding the preview step got rid of the spam. Also, you can use robots.txt to keep legitimate crawlers out of your posting pages (by and large - the contact form for the webmaster may be an exception).
I think the spambots find "likely looking" forms that seem to be for posting on guestbooks or forums (or contacting someone off a page like that). They then use heuristics to try to fill it in by looking for fields like "name" and "email". They then submit the form. But so far they don't appear to anticipate any preview page, or else they just assume that a site with something else after the initial POST is too complicated to work out automatically, I don't really know. All I do know is that I always used POST, and I was getting spam through the contact form. But then I added the preview step, and the spam stopped. I still saw bots hitting the page and making POSTs, but they only do it once. Go figure...
Funny this story should come up today. My community website has been getting attacked for the last couple of days by a botnet (I think) of zombie computers. I wrote the Spambot Trap article that was published here in 2002, and I've been using the trap successfully to block spambots ever since. Usually, the block list is a couple of dozen repeat offenders. But day before yesterday, it suddenly spiked up - there were dozens of spambots coming in from all kinds of different IP addresses. I'm pretty sure it's a botnet of zombies, because a) they all report exactly the same User-Agent, and b) they all come in directly to the guestbooks and forums (probably using a search engine) and c) all the IP addresses resolve to dialup, cable or DSL accounts (some businesses too). It's getting a bit much, because the block list has suddenly ballooned to over 160, constantly changing. The trap is coping ok, because the blocks will fall off after a while (the block time goes up as the power of 2 for each repeated offence). I have added some logfile snapshots to the article. (Look down the page to see how the number of blocks has suddenly increased in the last couple of days, and also notice how all the browsers are identical). I think this is some kind of virus that may still be spreading, because the number is only increasing.
I love Slackware, and I keep vacillating between going with Slack or Debian. I currently use slack on my workstation, and debian on the server, because the server is 64-bit and debian has a semi-official 64 bit port that works. The only 64-bit support for slack seems to come from slamd64, which is fine but I have to wonder why the "official" slackware distro is ignoring 64-bit? Is it just because of time, or is slamd64 eventually supposed to be rolled into the official distro?
I was veering toward preferring Debian, until I had to build my own Perl. On debian, this is a bit complex and a nightmare, to be honest, when all you want to do is build the damn thing there seems to be all this other crap you have to do in order to make it fit in with the rest of the "debian way". When I built perl on my slack box, it worked like a charm. On debian, it promptly broke a bunch of stuff (e.g. apt-get). And I couldn't simply remove the stock perl, because dozens of crucial packages depend on it. I know it's possible, I know, but it's NOT easy, if you have to sit down and spend a few hours researching how to build perl "the debian way". Slackware is much simpler in that regard.
So I remain torn. Sometimes I really like the apt-get simplicity of debian, especially for essential stuff that I really don't care about or want to spend a lot of time on, and want to "just work". On the other hand, straying off the straight and narrow in debian land can get you in a world of trouble. Slackware is much simpler - you can compile stuff from source if you want and it doesn't break everything. On the other hand, I don't like some aspects of slack - e.g. no easy way to restart crond. I really like having all those restart scripts under/etc/init.d in debian. Also, sometimes things are in weird places - e.g. who thought to put cron files under/var/spool/cron/crontabs? Why can't all config files just live under/etc? It just makes things harder to back up.
All in all though, it seems like every distro has its pluses and minuses. For me, the lack of an official 64 bit support makes slack a second choice on the server at the moment, since I have a dual Opteron and really want to take advantage of that. But on the workstation, I have a real affection for slack's straightforward, no-crap nature.
Sorry, I didn't mean to make it sound like PostgreSQL is dead.
However, I don't think it will ever attain real popularity until the developers and zealots get over themselves and make it more straightforward... which may never happen, but whatever.
It's not dead. There will always be some people using it, just as some people will always love Lisp - it's a purist thing.
I hadn't heard of this before. I liked the sound of pretty graphs, and I particularly liked how easy the article made it sound to install and get things working. So I tried it (I'm running Sarge AMD64 on the server) and it worked fine. In fact, it was up and running in a couple of minutes. Very nice!
I have to say it is refreshing to see something that "just works" out of the box with sensible defaults. Truth be told, I am sick and tired of these holier-than-thou OSS zealots who keep pushing bloated, complex toolkits which have every option under the sun, but it doesn't all "just work" out of the install, no, that would be too easy wouldn't it. You have to read through reams of distributed, fragmented documentation, forum posts and other sources to get the damn thing working properly, not to mention cobbling together all these !@#$ing plugins that are sooooo wonderful and yet just end up being a pain in the butt because you have to track them all down individually. Why can't geeks grasp a simple fact: People don't necessarily have the time or inclination to spend days learning the arcane innards of your toolkit. I don't care if people say "well if you can't be bothered taking the time then you're not a real admin" or whatever, if I had to spend a lot of time on every package tuning it and writing a sendmail.cf-esque config file just to get it working *the way it should by default* then I'm probably just going to look for something else. That something else may be simpler and not as "pure" as your baby, but you know what? I'll use it, because it *just works* and does *most* things in a simple intuitive way. That's why MySQL became successful, and why PostgreSQL didn't - sure, PostgreSQL was more powerful (in theory anyway) and had a bunch more features, but it isn't optimized out of the box. Whenever I see people complain about how slow PostgreSQL turns out to be when they finally try it, the inevitable reply is "Well, you need to spend time tuning it - if you don't do that then you don't deserve to be running a server". Whatever. As far as I'm concerned these "Tuning required by default" and "You aren't a *real* x if you don't learn these reams of config options just to get it working" people just don't get it. Make it work out of the box with sensible defaults, and let people delve into stuff further *if they want to*, not by requirement.
I think the snobs are like this because they did go and learn all that stuff, and so they feel deep down that they have to justify that it was all worth it by putting down those who have a life and don't feel like dedicating days and weeks of effort to getting some stupid software package to function in the most basic way.
So, great job Munin. My hat is off to you - I have a graphical monitoring system for my server, and it took me about two minutes to get it working. Fantastic.
Re:Moving physical memory pages on NUMA systems?
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I mean 2 x 265, i.e. two dual core CPUs.
Re:Moving physical memory pages on NUMA systems?
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Linux 2.6.16 released
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I have a dual Opteron 265 (dual core) server running AMD64, which, so I understand, uses the NUMA architecture. I am no expert, but I understand that my 4GB RAM is split between the two processors on this architecture, at 2 GB each. Thus I have always wondered how exactly the OS can move tasks efficiently between processors if the memory for each task is so tied to a particular memory bank. For example, if you happen to have some tasks that are on one of the CPUs and they all suddenly start taking up more processor and more memory, was it possible previously for the kernel to move some of the tasks over to the other CPU, given the two separate memory banks?
Is this what the new kernel is addressing, or am I way out here? Anybody who knows about this stuff? Thanks in advance.
I think you are missing the point by throwing everybody into a big heap and calling it "web 2.0". For a start, the whole Web 2.0 thing is just an attempt by someone to sum up the resurgence of the internet post-dot-bust of 2000. Some thought that the Web would pretty much die away as an exciting medium after that, that the "fad" was over. I think many were secretly glad about the bust, either because they simply didn't understand any of it in the first place, and were jealous about it (or threatened), or else because they simply missed out on all the money sloshing around.
In any case, I personally don't think "Web 2.0" is anything real or substantial as a concept, it's simply the aggregate result of a few websites finding out "what works", in different areas. Google was finally able to demonstrate that you could actually make really interactive web apps that work across different browsers (I had stayed away from Javascript since the mid-90's because nothing seemed to be consistent across IE, Netscape etc, so this really was news to me when I saw Google maps for the first time).
AJAX is just a relatively small, technological thing. But much bigger than AJAX is, in my opinion, the burgeoning realization of the social internet. So why has it happened only now, when the technology to do blogging, tags etc has really been around from the very beginning? Well, I think the answer is that social trends take their own time, they happen on their own schedule. It's like crowd behavior, when everybody in the audience decides to start clapping or stop at the same time - groups have their own intelligence.
Finally, the reason we are only seeing these things now is because it's purely a matter of chance as to how long it takes to find out what works and what just misses the mark. Del.icio.us worked, blink.com didn't. Subtle difference, tags vs folders, but enough. It took years for people to realize what the Web could really be good for... at the start it was cool enough just to have a web page. That took a few years to get over. Then people started obsessing about cool design, then scripting, then eyeballs, then "push technology", then e-commerce... it's all trial and error. Eventually, by chance, someone makes some software that makes it really easy to post daily notes to a web page, and, well, that really worked. I think it's pretty funny that many times, the thing that turns out to "hit the mark" is the one that, before it was a hit, the "experts" would deride as being simplistic or just wrong. How could you trust the general public to write their own tags? How could you trust just *anybody* to edit a web page? Horrors!
Turns out what people really love to do is network and communicate with other people, also to seek group status by their work. People seek tribes, it's a part of our nature. The Web is just currently figuring out how to express this side of our nature in ways that work. For a long time everybody assumed that hierarchical classification schemes developed by experts in back rooms were the way to organize stuff. So this guy who did del.icio.us, almost by chance, comes up with a flat scheme that is totally user-driven... and it works. Kind of like Wikis work, when before, all of our senses would have screamed "No, it can't work! It's anarchy! Vandals will take over!"... and yet, here we are. Open source... works. Wiki... works. Blogging... works. Tagging... works. The common thread between all of these is the social aspect - people working together, interacting and communicating and improving the group as a whole as a result. Shouldn't be all that surprising really, it's how we got where we are today.
So, what to call "these people"? How about just... people?
Could someone please enlighten me here? I thought that MapServer already was an Open Source project. In fact, I have played with it some. It is a very nice server-based solution for generating interactive maps. So what is this "announcement" all about really? Wasn't MapServer Open Source already? Is this some kind of takeover of the MapServer project by someone else?
I don't know much at all about AutoDesk, I am just wondering what's really changed in MapServer land.
I put Slackware 10.1 on my current home workstations. Why? Well, I used to use RedHat, and I was a paying subscriber. But they dumped me at 7.3 and refused to support me any more unless I switched either to their Enterprise license (no thanks, I am a *home user*) or else go to Fedora. I have heard that Fedora is supposed to be a kind of "bleeding edge, let the community work out the kinks" distro. Now I fall into that strange middle ground - I am not a casual user (I run a website with hundreds of users) and I do not want to run a bleeding edge distro, and yet I can't afford a commercial license, and in any case I feel quite a bit of resentment so I suppose all the other reasons are moot. Anyway, that eliminated RedHat and Fedora.
I considered SuSE, but I just don't trust corporate distributions after RedHat abandoning me like that. If RedHat can do it, and they were the shining light of commercial distros, then who knows what other so-called "stable" companies could do at the drop of a hat? Sorry, but that's just the way my thinking goes now. RedHat, are you listening? Your decisions have repercussions for real people like me. We remember stuff like that. It doesn't really matter if you employ a lot of kernel developers or contribute a lot of code to the Open Source community - I feel burned. So that eliminated the commercial distros.
So, what else? Debian. Well, when I had to do this install, Sarge was not stable yet. Woody was way too old, and I just didn't want to mess around with testing or unstable. So that sort of put Debian out of the running (then - now is different, since Sarge is now stable). I had heard of Gentoo, Ubuntu and so on, but I am just nervous going with anything too new. Also, I don't particularly relish the idea of Gentoo's "build everything from source" ethos. Just sounds like a lot of work, even if it is all amazingly optimized afterward.
So I came to Slackware. It sounded like a worthy candidate because it was not run by a big corporation, but rather by a passionate individual who's been doing it for long enough to have demonstrated (at least to me) his dedication and perseverence. So I tried 10.0, and was very pleasantly surprised. It "just worked" right out of the install. I had heard people say that it was bloat-free, and this is pleasantly so. It is very smooth and surprisingly "professional feeling". I have had absolutely no problems with slackware crashing on me or otherwise creating grief. I was especially pleasantly surprised at how all my previously "difficult" peripherals worked without any special tweaking - DVD burning, sound and so on.
There are issues, but they are more failings on my part than on slackware's. Probably the two main issues I have are:
1. Package availability and installation. I know about slapt-get, and I use it to get security updates. However I find quite often that some little utility that I need is just not available as a slackware package. I know it's no big deal, I can just go and get the source and build it, but as I said earlier, I am lazy. Debian works much better in this regard, since I can mostly just type "apt-get install xxx" and (usually) it will just be there a few seconds later. This is nice, a good thing. I can have confidence that Debian packages have been reasonably tested and will work well with the rest of the system. But, like I said, this is a somewhat minor gripe.
2. Different locations for config files. Again, this is my problem, not slackware's, but it's just something that trips me up occasionally (less as time goes on). So stuff is generally under/etc/rc.d. But there is no easy way to restart cron, for example. And there's no/etc/crontab. So it's harder to make quick changes to that. It's somewhere else, but I always forget where. And I always have to look for/var/spool/cron/crontab, for some reason. Again, these are my problems - it's just a little irritating that it's different from the way other distros work. In any case, why on earth co
Slashdot Mirror
When I was at the University of Edinburgh back in the 1980's, I seem to remember the CS workstations being named after pubs in the city. That worked since there are so many pubs in Edinburgh - practically one on every street corner. It worked pretty well because the names were distinctive and recognizable, and it was at least a little humorous. I think it's better to use a set names that people already recognize, since the brain is really good at recognition. Abstract names are not so great, since they require conscious effort to memorize.
Bots should adhere to the robots.txt rules. That is how webmasters "give permission" to bots such as Googlebot to crawl their website. If a bot doesn't bother reading robots.txt, then it qualifies as abusive, in my book.
I only give permission to googlebot in my robots.txt, and disallow everybody else. Thus AVG does not have permission to do this, no.
I hate the RIAA as much as anyone, I think they are a bunch of scumbags. But people need to realize that this is not simply a case of someone ripping CDs for their own personal use; according to the supplemental brief (pdf) (see page 12,13 etc), the guy apparently was using KazAa and had the files into the shared directory. Now I am not making any judgement on the legality or morality of doing this; it's simply worth noting that this is not a simple case of "now it's illegal to even rip your own CDs (SHOCK! HORROR!)". This is more a case of the same-old, same-old RIAA going after someone who seemed to be sharing the files over a peer-to-peer network. I know the article quotes them as saying scary and insane stuff about it not being legal to even make copies of your own CDs, but didn't the Audio Home Recording Act take care of making copies for your own use a while back? I think it's pretty easy to convince any jury that making copies of CDs and distributing them over the internet is "wrong", but they'd have a hard time convincing any sane person that ripping mp3 versions of your own, legally purchased CDs, for your own use, is in any wrong.
That does it! I'm moving to... oh wait
Your reply might have prompted a reaction from me of "Hey, that's interesting, thanks for the tip". However the shrill and overly aggressive tone of it just left me cold, instead thinking "Wow, what an asshole" regardless of any actual points you might have had.
Here's a clue: You don't convince people by shouting at them, telling them they are completely, utterly, totally wrong (especially when the world really isn't as black and white as you are suggesting). I'm guessing you might the the type of person who would also try to tell me I'm completely, utterly wrong for using MySQL at all. I've long given up trying to reason with zealots.
In point of fact, your post is a good example of why I don't post all that much on slashdot or reddit any more. It seems that many people who "debate" online have given up on civilized discussion and instead jump straight to the kind of cut-throat, over-the-top, spittle-flying shouting match that typifies television "news" these days.
See, we could be talking about the technical merits of your argument, but instead you got me going on how you come across like a total dick.
Could the job be done using ssh tunneling? Probably, undoubtedly so. Does my setup work just fine for what it's doing? Absolutely, for the last eight years in fact. For me, the MySQL security model works just fine. As I said, I'll be using the SSL feature anyway as soon as I can get around to rebuilding MySQL with SSL enabled.
And incidentally, it's "lose", not "loose".
Bye now.
I have a LAMP server in colo which is running a fair sized community site, and I use MySQL replication for instant backup of data updates to my home workstation. I can't afford to run redundant servers at the moment, so this is a nice "poor man's backup" (not hot spare, just a relative guarantee that if the server or colo center blew up suddenly then I'd at least have a copy of the data on my home box, losing at most a millisecond or so of updates).
Since my home is on cable, there isn't any static IP address to put in the server's iptables rules, and so I need to leave the mysql port on the server open. For security I use MySQL grant tables to specify that from outside only the restricted 'replication' user can have password access. Even if someone managed to guess the password for that user, the grants say that all they can do is replicate (and then they'd have issues because they wouldn't have any initial copy of the database). Since I don't store passwords in the db at all, it's fairly secure. Sure, it's not bulletproof, but as long as you're aware of the issues and take reasonable steps, it's very possible to have a database server intentionally open to the internet.
Even better, run the replication over ssl, then nobody can sniff anything from the stream. I haven't done that yet (until recently I was running an older version that didn't support ssl) but it is on my to-do list.
Another small thing you can do is to change the port that MySQL is listening on, but haven't bothered to go that far yet - the existing security seems to have been pretty solid.
I have never heard a clear explanation of exactly why Pelosi and Reid are so against the concept of impeachment. I mean, they actually seem hostile to it. Why is this? The only argument I've seen is that they are somehow "afraid of a backlash" but that seems like a very flimsy reason given the obvious sentiment rising in this country. It seems almost as if the Democrats are somehow actually on Bush's side in some way, and not on the side of "the people" any more. It's almost like the "Opposition party" got taken over by a bunch of Republicans who now take great pains to squelch anything that feels like actual opposition. And they make noises about stopping Bush, but then roll over at every opportunity and give him exactly what he asked for.
I really, really dislike Bush, Cheney & Co. But I am truthfully starting to dislike the Democrats even more, if that's even possible - because it's somehow even worse to be stabbed in the back by a supposed friend than it is to be kicked in the face by your enemy (which you kind of expect). I feel like this country is now being betrayed just as much by the inaction of the Democrats as by the actions of the Republicans.
I have suggested this before and always got shouted down for it... but as a web developer, I really wish they had simply implemented tags like 'date', which the browser would automatically know about as a date field and have its own built-in popup calendar for browsing dates, rather than having to either rely on plain text, lame dropdown menus, or else implementing yet another date popup javascript library (or including yet another javascript library which slows down the user experience even more).
There are so many things that could be included in the html language if it weren't for the purists - dates, columns, real collapsable tree controls, counters, AJAXified controls that work without all the crap you have to do today to detect browsers... but no, the purists say "you can do it in this (incredible convoluted) css" or "you can implement this in javascript" (cue long convoluted "obvious" solution).
Geeks are notorious for generalising and making everything nice and orthogonal, but they often forget that sometimes it's worth having something that makes life easier 90% of the time, even if it's technically possible to reduce it to a set of other constructs that already exist.
Remember lisp, nobody uses it for real-world programming even though it's incredibly powerful. No, we use other languages that have lots of useless and redundant and inflexible syntax that makes the act of everyday programming easier and more straightforward most of the time. Are these inferior languages as powerful, expressive and all-encompassing as lisp? No. Are they easier for 99% of mere mortals to comprehend and use? Yes. If we had tags for controls that reflected the more dynamic nature of the Web today, even if many of those tags could be implemented in javascript, it would make pages smaller and faster 90% of the time (you could still implement it yourself if you really needed additional functionality).
But, as usual, the purists are in control. We're not supposed to use tables for arranging pages; no, we have to use CSS to do that. So now we have a bunch of pages that don't render properly. But do they admit that it was a bad idea? No, it's the browsers' faults for crappy implementations. I don't get it, this religious mindset that says "You must do it one way, our way is the only way". "The TABLE tag is for tabular data only, don't use it for arranging the page". What crap. The table tag is amazingly useful, it works in all browsers, and no I don't mind in the least typing TR and TD everywhere. It's simple and it works. Yes, it's more verbose perhaps than the CSS version but at least it works in all browsers and doesn't end up with overlapping crappy text all over the place.
I think the main reason "Web 2.0" has taken hold as a buzzword is the crash of 2000. There was a huge ramp-up in internet hype all the way from 1994 to around 2000 or so, driven largely (in the popular consciousness) by Netscape. Then came the stock market crash, and along with it came down all the dot-coms. Then we had a nuclear winter, where online advertising was officially dead, and nobody could get a job, and there was no startup funding for anything "fun" any more.
Then the new phase gradually started, with Google leading the way toward cool AJAX applications that actually worked (Google Maps being the prime example, for me anyway, that made me go "wow! cool!"). AJAX basically enabled more interactive applications where you could click on something and something would happen without a whole new page being loaded. So stuff like rating posts and moving maps became much easier and more desktop-like.
Basically, Web 2.0 is an expression of the first big wave (1990's) followed by the crash, followed by the second wave. I don't think it's really about any particular technology or social networking (we had that before, just in slightly more basic form); it's more about the second wind, the second chance, the second go around the hype machine. So now we again start to have companies that have lots of users, but no revenue to speak of, being bought for billions of dollars. And so it goes.
Web 3.0 will not come until there has been another crash, and another nuclear winter, and another resurgance on the back of some new, apparently minor tweak that makes people go "wow! cool!" all over again.
The thing the academics who push the semantic web fail to consider (most of the time) is that the Real World does not function like their Ideal World. In the Ideal World, everybody cooperates and works together to produce something of value for all mankind. So we get lots of correctly and appropriately marked up pages that give useful information on what's stored therein.
But in the Real World, any online system that is used by a large enough number of people will eventually become attractive for spammers and scammers to defile and twist to their own purposes. So you'll get a deluge of pages that appear to be useful reviews of digital cameras (and are marked up as such) but in fact simply go to a useless "search" page that has lots of link farm references.
And if you say "Ok, so we don't trust the author of the page, we have someone else do it"... then who? Who's going to do all the work? Answer: Nobody. AI is nowhere near being smart enough for this. Keyword searching is, unfortunately, here to stay. If you trust the author to do the markup, then the spammers have a field day. If you say "Only trusted authors" then the system will still fail, due to laziness on most people's part - if a system isn't trivial to implement and involves some kind of "authentication" or "authorization" then nobody will use it, period. The Web succeeded in the first place because anybody anywhere could just stick up a Web server and publish pages, and it was immediately visible to the whole world.
The Semantic Web will fail for the same reason that the "meta" tag failed in HTML: Any system that can be abused by spammers, will be abused.
So, the Semantic Web, which is all about helping people find stuff, will fail. Not because of any technological shortcomings (it's all very nice in theory), but simply because we as people won't work together to make it work. Well, a small number of people could work together, but as that number got larger, until it reaches the point of being useful, it will automatically get to the tipping point where it becomes worthwhile for the spammers to jump in and foul it all up.
Typo: I said "Larry knew this", I meant "Jimbo knew this". Sorry.
You are twisting reality around in a truly bizarre fashion. Doesn't truth matter any more? You appear to be hung up on some kind of abstract concept ("credentials" and whether they matter or not) while holding your fingers in your ears and saying "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" with respect to the giant elephant in the room - which is the simple fact that what this admin did was unethical, manipulative and just plain WRONG, and moreover Larry probably knew this, and didn't seem to care. It's quite amazing the mental contortions people will go through (calling all of this "disinformation" or "misinformation" rather than LIES) in order to convince themselves that they are in the right and ok. These are traits of truly mentally disturbed people, when they can't even admit to themselves that they deceived everybody. It's not about credentials, man, it's about right and wrong in the most fundamental sense.
Anybody know if SHA-512 is mathematically vulnerable to the same kind of attack as SHA-1 (only presumably requiring more computing power)? Or is it really a different kind of beast?
Actually, I had always used POST on my contact form. Simply adding the preview step got rid of the spam. Also, you can use robots.txt to keep legitimate crawlers out of your posting pages (by and large - the contact form for the webmaster may be an exception).
I think the spambots find "likely looking" forms that seem to be for posting on guestbooks or forums (or contacting someone off a page like that). They then use heuristics to try to fill it in by looking for fields like "name" and "email". They then submit the form. But so far they don't appear to anticipate any preview page, or else they just assume that a site with something else after the initial POST is too complicated to work out automatically, I don't really know. All I do know is that I always used POST, and I was getting spam through the contact form. But then I added the preview step, and the spam stopped. I still saw bots hitting the page and making POSTs, but they only do it once. Go figure...
Funny this story should come up today. My community website has been getting attacked for the last couple of days by a botnet (I think) of zombie computers. I wrote the Spambot Trap article that was published here in 2002, and I've been using the trap successfully to block spambots ever since. Usually, the block list is a couple of dozen repeat offenders. But day before yesterday, it suddenly spiked up - there were dozens of spambots coming in from all kinds of different IP addresses. I'm pretty sure it's a botnet of zombies, because a) they all report exactly the same User-Agent, and b) they all come in directly to the guestbooks and forums (probably using a search engine) and c) all the IP addresses resolve to dialup, cable or DSL accounts (some businesses too). It's getting a bit much, because the block list has suddenly ballooned to over 160, constantly changing. The trap is coping ok, because the blocks will fall off after a while (the block time goes up as the power of 2 for each repeated offence). I have added some logfile snapshots to the article. (Look down the page to see how the number of blocks has suddenly increased in the last couple of days, and also notice how all the browsers are identical). I think this is some kind of virus that may still be spreading, because the number is only increasing.
Anybody else seeing this kind of stuff happening?
I love Slackware, and I keep vacillating between going with Slack or Debian. I currently use slack on my workstation, and debian on the server, because the server is 64-bit and debian has a semi-official 64 bit port that works. The only 64-bit support for slack seems to come from slamd64, which is fine but I have to wonder why the "official" slackware distro is ignoring 64-bit? Is it just because of time, or is slamd64 eventually supposed to be rolled into the official distro?
/etc/init.d in debian. Also, sometimes things are in weird places - e.g. who thought to put cron files under /var/spool/cron/crontabs? Why can't all config files just live under /etc? It just makes things harder to back up.
I was veering toward preferring Debian, until I had to build my own Perl. On debian, this is a bit complex and a nightmare, to be honest, when all you want to do is build the damn thing there seems to be all this other crap you have to do in order to make it fit in with the rest of the "debian way". When I built perl on my slack box, it worked like a charm. On debian, it promptly broke a bunch of stuff (e.g. apt-get). And I couldn't simply remove the stock perl, because dozens of crucial packages depend on it. I know it's possible, I know, but it's NOT easy, if you have to sit down and spend a few hours researching how to build perl "the debian way". Slackware is much simpler in that regard.
So I remain torn. Sometimes I really like the apt-get simplicity of debian, especially for essential stuff that I really don't care about or want to spend a lot of time on, and want to "just work". On the other hand, straying off the straight and narrow in debian land can get you in a world of trouble. Slackware is much simpler - you can compile stuff from source if you want and it doesn't break everything. On the other hand, I don't like some aspects of slack - e.g. no easy way to restart crond. I really like having all those restart scripts under
All in all though, it seems like every distro has its pluses and minuses. For me, the lack of an official 64 bit support makes slack a second choice on the server at the moment, since I have a dual Opteron and really want to take advantage of that. But on the workstation, I have a real affection for slack's straightforward, no-crap nature.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/
Sorry, I didn't mean to make it sound like PostgreSQL is dead.
However, I don't think it will ever attain real popularity until the developers and zealots get over themselves and make it more straightforward... which may never happen, but whatever.
It's not dead. There will always be some people using it, just as some people will always love Lisp - it's a purist thing.
I hadn't heard of this before. I liked the sound of pretty graphs, and I particularly liked how easy the article made it sound to install and get things working. So I tried it (I'm running Sarge AMD64 on the server) and it worked fine. In fact, it was up and running in a couple of minutes. Very nice!
I have to say it is refreshing to see something that "just works" out of the box with sensible defaults. Truth be told, I am sick and tired of these holier-than-thou OSS zealots who keep pushing bloated, complex toolkits which have every option under the sun, but it doesn't all "just work" out of the install, no, that would be too easy wouldn't it. You have to read through reams of distributed, fragmented documentation, forum posts and other sources to get the damn thing working properly, not to mention cobbling together all these !@#$ing plugins that are sooooo wonderful and yet just end up being a pain in the butt because you have to track them all down individually. Why can't geeks grasp a simple fact: People don't necessarily have the time or inclination to spend days learning the arcane innards of your toolkit. I don't care if people say "well if you can't be bothered taking the time then you're not a real admin" or whatever, if I had to spend a lot of time on every package tuning it and writing a sendmail.cf-esque config file just to get it working *the way it should by default* then I'm probably just going to look for something else. That something else may be simpler and not as "pure" as your baby, but you know what? I'll use it, because it *just works* and does *most* things in a simple intuitive way. That's why MySQL became successful, and why PostgreSQL didn't - sure, PostgreSQL was more powerful (in theory anyway) and had a bunch more features, but it isn't optimized out of the box. Whenever I see people complain about how slow PostgreSQL turns out to be when they finally try it, the inevitable reply is "Well, you need to spend time tuning it - if you don't do that then you don't deserve to be running a server". Whatever. As far as I'm concerned these "Tuning required by default" and "You aren't a *real* x if you don't learn these reams of config options just to get it working" people just don't get it. Make it work out of the box with sensible defaults, and let people delve into stuff further *if they want to*, not by requirement.
I think the snobs are like this because they did go and learn all that stuff, and so they feel deep down that they have to justify that it was all worth it by putting down those who have a life and don't feel like dedicating days and weeks of effort to getting some stupid software package to function in the most basic way.
So, great job Munin. My hat is off to you - I have a graphical monitoring system for my server, and it took me about two minutes to get it working. Fantastic.
I mean 2 x 265, i.e. two dual core CPUs.
Hmmm, maybe I should RTFA occasionally...
I have a dual Opteron 265 (dual core) server running AMD64, which, so I understand, uses the NUMA architecture. I am no expert, but I understand that my 4GB RAM is split between the two processors on this architecture, at 2 GB each. Thus I have always wondered how exactly the OS can move tasks efficiently between processors if the memory for each task is so tied to a particular memory bank. For example, if you happen to have some tasks that are on one of the CPUs and they all suddenly start taking up more processor and more memory, was it possible previously for the kernel to move some of the tasks over to the other CPU, given the two separate memory banks?
Is this what the new kernel is addressing, or am I way out here? Anybody who knows about this stuff? Thanks in advance.
I think you are missing the point by throwing everybody into a big heap and calling it "web 2.0". For a start, the whole Web 2.0 thing is just an attempt by someone to sum up the resurgence of the internet post-dot-bust of 2000. Some thought that the Web would pretty much die away as an exciting medium after that, that the "fad" was over. I think many were secretly glad about the bust, either because they simply didn't understand any of it in the first place, and were jealous about it (or threatened), or else because they simply missed out on all the money sloshing around.
... people?
In any case, I personally don't think "Web 2.0" is anything real or substantial as a concept, it's simply the aggregate result of a few websites finding out "what works", in different areas. Google was finally able to demonstrate that you could actually make really interactive web apps that work across different browsers (I had stayed away from Javascript since the mid-90's because nothing seemed to be consistent across IE, Netscape etc, so this really was news to me when I saw Google maps for the first time).
AJAX is just a relatively small, technological thing. But much bigger than AJAX is, in my opinion, the burgeoning realization of the social internet. So why has it happened only now, when the technology to do blogging, tags etc has really been around from the very beginning? Well, I think the answer is that social trends take their own time, they happen on their own schedule. It's like crowd behavior, when everybody in the audience decides to start clapping or stop at the same time - groups have their own intelligence.
Finally, the reason we are only seeing these things now is because it's purely a matter of chance as to how long it takes to find out what works and what just misses the mark. Del.icio.us worked, blink.com didn't. Subtle difference, tags vs folders, but enough. It took years for people to realize what the Web could really be good for... at the start it was cool enough just to have a web page. That took a few years to get over. Then people started obsessing about cool design, then scripting, then eyeballs, then "push technology", then e-commerce... it's all trial and error. Eventually, by chance, someone makes some software that makes it really easy to post daily notes to a web page, and, well, that really worked. I think it's pretty funny that many times, the thing that turns out to "hit the mark" is the one that, before it was a hit, the "experts" would deride as being simplistic or just wrong. How could you trust the general public to write their own tags? How could you trust just *anybody* to edit a web page? Horrors!
Turns out what people really love to do is network and communicate with other people, also to seek group status by their work. People seek tribes, it's a part of our nature. The Web is just currently figuring out how to express this side of our nature in ways that work. For a long time everybody assumed that hierarchical classification schemes developed by experts in back rooms were the way to organize stuff. So this guy who did del.icio.us, almost by chance, comes up with a flat scheme that is totally user-driven... and it works. Kind of like Wikis work, when before, all of our senses would have screamed "No, it can't work! It's anarchy! Vandals will take over!"... and yet, here we are. Open source... works. Wiki... works. Blogging... works. Tagging... works. The common thread between all of these is the social aspect - people working together, interacting and communicating and improving the group as a whole as a result. Shouldn't be all that surprising really, it's how we got where we are today.
So, what to call "these people"? How about just
Could someone please enlighten me here? I thought that MapServer already was an Open Source project. In fact, I have played with it some. It is a very nice server-based solution for generating interactive maps. So what is this "announcement" all about really? Wasn't MapServer Open Source already? Is this some kind of takeover of the MapServer project by someone else?
I don't know much at all about AutoDesk, I am just wondering what's really changed in MapServer land.
TIA
I put Slackware 10.1 on my current home workstations. Why? Well, I used to use RedHat, and I was a paying subscriber. But they dumped me at 7.3 and refused to support me any more unless I switched either to their Enterprise license (no thanks, I am a *home user*) or else go to Fedora. I have heard that Fedora is supposed to be a kind of "bleeding edge, let the community work out the kinks" distro. Now I fall into that strange middle ground - I am not a casual user (I run a website with hundreds of users) and I do not want to run a bleeding edge distro, and yet I can't afford a commercial license, and in any case I feel quite a bit of resentment so I suppose all the other reasons are moot. Anyway, that eliminated RedHat and Fedora.
/etc/rc.d. But there is no easy way to restart cron, for example. And there's no /etc/crontab. So it's harder to make quick changes to that. It's somewhere else, but I always forget where. And I always have to look for /var/spool/cron/crontab, for some reason. Again, these are my problems - it's just a little irritating that it's different from the way other distros work. In any case, why on earth co
I considered SuSE, but I just don't trust corporate distributions after RedHat abandoning me like that. If RedHat can do it, and they were the shining light of commercial distros, then who knows what other so-called "stable" companies could do at the drop of a hat? Sorry, but that's just the way my thinking goes now. RedHat, are you listening? Your decisions have repercussions for real people like me. We remember stuff like that. It doesn't really matter if you employ a lot of kernel developers or contribute a lot of code to the Open Source community - I feel burned. So that eliminated the commercial distros.
So, what else? Debian. Well, when I had to do this install, Sarge was not stable yet. Woody was way too old, and I just didn't want to mess around with testing or unstable. So that sort of put Debian out of the running (then - now is different, since Sarge is now stable). I had heard of Gentoo, Ubuntu and so on, but I am just nervous going with anything too new. Also, I don't particularly relish the idea of Gentoo's "build everything from source" ethos. Just sounds like a lot of work, even if it is all amazingly optimized afterward.
So I came to Slackware. It sounded like a worthy candidate because it was not run by a big corporation, but rather by a passionate individual who's been doing it for long enough to have demonstrated (at least to me) his dedication and perseverence. So I tried 10.0, and was very pleasantly surprised. It "just worked" right out of the install. I had heard people say that it was bloat-free, and this is pleasantly so. It is very smooth and surprisingly "professional feeling". I have had absolutely no problems with slackware crashing on me or otherwise creating grief. I was especially pleasantly surprised at how all my previously "difficult" peripherals worked without any special tweaking - DVD burning, sound and so on.
There are issues, but they are more failings on my part than on slackware's. Probably the two main issues I have are:
1. Package availability and installation. I know about slapt-get, and I use it to get security updates. However I find quite often that some little utility that I need is just not available as a slackware package. I know it's no big deal, I can just go and get the source and build it, but as I said earlier, I am lazy. Debian works much better in this regard, since I can mostly just type "apt-get install xxx" and (usually) it will just be there a few seconds later. This is nice, a good thing. I can have confidence that Debian packages have been reasonably tested and will work well with the rest of the system. But, like I said, this is a somewhat minor gripe.
2. Different locations for config files. Again, this is my problem, not slackware's, but it's just something that trips me up occasionally (less as time goes on). So stuff is generally under