I take Vicoprofen (for migraine pain). It's mixed with Ibuprofen instead of Tylenol. It still makes me sick all day after taking it. No idea why people abuse it.
For me it comes down to a choice between being in horrible agony all day or having no pain but stuck in bed feeling dizzy and like shit all day. I'll take that over the pain.
Now there may be some anti-nausea I can take to counteract some of the negative affects, but I haven't asked my doctor about that because the effects now ensure I won't abuse it and I don't want to know otherwise I guess.
I ended up having temporary facial palsy (i.e. half my face drooped and didn't work) after taking Ibuprofin for a week for severe headache pain related to heat stroke. I also felt dizzy and sick while taking the Ibuprofin, but the headache pain without meds was unbearable. After the headache pain from effects of heat stroke passed I was able to stop taking Ibuprofin, and a week later the facal palsy went away. I can't know for sure that the Ibuprofin caused the palsy, but some number of people that take Ibuprofin report having palsy from it.
The nastiest thing about the facial palsy was that on the side of my face that had the palsy the eyelid didn't "auto-blink" anymore, so the eye would get dry. It was especially noticable on long drives. To wet the eye I would have to consciously close both eyes at once -- for whatever reason that still worked. It's a bit mentally draining to have to constantly remember to close both eyes to wet them.
I personally have run Arch+KDE4 for the past few years and have loved it. Why? Because it works for ME, and I can customize, adjust, etc. things just the way I want them, which is very likely unique to my needs and probably wouldn't be great for someone else to use. But that's the beauty of running Linux on the desktop, you can configure the 'appliance' for your specific need rather than be confined to what someone else thinks is the best way to run a GUI.
I'm mainly a Debian user, I'm also running Arch (in a VM, for Desktop use, with LUKS/cryptfs) and I'm very pleased with what I find with it so far. However one thing I do notice is that for Daemons, Arch upgrades seem to create ".pacnew" configuration files that sit alongside the original configuration files and outputting a warning, somewhat similar to how RPMs upgrade with ".rpmnew" files. I don't particularly like that -- I much prefer the prompts for administrator input that the APT/dpkg system brings up when.deb packages are upgraded that have user-modified configuration files. It's way too easy to miss the text warning that flies by on the screen saying there's a ".pacnew" file somewhere during a "pacman -Syu" upgrade.
The ZDNet reivew looks like it's of Ubuntu (i.e. with the Unity/Gnome interface) and doesn't seem to include KUbuntu (with the KDE4 interface). Oh well.
I've yet to deal with an organization that has a GPG/PGP key for encrypting email to the organization. I don't think there's anything wrong with asking if they have one for encrypted email use, and so I think it's fine if you go ahead and do so, but I also don't expect that they have one.
What is more common is for the email MTA to support SMTP over TLS encrypted transfers. This can be verified using 'swaks' by testing each of the company's email servers listed in DNS one by one.
Finding the mail servers that cover a domain, for instance "nonsense.com":
$swaks --ehlo testing.example.com --server nullmx.nonsense.com --tls -q TLS === Trying nullmx.nonsense.com:25... === Connected to nullmx.nonsense.com.
220 mx ESMTP
EHLO testing.example.com
250-mx
250-PIPELINING
250-SIZE
250 8BITMIME *** Host did not advertise STARTTLS
QUIT
221 mx === Connection closed with remote host.
If the company email MTAs all DO support SMTPS, then perhaps that will be good enough. Even if the company did support GPG, there are certain things such as the Subject for the email which don't get encrypted, so SMTPS is important for those reasons anyway.
Like everyone else, I have no idea what they're doing, but no, it doesn't rule out focused surveillance.
What's being acquired as evidence is very wide, and the NSA is famous for both large data storage and building a database of interpersonal connections. Regardless if the particular reason this information is being gathered, I'm working under the assumption that they're going to be using the information in whatever way they can, rather than for the original reason they're taking the data.
I find it really concerning that a secret court can order such wide data transfer to the NSA, and also order that the order be kept secret.
Performance reviews are a good feedback mechanism for both the worker and the manager. It sounds to me like this particular programmer is feeling disconnected and as such doesn't seem to be taking account of the reporcussions for the way in which he's doing his work. Likewise this is bad for morale for everybody else, because they're having to clean up the mess. Nobody wins in this scenario -- the lone programmer is unhappy and the people he works with that want to work collaboratively are unhappy.
So the recommendation I have is to at least try to have a conversation with the programmer about these things and try to help him reconnect with his fellow employees. This is not a "blame session", it's an attempt to get the team reconnected so that they can work as a team. It sounds like the programmer isn't able to say "I don't understand this" and as such can't learn from his fellow employees because of perceived judgment or a sense of insecurity. This is common, and can lead to all kinds of bullying behavior -- but it's the underlying disconnection that's the biggest part of the problem, IMHO.
Hopefully this works. If not, hopefully the effort wil bring to light what needs to be done.
I have quite a lot of Debian workstations that I also want to just work, otherwise the users using them won't be very productive that day.
Agreed. Debian workstations work fairly well. [Occasionally I have to build a newer kernel for new hardware, but I can deal with that.] I like that things are stable during the release cycle.
... since the default desktop for Wheezy is the unutterably awful GNOME 3.
And in Debian Gnome3 now has a dependency on NetworkManager.
Users of the Wicd networking manager should be aware of this, because NetworkManager conflicts with Wicd. Neither Wicd no NetworkManager work when they're both active, and at the moment there's no warning about this nor instructions on what to do about it.:-(
Standing in a Utility boiler (Coal plant) I get full 3g signal (dont have 4g where I live). Fully enclosed and welded air tight, I get better signal inside than out.
"Instead of "passively blocking", I think you mean "shielding". As in a " Faraday cage". This doesn't hamper signals outside of the structure."
It's mostly due to bad reflections, interference, and simple attenuation. Unless a building is entirely steel clad, modern buildings make terrible Faraday cages.
Even with steel studs at 18" centers, that's more than 3 times the wavelength of 2GHz signals. Aside from studs, beams and girders and the like, even in a building with a lot of them, are nowhere near close enough to make a Faraday cage at those wavelengths.
You're probably right. "Real" shielded structures (such as anechoic chambers to test antennas) usually have conductive "fingers" in the doors, filters on incoming power lines, screens covering the air ducts... etc. Dispersion, intersymbol interference/distortion, multipath interference... those are more likely.
I didn't want to get into all of that; sometimes I just want to give a more "simple" kind of answer.:-P
Asking Slashdot, you'll get vastly differing opinions but you'll likely get some interesting information which will likely be useful. However... the only way to really know which distro is "right" for you is to try several and pick one. So I would suggest geting out your favorite Virtualization software (VirtualBox, KVM, etc) and try several distros at once. Find out what you like.
I recently did this back in August 2012. Here are the distros I liked:
*Mint Debian 201204 Fedora 17 (18 has a yucky installer) OpenSuSE 12.1 *Debian (Squeeze, Wheezy, Sid) Arch (fastest package installs by far, no sound in a VirtualBox VM) *Pear Linux 5 (looks just like a Mac, except a Pear in place of an Apple. Fun to play with.) Slackware 13 Vector Linux7.0 (based on Slackware, has package management. Fun, snappy.)
Least recommended: Gentoo. Attempting a base install + KDE4 was a THREE FULL DAY compile, after which X refused to start. Very frustrating. 2nd least recommended: FreeBSD, only because there's no GUI by default, and I couldn't find instructions to install one.
Regardless of which you choose in the end, best of luck to you.:)
I have never heard Slackware called: "The simple easy to use Linux distro".
Not that I really have not much experience, but I would only disagree with you on one point.
I started with Slackare in 1995, used it up to 1999 -- I found it easy to use, but it wasn't easy to upgrade because upgrading meant reinstalling because it didn't have package management at that time. In 1999 I went to Debian because it allowed upgrading in place. I've since tested Slackare 13 and found it easy to use.;-) [I didn't test whatever pakage management it may or may not have had, though.]
Mint (et all), is a better starting point than Ubuntu right now.
I don't like the Unity GUI in Ubuntu either (it's awful), but Mint has very few developers and I've been hearing complaints about the timeliness of downloading updates due to the small number of servers in their infrastructure. So I guess I'm saying that I agree, but that there are some other things to consider.
Mail servers are an utter pain to run though from what I hear - i.e. for outbound at least you have to deal with all the blacklisting and stuff which goes on due to spam.
The only time I've heard of this happening are for mail servers that also run mailing lists. I've been running my own server for 14 years and I haven't been blacklisted once. (Maybe I've just been lucky?)
Though outside of that the idea is appealing - I've long been thinking that I need to get a box hosted somewhere to act as a personal server for all types of things.
Yes... it's got a lot of advantages. Dealing with your own email server is rather interesting, it does take time to "get it right" (that takes a couple of years of tweaking) but after that it generally requires very little maintenance. And it's nice to have a server online to store and distribute files, have a personal blog that won't go away, etc.
I had that too - some insane bullshit of using it as a transfer point to sort stuff.
If I remember correctly (it's been a long time) the user I was dealing with was deleting messages he had dealt with, but got into the habit of referring back to the messages when necessary in the Trash folder. I suggested moving these sort of messages to another locally-stored folder, but the user refused saying "I'm used to working out of my Trash now."
I'd set up mail clients to empty Trash on exit, and when the guy that was doing this logged back in it was of course empty, so he came to rant at me in the lunch room to the amusement of all onlookers.
Logical. I considered trying that, but never did.
Now every few months he rings me up about a full disk, and each time I have to suggest emptying the Trash mail folder and the "Recycle Bin" on his desktop.
That reminds me... another thing that was going on back then was that a small set of users refused to delete any messages off the server, and at the time the server used MBOX storage and ext3 had a 2 GB filesize limit. One particular Sales guy got so much email that he would hit the 2 GB storage limit about every 3 months. He'd then call me up and tell me he wasn't getting his mail, I'd find his mailbox full, and I had to use 'mutt' to go delete old messages. I kept requesting to set his mail client to delete messages older than 3 months, but he kept refusing to allow me to do that. Instead he kept calling me every three months to fix his mailbox.
The next attempt at a fix was to make a script to watch mailbox sizes and warn the users of those mailboxes that were getting full to do something about it or to call me. I didn't expect that to work -- and it didn't -- but it was the next thing to try.
The final solution was to modify the "watch mailbox sizes" script to first warn the user about their mailbox size at a "soft" threshold, and let them know that when the mailbox size reaches a "hard" threshold that the system will automatically delete old messages out of their mailbox. I wrote another script that did just that, which (if I remember correctly) deleted messages that were older than 3 months. And with that, I never got another call about users reaching their mailbox size limits.
It's not that the person in question is stupid, it's that such people don't understand the design purpose of such items and use them in ways opposed to what was intended, which can sometimes produce useful results as well as just utter facepalms.
Right. Or they build up bad habits of using the system in a way that it wasn't designed for -- just like your story about the garbage bins used to store backup tapes. (Good story, BTW -- thanks.)
It should be noted that this latter solution also does not cause backscatter because it doesn't generate a bounce. [For a bounce to occur, the message first needs to be accepted, but then for some reason cannot be delivered.]
That depends on how the spam is being sent to you.
If the spam is coming directly from a spamming tool that ignores failures then rejecting it won't create a bounce. On the other hand if the spam is being sent to you by a proper MTA then the reject will cause the sending MTA to send a bounce message to whoever the message claims to be from.
Ah. Good point. True. I was referring to the destination MTA (your server) not generating a bounce, and in that equation I hadn't thought about the possibility of the sending MTA sending a bounce.
A few years ago I was working as an email administrator and got a call to someone's desk that was having a problem with their mail client because some of the folders were too full. One of them was Trash, so I was about to erase messages from the folder when the user paniced; "wait, that's important!"
For whatever reason, they were using the Trash folder for "real work" (Sigh.)
The details are that the messages were never delivered in the first place, your setup would not protect against such a problem.
That's true.
How bad this is depends on the system -- in this case it sounds like Shaw was doing "accept, then drop" which is the worst case because no one is notified of the failure. If however Shaw rejected spam rather than accept it, the sending mail system would notify the sender that the message was not delivered. It should be noted that this latter solution also does not cause backscatter because it doesn't generate a bounce. [For a bounce to occur, the message first needs to be accepted, but then for some reason cannot be delivered.]
You don't even need to be on the Evil Twin network to do this; at least some Torrent clients have a setting for what IP address to report that you're using. Some time ago I remember researchers from one of the big-name universities (MIT?) doing this and reporting the IP address of local network printers, and successfully received DMCA notices sent to the university reporting Torrent use by the IP address of the printer.
The other thing I'll mention is that doing a "tit-for-tat" hack on the Evil Twin network is probably the wrong thing to do.
For others suggesting the use of a directional antenna -- this is trickier than it sounds. Most directional antennas (like yagis) have a narrow horizonatal beamwidth, but a very wide virtical beamwidth (when mounted for the horizonatal beamwidth -- vice-versa when mounted for the virtical beamwidth). A dish might be more pinpoint, depending on the type of feedhorn used. Likewise there's no limit to the "depth" that the signal travels -- so for instance if you think that a particular appartment building contains a transmitter you're trying to locate, it's not simple to pin down which appartment has the transmitter. This is furthermore exaserbated by reflective surfaces, including typical corrogated metal floors used in building construction. Typical direction-finding requires a set of adjustible attenuators to further localize the originating strong signnal from the weaker reflected signals. As tough as this can be in an urban environment, "DFing" (direction finding) using a directional antenna is still cheaper and more reliable than using a Doppler Scanner.
Claiming that a reporter for a major newspaper is blatantly lying is absolutely not the right way to go about this.
The detail here as to where Musk went astray was in assuming bad faith on the part of Broder. All of the raw data that Musk described was good; if he had stated the facts he knew and then asked the question "How can we explain the discrepency?", that would have been a lot better PR.
Unfortunately this is the kind of thing that I don't usually see managers or marketers do well; the people that "stick to the facts" and know when they've strayed outside of what they know for sure tend to be engineers. Elon Musk has a PhD in Applied Physics so he obviously has a scientific background, but he's currently acting as the CEO which is a management position, and the transition from being a technical designer to manager unfortunately comes with a change of focus. That's my best guess as to why he drew an assuming conclusion here.
When it comes to the back-end of the "progress bar", it's essentially a widget that shows a percentage from 0 - 100%. So the question actuall is, does the thing the progress bar is showing the "progress" of output a "percentage done" or not. Sometimes the "percentage done" can be estimated or calculated, but sometimes it can't. Some programs (like 'dd') don't give any progress output at all.
What's annoying is when programmers show a "progress bar" that changes but doesn't actually show any progress -- so whatever they show is fake. That's irritating, because when that happens it means the user is essentially being lied to, and defeats the purpose of the progress bar. I'd personally rather see a message of "please wait while (blah)" than see a fake progress bar.
The latest place I saw a fake progress bar was in the Java setup GUI in Untange (which is based on Debian). Every single area a progress bar is shown in this GUI shows looping "fake" progress. Ugh.
And, sadly, most of the interference issues would not be solved by installing a filter on the antenna,
That wouldn't help at all because the issue is the TV being desensitized by a signal that is out-of-band for TV, but in-band for Ham radio. You cannot filter out the signal that you're trying to transmit, as that defeats the purpose.
If the signal that is interfering with the TV is coming in the antenna connection, then installing a filter on that connection is exactly how you'd solve the problem.
Again -- absolutely not. I'm going to try to clarify this for you one last time.
This is a case where the Ham is transmitting on a ham band (not on a TV band), but the proximity between the Ham and the neighbor's TV antenna means that the neighbor's TV, which lacks an input filter to initially reject the Ham band, is desensitized by the powerful signal, and as such isn't able to receive the weaker broacast TV signal. The effect the neighbor sees is "I can't see my channel", but it's neither the Ham's nor the neighbor's fault as to why that is. It's also perfectly legal for the Ham to be transmitting, because the Ham is not transmitting outside of the Ham band, and is thus not interfering.
This cannot be filtered at the Ham antenna. The filtering has to be done at the neighbor's TV.
Yes, you'd filter out the signal that the ham is transmitting whether it is direct interference (the most common) or desense.
Don't buy hardware that can be bricked by flashing the BIOS.
Unfair statement; this was a situation where firmware came out later, and also almost all hardware (video cards, hard disks, network cards, motherboards, etc) has flashable firmware. Even if you have a backup of the BIOS, that cannot always save you -- like a backup of a video BIOS when the videocard can't work because it's BIOS is borked so that the screen is always black.
It's you. I've flashed firmwares of hundreds of devices - motherboards, phones, video cards, embedded systems, routers, etc, and I have never once had one of them brick.
That's not a fair statement, because the specific devices and firmware versions have not yet been stated, so your statement is completely based on an assumption based solely on your experiences, which may nor may not have any relevance to this hardware in question. Thus what you're doing is known as "blaming the victim".
Slashdot Mirror
I take Vicoprofen (for migraine pain). It's mixed with Ibuprofen instead of Tylenol. It still makes me sick all day after taking it. No idea why people abuse it.
For me it comes down to a choice between being in horrible agony all day or having no pain but stuck in bed feeling dizzy and like shit all day. I'll take that over the pain.
Now there may be some anti-nausea I can take to counteract some of the negative affects, but I haven't asked my doctor about that because the effects now ensure I won't abuse it and I don't want to know otherwise I guess.
I ended up having temporary facial palsy (i.e. half my face drooped and didn't work) after taking Ibuprofin for a week for severe headache pain related to heat stroke. I also felt dizzy and sick while taking the Ibuprofin, but the headache pain without meds was unbearable. After the headache pain from effects of heat stroke passed I was able to stop taking Ibuprofin, and a week later the facal palsy went away. I can't know for sure that the Ibuprofin caused the palsy, but some number of people that take Ibuprofin report having palsy from it.
The nastiest thing about the facial palsy was that on the side of my face that had the palsy the eyelid didn't "auto-blink" anymore, so the eye would get dry. It was especially noticable on long drives. To wet the eye I would have to consciously close both eyes at once -- for whatever reason that still worked. It's a bit mentally draining to have to constantly remember to close both eyes to wet them.
Hopefully you'll never run into this problem.
...
I personally have run Arch+KDE4 for the past few years and have loved it. Why? Because it works for ME, and I can customize, adjust, etc. things just the way I want them, which is very likely unique to my needs and probably wouldn't be great for someone else to use. But that's the beauty of running Linux on the desktop, you can configure the 'appliance' for your specific need rather than be confined to what someone else thinks is the best way to run a GUI.
I'm mainly a Debian user, I'm also running Arch (in a VM, for Desktop use, with LUKS/cryptfs) and I'm very pleased with what I find with it so far. However one thing I do notice is that for Daemons, Arch upgrades seem to create ".pacnew" configuration files that sit alongside the original configuration files and outputting a warning, somewhat similar to how RPMs upgrade with ".rpmnew" files. I don't particularly like that -- I much prefer the prompts for administrator input that the APT/dpkg system brings up when .deb packages are upgraded that have user-modified configuration files. It's way too easy to miss the text warning that flies by on the screen saying there's a ".pacnew" file somewhere during a "pacman -Syu" upgrade.
The ZDNet reivew looks like it's of Ubuntu (i.e. with the Unity/Gnome interface) and doesn't seem to include KUbuntu (with the KDE4 interface).
Oh well.
I've yet to deal with an organization that has a GPG/PGP key for encrypting email to the organization. I don't think there's anything wrong with asking if they have one for encrypted email use, and so I think it's fine if you go ahead and do so, but I also don't expect that they have one.
What is more common is for the email MTA to support SMTP over TLS encrypted transfers. This can be verified using 'swaks' by testing each of the company's email servers listed in DNS one by one.
Finding the mail servers that cover a domain, for instance "nonsense.com":
$dig nonsense.com mx +short
10 nullmx.nonsense.com.
$swaks --ehlo testing.example.com --server nullmx.nonsense.com --tls -q TLS
=== Trying nullmx.nonsense.com:25...
=== Connected to nullmx.nonsense.com.
220 mx ESMTP
EHLO testing.example.com
250-mx
250-PIPELINING
250-SIZE
250 8BITMIME
*** Host did not advertise STARTTLS
QUIT
221 mx
=== Connection closed with remote host.
If the company email MTAs all DO support SMTPS, then perhaps that will be good enough. Even if the company did support GPG, there are certain things such as the Subject for the email which don't get encrypted, so SMTPS is important for those reasons anyway.
Like everyone else, I have no idea what they're doing, but no, it doesn't rule out focused surveillance.
What's being acquired as evidence is very wide, and the NSA is famous for both large data storage and building a database of interpersonal connections. Regardless if the particular reason this information is being gathered, I'm working under the assumption that they're going to be using the information in whatever way they can, rather than for the original reason they're taking the data.
I find it really concerning that a secret court can order such wide data transfer to the NSA, and also order that the order be kept secret.
I think you've got the right idea.
Performance reviews are a good feedback mechanism for both the worker and the manager. It sounds to me like this particular programmer is feeling disconnected and as such doesn't seem to be taking account of the reporcussions for the way in which he's doing his work. Likewise this is bad for morale for everybody else, because they're having to clean up the mess. Nobody wins in this scenario -- the lone programmer is unhappy and the people he works with that want to work collaboratively are unhappy.
So the recommendation I have is to at least try to have a conversation with the programmer about these things and try to help him reconnect with his fellow employees. This is not a "blame session", it's an attempt to get the team reconnected so that they can work as a team. It sounds like the programmer isn't able to say "I don't understand this" and as such can't learn from his fellow employees because of perceived judgment or a sense of insecurity. This is common, and can lead to all kinds of bullying behavior -- but it's the underlying disconnection that's the biggest part of the problem, IMHO.
Hopefully this works. If not, hopefully the effort wil bring to light what needs to be done.
I have quite a lot of Debian workstations that I also want to just work, otherwise the users using them won't be very productive that day.
Agreed. Debian workstations work fairly well. [Occasionally I have to build a newer kernel for new hardware, but I can deal with that.] I like that things are stable during the release cycle.
... since the default desktop for Wheezy is the unutterably awful GNOME 3.
And in Debian Gnome3 now has a dependency on NetworkManager.
Users of the Wicd networking manager should be aware of this, because NetworkManager conflicts with Wicd. Neither Wicd no NetworkManager work when they're both active, and at the moment there's no warning about this nor instructions on what to do about it. :-(
Standing in a Utility boiler (Coal plant) I get full 3g signal (dont have 4g where I live). Fully enclosed and welded air tight, I get better signal inside than out.
That's interesting, and certainly possible.
"Instead of "passively blocking", I think you mean "shielding". As in a " Faraday cage". This doesn't hamper signals outside of the structure."
It's mostly due to bad reflections, interference, and simple attenuation. Unless a building is entirely steel clad, modern buildings make terrible Faraday cages.
Even with steel studs at 18" centers, that's more than 3 times the wavelength of 2GHz signals. Aside from studs, beams and girders and the like, even in a building with a lot of them, are nowhere near close enough to make a Faraday cage at those wavelengths.
You're probably right. "Real" shielded structures (such as anechoic chambers to test antennas) usually have conductive "fingers" in the doors, filters on incoming power lines, screens covering the air ducts... etc. Dispersion, intersymbol interference/distortion, multipath interference... those are more likely.
I didn't want to get into all of that; sometimes I just want to give a more "simple" kind of answer. :-P
...however many are very likely "passively blocking" phone signals due to the commonly used construction materials in commercial buildings.
Instead of "passively blocking", I think you mean "shielding". As in a " Faraday cage". This doesn't hamper signals outside of the structure.
Asking Slashdot, you'll get vastly differing opinions but you'll likely get some interesting information which will likely be useful.
However... the only way to really know which distro is "right" for you is to try several and pick one.
So I would suggest geting out your favorite Virtualization software (VirtualBox, KVM, etc) and try several distros at once. Find out what you like.
I recently did this back in August 2012. Here are the distros I liked:
*Mint Debian 201204
Fedora 17 (18 has a yucky installer)
OpenSuSE 12.1
*Debian (Squeeze, Wheezy, Sid)
Arch (fastest package installs by far, no sound in a VirtualBox VM)
*Pear Linux 5 (looks just like a Mac, except a Pear in place of an Apple. Fun to play with.)
Slackware 13
Vector Linux7.0 (based on Slackware, has package management. Fun, snappy.)
Least recommended: Gentoo. Attempting a base install + KDE4 was a THREE FULL DAY compile, after which X refused to start. Very frustrating.
2nd least recommended: FreeBSD, only because there's no GUI by default, and I couldn't find instructions to install one.
Regardless of which you choose in the end, best of luck to you. :)
I have never heard Slackware called: "The simple easy to use Linux distro".
Not that I really have not much experience, but I would only disagree with you on one point.
I started with Slackare in 1995, used it up to 1999 -- I found it easy to use, but it wasn't easy to upgrade because upgrading meant reinstalling because it didn't have package management at that time. In 1999 I went to Debian because it allowed upgrading in place. I've since tested Slackare 13 and found it easy to use. ;-) [I didn't test whatever pakage management it may or may not have had, though.]
Mint (et all), is a better starting point than Ubuntu right now.
I don't like the Unity GUI in Ubuntu either (it's awful), but Mint has very few developers and I've been hearing complaints about the timeliness of downloading updates due to the small number of servers in their infrastructure. So I guess I'm saying that I agree, but that there are some other things to consider.
Mail servers are an utter pain to run though from what I hear - i.e. for outbound at least you have to deal with all the blacklisting and stuff which goes on due to spam.
The only time I've heard of this happening are for mail servers that also run mailing lists. I've been running my own server for 14 years and I haven't been blacklisted once. (Maybe I've just been lucky?)
Though outside of that the idea is appealing - I've long been thinking that I need to get a box hosted somewhere to act as a personal server for all types of things.
Yes... it's got a lot of advantages. Dealing with your own email server is rather interesting, it does take time to "get it right" (that takes a couple of years of tweaking) but after that it generally requires very little maintenance. And it's nice to have a server online to store and distribute files, have a personal blog that won't go away, etc.
I had that too - some insane bullshit of using it as a transfer point to sort stuff.
If I remember correctly (it's been a long time) the user I was dealing with was deleting messages he had dealt with, but got into the habit of referring back to the messages when necessary in the Trash folder. I suggested moving these sort of messages to another locally-stored folder, but the user refused saying "I'm used to working out of my Trash now."
I'd set up mail clients to empty Trash on exit, and when the guy that was doing this logged back in it was of course empty, so he came to rant at me in the lunch room to the amusement of all onlookers.
Logical. I considered trying that, but never did.
Now every few months he rings me up about a full disk, and each time I have to suggest emptying the Trash mail folder and the "Recycle Bin" on his desktop.
That reminds me... another thing that was going on back then was that a small set of users refused to delete any messages off the server, and at the time the server used MBOX storage and ext3 had a 2 GB filesize limit. One particular Sales guy got so much email that he would hit the 2 GB storage limit about every 3 months. He'd then call me up and tell me he wasn't getting his mail, I'd find his mailbox full, and I had to use 'mutt' to go delete old messages. I kept requesting to set his mail client to delete messages older than 3 months, but he kept refusing to allow me to do that. Instead he kept calling me every three months to fix his mailbox.
The next attempt at a fix was to make a script to watch mailbox sizes and warn the users of those mailboxes that were getting full to do something about it or to call me. I didn't expect that to work -- and it didn't -- but it was the next thing to try.
The final solution was to modify the "watch mailbox sizes" script to first warn the user about their mailbox size at a "soft" threshold, and let them know that when the mailbox size reaches a "hard" threshold that the system will automatically delete old messages out of their mailbox. I wrote another script that did just that, which (if I remember correctly) deleted messages that were older than 3 months. And with that, I never got another call about users reaching their mailbox size limits.
It's not that the person in question is stupid, it's that such people don't understand the design purpose of such items and use them in ways opposed to what was intended, which can sometimes produce useful results as well as just utter facepalms.
Right. Or they build up bad habits of using the system in a way that it wasn't designed for -- just like your story about the garbage bins used to store backup tapes. (Good story, BTW -- thanks.)
It should be noted that this latter solution also does not cause backscatter because it doesn't generate a bounce. [For a bounce to occur, the message first needs to be accepted, but then for some reason cannot be delivered.]
That depends on how the spam is being sent to you.
If the spam is coming directly from a spamming tool that ignores failures then rejecting it won't create a bounce. On the other hand if the spam is being sent to you by a proper MTA then the reject will cause the sending MTA to send a bounce message to whoever the message claims to be from.
Ah. Good point. True.
I was referring to the destination MTA (your server) not generating a bounce, and in that equation I hadn't thought about the possibility of the sending MTA sending a bounce.
Thanks for the correction. :)
isn't a holding-bay?
/dev/null isn't, but sadly the "Trash" folder is.
A few years ago I was working as an email administrator and got a call to someone's desk that was having a problem with their mail client because some of the folders were too full. One of them was Trash, so I was about to erase messages from the folder when the user paniced; "wait, that's important!"
For whatever reason, they were using the Trash folder for "real work"
(Sigh.)
The details are that the messages were never delivered in the first place, your setup would not protect against such a problem.
That's true.
How bad this is depends on the system -- in this case it sounds like Shaw was doing "accept, then drop" which is the worst case because no one is notified of the failure. If however Shaw rejected spam rather than accept it, the sending mail system would notify the sender that the message was not delivered. It should be noted that this latter solution also does not cause backscatter because it doesn't generate a bounce. [For a bounce to occur, the message first needs to be accepted, but then for some reason cannot be delivered.]
You don't even need to be on the Evil Twin network to do this; at least some Torrent clients have a setting for what IP address to report that you're using. Some time ago I remember researchers from one of the big-name universities (MIT?) doing this and reporting the IP address of local network printers, and successfully received DMCA notices sent to the university reporting Torrent use by the IP address of the printer.
The other thing I'll mention is that doing a "tit-for-tat" hack on the Evil Twin network is probably the wrong thing to do.
For others suggesting the use of a directional antenna -- this is trickier than it sounds. Most directional antennas (like yagis) have a narrow horizonatal beamwidth, but a very wide virtical beamwidth (when mounted for the horizonatal beamwidth -- vice-versa when mounted for the virtical beamwidth). A dish might be more pinpoint, depending on the type of feedhorn used. Likewise there's no limit to the "depth" that the signal travels -- so for instance if you think that a particular appartment building contains a transmitter you're trying to locate, it's not simple to pin down which appartment has the transmitter. This is furthermore exaserbated by reflective surfaces, including typical corrogated metal floors used in building construction. Typical direction-finding requires a set of adjustible attenuators to further localize the originating strong signnal from the weaker reflected signals. As tough as this can be in an urban environment, "DFing" (direction finding) using a directional antenna is still cheaper and more reliable than using a Doppler Scanner.
Stunningly bad.
...
Claiming that a reporter for a major newspaper is blatantly lying is absolutely not the right way to go about this.
The detail here as to where Musk went astray was in assuming bad faith on the part of Broder. All of the raw data that Musk described was good; if he had stated the facts he knew and then asked the question "How can we explain the discrepency?", that would have been a lot better PR.
Unfortunately this is the kind of thing that I don't usually see managers or marketers do well; the people that "stick to the facts" and know when they've strayed outside of what they know for sure tend to be engineers. Elon Musk has a PhD in Applied Physics so he obviously has a scientific background, but he's currently acting as the CEO which is a management position, and the transition from being a technical designer to manager unfortunately comes with a change of focus. That's my best guess as to why he drew an assuming conclusion here.
When it comes to the back-end of the "progress bar", it's essentially a widget that shows a percentage from 0 - 100%.
So the question actuall is, does the thing the progress bar is showing the "progress" of output a "percentage done" or not.
Sometimes the "percentage done" can be estimated or calculated, but sometimes it can't. Some programs (like 'dd') don't give any progress output at all.
What's annoying is when programmers show a "progress bar" that changes but doesn't actually show any progress -- so whatever they show is fake. That's irritating, because when that happens it means the user is essentially being lied to, and defeats the purpose of the progress bar. I'd personally rather see a message of "please wait while (blah)" than see a fake progress bar.
The latest place I saw a fake progress bar was in the Java setup GUI in Untange (which is based on Debian). Every single area a progress bar is shown in this GUI shows looping "fake" progress. Ugh.
And, sadly, most of the interference issues would not be solved by installing a filter on the antenna,
That wouldn't help at all because the issue is the TV being desensitized by a signal that is out-of-band for TV, but in-band for Ham radio. You cannot filter out the signal that you're trying to transmit, as that defeats the purpose.
If the signal that is interfering with the TV is coming in the antenna connection, then installing a filter on that connection is exactly how you'd solve the problem.
Again -- absolutely not. I'm going to try to clarify this for you one last time.
This is a case where the Ham is transmitting on a ham band (not on a TV band), but the proximity between the Ham and the neighbor's TV antenna means that the neighbor's TV, which lacks an input filter to initially reject the Ham band, is desensitized by the powerful signal, and as such isn't able to receive the weaker broacast TV signal. The effect the neighbor sees is "I can't see my channel", but it's neither the Ham's nor the neighbor's fault as to why that is. It's also perfectly legal for the Ham to be transmitting, because the Ham is not transmitting outside of the Ham band, and is thus not interfering.
This cannot be filtered at the Ham antenna. The filtering has to be done at the neighbor's TV.
Yes, you'd filter out the signal that the ham is transmitting whether it is direct interference (the most common) or desense.
Absolutely not.
I think it's best if the original author would please name the particular products.
Don't buy hardware that can be bricked by flashing the BIOS.
Unfair statement; this was a situation where firmware came out later, and also almost all hardware (video cards, hard disks, network cards, motherboards, etc) has flashable firmware. Even if you have a backup of the BIOS, that cannot always save you -- like a backup of a video BIOS when the videocard can't work because it's BIOS is borked so that the screen is always black.
It's you. I've flashed firmwares of hundreds of devices - motherboards, phones, video cards, embedded systems, routers, etc, and I have never once had one of them brick.
That's not a fair statement, because the specific devices and firmware versions have not yet been stated, so your statement is completely based on an assumption based solely on your experiences, which may nor may not have any relevance to this hardware in question. Thus what you're doing is known as "blaming the victim".