Interesting concept. I'm not sure how you'd get around one company/organization running the centralized directory for this, though.
I saw in Verisign Usurps.com someone was working on a DNS system that used Freenet to distribute DNS around the net, but then it becomes a chicken-and-egg problem (again).
...why don't those hackers get it over with already and create.sux?
Because the first names registered would be those such as "microsoft.sux"
At this point, it might very well be "icann.sux", "networksolutions.sux", "verisign.sux". At least, those would be the ones I would register first.
But it should be pointed out that the only real restriction right now on starting your own TLD and getting away from all this crap is the fact that you'll need to convince enough people to use your nameserver as a new root-level server... Otherwise, there'd already be more popular TLDs...
If we could convince package authors for Linux/*BSD systems to include alternate root servers in their bind/genericdnsfoo packages, a large part of the problem would transparently be solved. Maybe... --
Aside from the somewhat confusing (to someone like my gf who doesn't know anything at all about DNS, yet registered a domain) web pages, I've been fairly happy with Joker, which is also 12 Euros a year. I should probably compare them to gandi.net, since I have an easier (read any chance) of understand untranslated French than I do German (and some of Joker's pages never got translated the last time I was there).
My direct answer to this ask Slashdot, bearing in mind that IANAL, is yes, you are legitimately in violation of the SGI trademark, it is quite conceivable that people could confuse OpenGL and Open[ICA]L, esp. as all are graphics libraries, and you should not fight this, because you will quite legitimately lose.
Which was submitted last week to both/. and newsforge, and wasn't deemed newsworthy. oh well, I guess speculation on what they're doing next is more newsworthy than the fact that they're no longer selling linux laptops.
Normally I wouldn't, but this is plain ridiculous. One would think that anyone with even a modicum of responsibility would at least verify the story links before posting. As other posters have said, there's no indication linuxtoday.com has ANY story relating to this at all.
Seriously, doesn't anyone actually check these links before the stories are posted? If not, a particularly juicy-sounding story could easily get that damned goatse.cx link onto the main/. page...
It takes some kind of "human calculator" to come up with this? I pointed it out to friends and family over 15 freaking years ago that we could have 13 28-day months w/ one day left over.
Sometimes I think the world's going to hell in a handbasket, and these kind of "grand proclamations" just confirm it. Christ, for anyone who knows anything about the lunar cycle, it should be a no-brainer.
And saying that encryption is a sign of criminal activity is like arresting people who buy ski masks. Preposterous.
Try "envelopes" instead of ski masks. The fastest way to illustrate to people why *I* prefer encryption is to use the postcard/envelope analogy.
"Obviously you have something to hide, since you keep sending your paper mail in envelopes ('enhanced privacy' envelopes, no less!), than using postcards for everything. What criminal activities are you engaging in?"
I think now's a good time to set up my own anon remailer, and start regularly sending encrypted traffic through it and the rest of the remailer network. Synchronously. Of varying sizes. So there's no way to prove that a particular message happens to be real and not just cover traffic.
... but probably a III series. I started out using PDAs shortly after a friend in college got the Pilot 1000 (or was it the 5000?). Being a geek, and fairly trusting, he let me play with it for a while, and I picked up the basics of Graffiti in about 15 minutes.
By the time I saved up enough play money to get one, the PalmPilot Personal and Professional were out, so I picked up a PPPro. That was about 3 or 4 years ago. It really helped me keep track of assignments for classes, student government, etc.
It wasn't until I got to into the working world (and grad school part time), that I really started using it for anything "serious". I found using the Memo app for taking notes in meetings and classes, especially with liberal use of the built-in shortcuts.
I upgraded with the PalmIII expansion card when it came out (I was running out of space w/ just 1 meg of memory). It worked fairly flawlessly once I stopped downloading a lot of the "crap" applications that are out there. (Unfortunately, you can't really tell the cream from the crap except by using it, usually)
About a year ago or so, after my girlfriend of the time kept repeatedly sitting on it (I kept it in a special pilot pouch made by a place which disappeared a few years ago), it ended up dying a slow, painful death. Resets at random times, the screen would periodically get scores of vertical lines, graffiti input would get erratic, and I'd have to constantly realign the digitizer.
I spent a few months without a PDA of any kind, and being late for meetings @ work, missing appointments, etc. I finally broke down and ended up getting a PalmIIIc after I'd been admiring a coworker's for a couple months.
In order to protect it, I purchased a RhinoSkin titanium slider case to protect it. They add just a little to the dimensions of the IIIc, and very little weight. Plus, I no longer need to worry about someone sitting on it. I also ended up getting a RhinoPack 2000 to carry everything in. It's able to hold my IIIc in case, my cellphone, 3-5 3.5" floppies (like tomsrtbt, Debian rescue, etc).
The 8 megs in the IIIc (and IIIxe that others have recommended) is great, I haven't been able to fill it up yet. The color is fairly crisp. I really like the rechargable batteries and being able to charge from the cradle, since I was going through a pair of AAAs about every 2-3 weeks, and had to make a conscious effort to not leave my older PalmPilot in the cradle (there's a problem with them, where if you leave them in the cradle, the batteries drain...there's a few quick fixes out for that though, that involve modifying the cradle).
The other thing I like about Palms in general is that they use Flash ROMs, so it's fairly painless (if you have access to a Windows PC or a Mac) to upgrade the OS when Palm releases completely new ROM images. Apparently, Handspring doesn't have Flash ROMs in the Visor series, claiming that they'll just release springboard modules to upgrade the OS. That's great, except when you happen to want/need features in the new OS, but also want to use another springboard (pointed out by a coworker recently who bought one of the newer Visors).
Linux support (and unix in general, OS/2, etc) has been around for as long as I've owned Pilots/Palms, in the pilot-link package (usually available w/ most distros and on Palm software websites).
I'm still using the IIIc to basically organize my life, and take notes in meetings and classes still. --
Is there anything that this Ghost does that couldn't be accomplished using, say, dd? I've played a bit with dd+netcat+gzip for creating disk images, and everything *seems* to work ok (I seem to recall being able to send images over a network, but I don't remember if I ever got around to mounting them via loopback or whatever to check that they were usable).
Assuming Ghost doesn't do anything really funky to the disk images, perhaps a modified tomsrtbt (2.2.18 kernel) or somesuch would be a solution. You'd also theoretically be able to access Zip (etc) drives to pull off images as well.
The simple fact is that landlines won't exist in twenty years at all. Nowadays mobility is the key; landlines are clearly archaic.
Land lines are still relevant, at least here in the states. The company I was working for was doing some work for a car dealership a few years ago. As part of it, we all got to know most of the Big Guys(tm) there, such as the owner, CFO, etc. At the time I happened to mention while shooting the breeze how I was thinking about getting rid of my land line, because mobile phones were so much more convenient. The CFO told me flat out that yes, I could do that, as long as I didn't want to ever be approved for a loan.
Apparently money lenders here more or less require one to have a telephone number at a fixed address. I can only assume it's because they want to know there's a place you're ostensibly going to show up at eventually, so if you start having repayment "problems", someone can stop by to "encourage" you to continue making your loan payments.
So landlines aren't quite dead yet. Maybe if all the GPS-tracking of cellphones I've read about on certain mailing lists comes to be ubiquitous, landlines will be unimportant. But until then, they're still going to be necessary.
(And the day I can ditch Verizon for someone else will be one of the happiest days of my life--from the very moment I called them to activate service (when it was Bell Atlantic here), I've had nothing but problems from them, and their attitude has, in general, sucked.)
Well, for personal stuff, I usually hit places like secure-me.
I'm currently in a "network security" grad class (someday I'll take a class where I don't know what's going on), and the instructor, who works for Ernst & Young, seems to really know his stuff...
Of course, there's no reason to take my word for it, even though I don't work for them and my grade in the class is already more or less a lock regardless of what I do.
Significantly, just last month NeoPets.com had over 2.7 million unique visitors, with over 1.7 billion page views. Yet, at no time have any of our users ever confused our NeoMail service within our website with your client's software program.
Not that I would advocate it, but a few "confused users" who were looking for the NeoMail web application might want to ask NeoPets where they could download it.
Again, I wouldn't advocate this, but I'd certainly suggest being polite and confused.
Okay, never having been tempted (much) by any of these free web hosting services, I'm not too familiar with their terms of service. But, if it's stated in there, and people still uploaded content, then yeah, it stinks to high heaven, but <sigh> they're within their rights to use it the way they see fit.
MSN Web communities weren't notified in advance of the service, which appears as a small ``buy products'' button next to the images. But MSN is advising users who don't like the feature to make their communities private by restricting membership to a select group to or take the images off the site altogether.
Of course, if the users don't like it, there's nothing stopping them from moving to another service, even one they might have to pay for. At least then there might be more of an assurance that they have more control over their content.
I still think it stinks though that these web communities weren't at least given some kind of warning that this would be going into effect.
I sometimes wonder if people read before responding... The whole idea of using DNS on top of phone-based IPs would be to KEEP a single identifier for you/your phone.
Maybe I'm the only person who has trouble getting a new number out the all the people that have my old one. Maybe it isn't such a big deal. Yeah, stationary needs to be changed, records all over the place, business cards, etc., but I guess I'm the only one who finds that a PITA.
Might as well keep the crappy system we have now, since it apparently isn't a problem.
Yeah, I can get email on my phone too. But what we seem to be talking about here is using an IP address (with dns, possibly) in place of a phone number.
Just thought of another negative: people are always complaining about the lack of domain names as it is. Would we use a new TLD (.phone?.wireless?), or have something like phone://hemos.attws.com ? Which, again, would tie things to a single provider and would change every time you went w/ another service.
DNS? God, I hate having to "type" names to go with the numbers in my cellphone. I'd hate to try to do that on a regular basis.
Of course, DNS WOULD help alleviate the whole "well, I switched providers, so my number is now..." syndrome. Assuming, of course, we don't get to the point where phone numbers really DO follow us around.
My only fear is, "Yeah, you can call me at phone://goatse.cx" Not to mention all the likely spam...
Make wireless phones use IPs? Um, if IP addresses were so easy to remember, we would be using them in place of name. For example, we'd all go to http://64.28.67.48/ instead of http://slashdot.org/ to read/.
And what happens when (if) we move to IPv6? Do you really want to have to dial numbers that long?
Here in Maryland, we have overlapping area codes, so (at the time) Bell Atlantic implemented 10-digit phone numbers. It's really not all that difficult to handle.
I only have problems when I'm in an area of the country that doesn't have the same issues, and try to dial the area code before the number (like when I was in Delaware last year, and had to use a pay phone for directions).
What's 3 more digits per dial, anyway? Especially in this age of speed dial phones....
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting concept. I'm not sure how you'd get around one company/organization running the centralized directory for this, though.
.com someone was working on a DNS system that used Freenet to distribute DNS around the net, but then it becomes a chicken-and-egg problem (again).
I saw in Verisign Usurps
--
Because the first names registered would be those such as "microsoft.sux"
At this point, it might very well be "icann.sux", "networksolutions.sux", "verisign.sux". At least, those would be the ones I would register first.
But it should be pointed out that the only real restriction right now on starting your own TLD and getting away from all this crap is the fact that you'll need to convince enough people to use your nameserver as a new root-level server... Otherwise, there'd already be more popular TLDs...
If we could convince package authors for Linux/*BSD systems to include alternate root servers in their bind/genericdnsfoo packages, a large part of the problem would transparently be solved. Maybe...
--
Aside from the somewhat confusing (to someone like my gf who doesn't know anything at all about DNS, yet registered a domain) web pages, I've been fairly happy with Joker, which is also 12 Euros a year. I should probably compare them to gandi.net, since I have an easier (read any chance) of understand untranslated French than I do German (and some of Joker's pages never got translated the last time I was there).
--
OpenML? Oh, you mean an implementation of the ML language? It's not?! Why, that's damned confusing...
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They are?
It sure seems like only OpenIL out of those could be easily confused with OpenGL...
--
looks at calendar
looks at today's date
looks at date of newsforge article
Like I said..last week.
--
Which was submitted last week to both /. and newsforge, and wasn't deemed newsworthy. oh well, I guess speculation on what they're doing next is more newsworthy than the fact that they're no longer selling linux laptops.
--
Normally I wouldn't, but this is plain ridiculous. One would think that anyone with even a modicum of responsibility would at least verify the story links before posting. As other posters have said, there's no indication linuxtoday.com has ANY story relating to this at all.
--
We read it on /. so it must be true.
/. page...
Seriously, doesn't anyone actually check these links before the stories are posted? If not, a particularly juicy-sounding story could easily get that damned goatse.cx link onto the main
--
It takes some kind of "human calculator" to come up with this? I pointed it out to friends and family over 15 freaking years ago that we could have 13 28-day months w/ one day left over.
Sometimes I think the world's going to hell in a handbasket, and these kind of "grand proclamations" just confirm it. Christ, for anyone who knows anything about the lunar cycle, it should be a no-brainer.
--
And saying that encryption is a sign of criminal activity is like arresting people who buy ski masks. Preposterous.
Try "envelopes" instead of ski masks. The fastest way to illustrate to people why *I* prefer encryption is to use the postcard/envelope analogy.
"Obviously you have something to hide, since you keep sending your paper mail in envelopes ('enhanced privacy' envelopes, no less!), than using postcards for everything. What criminal activities are you engaging in?"
I think now's a good time to set up my own anon remailer, and start regularly sending encrypted traffic through it and the rest of the remailer network. Synchronously. Of varying sizes. So there's no way to prove that a particular message happens to be real and not just cover traffic.
Or it could be too late.
--
... but probably a III series. I started out using PDAs shortly after a friend in college got the Pilot 1000 (or was it the 5000?). Being a geek, and fairly trusting, he let me play with it for a while, and I picked up the basics of Graffiti in about 15 minutes.
By the time I saved up enough play money to get one, the PalmPilot Personal and Professional were out, so I picked up a PPPro. That was about 3 or 4 years ago. It really helped me keep track of assignments for classes, student government, etc.
It wasn't until I got to into the working world (and grad school part time), that I really started using it for anything "serious". I found using the Memo app for taking notes in meetings and classes, especially with liberal use of the built-in shortcuts.
I upgraded with the PalmIII expansion card when it came out (I was running out of space w/ just 1 meg of memory). It worked fairly flawlessly once I stopped downloading a lot of the "crap" applications that are out there. (Unfortunately, you can't really tell the cream from the crap except by using it, usually)
About a year ago or so, after my girlfriend of the time kept repeatedly sitting on it (I kept it in a special pilot pouch made by a place which disappeared a few years ago), it ended up dying a slow, painful death. Resets at random times, the screen would periodically get scores of vertical lines, graffiti input would get erratic, and I'd have to constantly realign the digitizer.
I spent a few months without a PDA of any kind, and being late for meetings @ work, missing appointments, etc. I finally broke down and ended up getting a PalmIIIc after I'd been admiring a coworker's for a couple months.
In order to protect it, I purchased a RhinoSkin titanium slider case to protect it. They add just a little to the dimensions of the IIIc, and very little weight. Plus, I no longer need to worry about someone sitting on it. I also ended up getting a RhinoPack 2000 to carry everything in. It's able to hold my IIIc in case, my cellphone, 3-5 3.5" floppies (like tomsrtbt, Debian rescue, etc).
The 8 megs in the IIIc (and IIIxe that others have recommended) is great, I haven't been able to fill it up yet. The color is fairly crisp. I really like the rechargable batteries and being able to charge from the cradle, since I was going through a pair of AAAs about every 2-3 weeks, and had to make a conscious effort to not leave my older PalmPilot in the cradle (there's a problem with them, where if you leave them in the cradle, the batteries drain...there's a few quick fixes out for that though, that involve modifying the cradle).
The other thing I like about Palms in general is that they use Flash ROMs, so it's fairly painless (if you have access to a Windows PC or a Mac) to upgrade the OS when Palm releases completely new ROM images. Apparently, Handspring doesn't have Flash ROMs in the Visor series, claiming that they'll just release springboard modules to upgrade the OS. That's great, except when you happen to want/need features in the new OS, but also want to use another springboard (pointed out by a coworker recently who bought one of the newer Visors).
Linux support (and unix in general, OS/2, etc) has been around for as long as I've owned Pilots/Palms, in the pilot-link package (usually available w/ most distros and on Palm software websites).
I'm still using the IIIc to basically organize my life, and take notes in meetings and classes still.
--
You should read YRO periodically. This has been there since 07:34!
--
Scripting is great. It simplifies life tremendously.
Another thing is that it's possible to edit ghost images - something I don't think is possible with dd.
Mount via a loopback? Would probably have to decompress the image first, but as long as there's a supported FS in the image, shouldn't it work?
--
Is there anything that this Ghost does that couldn't be accomplished using, say, dd? I've played a bit with dd+netcat+gzip for creating disk images, and everything *seems* to work ok (I seem to recall being able to send images over a network, but I don't remember if I ever got around to mounting them via loopback or whatever to check that they were usable).
Assuming Ghost doesn't do anything really funky to the disk images, perhaps a modified tomsrtbt (2.2.18 kernel) or somesuch would be a solution. You'd also theoretically be able to access Zip (etc) drives to pull off images as well.
--
I'm one of the many people who would ditch his land line if it weren't for the War on Some Drugs.
:-(
Amen! I'd be doing the same thing myself, but I kinda like being able to drive something other than a clunker right now.
--
The simple fact is that landlines won't exist in twenty years at all. Nowadays mobility is the key; landlines are clearly archaic.
Land lines are still relevant, at least here in the states. The company I was working for was doing some work for a car dealership a few years ago. As part of it, we all got to know most of the Big Guys(tm) there, such as the owner, CFO, etc. At the time I happened to mention while shooting the breeze how I was thinking about getting rid of my land line, because mobile phones were so much more convenient. The CFO told me flat out that yes, I could do that, as long as I didn't want to ever be approved for a loan.
Apparently money lenders here more or less require one to have a telephone number at a fixed address. I can only assume it's because they want to know there's a place you're ostensibly going to show up at eventually, so if you start having repayment "problems", someone can stop by to "encourage" you to continue making your loan payments.
So landlines aren't quite dead yet. Maybe if all the GPS-tracking of cellphones I've read about on certain mailing lists comes to be ubiquitous, landlines will be unimportant. But until then, they're still going to be necessary.
(And the day I can ditch Verizon for someone else will be one of the happiest days of my life--from the very moment I called them to activate service (when it was Bell Atlantic here), I've had nothing but problems from them, and their attitude has, in general, sucked.)
--
Well, for personal stuff, I usually hit places like secure-me.
I'm currently in a "network security" grad class (someday I'll take a class where I don't know what's going on), and the instructor, who works for Ernst & Young, seems to really know his stuff...
Of course, there's no reason to take my word for it, even though I don't work for them and my grade in the class is already more or less a lock regardless of what I do.
--
Not that I would advocate it, but a few "confused users" who were looking for the NeoMail web application might want to ask NeoPets where they could download it.
Again, I wouldn't advocate this, but I'd certainly suggest being polite and confused.
--
Okay, never having been tempted (much) by any of these free web hosting services, I'm not too familiar with their terms of service. But, if it's stated in there, and people still uploaded content, then yeah, it stinks to high heaven, but <sigh> they're within their rights to use it the way they see fit.
Of course, if the users don't like it, there's nothing stopping them from moving to another service, even one they might have to pay for. At least then there might be more of an assurance that they have more control over their content.
I still think it stinks though that these web communities weren't at least given some kind of warning that this would be going into effect.
--
I sometimes wonder if people read before responding... The whole idea of using DNS on top of phone-based IPs would be to KEEP a single identifier for you/your phone.
Maybe I'm the only person who has trouble getting a new number out the all the people that have my old one. Maybe it isn't such a big deal. Yeah, stationary needs to be changed, records all over the place, business cards, etc., but I guess I'm the only one who finds that a PITA.
Might as well keep the crappy system we have now, since it apparently isn't a problem.
--
Yeah, I can get email on my phone too. But what we seem to be talking about here is using an IP address (with dns, possibly) in place of a phone number.
.wireless?), or have something like phone://hemos.attws.com ? Which, again, would tie things to a single provider and would change every time you went w/ another service.
Just thought of another negative: people are always complaining about the lack of domain names as it is. Would we use a new TLD (.phone?
--
DNS? God, I hate having to "type" names to go with the numbers in my cellphone. I'd hate to try to do that on a regular basis.
Of course, DNS WOULD help alleviate the whole "well, I switched providers, so my number is now..." syndrome. Assuming, of course, we don't get to the point where phone numbers really DO follow us around.
My only fear is, "Yeah, you can call me at phone://goatse.cx" Not to mention all the likely spam...
--
Make wireless phones use IPs? Um, if IP addresses were so easy to remember, we would be using them in place of name. For example, we'd all go to http://64.28.67.48/ instead of http://slashdot.org/ to read /.
And what happens when (if) we move to IPv6? Do you really want to have to dial numbers that long?
--
Here in Maryland, we have overlapping area codes, so (at the time) Bell Atlantic implemented 10-digit phone numbers. It's really not all that difficult to handle.
I only have problems when I'm in an area of the country that doesn't have the same issues, and try to dial the area code before the number (like when I was in Delaware last year, and had to use a pay phone for directions).
What's 3 more digits per dial, anyway? Especially in this age of speed dial phones....
--