Misleading indeed - what would be even more interesting to see is the flip-side: How many servers using some version of Windows have switched to Linux? Although perhaps not as high (otherwise why would they make it a point to mention the 5% in the first place - assuming they're unbiased, of course), I'm sure there are plenty.
I did a quick purusal of Netcraft's site to see if they tracked it, without success.
And of course, it's not too surprising to see Windows 2003 servers poping up all over the place - plenty of people are upgrading since it's a relatively new product.
My findings as well. I have Shaw at home, and Telus at my office. I've had a warning call from Shaw, and my buddy has been cut off TWICE from them for excessive downloading.
But I've been running my Telus connection at pretty much 100% capacity for 6+ months now without so much as an email from them. Even though their DSL is capped at ~200KBytes/sec down (~100KB up), while with Shaw's cable I've seen 800KB+ down (~60KB up), I'll most certainly switch over to Telus should Shaw give me another warning.
And yes, I spent a couple hours trying to find mention of bandwidth caps in both of their agreements, to no avail. However on the phone, a Shaw rep mentioned the 6 down, 2 up limit (but she said they don't normally call unless the down breaks 15).
Still praying for speakeasy to open up in Canada so I can get access to a REAL ISP. Telus may not enforce bandwidth caps (yet), but their customer service is downright awful.
Re:How to create a persistant homedir on USB memor
on
Knoppix 3.3 Is Out
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· Score: 1
From that link:
Q: Is it possible -- beside a modified CD -- to use Persistent Home on a USB-stick, when the PC has no floppy-drive?
A: Not easily at the moment, but it can be done with some magic...
Ah crap, and I left my magic wand at the office...
any idea if the German version actually has an answer to that question?
I think you're correct in that most ISP's here won't hand over your personal data to the **AA, but I know for fact that some ISP's WILL give warnings to their users on behalf of the **AA. My brother in Vancouver had his account suspended after 2 warnings from Rogers (who was notified by the MPAA that his IP was sharing popular movie TeleSync's over bittorrent). I've also read several other accounts from Canadians on various message boards, although no RIAA infringements yet - so maybe this is a little offtopic.
But my point is that it's really up the ISP's on how to handle complaints from other companies.
Card-counting is NOT illegal, at least not in the US, and I suspect anywhere in the world. It would simply be impossible to prove.
It is, however, frowned upon by the casinos - so much so that should you consistently make a bunch of money, they can tell you to leave and never come back. Any other establishment can legally do as well, for no reason.
Read Ahead (aka PreFetching) is useful, but only when sanctioned by the website - which is why Mozilla has done it the way it has (ie. the right way).
If a browser just suddenly decides to grab a bunch of pages, some of those pages could contain dynamic content that perhaps changes a database on the server, using basic CGI args in the link. Who knows the amount of trouble that could cause.
Examples: "click here to add this $500 service to your account", "click here to delete your account", "click here if you're absolutely sure you want to do this horribly un-reversable act", etc.
I don't like speaking for people, but I imagine the submitter was just trying to stave off the inevitable cries of "but this will only encourage the script kiddies!", by showing that it's already been available online for some time.
The Handspring Treo has a similar scroll wheel on the side - and the usual Palm scroll buttons on the front. (Plus, of course, it's a mobile phone too - GSM or PCS, depending on the model). Personally, I can't live without mine.
True, but the marketing guys normally want the ad to show no matter how long the page is taking to load, and one way to do it is to put the banner ad HTML near the top, OUTSIDE of any major tables (and tables are still the defacto standard in formatting a web page of any complexity).
This way, if there's any dynamic / intensive code in the middle of the page (which will get hit hardest under a/. attack), at least the banner ad is displayed and the brass is happy.
I'd also like to point out that Trend Micro offers a great freeonline virus scanner that comes in very handy when you get a call from a friend/relative who's having computer problems. No need to haul over and install your own virus scanner (which is undoubtedly against said virus scanner's EULA anyway) just to find out if they're infected. I can't remember if it actually CLEANS the viruses it finds, but manually removing most viruses isn't all that tough once you know what you're looking for.
The HouseCall product has also spotted viruses that Norton did not.
If you use Windows NT or XP, the refresh rate problem may not be with your video card drivers (at least according to this site). Get the excellent RefreshForce utility, which has worked wonders for me over two different cards - I had no idea I could run 1024x768 at 144Hz with my monitor.
As for the crashing, well, yeah - ATI drivers suck.
I always DL demos before buying a game, even if I already know I'm going to buy it. This is especially important for a game like Doom 3 - I need to know if my current computer will handle it, or if I need to run out and upgrade everything.
Who am I kidding... of course I'm going to need a new computer for Doom 3... Just hope 4 processor Opterons and Dual Radeon 9800 Pro prices drop significantly before the years out!;)
"Google has an 84 linux box cluster and they index about 4 billon sites with it."
I think you're just a tad off with that "84" number - on their site, they claim "...thousands of low cost PCs". Although I can't find the actual numbers, I remember them being about 8000 a few years ago, shortly after they partnered with Yahoo - who knows what they're up to now. I'd love to see what their primary datacenter looks like!
But seriously, I've always wanted something like this for work. A simple status indicator whether the cluster of machines I'm responsible for is Working Fine (green), Having Issues (yellow), or Completely B0rked (red).
Currently, I keep a persistent browser window open to a simple web-based script that checks on the status of everything and sets its background to one of those colors based on what it finds (it's quite a bit more verbose than just that should something be wrong, but that's not the point). This is fine and dandy for my use, but for the sake of being interupted during an emergency...
It'd be really cool (and actually useful) to have a separate orb that glows the same color... so the next time my PHB runs in to tell me I forgot my TPS report cover sheet.. er.. to tell me that he's noticed a problem with the site, he'll first see the big red glow and realize I'm already aware of it.
(that, and when I'm deep into a Quake match, and can't see the little window...)
I agree, Gentoo's portage is the best package management I've come across. Not only doe it make ANY package a one-line command that will automatically "download, untar, [patch], configure, make, make test, make install", but it uses system global optimizations for compiles, takes care of all dependencies, and places binaries, libraries, config files and startup scripts all in standard locations. And their "gentoo-sources" version of the kernel has over 70 high-performance patches it includes to the vanilla kernel.org tree (but of course, you don't have to use them if you don't want to, but why not?)
It even has a great/etc/env system for managing environment variables (both bash and csh flavors), so if it needs to install binaries in a non-standard location, you "PATH" is automatically updated to include it.
I don't use Gentoo as a desktop platform, so I can't comment on its X/KDE/Gnome setups, but I'm sure they're just as complete and easy. And although Gentoo may be rather intimidating for a n00b initially, it does have excellent documentation and a great support community at their site.
Keeping a system up-to-date with the latest and greatest has never been this easy!
The problem seems to be that a lot of people think E-mails are something that is always to be replied to immediately, as if they were phone calls. I do not know why this is; ordinary paper-mail is certainly asynchronous, and any kind of written letter (paper or electronic) requires about the same amount of thought anyways.
I used to agree completely - I didn't want to bother typing up any reply until I had completely any request or completely thought through the issue. What's the point?
But I've been on the other end enough times that I've changed my mind. I hate sending an email asking someone to take a look into a bug or other problem, and not getting a response back for days. You're left thinking "did he get it?", "is he working on it?", "is he as concerned as I am?". This eventually leads to either more emails ("haven't heard from you, what's up") or to a more intrusive phone-call just to see if anything's happening on the other end. A simple "got your email, am looking into it" reply can go a LONG ways to calm the nerves at the other end.
The original "return receipt" concept of email would actually help this without requiring any additional work, but most people feel it's too big-brotherly ("they just want to check how often I read my email").
My policy now is that for any reply that may take more than 15 minutes from my end to get back to them with, I'll send a quick "got it" email - takes 10 seconds of my time, but avoids any nasty calls later.
That revenge killing isn't all that hilarious... the murder victim was a simple consul for the Nigerian Embassy, and had nothing to do with the scams - and a secretary was also wounded. I imagine the crazed and confused 72-year old gunman just assumed anyone linked to Nigeria must be in on it.
Now if the murder victim was one of the scam artists, I'd be dancing a little jig right now.
It's a good idea in principal, but focusing on the the (current) major distros perhaps isn't a great solution. Sure, most distros out there today were based on RedHat, SlackWare, Debian, SCO, or some other *nix (like BSD) when they started, but those names mean nothing to those outside the community.
I think a functional labelling would be more appropriate, such as distros targetted towards "servers", "desktops", "new-to-linux", and/or "complete customization" (PC term for "hardcore geek").
Now, before I'm be flamed to death for trying to put certain distros under any of those labels, I completely realize ANY distro can be used for ANY purpose (as other posters have pointed out, they're ALL just the same kernel, and a whole bunch of the same utilities and patches, but with some extra "glue", packaging, and support systems). That's the real beauty of Linux, but it takes a while for a newbie to realize this.
The whole reason there are so many distros is because certain people didn't like how other distros were "focused".
Examples:
Mandrake and RedHat typically appeal to desktop users and newbies alike, since their ease-of-installation, configuration, and hardware compatibilites are top-notch (Yes, they both offer server-focused packages, but that's my point - they realize they have to market those differently than their stock packages).
Debian is targetted towards server installations and/or those who value pure stablity over having the latest and greatest front-end features (and those who actually realize there's typically a trade-off with "new vs. stable")
Slackware, Gentoo (my current favorite), Sorcerer, Lunar, Linux-From-Scratch et al are focused towards the hard-core linux guys who want to be able to control absolutely everything about their system, be it for desktops OR servers, but these are obviously not targetted towards newbies.
I began my Linux introduction with Slackware myself back when there were very few distros to choose from, but I'm from a CS background working on SunOS, IRIX, and AIX machines. The level of complexity wasn't a consideration of mine.
But for newbies (and remember, everyone is a newbie at one point), I feel it's best to start with the pre-packaged, easy-to-use (trade-off: harder to customize) version of any softare, and work your way up.
Figures that when a case mod article is posted like this one where the editor says "at what point would it have made more sense just to buy a regular computer?", almost every response is "because it's cool, you dolt!".
Yet when a case mod is posted without that disclaimer, everyone claims "this is sooo non-news... why, oh why would anyone bother doing this?"
1) Perhaps it takes a while longer to get Apache up vs. IIS (or most *nix server packages vs. their MS equivalents), but you are far more likely to really understand what Apache's exact role is and how it functions, while with IIS most of the details are purposefully hidden on you. Perhaps you really don't care about them, but when something b0rks down the road, believe me, you'll be begging for a good old man page to help you decipher what went wrong.
2) After the inital setup, getting the other 99 boxes in the cluster set up and running is a matter of copying the binaries & config files around in a single "foreach" loop, instead of removing the CD, moving over to the next one, and starting the IIS install & config all over again. With *nix, managing 100's of servers is a piece of cake after you've taken care of the "master" machine. (ok, I've been a *nix nut for a few years now, so perhaps windows has a better way to manage clusters presently).
3) If you don't want to learn all the inner workings of your system (although I'd argue it's only benefitial, especially when it comes to security and troubleshooting), you can always install one of many "config" front-ends to take care of all the nasty details, such as WebMin (which also has some nice clustering config modules).
4) Finally, any good linux distro makes most of the configuration as simple as the windows equiv., be them front-end GUIs, web-apps, or even command-line tools. It's rare these days to have to manually DL the.tar.gz, unpack,./configure, make, make test, make install, etc. Most package managers will do this for you (or DL the binaries/RPMs). But then at least you have the option of getting your hands dirty should you need to.
Just be happy you're not a Canadian - there was a point in time not terribly long ago that we were ahead of Americans in the tech on our phones (esp. during the hay-day of Nortel), but since then we've fast been falling behind (and certainly can't hold a flame to Japan). For example, we just got the Treo 270, which I've been eagerly awaiting and was finally able to obtain a month ago, whereas I could have picked it up in California over a year ago.
And on a side-note, Rogers AT&T, the only decent GSM provider where I live (Calgary - Fido being the unfortunate alternative), LOCKS the Circuit Switched Data feature of the phone, forcing you to use their extremely overpriced GPRS service.
Now GPRS is a superior service for connectivity, but not for $5/month for 150kb of data (that's just a few web pages! I wouldn't be happy with that each DAY!) CSD would be much nicer for me, even with the 30-second connect time and external ISP requirement - at least you get charged plain air-time charges. +2 Karma to whoever out there tells me how to unlock the CPS service of these phones (REAL Karma, not this fake stuff...:)
Sorry for the rant here, but it's not entirely OT - I'd love to use my Treo to update my website from the road, just not at the prices they want to charge me... (I could set up an SMS/email gateway easily enough if all I wanted to do was blog, but I'd also like to use SSH, WebMin, etc).
Absolutely. You're not the only one "forging" the From: address at all, since it's the default thing to do in a lot of Mail programs.
Example: Mozilla Mail - I have three different IMAP servers that I talk to (Work, Personal, and my ISP's). When I reply to a mail from any of those, Mozilla correctly changes my "From:" field to the appropriate setting so the emails will come back to whichever account I was sending from.
However, with Mozilla, you can only specify ONE outgoing SMTP server, which in my case is my local machine. This would mean almost all of outgoing emails would get rejected, as the reverse lookup of my Mail-From: header wouldn't match my local IP.
Plus, it's not uncommon for large ISPs or organizations to have a different set (IP block) of outgoing SMTP vs. incoming SMTP, to distribute load.
Slashdot Mirror
I did a quick purusal of Netcraft's site to see if they tracked it, without success.
And of course, it's not too surprising to see Windows 2003 servers poping up all over the place - plenty of people are upgrading since it's a relatively new product.
I for one welcome... ah nevermind.
Ah, crap! And I just rented that! Way to spoil the ending... (you insensitive clod) :P
But I've been running my Telus connection at pretty much 100% capacity for 6+ months now without so much as an email from them. Even though their DSL is capped at ~200KBytes/sec down (~100KB up), while with Shaw's cable I've seen 800KB+ down (~60KB up), I'll most certainly switch over to Telus should Shaw give me another warning.
And yes, I spent a couple hours trying to find mention of bandwidth caps in both of their agreements, to no avail. However on the phone, a Shaw rep mentioned the 6 down, 2 up limit (but she said they don't normally call unless the down breaks 15).
Still praying for speakeasy to open up in Canada so I can get access to a REAL ISP. Telus may not enforce bandwidth caps (yet), but their customer service is downright awful.
But my point is that it's really up the ISP's on how to handle complaints from other companies.
It is, however, frowned upon by the casinos - so much so that should you consistently make a bunch of money, they can tell you to leave and never come back. Any other establishment can legally do as well, for no reason.
If a browser just suddenly decides to grab a bunch of pages, some of those pages could contain dynamic content that perhaps changes a database on the server, using basic CGI args in the link. Who knows the amount of trouble that could cause.
Examples: "click here to add this $500 service to your account", "click here to delete your account", "click here if you're absolutely sure you want to do this horribly un-reversable act", etc.
I don't like speaking for people, but I imagine the submitter was just trying to stave off the inevitable cries of "but this will only encourage the script kiddies!", by showing that it's already been available online for some time.
The Handspring Treo has a similar scroll wheel on the side - and the usual Palm scroll buttons on the front. (Plus, of course, it's a mobile phone too - GSM or PCS, depending on the model). Personally, I can't live without mine.
This way, if there's any dynamic / intensive code in the middle of the page (which will get hit hardest under a /. attack), at least the banner ad is displayed and the brass is happy.
I'd also like to point out that Trend Micro offers a great free online virus scanner that comes in very handy when you get a call from a friend/relative who's having computer problems. No need to haul over and install your own virus scanner (which is undoubtedly against said virus scanner's EULA anyway) just to find out if they're infected. I can't remember if it actually CLEANS the viruses it finds, but manually removing most viruses isn't all that tough once you know what you're looking for.
The HouseCall product has also spotted viruses that Norton did not.
As for the crashing, well, yeah - ATI drivers suck.
Who am I kidding... of course I'm going to need a new computer for Doom 3... Just hope 4 processor Opterons and Dual Radeon 9800 Pro prices drop significantly before the years out! ;)
I think you're just a tad off with that "84" number - on their site, they claim "...thousands of low cost PCs". Although I can't find the actual numbers, I remember them being about 8000 a few years ago, shortly after they partnered with Yahoo - who knows what they're up to now. I'd love to see what their primary datacenter looks like!
But seriously, I've always wanted something like this for work. A simple status indicator whether the cluster of machines I'm responsible for is Working Fine (green), Having Issues (yellow), or Completely B0rked (red).
Currently, I keep a persistent browser window open to a simple web-based script that checks on the status of everything and sets its background to one of those colors based on what it finds (it's quite a bit more verbose than just that should something be wrong, but that's not the point). This is fine and dandy for my use, but for the sake of being interupted during an emergency...
It'd be really cool (and actually useful) to have a separate orb that glows the same color... so the next time my PHB runs in to tell me I forgot my TPS report cover sheet.. er.. to tell me that he's noticed a problem with the site, he'll first see the big red glow and realize I'm already aware of it.
(that, and when I'm deep into a Quake match, and can't see the little window...)
It even has a great /etc/env system for managing environment variables (both bash and csh flavors), so if it needs to install binaries in a non-standard location, you "PATH" is automatically updated to include it.
I don't use Gentoo as a desktop platform, so I can't comment on its X/KDE/Gnome setups, but I'm sure they're just as complete and easy. And although Gentoo may be rather intimidating for a n00b initially, it does have excellent documentation and a great support community at their site.
Keeping a system up-to-date with the latest and greatest has never been this easy!
But I've been on the other end enough times that I've changed my mind. I hate sending an email asking someone to take a look into a bug or other problem, and not getting a response back for days. You're left thinking "did he get it?", "is he working on it?", "is he as concerned as I am?". This eventually leads to either more emails ("haven't heard from you, what's up") or to a more intrusive phone-call just to see if anything's happening on the other end. A simple "got your email, am looking into it" reply can go a LONG ways to calm the nerves at the other end.
The original "return receipt" concept of email would actually help this without requiring any additional work, but most people feel it's too big-brotherly ("they just want to check how often I read my email").
My policy now is that for any reply that may take more than 15 minutes from my end to get back to them with, I'll send a quick "got it" email - takes 10 seconds of my time, but avoids any nasty calls later.
Now if the murder victim was one of the scam artists, I'd be dancing a little jig right now.
I think a functional labelling would be more appropriate, such as distros targetted towards "servers", "desktops", "new-to-linux", and/or "complete customization" (PC term for "hardcore geek").
Now, before I'm be flamed to death for trying to put certain distros under any of those labels, I completely realize ANY distro can be used for ANY purpose (as other posters have pointed out, they're ALL just the same kernel, and a whole bunch of the same utilities and patches, but with some extra "glue", packaging, and support systems). That's the real beauty of Linux, but it takes a while for a newbie to realize this.
The whole reason there are so many distros is because certain people didn't like how other distros were "focused".
Examples:
- Mandrake and RedHat typically appeal to desktop users and newbies alike, since their ease-of-installation, configuration, and hardware compatibilites are top-notch (Yes, they both offer server-focused packages, but that's my point - they realize they have to market those differently than their stock packages).
- Debian is targetted towards server installations and/or those who value pure stablity over having the latest and greatest front-end features (and those who actually realize there's typically a trade-off with "new vs. stable")
- Slackware, Gentoo (my current favorite), Sorcerer, Lunar, Linux-From-Scratch et al are focused towards the hard-core linux guys who want to be able to control absolutely everything about their system, be it for desktops OR servers, but these are obviously not targetted towards newbies.
I began my Linux introduction with Slackware myself back when there were very few distros to choose from, but I'm from a CS background working on SunOS, IRIX, and AIX machines. The level of complexity wasn't a consideration of mine.But for newbies (and remember, everyone is a newbie at one point), I feel it's best to start with the pre-packaged, easy-to-use (trade-off: harder to customize) version of any softare, and work your way up.
Yet when a case mod is posted without that disclaimer, everyone claims "this is sooo non-news... why, oh why would anyone bother doing this?"
Poor /. editor's ain't gettin' no respect...
1) Perhaps it takes a while longer to get Apache up vs. IIS (or most *nix server packages vs. their MS equivalents), but you are far more likely to really understand what Apache's exact role is and how it functions, while with IIS most of the details are purposefully hidden on you. Perhaps you really don't care about them, but when something b0rks down the road, believe me, you'll be begging for a good old man page to help you decipher what went wrong.
2) After the inital setup, getting the other 99 boxes in the cluster set up and running is a matter of copying the binaries & config files around in a single "foreach" loop, instead of removing the CD, moving over to the next one, and starting the IIS install & config all over again. With *nix, managing 100's of servers is a piece of cake after you've taken care of the "master" machine. (ok, I've been a *nix nut for a few years now, so perhaps windows has a better way to manage clusters presently).
3) If you don't want to learn all the inner workings of your system (although I'd argue it's only benefitial, especially when it comes to security and troubleshooting), you can always install one of many "config" front-ends to take care of all the nasty details, such as WebMin (which also has some nice clustering config modules).
4) Finally, any good linux distro makes most of the configuration as simple as the windows equiv., be them front-end GUIs, web-apps, or even command-line tools. It's rare these days to have to manually DL the .tar.gz, unpack, ./configure, make, make test, make install, etc. Most package managers will do this for you (or DL the binaries/RPMs). But then at least you have the option of getting your hands dirty should you need to.
As usual,
And on a side-note, Rogers AT&T, the only decent GSM provider where I live (Calgary - Fido being the unfortunate alternative), LOCKS the Circuit Switched Data feature of the phone, forcing you to use their extremely overpriced GPRS service.
Now GPRS is a superior service for connectivity, but not for $5/month for 150kb of data (that's just a few web pages! I wouldn't be happy with that each DAY!) CSD would be much nicer for me, even with the 30-second connect time and external ISP requirement - at least you get charged plain air-time charges. +2 Karma to whoever out there tells me how to unlock the CPS service of these phones (REAL Karma, not this fake stuff...:)
Sorry for the rant here, but it's not entirely OT - I'd love to use my Treo to update my website from the road, just not at the prices they want to charge me... (I could set up an SMS/email gateway easily enough if all I wanted to do was blog, but I'd also like to use SSH, WebMin, etc).
Example: Mozilla Mail - I have three different IMAP servers that I talk to (Work, Personal, and my ISP's). When I reply to a mail from any of those, Mozilla correctly changes my "From:" field to the appropriate setting so the emails will come back to whichever account I was sending from.
However, with Mozilla, you can only specify ONE outgoing SMTP server, which in my case is my local machine. This would mean almost all of outgoing emails would get rejected, as the reverse lookup of my Mail-From: header wouldn't match my local IP.
Plus, it's not uncommon for large ISPs or organizations to have a different set (IP block) of outgoing SMTP vs. incoming SMTP, to distribute load.
And http://dance.efactory.de/.