Obviously, you don't live in Asia. Maybe you've never even been a tourist here.
I have lived in Asia for nine years, married here, and have a family here. You could say that I'm a bit familiar with it.
The only thing wrong with that post is the blanket statement "Koreans simply don't care about orphans." Some do, but yeah, most probably don't. It's the same in Japan, where I lived for several years, and in the country where I live now (not Korea, but my wife's country). Most of the orphans who get adopted here are adopted by North Americans and Europeans. The rest stay in orphanages and many then wind up on the street, as beggars or criminals. I have seen with my own eyes, and heard from my wife, who knows because it is her culture, that Asian cultures by and large don't care much at all about orphans, beggars, the homeless, what have you. This is not flamebait, this is not a troll, this is just the fact of the matter as observed by someone who has been in Asia for a long time and has an Asian wife and children.
I've met some people coming here to adopt babies from orphanages, and they were wonderful, compassionate people. The government here, to its credit, does not stand in the way of these adoptions. Their adoptive parents can provide for these children in a way that orphanages, whether private or government-run, could ever do. Everyone wins when there is an adoption.
Before you mod someone a troll, please stop and consider whether or not what they are saying might be true, even if it's an unpleasant truth. If you don't know for a fact that it's not, please save your mod points for something that is obviously a troll or flamebait, not something that just might disagree with your world view or your own prejudices.
Happily, your moderation is on my meta-mod list for today. Unfair.
... one big open proxy, with large sections of its netblock blackholed all over the world, and its entire netblock blackholed by some?! Yikes! I had no idea!
If I had any mod points, I'd give you one. Absolutely, buying Sun would make more sense for IBM than for anyone else. Integrating the product lines would take a long time and what to do with Solaris would be a big question (best answer: put a lot of Solaris' high-end capabilities into Linux and eventually stop shipping both Solaris and AIX when there is no longer any advantage to doing so).
It makes sense for IBM for the market share increase it would get them, for the removal of a competitor at the high end, and for the technological treasure chest it would get them, including control of Java, which is one of IBM's most important software arenas. IBM could then keep Java to itself as Sun has or, more likely, submit it to a standards body (can you say "ISO Standard Java," boys and girls?)
What's wrong with coffee houses? Since sysadmins live on coffee (most of us, anyway), coffee houses must be a good thing. Coffee houses with wireless access mean we can ssh-tunnel back to our networks and can admin the whole mess w/out ever leaving Starbucks:-)
But the real reason I replied to this post was your sig: "Albert Einstein nailed space-time, but the wild thing had him stumped - Thomas Dolby." By all accounts, Einstein had the wild thing down pretty good, too:-)
Most of my background is in WAN engineering and *nix administration, but much of my current paying work is W2K administration (and a bit of *nix). Outlook Express is on my list of software that is not allowed on our company LAN. Why? It's crappy. It has what may be the worst security history of any software product (unless IE is worse), and still isn't RFC-compliant WRT handling PGP-or-GPG-signed email.
My point is that whether or not you think is crappy or not has nothing to with whether is crappy or not.
Outlook Express is a crappy application, and would be so even if it had a Linux version. I would still not allow it on our network.
By way of contrast, let's consider Konqueror, which in its latest version I have come to consider the best web browser available, on any platform. Regardless of whether you think it's running on a crappy OS or a good one, the application is outstanding. It's rendering is extremely fast, it offers the finest-grained security control of any browser I've used, and the best bookmark management system as well (IMO). The only thing any competitor has on it is Mozilla's Personal Folder Toolbar, but I can fake that one pretty well in Konqueror with minimal effort. The only other browser really close to Konqueror is Opera. Mozilla/Galeon/Netscape are in the same league but not on the same level.
It _seems_ costly, until you start doing some math. I know the price shocked me, too.
I just finished a pilot VOIP install in an extremely rural area of Vietnam, about 250 km or so northwest of Hanoi, as part of a feasability study for bringing VOIP to rural areas. The system consists of a few IP phones in three locations (one of which, a high school, had no telephone at all before the VOIP install) and a couple of PCs for Internet access.
The main site has a satellite uplink and is connected to the first remote site over an 802.11b WAN link using a wireless router with a directional antenna at one end and an omni-directional antenna at the other. The first remote site is connected to the second remote site, about 200 meters away, which has a small directional antenna pointed at the omnidirectional one at the first remote site. The voice quality is outstanding, and we tested it with calls to as far away as Ho Chi Minh City, a distance of 1600 kilometers or so.
The initial cost of the equipment (Cisco VOIP gateway and call manager), a layer 3 fast ethernet switch, the satellite equipment, the IP phones, etc., looks expensive, but when you compare that to the cost of running landlines over nearly vertical mountains to a place that is an hour's drive over dirt roads from the nearest town big enough to even have lodging, you can see that if such a project is expanded from pilot program to full deployment, the costs scale very well. Even if a POTS network used microwave links over the mountains and only needed a wired network locally, the cost of building that wired network and putting up the microwave towers over the mountains would at least equal the cost of the a VOIP network with satellite uplink, and probably exceed it.
Once the one-time costs are over, operating a wireless VOIP network in such an area would certainly have a lower running cost than operating a POTS network. I wish we had had Cisco's new wireless IP phones available for the install instead of the wired ones we used. Just not having to install ethernet cabling and surface conduits in concrete-walled buildings would have saved us at least a full day's work, which would have recovered the higher cost of the wireless AP and NICs compared to the cost of a cheap switch, cable, and wired NICs.
In short, 802.11b IP phones are a significant and very promising development that will offer a significant cost savings over both POTS networks and wired Ethernet networks in remote locations.
Re:May as well be the first to say it
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AOL Sues Spammers
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· Score: 2
slumos> Huh? It certainly doesn't cost less to send a billion messages than it does to receive a billion messages. I'm sure it costs more.
You've obviously never worked in the ISP business.
The spammer is not paying for the delivery costs at all, just pumping out spam through a DSL or cable line (mostly - sometimes they use dialup), and sending the stuff through open relays and open proxies who are bearing most of the actual load of sending.
Moreover, those billion spams are not being sent by one person. They are being sent from a number of places and all converge on AOL and the other targets.
Having worked for an ISP myself, I can tell you something about the costs incurred in receiving spam. The load of spam filtering required us to run twice as many MXes as we would have needed if we were not being spammed. Even if we hadn't filtered, we still would have needed more MXes than we would have needed without spam. Because we could not raise prices in a competitive environment with a downward pricing trend, the hardware and personnel costs of spam filtering really cut into our already very thin profit margin.
slumos> If AOL has something to defend against, it's people who sign up, start getting 100 spams for every actual message immediately, and cancel.
The way to defend against that would be to eliminate the cause that makes those customers cancel. Since that cause is spam, suing the spammers into the poor house seems like a reasonable move.
Re:May as well be the first to say it
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AOL Sues Spammers
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· Score: 5, Insightful
AC> Nor are you charged by the byte of spam delivered to your email account.
How do you know? A lot of people are charged either for bandwidth, bytes transferred, telco connect time, ISP connect time, or some combination of those. It depends on where you live and/or what kind of service you have. Where I live, I pay per minute for both the ISP and telco connection. Any spam I get costs me money from my pocket. Want another example? How about a company with a co-lo or virtually hosted server in a data center? They may well be paying for both bandwidth and transfer volume. The more megabytes of spam they get per month, the higher their IT costs are.
Spam also costs money to the people whose relays are hijacked to send it. Some might argue that they deserve it, although I wouldn't agree. Their incompetence does not give anyone the right to violate their systems. Even if you think they deserve it, however, *I* don't deserve the end result - spam.
My mail is forwarded through a very aggressively anti-spam ISP where I used to live, so I don't see nearly as much as my wife does (her local ISP does nothing at all about spam), but one spam is one too many.
Suing spammers will help, but to really get to them, spamming will have to become a crime. Use a relay, go to jail.
1) Most of the people I know who work in IT aren't geeks. In fact, a large number of them (maybe higher than average?) are also musicians (and the complement, a lot of the musicians I know work in IT), and so could be regarded as cooler than average, or something;
2) Even the ones who are geeks are usually married, if they're of the age for that. Interestingly, I would say that in most cases (including mine) their wives rank higher on the physical attractiveness scale than they do. I don't know what conclusions, if any, can be drawn from that, but there it is.
The reason I believe that being a car guy = !attractive to many women (in particular, it seems as though college-educated women don't want to go out with a mechanic, even if he also has a degree) does not come from the idea that it's "uncool" to be one, or more "cool" to be in IT, but from the social prestige factor, which could also be stated as "A mechanic?! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeuuuuuuuwww!" If their friends ask, "So, what does he do?" they want to be able to name some white-collar job for purely prestige reasons, to avoid the "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuuuwww!" response.
Therefore, being able to say "He's a software engineer/sysadmin/network engineer/whatever" is a lot better than "He's a mechanic." It doesn't help much if they can say "He's a mechanic but he has a college degree." It doesn't even help if they can say "He's a mechanic, but he has a Magna Cum Laude degree and is smarter than you and your husband put together." The first three words ruin it for most of their peers.
It's all an image thing. A lot of people think that being a mechanic (or other blue-collar worker) means you're low class, poorly educated, whatever. They don't realize that being a good mechanic, plumber, electrician, etc., takes a lot of skill and intelligence. People who are good at troubleshooting complex mechanical systems such as automobiles are also likely to be pretty good at troubleshooting complex software systems.
I think the mechanic analogy is probably the best. There is little difference between your average mechanic and your average computer/software/techie engineer type - other than one is physical and the other is not.
Someone please mod him up insightful.
My brother, who holds a Magna Cum Laude degree in economics, was also a mechanic. Not just a mechanic, but an ASE-certified Mastertech. Combined with a natural talent for automobiles, that made him one kick-ass mechanic. However, did that get him social respect or dates? BAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA! It did get him plenty of people offering him a six-pack of (cheap domestic) beer if we would do some repair on their cars, though. Needless to say, their cars went unfixed, at least by him.
After he stopped being a mechanic and went into IT (where he continued to be employed throughout the dot-com bust and its aftermath, as have I) he did get more respect b/c he was in a white-collar job. He got married, too. Come to think of it, I never used to meet anybody when I was a car hobbyist and could usually be found with a wrench in my hand in my spare time. Now that I work in IT and pay somebody else to do that stuff, I'm married too. I guess being a car guy isn't attracitve to many women. The only difference between now and then is that I spend my spare time working on computers instead of cars.
As for having a respected career where you are considered a valuable professional, being a doctor or lawyer has always been safest bet. Even those fields, however, aren't what they used to be. If you talked to doctors who work for HMOs, a lot of them would probably have the same gripes that IT professionals have today.
Props to AOL for validating what we (ISP) were already doing three years ago.
The policy went like this:
- Most of the mail we receive from SMTP hosts in residential DSL pools was spam. Therefore, we are banning connections originating in any such pool from which we have been spammed;
- This is based on reverse lookup; if you want to send us mail directly, get your provider to give you correct reverse lookup for your FQDN;
- If your provider cannot or will not do that, use their outbound SMTP service as your smarthost. That's what it's there for;
- Our spam filtering is aggressive by customer demand, and it is totally optional. Customers who don't want it can disable it. The fact that your intended recipients have enabled it means they want this level of filtering.
- Finally, don't feel singled out. We apply the same rules to cable pools and dialup pools from which we have been spammed, plus netblocks (some quite large and located in Korea or China), plus we have language-specific filters to reject mail written in Korean or Chinese. Oh, and a few thousand specific domains, as well.
However, I do have to dopeslap AOL for having their postmaster address reject mail. The postmaster address must accept any mail from anywhere.
I have to post this as an AC. Some of you will recognize who I am.
You raise some good points here, which I have also encountered in my work.
I am employed with a small IT consulting firm in Viet Nam. In our office, my workstation is a Debian box, as is our server, which to the outside world is our MX and runs our website. On the inside, it runs internal DNS, POP3, Samba, phpgroupware, and a few other things. The other workstations in our office all run Win2K or WinXP, and they do so for two reasons: the developers are normally developing for Windows b/c that's what our customers want, and everyone need to be able to read and write all MS Office documents, including things from Visio. If there was a product that ran on Linux that could truly adequately cover the MS Office compatiblity front, I could migrate most of our office from Windows to Linux right now. That "most" would be the ordinary users like the secretary, the president, accounting, etc. Linux with KDE or GNOME is ready for that right now in a corporate environment, esp. with a professional sysadmin available. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not used KDE or GNOME lately.
Developers working on Windows-based stuff would, obviously, need to keep their Windows machines even if we migrated most people to Linux.
At a customer site, I installed Red Hat on a machine there, primarily to do network intrusion detection. The words of the president of that company, who has a favorable view of Free and Open Source software, are that he would love to be able to migrate the whole office to Linux, but he has two problems which are difficult to address: the MS Office problem, and the fact that they are already using Exchange and Outlook. They don't exactly like Exchange and Outlook, viewing it as both not secure enough and not reliable enough, but they need its functionality.
Now, we could probably successfully replace their Exchange Server with Lotus Domino on Linux, and provide the file services over Samba without difficulty, thus ridding them of their Exchange box. There is, however, one last problem there: they already have Exchange. It's paid for. Thus, they'd have to shell out for the cost of the Domino server and about 30 Windows clients to make the transition, plus new hardware on which to run it. Particularly when the business climate is not great, it's hard for a company to justify the expenditure. Even if what they have now doesn't work as well as they'd like, it works well enough for them to keep using it when the better alternative would be expensive. Of course, that doesn't solve the MS Office problem that would be faced if we tried to migrate their workstations. I've tried the alternatives, and their just isn't anything that's good enough right now. I think one year will make a tremendous difference, but right now I cannot recommend anything to a customer who needs to be able to read *all* MS Office documents without trouble. If there was a solution, even a proprietary one, I think they would buy it. But there isn't.
That's the situation at a foreign company where, to the best of my knowledge, everything is licensed.
However, the situation here is that the great majority (my educated guess is over 90%) of the Windows software used here is pirated. That's in business. For individuals, I'd put that figure at over 99%.
So let's look at the case of the majority of the businesses, esp. small and medium ones. They are running pirate versions of W2K or XP, Office, Exchange, whatever else they need, that they bought for about one US dollar per CD-ROM at a pirate shop. Imagine we come along wanting to sell them a Linux-based system. All we have to offer is reliability, no cost savings. And we still have the MS Office problem, but assume it's one year later and for no more than US $100 per seat we can offer them a 100% MS-Office compatible office suite that runs on Linux and we won't pirate it for them. So, they have to spend thousands of dollars for software and some transitio
There is one bright spot in that impossibly awful TOS (maybe that should be "toss"). Their customers may not:
knowingly or negligently transmit any virus or other disabling feature or any other similar software or programs that may damage the operation of another's Systems, data or other property
In other words, you are responsble for the basic security of your computer. If you have an id10t problem and open up every attachment asking for your advice and get absolutely every virus that comes along - a pretty good definition of negligent, in this context - they can hold your feet to the fire for it.
Anyone who has ever worked for an ISP would feel joy at having such a clause, b/c it would allow you dump a certain group of problem customers, should you choose to do so. Finally, being grossly stupid is a crime, or least a TOS violation. Woohoo!:-)
Old Deskjets are, of course, pretty bulletproof. Over 10 years ago I bought a 540C. It only does 300 DPI and is nowhere near photo-quality, of course, but my father still uses that printer today.
In our office, we have a 960C that prints 1000 pages a month or so, and it's doing fine. Wether it will still be fine in two years remains to be seen:-)
Now, I wish HP DAT drives held up this well. At the ISP where I worked for four years, we had to replace our HP DDS-3 drive once a year (internal or external didn't make any difference). We finally settled the issue by getting a couple of used Sun DLT changers at a bargain price. End of difficulties, and a whole lot faster:-)
I lived in Japan for 8 years before moving to Vietnam. Epistiotomy is quite common here, too; we avoided it only because a C-section became medically necessary a few days before our due date.
Our baby was so large that in retrospect my wife was kind of glad of the c-section:-)
While you are well-qualified in IT (I took the time to visit your site before responding), linguistics is another matter.
My academic background is in linguistics, and it always when people who know absolutely nothing about (human) languages or the acquisition thereof nevertheless hold forth on the topic like they are some kind of experts. Telling people that baby talk is bad is dead wrong.
It is quite well established in the literature that baby talk is not only natural and healthy for children, it's a normal and important part of their language acquisition process and *should not* be avoided. It has also recently been found that the higher-pitched cooing and such from the mother and other female caregivers is more easily grokked by babies than the baby talk from the father and other male caregivers, which may confuse them. After reading that, I observed my own child and compared her response to my baby talk and my (single point of) empirical evidence supports that conclusion.
The exaggeration of sounds in baby talk is very important to help infants get a grasp on the sounds of language. Our baby gets lots of baby talk in both my wife's native language and mine, and she's already producing a number of sounds from both at four months old. Her cousin, who is 3 months older but seems to get much less baby talk, is far less "talkative." Our baby will look at us and other familiy members and "talk" on a regular basis.
Read to your child, but when s/he is old enough to grok that. When s/he's not, talk to your child. It will help with language acquisition. Sitting there and reading from a book will not. It's probably a little better than just turning on the TV, but just as context-free.
Re:Are there still sysadmin only jobs out there?
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Post-crash Salary Survey
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· Score: 3, Funny
> shit, where are the 6-figure positions???
Yeah, but s/he didn't say how many of those six figures were to the left of the decimal point:-)
So let me get this straight. You only care if people are being killed if they are Muslims? That if they were Jews, Christians, Buddhists, agnostics, Cao Dai, atheists, whatever, you wouldn't care? Or would care less than you do about Muslims?
Now, let me ask you an honest question. This is not a troll, nor intended to be flamebait. I often see expressed in the media Muslim opinions that essentially seem to be saying "The only thing that matters here is that the people in Iraq are (mostly) Muslims. Who is right and who is wrong doesn't matter, only who is Muslim." Do many Muslims actually believe that, or is it that only only those who believe that make headlines?
Another question: if two primarily Muslim countries have a war, how do you know which one to cheer for? The one that is the same sect of Muslim as you (Shia, Sunni, etc.), or what? Or does right and wrong come into the picture only at that point, but not if one of the combatants is a not a primarily Muslim nation?
Final question: There are a number of American Muslims, too. I'd be surprised if some of them are not in the war right now, fighting against Iraq. Uh-oh, now we have Muslims fighting Muslims, how do you cheer for?
Let me restate that none of the above is a troll or meant to be flamebait, I honestly want to hear your thoughts on these points so that I can better understand the Muslim point of view on this war. I hope you will respond in the same spirit, since the world needs a lot more understanding and a lot less flamebait, IMO.
Finally, let me make one point of my own: that no matter what some people may think, this war is *not* about religion. In fact, the United States has never been in a war about religion. This war is about politics, it's about (IMO) a personal grudge, it's about oil and money and weapons. To some extent, it's even really about Saddam Hussein's conduct. However, it is most certainly not about religion.
I forgot to mention that back in 1998 when I was running TurboLinux (can't recall if it was 3.x or 4.x) and was looking over my httpd logs, I found them filled with accesses from various ISPs in Japan (where I was living at the time) to various Pr0n sites, mostly overseas. A little digging revealed the astonishing fact that TL was installing Apache configured as an open proxy by default!
I shut that up right away and reported it to their (then) head developer in Japan, who was a former colleague. The tie-in is that besides Japan, the other places where TurboLinux was big were Korea, and to some extent, China. There are so many open proxy Linux boxes in Korean educational institutions that I have an (untested) theory that back in those days, TurboLinux was installed on lots of boxes b/c of its double-byte capabilities, which were out-of-the-box better than any other distro at the time (Red Hat later caught up, partly b/c they hired some key staff away from TurboLinux in Japan) and thus a ton of open proxies were ushered into Korea.
And you are nobody to tell me how to run the systems I administer. As far as bounces of legit mail go, our customers were quite understanding about that, because our spam filtering was completely opt-in: if you don't want it, don't turn it on (it defaulted to off).
Our churn rate was low, we were profitable in a market where most ISPs aren't, and many of our customers had been with us since the company was started, so we were obviously doing something right.
And in fact, our suggestion to business DSL customers of said telco is that *they* get another ISP, one that will give them correct reverse DNS. A number of them took that advice, some smarthosted. All understood our problem and why we were doing it.
Those netblocks are filled with open proxies. The problem is so widespread in (South) Korea that there are days when I think the number of machines that aren't open proxies is in the minority. This is particularly true about boxes at Korean schools.
A quick nmap of those two IPs leaves me fairly convinced that they are being used for spam relay without the permission of their owners.
Mailbombing them would not be terribly productive, and would almost certainly get you in trouble with your upstream if anyone complained, and wouldn't really help the situation. I don't consider inadvertant open proxy operators to be totally innocent victims, but attacking their machines won't help anything.
Putting spammers in jail and fining them the value of what they made off spam + a punitive fine would help, but in most places, spamming isn't even a violation of civil law yet, let alone criminal law. We're a long way from giving spammers what they deserve.
Many legitimate machines and users - even whole ISPs - unfairly end up on blacklists, while the spammers just find another way through.
I spent five years working for ISPs, and during that time the only case of blocking I can think of that you could even possibly argue is unfair is the case of a certain major telco in the western United States which was (and AFAIK still is):
* Lumping its business DSL customers and home DSL customers together in the same pool;
* Not provding reverse DNS services to its business customers (their forward lookup might say mail.example.com, but the reverse still said host-aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd-spammydsl.sometelco.net)
* Doing, as far as we could tell, nothing at all about spammers in their DSL pool, which was a major source of spam;
* Doing, as far as we could tell, nothing about open relays & open proxies in their DSL pool.
This led to the situation of us blocking their entire DSL pool based on reverse DNS.
You could make the argument that it was unfair to said telco's business DSL customers to have their legitimate mail blocked, but I would then ask you, "Who was it that was being unfair to them? My employer, when we had no way to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate mail in that DSL pool from which most mail was illegitimate, or said telco, which was not providing proper service to its business DSL customers, who were paying a large premium over what residential DSL customers were paying and apparently getting little in exchange for their money?" My answer, of course, would be "Not my (then) employer."
Please note that we did not consider blocking of residential DSL customers to be unfair in any way, ditto for ordinary dial pool customers. It is normal for ISPs (and the telco in question did so) to provide outbound SMTP hosts for use by their customers. All those affected, including the business DSL customers, could make use of them either directly or as a smarthost. It is not unfair to tell a residential customer "Use your provider's outbound SMTP hosts. That's what they are their for." I'm not convinced that it's unfair to say that to a business DSL customer either, although I understand how they would like to be able to send mail directly instead of smarthosting through their provider. However, if the telco's position is essentially that a DSL line, because it doesn't cost like a leased line, does not include the normal services that come with a leased line (such as reverse DNS service), that is an issue to be settled between the telco and the customer.
I also question whether or not it is "unfair" to anyone to refuse their mail, on the grounds that delivering mail to any domain is a privilege, not a right. It is, of course, customary to extend that privilege to anyone who has not violated it or is not a member of a group of IP addresses where violation of that privilege is the norm (as in the case above), but no domain can be ordered to accept mail from any other domain. Refusing mail may have consequences for the refuser, of course, but that is their choice to make.
2.2 is still quite viable for use on production servers. At my former employer, the mail system (4 MXes, 2 outbound SMTP boxes, 2 POP proxies, and 2 backend mail spools) still runs 2.2 because it has been utterly stable (2.4 is pretty stable now too, but for a long time 2.4 was held to be too volatile for production use by many people, and more than a few still think so).
The default kernel remains 2.2 in Debian Stable, as well. On my personal machine I run 2.4, but if I were installing to a server that had no need for USB, etc., I would think about using 2.2 even now.
Slashdot Mirror
To the moderator who rated this a troll:
Obviously, you don't live in Asia. Maybe you've never even been a tourist here.
I have lived in Asia for nine years, married here, and have a family here. You could say that I'm a bit familiar with it.
The only thing wrong with that post is the blanket statement "Koreans simply don't care about orphans." Some do, but yeah, most probably don't. It's the same in Japan, where I lived for several years, and in the country where I live now (not Korea, but my wife's country). Most of the orphans who get adopted here are adopted by North Americans and Europeans. The rest stay in orphanages and many then wind up on the street, as beggars or criminals. I have seen with my own eyes, and heard from my wife, who knows because it is her culture, that Asian cultures by and large don't care much at all about orphans, beggars, the homeless, what have you. This is not flamebait, this is not a troll, this is just the fact of the matter as observed by someone who has been in Asia for a long time and has an Asian wife and children.
I've met some people coming here to adopt babies from orphanages, and they were wonderful, compassionate people. The government here, to its credit, does not stand in the way of these adoptions. Their adoptive parents can provide for these children in a way that orphanages, whether private or government-run, could ever do. Everyone wins when there is an adoption.
Before you mod someone a troll, please stop and consider whether or not what they are saying might be true, even if it's an unpleasant truth. If you don't know for a fact that it's not, please save your mod points for something that is obviously a troll or flamebait, not something that just might disagree with your world view or your own prejudices.
Happily, your moderation is on my meta-mod list for today. Unfair.
Umm, yes, that's why it's funny. It's called satire, perhaps you've heard of it?
... one big open proxy, with large sections of its netblock blackholed all over the world, and its entire netblock blackholed by some?! Yikes! I had no idea!
If I had any mod points, I'd give you one. Absolutely, buying Sun would make more sense for IBM than for anyone else. Integrating the product lines would take a long time and what to do with Solaris would be a big question (best answer: put a lot of Solaris' high-end capabilities into Linux and eventually stop shipping both Solaris and AIX when there is no longer any advantage to doing so).
It makes sense for IBM for the market share increase it would get them, for the removal of a competitor at the high end, and for the technological treasure chest it would get them, including control of Java, which is one of IBM's most important software arenas. IBM could then keep Java to itself as Sun has or, more likely, submit it to a standards body (can you say "ISO Standard Java," boys and girls?)
What's wrong with coffee houses? Since sysadmins live on coffee (most of us, anyway), coffee houses must be a good thing. Coffee houses with wireless access mean we can ssh-tunnel back to our networks and can admin the whole mess w/out ever leaving Starbucks :-)
:-)
But the real reason I replied to this post was your sig: "Albert Einstein nailed space-time, but the wild thing had him stumped - Thomas Dolby." By all accounts, Einstein had the wild thing down pretty good, too
Since when does MUA = OS?
Most of my background is in WAN engineering and *nix administration, but much of my current paying work is W2K administration (and a bit of *nix). Outlook Express is on my list of software that is not allowed on our company LAN. Why? It's crappy. It has what may be the worst security history of any software product (unless IE is worse), and still isn't RFC-compliant WRT handling PGP-or-GPG-signed email.
My point is that whether or not you think is crappy or not has nothing to with whether is crappy or not.
Outlook Express is a crappy application, and would be so even if it had a Linux version. I would still not allow it on our network.
By way of contrast, let's consider Konqueror, which in its latest version I have come to consider the best web browser available, on any platform. Regardless of whether you think it's running on a crappy OS or a good one, the application is outstanding. It's rendering is extremely fast, it offers the finest-grained security control of any browser I've used, and the best bookmark management system as well (IMO). The only thing any competitor has on it is Mozilla's Personal Folder Toolbar, but I can fake that one pretty well in Konqueror with minimal effort. The only other browser really close to Konqueror is Opera. Mozilla/Galeon/Netscape are in the same league but not on the same level.
I just finished a pilot VOIP install in an extremely rural area of Vietnam, about 250 km or so northwest of Hanoi, as part of a feasability study for bringing VOIP to rural areas. The system consists of a few IP phones in three locations (one of which, a high school, had no telephone at all before the VOIP install) and a couple of PCs for Internet access.
The main site has a satellite uplink and is connected to the first remote site over an 802.11b WAN link using a wireless router with a directional antenna at one end and an omni-directional antenna at the other. The first remote site is connected to the second remote site, about 200 meters away, which has a small directional antenna pointed at the omnidirectional one at the first remote site. The voice quality is outstanding, and we tested it with calls to as far away as Ho Chi Minh City, a distance of 1600 kilometers or so.
The initial cost of the equipment (Cisco VOIP gateway and call manager), a layer 3 fast ethernet switch, the satellite equipment, the IP phones, etc., looks expensive, but when you compare that to the cost of running landlines over nearly vertical mountains to a place that is an hour's drive over dirt roads from the nearest town big enough to even have lodging, you can see that if such a project is expanded from pilot program to full deployment, the costs scale very well. Even if a POTS network used microwave links over the mountains and only needed a wired network locally, the cost of building that wired network and putting up the microwave towers over the mountains would at least equal the cost of the a VOIP network with satellite uplink, and probably exceed it.
Once the one-time costs are over, operating a wireless VOIP network in such an area would certainly have a lower running cost than operating a POTS network. I wish we had had Cisco's new wireless IP phones available for the install instead of the wired ones we used. Just not having to install ethernet cabling and surface conduits in concrete-walled buildings would have saved us at least a full day's work, which would have recovered the higher cost of the wireless AP and NICs compared to the cost of a cheap switch, cable, and wired NICs.
In short, 802.11b IP phones are a significant and very promising development that will offer a significant cost savings over both POTS networks and wired Ethernet networks in remote locations.
slumos> Huh? It certainly doesn't cost less to send a billion messages than it does to receive a billion messages. I'm sure it costs more.
You've obviously never worked in the ISP business.
The spammer is not paying for the delivery costs at all, just pumping out spam through a DSL or cable line (mostly - sometimes they use dialup), and sending the stuff through open relays and open proxies who are bearing most of the actual load of sending.
Moreover, those billion spams are not being sent by one person. They are being sent from a number of places and all converge on AOL and the other targets.
Having worked for an ISP myself, I can tell you something about the costs incurred in receiving spam. The load of spam filtering required us to run twice as many MXes as we would have needed if we were not being spammed. Even if we hadn't filtered, we still would have needed more MXes than we would have needed without spam. Because we could not raise prices in a competitive environment with a downward pricing trend, the hardware and personnel costs of spam filtering really cut into our already very thin profit margin.
slumos> If AOL has something to defend against, it's people who sign up, start getting 100 spams for every actual message immediately, and cancel.
The way to defend against that would be to eliminate the cause that makes those customers cancel. Since that cause is spam, suing the spammers into the poor house seems like a reasonable move.
AC> Nor are you charged by the byte of spam delivered to your email account.
How do you know? A lot of people are charged either for bandwidth, bytes transferred, telco connect time, ISP connect time, or some combination of those. It depends on where you live and/or what kind of service you have. Where I live, I pay per minute for both the ISP and telco connection. Any spam I get costs me money from my pocket. Want another example? How about a company with a co-lo or virtually hosted server in a data center? They may well be paying for both bandwidth and transfer volume. The more megabytes of spam they get per month, the higher their IT costs are.
Spam also costs money to the people whose relays are hijacked to send it. Some might argue that they deserve it, although I wouldn't agree. Their incompetence does not give anyone the right to violate their systems. Even if you think they deserve it, however, *I* don't deserve the end result - spam.
My mail is forwarded through a very aggressively anti-spam ISP where I used to live, so I don't see nearly as much as my wife does (her local ISP does nothing at all about spam), but one spam is one too many.
Suing spammers will help, but to really get to them, spamming will have to become a crime. Use a relay, go to jail.
I've made a couple of observations:
1) Most of the people I know who work in IT aren't geeks. In fact, a large number of them (maybe higher than average?) are also musicians (and the complement, a lot of the musicians I know work in IT), and so could be regarded as cooler than average, or something;
2) Even the ones who are geeks are usually married, if they're of the age for that. Interestingly, I would say that in most cases (including mine) their wives rank higher on the physical attractiveness scale than they do. I don't know what conclusions, if any, can be drawn from that, but there it is.
The reason I believe that being a car guy = !attractive to many women (in particular, it seems as though college-educated women don't want to go out with a mechanic, even if he also has a degree) does not come from the idea that it's "uncool" to be one, or more "cool" to be in IT, but from the social prestige factor, which could also be stated as "A mechanic?! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeuuuuuuuwww!" If their friends ask, "So, what does he do?" they want to be able to name some white-collar job for purely prestige reasons, to avoid the "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuuuwww!" response.
Therefore, being able to say "He's a software engineer/sysadmin/network engineer/whatever" is a lot better than "He's a mechanic." It doesn't help much if they can say "He's a mechanic but he has a college degree." It doesn't even help if they can say "He's a mechanic, but he has a Magna Cum Laude degree and is smarter than you and your husband put together." The first three words ruin it for most of their peers.
It's all an image thing. A lot of people think that being a mechanic (or other blue-collar worker) means you're low class, poorly educated, whatever. They don't realize that being a good mechanic, plumber, electrician, etc., takes a lot of skill and intelligence. People who are good at troubleshooting complex mechanical systems such as automobiles are also likely to be pretty good at troubleshooting complex software systems.
I think the mechanic analogy is probably the best. There is little difference between your average mechanic and your average computer/software/techie engineer type - other than one is physical and the other is not.
Someone please mod him up insightful.
My brother, who holds a Magna Cum Laude degree in economics, was also a mechanic. Not just a mechanic, but an ASE-certified Mastertech. Combined with a natural talent for automobiles, that made him one kick-ass mechanic. However, did that get him social respect or dates? BAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA! It did get him plenty of people offering him a six-pack of (cheap domestic) beer if we would do some repair on their cars, though. Needless to say, their cars went unfixed, at least by him.
After he stopped being a mechanic and went into IT (where he continued to be employed throughout the dot-com bust and its aftermath, as have I) he did get more respect b/c he was in a white-collar job. He got married, too. Come to think of it, I never used to meet anybody when I was a car hobbyist and could usually be found with a wrench in my hand in my spare time. Now that I work in IT and pay somebody else to do that stuff, I'm married too. I guess being a car guy isn't attracitve to many women. The only difference between now and then is that I spend my spare time working on computers instead of cars.
As for having a respected career where you are considered a valuable professional, being a doctor or lawyer has always been safest bet. Even those fields, however, aren't what they used to be. If you talked to doctors who work for HMOs, a lot of them would probably have the same gripes that IT professionals have today.
Props to AOL for validating what we (ISP) were already doing three years ago.
The policy went like this:
- Most of the mail we receive from SMTP hosts in residential DSL pools was spam. Therefore, we are banning connections originating in any such pool from which we have been spammed;
- This is based on reverse lookup; if you want to send us mail directly, get your provider to give you correct reverse lookup for your FQDN;
- If your provider cannot or will not do that, use their outbound SMTP service as your smarthost. That's what it's there for;
- Our spam filtering is aggressive by customer demand, and it is totally optional. Customers who don't want it can disable it. The fact that your intended recipients have enabled it means they want this level of filtering.
- Finally, don't feel singled out. We apply the same rules to cable pools and dialup pools from which we have been spammed, plus netblocks (some quite large and located in Korea or China), plus we have language-specific filters to reject mail written in Korean or Chinese. Oh, and a few thousand specific domains, as well.
However, I do have to dopeslap AOL for having their postmaster address reject mail. The postmaster address must accept any mail from anywhere.
Oops, so much for the AC :-p
I have to post this as an AC. Some of you will recognize who I am.
You raise some good points here, which I have also encountered in my work.
I am employed with a small IT consulting firm in Viet Nam. In our office, my workstation is a Debian box, as is our server, which to the outside world is our MX and runs our website. On the inside, it runs internal DNS, POP3, Samba, phpgroupware, and a few other things. The other workstations in our office all run Win2K or WinXP, and they do so for two reasons: the developers are normally developing for Windows b/c that's what our customers want, and everyone need to be able to read and write all MS Office documents, including things from Visio. If there was a product that ran on Linux that could truly adequately cover the MS Office compatiblity front, I could migrate most of our office from Windows to Linux right now. That "most" would be the ordinary users like the secretary, the president, accounting, etc. Linux with KDE or GNOME is ready for that right now in a corporate environment, esp. with a professional sysadmin available. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not used KDE or GNOME lately.
Developers working on Windows-based stuff would, obviously, need to keep their Windows machines even if we migrated most people to Linux.
At a customer site, I installed Red Hat on a machine there, primarily to do network intrusion detection. The words of the president of that company, who has a favorable view of Free and Open Source software, are that he would love to be able to migrate the whole office to Linux, but he has two problems which are difficult to address: the MS Office problem, and the fact that they are already using Exchange and Outlook. They don't exactly like Exchange and Outlook, viewing it as both not secure enough and not reliable enough, but they need its functionality.
Now, we could probably successfully replace their Exchange Server with Lotus Domino on Linux, and provide the file services over Samba without difficulty, thus ridding them of their Exchange box. There is, however, one last problem there: they already have Exchange. It's paid for. Thus, they'd have to shell out for the cost of the Domino server and about 30 Windows clients to make the transition, plus new hardware on which to run it. Particularly when the business climate is not great, it's hard for a company to justify the expenditure. Even if what they have now doesn't work as well as they'd like, it works well enough for them to keep using it when the better alternative would be expensive. Of course, that doesn't solve the MS Office problem that would be faced if we tried to migrate their workstations. I've tried the alternatives, and their just isn't anything that's good enough right now. I think one year will make a tremendous difference, but right now I cannot recommend anything to a customer who needs to be able to read *all* MS Office documents without trouble. If there was a solution, even a proprietary one, I think they would buy it. But there isn't.
That's the situation at a foreign company where, to the best of my knowledge, everything is licensed.
However, the situation here is that the great majority (my educated guess is over 90%) of the Windows software used here is pirated. That's in business. For individuals, I'd put that figure at over 99%.
So let's look at the case of the majority of the businesses, esp. small and medium ones. They are running pirate versions of W2K or XP, Office, Exchange, whatever else they need, that they bought for about one US dollar per CD-ROM at a pirate shop.
Imagine we come along wanting to sell them a Linux-based system. All we have to offer is reliability, no cost savings. And we still have the MS Office problem, but assume it's one year later and for no more than US $100 per seat we can offer them a 100% MS-Office compatible office suite that runs on Linux and we won't pirate it for them. So, they have to spend thousands of dollars for software and some transitio
In other words, you are responsble for the basic security of your computer. If you have an id10t problem and open up every attachment asking for your advice and get absolutely every virus that comes along - a pretty good definition of negligent, in this context - they can hold your feet to the fire for it.
Anyone who has ever worked for an ISP would feel joy at having such a clause, b/c it would allow you dump a certain group of problem customers, should you choose to do so. Finally, being grossly stupid is a crime, or least a TOS violation. Woohoo! :-)
Old Deskjets are, of course, pretty bulletproof. Over 10 years ago I bought a 540C. It only does 300 DPI and is nowhere near photo-quality, of course, but my father still uses that printer today.
:-)
:-)
In our office, we have a 960C that prints 1000 pages a month or so, and it's doing fine. Wether it will still be fine in two years remains to be seen
Now, I wish HP DAT drives held up this well. At the ISP where I worked for four years, we had to replace our HP DDS-3 drive once a year (internal or external didn't make any difference). We finally settled the issue by getting a couple of used Sun DLT changers at a bargain price. End of difficulties, and a whole lot faster
I lived in Japan for 8 years before moving to Vietnam. Epistiotomy is quite common here, too; we avoided it only because a C-section became medically necessary a few days before our due date.
:-)
Our baby was so large that in retrospect my wife was kind of glad of the c-section
>Never, EVER use baby talk?!?!
While you are well-qualified in IT (I took the time to visit your site before responding), linguistics is another matter.
My academic background is in linguistics, and it always when people who know absolutely nothing about (human) languages or the acquisition thereof nevertheless hold forth on the topic like they are some kind of experts. Telling people that baby talk is bad is dead wrong.
It is quite well established in the literature that baby talk is not only natural and healthy for children, it's a normal and important part of their language acquisition process and *should not* be avoided. It has also recently been found that the higher-pitched cooing and such from the mother and other female caregivers is more easily grokked by babies than the baby talk from the father and other male caregivers, which may confuse them. After reading that, I observed my own child and compared her response to my baby talk and my (single point of) empirical evidence supports that conclusion.
The exaggeration of sounds in baby talk is very important to help infants get a grasp on the sounds of language. Our baby gets lots of baby talk in both my wife's native language and mine, and she's already producing a number of sounds from both at four months old. Her cousin, who is 3 months older but seems to get much less baby talk, is far less "talkative." Our baby will look at us and other familiy members and "talk" on a regular basis.
Read to your child, but when s/he is old enough to grok that. When s/he's not, talk to your child. It will help with language acquisition. Sitting there and reading from a book will not. It's probably a little better than just turning on the TV, but just as context-free.
> shit, where are the 6-figure positions???
:-)
Yeah, but s/he didn't say how many of those six figures were to the left of the decimal point
So let me get this straight. You only care if people are being killed if they are Muslims? That if they were Jews, Christians, Buddhists, agnostics, Cao Dai, atheists, whatever, you wouldn't care? Or would care less than you do about Muslims?
Now, let me ask you an honest question. This is not a troll, nor intended to be flamebait. I often see expressed in the media Muslim opinions that essentially seem to be saying "The only thing that matters here is that the people in Iraq are (mostly) Muslims. Who is right and who is wrong doesn't matter, only who is Muslim." Do many Muslims actually believe that, or is it that only only those who believe that make headlines?
Another question: if two primarily Muslim countries have a war, how do you know which one to cheer for? The one that is the same sect of Muslim as you (Shia, Sunni, etc.), or what? Or does right and wrong come into the picture only at that point, but not if one of the combatants is a not a primarily Muslim nation?
Final question: There are a number of American Muslims, too. I'd be surprised if some of them are not in the war right now, fighting against Iraq. Uh-oh, now we have Muslims fighting Muslims, how do you cheer for?
Let me restate that none of the above is a troll or meant to be flamebait, I honestly want to hear your thoughts on these points so that I can better understand the Muslim point of view on this war. I hope you will respond in the same spirit, since the world needs a lot more understanding and a lot less flamebait, IMO.
Finally, let me make one point of my own: that no matter what some people may think, this war is *not* about religion. In fact, the United States has never been in a war about religion. This war is about politics, it's about (IMO) a personal grudge, it's about oil and money and weapons. To some extent, it's even really about Saddam Hussein's conduct. However, it is most certainly not about religion.
I forgot to mention that back in 1998 when I was running TurboLinux (can't recall if it was 3.x or 4.x) and was looking over my httpd logs, I found them filled with accesses from various ISPs in Japan (where I was living at the time) to various Pr0n sites, mostly overseas. A little digging revealed the astonishing fact that TL was installing Apache configured as an open proxy by default!
I shut that up right away and reported it to their (then) head developer in Japan, who was a former colleague. The tie-in is that besides Japan, the other places where TurboLinux was big were Korea, and to some extent, China. There are so many open proxy Linux boxes in Korean educational institutions that I have an (untested) theory that back in those days, TurboLinux was installed on lots of boxes b/c of its double-byte capabilities, which were out-of-the-box better than any other distro at the time (Red Hat later caught up, partly b/c they hired some key staff away from TurboLinux in Japan) and thus a ton of open proxies were ushered into Korea.
And you are nobody to tell me how to run the systems I administer. As far as bounces of legit mail go, our customers were quite understanding about that, because our spam filtering was completely opt-in: if you don't want it, don't turn it on (it defaulted to off).
Our churn rate was low, we were profitable in a market where most ISPs aren't, and many of our customers had been with us since the company was started, so we were obviously doing something right.
And in fact, our suggestion to business DSL customers of said telco is that *they* get another ISP, one that will give them correct reverse DNS. A number of them took that advice, some smarthosted. All understood our problem and why we were doing it.
A quick nmap of those two IPs leaves me fairly convinced that they are being used for spam relay without the permission of their owners. Mailbombing them would not be terribly productive, and would almost certainly get you in trouble with your upstream if anyone complained, and wouldn't really help the situation. I don't consider inadvertant open proxy operators to be totally innocent victims, but attacking their machines won't help anything.
Putting spammers in jail and fining them the value of what they made off spam + a punitive fine would help, but in most places, spamming isn't even a violation of civil law yet, let alone criminal law. We're a long way from giving spammers what they deserve.
I spent five years working for ISPs, and during that time the only case of blocking I can think of that you could even possibly argue is unfair is the case of a certain major telco in the western United States which was (and AFAIK still is):
This led to the situation of us blocking their entire DSL pool based on reverse DNS.
You could make the argument that it was unfair to said telco's business DSL customers to have their legitimate mail blocked, but I would then ask you, "Who was it that was being unfair to them? My employer, when we had no way to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate mail in that DSL pool from which most mail was illegitimate, or said telco, which was not providing proper service to its business DSL customers, who were paying a large premium over what residential DSL customers were paying and apparently getting little in exchange for their money?" My answer, of course, would be "Not my (then) employer."
Please note that we did not consider blocking of residential DSL customers to be unfair in any way, ditto for ordinary dial pool customers. It is normal for ISPs (and the telco in question did so) to provide outbound SMTP hosts for use by their customers. All those affected, including the business DSL customers, could make use of them either directly or as a smarthost. It is not unfair to tell a residential customer "Use your provider's outbound SMTP hosts. That's what they are their for." I'm not convinced that it's unfair to say that to a business DSL customer either, although I understand how they would like to be able to send mail directly instead of smarthosting through their provider. However, if the telco's position is essentially that a DSL line, because it doesn't cost like a leased line, does not include the normal services that come with a leased line (such as reverse DNS service), that is an issue to be settled between the telco and the customer.
I also question whether or not it is "unfair" to anyone to refuse their mail, on the grounds that delivering mail to any domain is a privilege, not a right. It is, of course, customary to extend that privilege to anyone who has not violated it or is not a member of a group of IP addresses where violation of that privilege is the norm (as in the case above), but no domain can be ordered to accept mail from any other domain. Refusing mail may have consequences for the refuser, of course, but that is their choice to make.
2.2 is still quite viable for use on production servers. At my former employer, the mail system (4 MXes, 2 outbound SMTP boxes, 2 POP proxies, and 2 backend mail spools) still runs 2.2 because it has been utterly stable (2.4 is pretty stable now too, but for a long time 2.4 was held to be too volatile for production use by many people, and more than a few still think so).
The default kernel remains 2.2 in Debian Stable, as well. On my personal machine I run 2.4, but if I were installing to a server that had no need for USB, etc., I would think about using 2.2 even now.