I am an American who lived in Japan for eight years before moving to my current country of residence. In Japan, the police can hold you for up to three *weeks* without access to counsel, and AFAICT there is no Miranda law there, either. Now you know why (in addition to fairly good police work) the Japanese legal system has a near-100% conviction rate.
We expect to return to the U.S. in a couple of years. There are things good and bad everywhere, and there is much that I will miss about Asia, but I will say that I prefer the U.S. legal system to any other under which I have lived.
Who knows what the ancients hid there. A plague, an unknown dangerous entity, horrendously dangerous alien tools or what?
I think you've seen The Keep late at night a few too many times.
You sure showed me. I bet people all around the world are talking about how you put me in my place. I better give up now, I could sure never win any argument with you. I'm so scared.
Um, no. NY Times doesn't invade anyone's privacy either. They don't force you to use their site (you're perfectly free to not use it, and I am one of those who choose not to), and they do not secretly take information from you. At least one of those conditions must be met for it to be invasion of privacy.
Spyware, for example, is (or at least can be, if the spyware doesn't tell you what it is doing) invasion of privacy. I hope you understand the difference between that and a site that requires registration for access. Somehow, though, I suspect that perhaps you don't.
Your assertion that the parent AC's argument is that one sacrifices privacy is, therefore, completely wrong. The parent stated most clearly that it was an invasion of privacy, but it is nothing of the kind. If you give up information voluntarily, that is a sacrifice of privacy (your words) but it is in no way an invasion of privacy (AC's words).
It's all perfectly clear to me. Maybe it is to you now, too. But who cares? I can't really give the time of day to anyone who has to call me an asshole because he can't beat me in an argument, and doesn't even have the guts to do it out in the open, choosing to hide behind AC instead.
One of the nice things about not living in North America is I don't know what Donald Rumsfeld sounds like. He doens't get much coverage far from home. Apparently, though, he and I must have one thing in common: we're both better at argument than you are (and I don't mean "being argumentative" - you're clearly better at that).
Your privacy has been invaded? Would you mind explaining how? Did someone crack your server and put a link to the NYT there? Did they spam you with a link to the NYT? Call you up on the phone while you were having dinner or engaging in some other important activity and tell you about it?
No?
What's You visited/. and saw the link there?
Did someone hold a knife or gun on you and force you to visit/.?
No?
What? You came there of your own free will and saw the link? OK, I think I'm starting to a get a handle on the situtation? You must own/., and they invaded your privacy by putting the link there.
No? You're just a visitor?
Oh.
Pardon me, but I think I'm having a hard time believing your privacy has been invaded.
The best answer to that one is to not use wu-ftpd. It has a really long and sordid security history, and just when you're starting to think there couldn't possibly be any root exploits left in something that's been around so long and been looked at (and cracked!) so much, along comes another one.
At my company we run Linux or *BSD on all of our servers and a number of our workstations, and wu-ftpd is not allowed on our network, by sysadmin fiat (we're badly paid, or we could drive something better than Fiats).
I can think of several applications that would probably sell well on Linux... lots of edutainment type programs (Oregon Trail, etc), a Print-Shop type program that would easily create greeting cards and banners
I don't know about the edutainment stuff (but then, I don't have any kids old enough to use a computer yet), but a good program for making cards and (better still) printing photos as well as the photo printing wizard in XP does it is a program I would pay for right now if it were available for Linux. I've been a Linux user for 5 years (exclusively Linux for most of that time) and in those years, no one has come out with a decent free program to do those things. In fact, I'm not aware of any program - free or not - for Linux that does those things. Somebody correct me (and gimme a URL!) if I'm wrong.
I strongly favor Free and Open Source software and really believe it is a better way. I would favor a Free product over an equivalent proprietary product for this reason, even if it wasn't quite as polished as the proprietary one. This is not about money, though, it's about software freedom. If GPL software were distributed in source only form and you had to pay to get a binary and if I could not compile the source for myself, I would pay for the binary.
I'm sure I'm by no means the only Linux user who believes that. A lot of boxed sets are bought by people who could download and burn their own ISOs, but want to support their distributor, I'm sure. I personally know several people who have done that. I have bought several boxed sets myself.
You can make money selling Linux software, but as Micah points out, it has to be something that people need. It also helps a lot of it doesn't have a Free competitor out there. If there is a Free competitor, you have to be a lot better if you want to compete.
Give this guy some money, please, so we can either be amazed or have a jolly good laugh at his expense.
I've already had a jolly good laugh at his expense. I don't knot if he actually wrote the text of the web site, but if he did, I expect he will be taken away in a straitjacket anytime now.
The hackneyed writing, the non-stop overuse of repetition to repeat himself, I reiterate, the nonstop overuse of repetition to repeat himself, the hyperole of it all!!!!!!!, the abisthmul spealing, the poor: punctuation, the of out order logical insertion of sentences all serve to indicate that the person who wrote the text for the web site is not only no scholar, s/he has no concept whatsoever of either scholarship or the written English language. If this is the best Kunkel can do for disciples, I cannot imagine anyone taking him seriously.
If the foregoing alone is not enough, at every point where a new "fact" is brought up that the reader might question, we are simply told that it is explained in the book. Of course, we are also given a link to buy the book. There is a commercial for the book on nearly every page, and several have two. Clearly, the purpose of this site is not to further scholarship or to edumacate anyone, but just to sell the book.
Based on what I have read at their web site - which I'm sure was also constructed with the assistance of locks, big check valves, and a pyramid-shaped pump - I find the theory totally implausible. No serious scholar, whether professional or amateur, would tolerate such a badly written site. By the Pharoah's Pump Foundation's own description of its work, this sounds like the biggest crackpot theory since Chariots of the Gods.
Actually, nothing could be farther from the truth. Allow me to explain.
I've owned my Epson printer for somewhat over a year now. During that time, Epson has probably already made as much profit from the ink cartridges and glossy photo paper I've purchased as they did from the printer itself. This means that before this printer has been obsoleted to the point where I will replace it (a long way off, and assuming it doesn't die), Epson will have made far more money by selling me supplies than they did by selling me the printer.
Bottom line: while it is of course great for Epson if people buy new printers often, it is also very much in their interest to have a large installed base of older-but-still-useful, well-supported printers our there. It not only gives them recurring revenue from supplies (unlike a printer sale, which is one-time revenue) but also gives them a good reputation that leads to more sales of printers, which leads to direct profits and still more recurring revenue from supplies. This happens because when people see Epson printers everywhere, and even old ones are still in use, it makes Epson the printer of choice because the buyer will get the best value for her investment.
Having old printers out there and in use will not hurt Epson unless the printers are so old that Epson has stopped selling supplies for them, abandoning the market to third-party suppliers. By the time a printer is that old, they don't have to care, because the market for supplies will be very small.
Successful business is all about recurring income. Another example:
I work for an ISP that also resells hardware, and while it's a help to our bottom line when we sell a piece of hardware, it's not what really keeps us going. If a leased-line customer buys a Cisco from us we make money on that, but not as much as we make on the recurring income from the leased line. This is the same reason Microsoft wants to move to an annual license model - it would be a steady source of recurring income, whether people bought new software or not.
Do we equal the community at large? We equal a good representative cross-section, and since my opinion is typical in my circles and since I also very commonly find people who share that opinion everywhere I go, the answer is that while I do not speak for them all, I speak for a great many. Quite possibly a majority.
WRT dismissing an argument b/c name-calling was used, I'm not dismissing it (only) because-calling was used, although since that was basically the whole content of the argument - "You're an elitist jerk!" - a case could be made for dismissal on those grounds. Mainly, however, I dismissed it because it was unsupported.
How can I say that Linux will remain a community? Because I believe it will. Despite the existence of distros like RH and MDK, Linux remains a community-driven thing, and there is no sign that this is going to stop. The community is a bit frayed at the edges, but the core is solid. If it did stop, that would spell the end of RH, MDK, and all the rest of the commercial distributors. If the greater community stopped producing and maintaining the Free Software that the distributors package up, they couldn't take on that role themselves. They do not have, and could not afford, the staff to do all of that. They'd go broke. Quickly.
Do users of MDK and RH have a right to expect upgrades without giving anything back? From their vendor, yes. At least if they actually bought the vendor's boxed set, made a donation, or bought a support contract. If they didn't, a case could be made that they don't have a right to expect anything from the vendor, either. They do not, however, have any claim on anyone whose software or documentation can be found in that distro.
As for whole corporations relying on Linux without giving anything back, there may be some. However, it is likely that they aren't taking anything, either. They have admins on staff who maintain their Linux systems for them. Gee, in fact, one of those companies pays me to do exactly that. I'm not a famous person, though, so we wont call that giving anything back. It supports me and my family, and allows me to time to do some things for free in the community. Under my direct influence, my company also paid the author of a GPLed product to write some extensions to it and release them under the GPL as part of the standard version. That was solely for our benefit, but many others have gained from that, and of course, the author did, too. Big companies like Sun and IBM and SGI have given back, too.
You were doing OK in this post, though, until you wrote:
"You don't DO Open Source and or Free Software in the expectation of anything in return. Thats why its "Free"."
Short response: Why not?
Longer response: The concept of giving back is what the entire community has been based on. If you've been around for a while, I'm sure you are quite aware of this. If you haven't, talk to some people who have. Don't take my word for it, b/c obviously you don't buy it coming from me. Ask somebody else.
The whole community has grown up on the strength of what happens when people benefit and then give back. To go back to your statement that you don['t see how I can say it will "remain" a community, in one scenario, you would be right to question that: if most people using Linux stop giving back, the community will collapse. Whether the distributors alone could sustain it in the face of that or not remains to be seen. I hope we won't have to find out.
I'm not allowed to be elitist? Ahem. Yes I am. Whether I can be elitist or not is (thank you very much for the perfect turn of phrase) simply not your call to make. It's true I don't own the software, but I don't have to help whiners, trolls, and lazy people learn it, either. Nor do I have to refrain from discouraging people who I think shouldn't be using it, for whatever reasons I think they shouldn't be using it. And let's be honest: if we both take off our sparring gloves for a minute, wouldn't you agree that there are people who (depending on how you view the problem) just shouldn't be using Linux because either they are not ready for Linux or Linux is not ready for them? There really are people who are better off with a Mac or even a Windows machine than they would be on Linux. And (sparring gloves back on) for some of those people, Linux is better off that way, too.
Oh, by the way, I do personally own anything that I create, even if it is under the GPL. Anything that's GPLed has a copyright holder. I can't prevent someone from using it, but I don't have to do anything for them, either. That's the free beer side of Free: you don't have to pay for it, and you're free to modify it as you see fit as long as you either release those modifications under the GPL or don't release them at all, but you have no *right* to support of any kind. Support for something that is free is at the sufferance of the author.
Details of what got people kicked out? Let's see:
- Repeated violations of written list policy, even after being warned;
- Not asking for help, but *demanding* it. And I don't mean even demanding it from a maintainer, but just demanding it from ordinary (if far more advanced) users like themselves. Saying, in effect, as I described before, "I'm trying out this Linux thing, therefore, you *owe* me help." A number of really great people left the LUG because they were fed up with that. Those events led to the Great Reformation. Things are much better now. They just didn't grok the concept that no one here owes you anything, but if you're civil and show initiative, many will really go the extra mile for you. I've stayed up most of the night helping people out many times. Not anyone who demanded that I do so, however. If you want to demand something from me, you have to be paying me, and even that has its limits;
- Posting questions where it was obvious that they had made no attempt at all to answer it themselves, not even a quick man page read or a Google search, then going ballistic on people (not me, if you're wondering) who politely but firmly told them to go and Read The Fine Manual, then come back and post if you still have any questions;
- Unloading on the list admins for doing their jobs;
That last may sound to you like we're some kind of awful elitists or something, but the real point of it is that we expect people to learn, and believe firmly that a major part of learning *nix is self-training. Not everyone will agree with this approach, but it's our approach and it has been successful for a great many people. Those who don't agree are quite welcome to find a forum that is more suited to their own philosophy and/or learning style. We, however, will not provide that forum.
As much as I've enjoyed this exchange, I'm going to refrain from posting further, partly because we've strayed way off the original Zaurus topic, and partly because I do have a project that I'm working on with a couple of other people and don't want to take more time away from it to do this.
Yes, I'm an elitist, and proud of it. You, however, do not understand elitism, because you're mistaking it with exclusivism. Exclusivists want to keep people out. I, as an elitist, am happy to let people in so long as they, too, are willing to work to become elite. What I, and all the other elitists I know are saying is that if you want to be lazy, dumb, and stupid, that's fine. It's your right. It is not, however, your right to do it here. If you want to come in here, you have to be willing to work to educate yourself and then give back to others. The only people I want to exclude are people who are, and who voluntarily choose to remain, ignorant. Being open doesn't mean having no standards. You sound like you didn't even read my post. But then, this is/. so I'm not surprised.
The problem with the people I described in my prior post is that they don't want become elite. They don't even want to become competent. They don't want to give back. They don't want to become part of the culture. They expect the culture to change for them. They just want it to be done for them, and they want it to be done NOW. They don't even have the good grace to be polite to the people from whom they are demanding free help when they haven't even yet lifted a finger to find their own answers. That is not acceptable. It will never be acceptable.
I, and many other long-time Linux users I know, just plain do not want these people using Linux. They ruin it for the rest of us. A number of them were expelled from our LUG because their attitudes nearly destroyed it and permanently drove away some of our most valued members - people whose names are probably well-known to some of you, and who are sorely missed.
Linux is, and shall remain a community. People who do not want to be part of the community, and give back as they are given to, do not belong here. They aren't wanted, and they certainly aren't needed.
You say I'm a jerk, yet you're the one who jumped straight to name-calling rather than put forth any sort of counterargument to my statements. Perhaps because you really can't. I advise you to stop and ask yourself who it is that really comes off looking like a jerk here?
If you can't present reasonable and well-constructed counterarguments to my position, then you should really just stay under your bridge.
There's nothing wrong with bashing Microsoft. People hate Microsoft because Microsoft has worked hard to make them hate it. Remember how popular Microsoft once was? Remember when Bill Gates' "The Road Ahead" was a huge seller? People commonly viewed neither Gates nor his company as being capable of doing wrong in those days. I should know. I was one of them. Things change. People wise up. Now, since Microsoft has worked so hard to earn all of this ill will, we would not want to cheat them out of their so richly deserved reward and disappoint them, would we?
However, I do not view making Linux more "user friendly" as a good thing. What you and many other people really mean by that is "Let's make a Linux for people who don't know anything about computers and don't want to." Maybe you don't realize you mean that, but it's true. The trouble is that apart from the sheer difficulty of doing so, this would not be a Good Thing. Why not? Because doing that to Linux or any other *nix is going to take away so much of what makes it *nix. Stop and think. Linux and the rest of the *nix family is a server operating system, first and foremost. And it has not one but two decent GUIs that are already quite good enough (but still getting better nevertheless) that not only sysadmins like me but many other power users and near power users can use it as their full-time desktop OS. Beyond that, Linux, particularly when running KDE, is good enough for the corporate desktop Right Now. [1] [2]
But Linux for Aunt Mable? Uh-uh. I don't believe you can do that without breaking most of what Linux is today for most of the people who use it. For years, I was an advocate of user-friendly Linux. My mind was gradually changed by the kind of people I saw coming to Linux. Not people who wanted to learn, to give back, to teach those who came after them the way those who went before me taught me. Not people who wanted to improve the product for the sake of improving it. There were some of those, of course, but they were a minority.
What did we get? Whiners. Losers. Trolls. People who came into Linux and said "You owe me something." The whole attitude was/is one of demanding that since they've tried this "Linux thing" that the community - the LUG they found, the author of the package that bugs them this week, somebody, anybody - owes them help, bug fixes, feature requests, whatever. The idea and ideal that this is a self-help community founded on the ideal and idealism of Linux and Free Software is totally lost on them. I really believed in Linux for the masses. Now I've come to my senses. There are many places where Linux or a *BSD is the best tool available, and this includes corporate workstations. But there are places where it just doesn't belong, too. Aunt Mable's desk is one of them.
For people who want to get away from MS but want a vendor they can demand things from (or try to), who want all the user friendliness, etc., I strongly and highly recommend a Mac running OS X. Apple has done a truly marvelous job, and OS X is onlyk going to get better with time. For the typical end-user market, Apple is where it's at now. OS X has a terrific UI, is easy to use (something Apple has always shot for and largely achieved better than MS), and has the power of *nix underneath the hood.
Yes, I know OS X is proprietary, and I'm all for Free Software. But I also know that there are people who just aren't right for Free Software, and it isn't right for them either. The people I described above. There is no such thing as a free lunch, yet that's what they try to get out of Free Software. They are far better off buying a good but proprietary product from a good and innovative company like Apple.
And do you know what? The Free Software community is better off, too. We don't have to deal with it. Free and Open Source software can be present on an OS X system, but Apple is in between them and us. I like it that way. I've never owned a Mac before, but my next computer purchase will be an iBook. Maybe it'll dual-boot Linux and OS X, or maybe not. It might be OS X only. That's how good it is.
There is a lot of business-friendliness in Linux, and a lot of that in OS X, too. I truly believe that most businesses would be better off with a Linux, Apple, or mixed Linux/Apple network than with a Windows network. We should do a lot of this. However, beware of letting too much user friendliness into Linux. You'll be sorry.
You'll have to excuse me while I go off and write some anti-Micro$oft tracts about much Windoze blows chunks and draw Borg attachments on Dr. Evi^H^H^H uh, I mean, Bill Gates. Or is that Winblows? Or just 'doze? Whatever.
Now run along and buy your Aunt Mable a Mac. And maybe a Linux-based PDA to go with it. The embedded market is a place where Linux can really shine. This is, although user-friendly, not a Bad Thing because - as in the Apple case - you have a vendor standing between the community and the people who are using the software but don't want to be in the community. They are the vendor's problem.
[1] By "corporate desktop" I mean an environment where there is a professional administrator (or at least someone who plays one on TV) overseeing the IT operations. Windows networks should have one of these too, of course, and the reason many don't is a combination of tight budgets (or just plain cheapness) combined with technicall non-savvy managers buying into the Microsoft sizzle that tried to make people think you don't really need admins. Lack of admins is a big reason for Code Red, Klez, et al, spreading the way they did.
[2] No, I'm not out to pump up KDE at the expensve of Gnome. In fact, I personally prefer and use Gnome. However, KDE is better for the corporate desktop environment at this point. It's better for new users at this point.
I'm a network engineer with the Japanese ISP division of a large international networking company whose name you would immediately recognize but which I cannot use here.
You have really asked two questions:
1) Is the bandwidth oversold
2) Do I have a true T-1?
Neither of these has anything to do with the other. I will address the first question, well, first.
All ISPs oversell their bandwidth. This is a perfectly acceptable and accepted practice, and hurts no one unless they are peaking their upstreams (an ISP I worked at before was doing that every day and it was ugly). Overselling bandwidth is how they make money. It's how the biggies make money, too.
If the little guy is saying he doesn't, he's either lying or he's runnin deep in the red. If the biggies say they aren't, they are definitely lying. If the biggy sales people say the little ISP does but they don't, they should be shot. No, hanged. No, both.
Generally, you'll get better service from smaller ISPs, where you're not just a number.
As to whether or not you have a true T-1, that falls into two parts: Did the telco provision it as one? If so, you do. If you don't trust them, this can be tested. Second, is it a T-1 but do you think the upstream is throttling you? That can be tested, too. Others have written plenty about how.
My recommendation: do what you should have done before you started this process, and hire a qualified consultant to spend a day with you checking it out and explaining some things.
I've been in the IT industry for over twenty years, first in IBM mainframes, now in *nix administration. My father is a retired systems programmer. In other words, I've seen IT not only for myself for a long-time, but cross-generationally. And I can tell you that the new management attitude toward IT isn't new - it's back to the *old* attitude that they always had.
I started out in bank IT (we called it DP back then - Data Processing) and also worked in hospital and defense and equipment leasing IT operations. One thing they all had in common - but of which banks were by far the worst - is they viewed the computer room as a black hole that sucked up their money and gave them nothing in return.
One can easily suppose they viewed the IT staff in the same way.
One thing few of them seemed to realize is that the actual fact of the matter was that far from sucking up their money and giving nothing back, the IT operations made their entire business possible. Even then. In the 1970s and 1980s.
The bank I worked for, as an example, had three data centers. A main one, an auxiliary one, and a smaller auxiliary one. Plus a cold site contract with a disaster recovery service. These data centers were geographically remote enough from each other that any natural disaster short of an asteroid impact could not destroy more than one of them. Why? Because if their IT operation was destroyed, the bank would have ceased to exist. The bank's money wasn't really in the vault. It was in our 3350s and 3380s and our 3081s. Someone, obviously knew that, and set up the data processing divisions accordingly. But the day-to-day attitude was that IT - the division without which the branches could not operate and the ATMs would all just sit there - was a drain on the company that produced no profits. Never mind that we enabled the frontline people in the branches to do their jobs and they would fail utterly without us.
So in the lament of IT being undervalued today, I see nothing but a return to the way it always was.
I'm a sysadmin at an ISP, and a few things I can tell you about spam are:
* Most spam is not sent by some loser with a modem. It's sent by some loser with DSL, cable, or big pipes from a large ISP or colo shop. DIY spammers are small fry that no one even needs to care about.
* Most of it never gets delivered. Our spam filters see to it that over 80% of the spam that reaches our MXes dies there, either through direct refusal because of RBL use and our own private lists, or later via other spam filters. So how effective is spam gonna be when nobody ever sees the stuff? I hope some spammers are reading this. Better still, I hope some customers of spammers are reading this (but I doubt it, in either case).
* The entire Republic of Korea is an open proxy:-p But our block list of Korean proxies and relays is longer even than my dick became via the "most advanced and technologically profound penis enlargement program on the Internet."
Anybody else out there working at an ISP? Are you getting similar reject levels on spam rejection? If not, and you're using Exim, let's compare notes. Or if you are, and you're using Exim, let's compare notes.
I'm a sysadmin at an ISP, and we have been filtering Klez inbound and outbound for 13 days, and the load basically hasn't tapered off at all. Since we started the Klez filter (thank you, Exim!) the number of bounces in our postmaster box doubled and show no real signs of slowing up.
That is a lot of bounces because we also filter on SirCam (still see some of those everyday), use several RBLs, and have extensive local spam filters and reject lists, as well as optional spam filters for Korean-encoded and Chinese-encoded mail (just rolled them out and over 800 customers have started using them already).
The cost of this is a lot of wasted bandwidth consumed by spam, worms, and viruses, in hardware (we run 4 MXes where two would otherwise suffice, because of the filtering load), and the countless hours we spend each week on defending our mail system and our customers from all this crap.
Besides the usual suspects (MS for their security holes, users for their laxness on applying updates, and the virus writers themselves), I also have to blame a lot of adminstrators for this. Mail admins, listen up! You KNOW Klez is out there and you KNOW it's going through your systems. You probably have a ton of captive specimens of it. Start filtering it inbound and outbound. You're not only helping other admins to control this problem, you're helping yourself.
And let's all be thankful that virus writers and spamware writers come from two camps that aren't likely to like each other, because if they got together and wrote a worm that silently propagated itself and turned Windows boxes into selectively open relays for use by the spammer/authors, that would be a real problem. The scary part is that it wouldn't be all that hard. The worms already have their own SMTP engines these days. The leap is small. Let's hope they don't make it, but let's think about how we're going to control it when they do.
Line of defense number 1: ISPs - if you don't already block port 25 in/out from your dial pools (requiring your dial users to smarthost through your outbound SMTP or send through it directly), start NOW. The ass you save will be your own. If we all do this (my employer has done this for years) we will cut off spam.
Of the hundreds of people who replied to this, a few of them seem to work, as I do, in a large installation with thousands of hosts. It is no coincidence that those few advocate a hierarchical naming scheme. Nothing else can scale to the number of *admins and other people* involved. That's what you need to scale. Sure, you could name hosts after (as one person suggested) 4,000 famous people, but not even the people who assign the names will remember what host does what a week later.
Go with something purely functional, such as mx01.mail.domain.com for the first MX (for example) or ns01.dns.domain.com, etc. Or if you have multiple locations, you can incorporate a geographical reference: mx01.mail.snd.domain.com for the first MX physically located in San Diego.
You can obscure it to something more encoded if you want, but both the safety you get from doing so and the risk you get from making your naming conventions plain are vastly exaggerated. Attackers most typically go after whole netblocks and they scan by IP address, not FQDN.
On the other hand, if someone has it in for your organization specfically, they may try to expressly target important hosts in your network. A person doing this is going to be far more skilled than a script kiddie scanning netblocks. In this case, having clear host names may help the attacker a little bit, but not much, and having obscured ones may slow the attacker down a little bit, but not much. This attacker *will* find out what your important hosts are, easily, with or without the help of your naming convention.
Bottom line: choose names that are easy for your staff to deal with, then lock down the boxes so they are hard for attackers to deal with.
Our plainly labeled boxes get probed all the time, but not more than our idiosyncratically labeled admins' workstations do. The naming convention hasn't seemed to have made any difference, so go for clarity.
I'm a sysadmin at an ISP.
While it is not our *responsibility* to
do anything about any virus (security
is your responsibility, not your ISP's),
as a service to both our customers and
the rest of the Internet community, we
are filtering SirCam on both inbound and
outbound mail. Yes, outbound. If one of our customers sends a SirCam mail, our SMTP servers will bounce it.
This not only prevents the customer's computer from spreading the virus, it
informs the customer that his/her computer is infected.
Slashdot Mirror
I am an American who lived in Japan for eight years before moving to my current country of residence. In Japan, the police can hold you for up to three *weeks* without access to counsel, and AFAICT there is no Miranda law there, either. Now you know why (in addition to fairly good police work) the Japanese legal system has a near-100% conviction rate.
We expect to return to the U.S. in a couple of years. There are things good and bad everywhere, and there is much that I will miss about Asia, but I will say that I prefer the U.S. legal system to any other under which I have lived.
Disinterred? You mean somebody dug you up from your grave? Are you're show you're a law student and not a vampire?
Oh, wait...
Who knows what the ancients hid there. A plague, an unknown dangerous entity, horrendously dangerous alien tools or what? I think you've seen The Keep late at night a few too many times.
That Aztek was disgusting. I live outside of North America, so I'd never seen one before. Yech. I'd rather have a nice-looking car like an Edsel :-p
You sure showed me. I bet people all around the world are talking about how you put me in my place. I better give up now, I could sure never win any argument with you. I'm so scared.
Um, no. NY Times doesn't invade anyone's privacy either. They don't force you to use their site (you're perfectly free to not use it, and I am one of those who choose not to), and they do not secretly take information from you. At least one of those conditions must be met for it to be invasion of privacy.
Spyware, for example, is (or at least can be, if the spyware doesn't tell you what it is doing) invasion of privacy. I hope you understand the difference between that and a site that requires registration for access. Somehow, though, I suspect that perhaps you don't.
Your assertion that the parent AC's argument is that one sacrifices privacy is, therefore, completely wrong. The parent stated most clearly that it was an invasion of privacy, but it is nothing of the kind. If you give up information voluntarily, that is a sacrifice of privacy (your words) but it is in no way an invasion of privacy (AC's words).
It's all perfectly clear to me. Maybe it is to you now, too. But who cares? I can't really give the time of day to anyone who has to call me an asshole because he can't beat me in an argument, and doesn't even have the guts to do it out in the open, choosing to hide behind AC instead.
One of the nice things about not living in North America is I don't know what Donald Rumsfeld sounds like. He doens't get much coverage far from home. Apparently, though, he and I must have one thing in common: we're both better at argument than you are (and I don't mean "being argumentative" - you're clearly better at that).
Your privacy has been invaded? Would you mind explaining how? Did someone crack your server and put a link to the NYT there? Did they spam you with a link to the NYT? Call you up on the phone while you were having dinner or engaging in some other important activity and tell you about it?
/. and saw the link there?
/.?
/., and they invaded your privacy by putting the link there.
No?
What's You visited
Did someone hold a knife or gun on you and force you to visit
No?
What? You came there of your own free will and saw the link? OK, I think I'm starting to a get a handle on the situtation? You must own
No? You're just a visitor?
Oh.
Pardon me, but I think I'm having a hard time believing your privacy has been invaded.
The best answer to that one is to not use wu-ftpd. It has a really long and sordid security history, and just when you're starting to think there couldn't possibly be any root exploits left in something that's been around so long and been looked at (and cracked!) so much, along comes another one.
At my company we run Linux or *BSD on all of our servers and a number of our workstations, and wu-ftpd is not allowed on our network, by sysadmin fiat (we're badly paid, or we could drive something better than Fiats).
I don't know about the edutainment stuff (but then, I don't have any kids old enough to use a computer yet), but a good program for making cards and (better still) printing photos as well as the photo printing wizard in XP does it is a program I would pay for right now if it were available for Linux. I've been a Linux user for 5 years (exclusively Linux for most of that time) and in those years, no one has come out with a decent free program to do those things. In fact, I'm not aware of any program - free or not - for Linux that does those things. Somebody correct me (and gimme a URL!) if I'm wrong.
I strongly favor Free and Open Source software and really believe it is a better way. I would favor a Free product over an equivalent proprietary product for this reason, even if it wasn't quite as polished as the proprietary one. This is not about money, though, it's about software freedom. If GPL software were distributed in source only form and you had to pay to get a binary and if I could not compile the source for myself, I would pay for the binary.
I'm sure I'm by no means the only Linux user who believes that. A lot of boxed sets are bought by people who could download and burn their own ISOs, but want to support their distributor, I'm sure. I personally know several people who have done that. I have bought several boxed sets myself.
You can make money selling Linux software, but as Micah points out, it has to be something that people need. It also helps a lot of it doesn't have a Free competitor out there. If there is a Free competitor, you have to be a lot better if you want to compete.
I've already had a jolly good laugh at his expense. I don't knot if he actually wrote the text of the web site, but if he did, I expect he will be taken away in a straitjacket anytime now.
The hackneyed writing, the non-stop overuse of repetition to repeat himself, I reiterate, the nonstop overuse of repetition to repeat himself, the hyperole of it all!!!!!!!, the abisthmul spealing, the poor: punctuation, the of out order logical insertion of sentences all serve to indicate that the person who wrote the text for the web site is not only no scholar, s/he has no concept whatsoever of either scholarship or the written English language. If this is the best Kunkel can do for disciples, I cannot imagine anyone taking him seriously.
If the foregoing alone is not enough, at every point where a new "fact" is brought up that the reader might question, we are simply told that it is explained in the book. Of course, we are also given a link to buy the book. There is a commercial for the book on nearly every page, and several have two. Clearly, the purpose of this site is not to further scholarship or to edumacate anyone, but just to sell the book.
Based on what I have read at their web site - which I'm sure was also constructed with the assistance of locks, big check valves, and a pyramid-shaped pump - I find the theory totally implausible. No serious scholar, whether professional or amateur, would tolerate such a badly written site. By the Pharoah's Pump Foundation's own description of its work, this sounds like the biggest crackpot theory since Chariots of the Gods.
Actually, nothing could be farther from the truth. Allow me to explain.
I've owned my Epson printer for somewhat over a year now. During that time, Epson has probably already made as much profit from the ink cartridges and glossy photo paper I've purchased as they did from the printer itself. This means that before this printer has been obsoleted to the point where I will replace it (a long way off, and assuming it doesn't die), Epson will have made far more money by selling me supplies than they did by selling me the printer.
Bottom line: while it is of course great for Epson if people buy new printers often, it is also very much in their interest to have a large installed base of older-but-still-useful, well-supported printers our there. It not only gives them recurring revenue from supplies (unlike a printer sale, which is one-time revenue) but also gives them a good reputation that leads to more sales of printers, which leads to direct profits and still more recurring revenue from supplies. This happens because when people see Epson printers everywhere, and even old ones are still in use, it makes Epson the printer of choice because the buyer will get the best value for her investment.
Having old printers out there and in use will not hurt Epson unless the printers are so old that Epson has stopped selling supplies for them, abandoning the market to third-party suppliers. By the time a printer is that old, they don't have to care, because the market for supplies will be very small.
Successful business is all about recurring income. Another example:
I work for an ISP that also resells hardware, and while it's a help to our bottom line when we sell a piece of hardware, it's not what really keeps us going. If a leased-line customer buys a Cisco from us we make money on that, but not as much as we make on the recurring income from the leased line. This is the same reason Microsoft wants to move to an annual license model - it would be a steady source of recurring income, whether people bought new software or not.
If it's the only board like that, it might be simpler to get your girlfriend replaced :-)
Do we equal the community at large? We equal a good representative cross-section, and since my opinion is typical in my circles and since I also very commonly find people who share that opinion everywhere I go, the answer is that while I do not speak for them all, I speak for a great many. Quite possibly a majority.
WRT dismissing an argument b/c name-calling was used, I'm not dismissing it (only) because-calling was used, although since that was basically the whole content of the argument - "You're an elitist jerk!" - a case could be made for dismissal on those grounds. Mainly, however, I dismissed it because it was unsupported.
How can I say that Linux will remain a community? Because I believe it will. Despite the existence of distros like RH and MDK, Linux remains a community-driven thing, and there is no sign that this is going to stop. The community is a bit frayed at the edges, but the core is solid. If it did stop, that would spell the end of RH, MDK, and all the rest of the commercial distributors. If the greater community stopped producing and maintaining the Free Software that the distributors package up, they couldn't take on that role themselves. They do not have, and could not afford, the staff to do all of that. They'd go broke. Quickly.
Do users of MDK and RH have a right to expect upgrades without giving anything back? From their vendor, yes. At least if they actually bought the vendor's boxed set, made a donation, or bought a support contract. If they didn't, a case could be made that they don't have a right to expect anything from the vendor, either. They do not, however, have any claim on anyone whose software or documentation can be found in that distro.
As for whole corporations relying on Linux without giving anything back, there may be some. However, it is likely that they aren't taking anything, either. They have admins on staff who maintain their Linux systems for them. Gee, in fact, one of those companies pays me to do exactly that. I'm not a famous person, though, so we wont call that giving anything back. It supports me and my family, and allows me to time to do some things for free in the community. Under my direct influence, my company also paid the author of a GPLed product to write some extensions to it and release them under the GPL as part of the standard version. That was solely for our benefit, but many others have gained from that, and of course, the author did, too. Big companies like Sun and IBM and SGI have given back, too.
You were doing OK in this post, though, until you wrote:
"You don't DO Open Source and or Free Software in the expectation of anything in return. Thats why its "Free"."
Short response: Why not?
Longer response: The concept of giving back is what the entire community has been based on. If you've been around for a while, I'm sure you are quite aware of this. If you haven't, talk to some people who have. Don't take my word for it, b/c obviously you don't buy it coming from me. Ask somebody else.
The whole community has grown up on the strength of what happens when people benefit and then give back. To go back to your statement that you don['t see how I can say it will "remain" a community, in one scenario, you would be right to question that: if most people using Linux stop giving back, the community will collapse. Whether the distributors alone could sustain it in the face of that or not remains to be seen. I hope we won't have to find out.
I'm not allowed to be elitist? Ahem. Yes I am. Whether I can be elitist or not is (thank you very much for the perfect turn of phrase) simply not your call to make. It's true I don't own the software, but I don't have to help whiners, trolls, and lazy people learn it, either. Nor do I have to refrain from discouraging people who I think shouldn't be using it, for whatever reasons I think they shouldn't be using it. And let's be honest: if we both take off our sparring gloves for a minute, wouldn't you agree that there are people who (depending on how you view the problem) just shouldn't be using Linux because either they are not ready for Linux or Linux is not ready for them? There really are people who are better off with a Mac or even a Windows machine than they would be on Linux. And (sparring gloves back on) for some of those people, Linux is better off that way, too.
Oh, by the way, I do personally own anything that I create, even if it is under the GPL. Anything that's GPLed has a copyright holder. I can't prevent someone from using it, but I don't have to do anything for them, either. That's the free beer side of Free: you don't have to pay for it, and you're free to modify it as you see fit as long as you either release those modifications under the GPL or don't release them at all, but you have no *right* to support of any kind. Support for something that is free is at the sufferance of the author.
Details of what got people kicked out? Let's see:
- Repeated violations of written list policy, even after being warned;
- Not asking for help, but *demanding* it. And I don't mean even demanding it from a maintainer, but just demanding it from ordinary (if far more advanced) users like themselves. Saying, in effect, as I described before, "I'm trying out this Linux thing, therefore, you *owe* me help." A number of really great people left the LUG because they were fed up with that. Those events led to the Great Reformation. Things are much better now. They just didn't grok the concept that no one here owes you anything, but if you're civil and show initiative, many will really go the extra mile for you. I've stayed up most of the night helping people out many times. Not anyone who demanded that I do so, however. If you want to demand something from me, you have to be paying me, and even that has its limits;
- Posting questions where it was obvious that they had made no attempt at all to answer it themselves, not even a quick man page read or a Google search, then going ballistic on people (not me, if you're wondering) who politely but firmly told them to go and Read The Fine Manual, then come back and post if you still have any questions;
- Unloading on the list admins for doing their jobs;
That last may sound to you like we're some kind of awful elitists or something, but the real point of it is that we expect people to learn, and believe firmly that a major part of learning *nix is self-training. Not everyone will agree with this approach, but it's our approach and it has been successful for a great many people. Those who don't agree are quite welcome to find a forum that is more suited to their own philosophy and/or learning style. We, however, will not provide that forum.
As much as I've enjoyed this exchange, I'm going to refrain from posting further, partly because we've strayed way off the original Zaurus topic, and partly because I do have a project that I'm working on with a couple of other people and don't want to take more time away from it to do this.
Nice sparring with you,
G-O
There's no such thing as an unbiased reader.
Yes, I'm an elitist, and proud of it. You, however, do not understand elitism, because you're mistaking it with exclusivism. Exclusivists want to keep people out. I, as an elitist, am happy to let people in so long as they, too, are willing to work to become elite. What I, and all the other elitists I know are saying is that if you want to be lazy, dumb, and stupid, that's fine. It's your right. It is not, however, your right to do it here. If you want to come in here, you have to be willing to work to educate yourself and then give back to others. The only people I want to exclude are people who are, and who voluntarily choose to remain, ignorant. Being open doesn't mean having no standards. You sound like you didn't even read my post. But then, this is /. so I'm not surprised.
The problem with the people I described in my prior post is that they don't want become elite. They don't even want to become competent. They don't want to give back. They don't want to become part of the culture. They expect the culture to change for them. They just want it to be done for them, and they want it to be done NOW. They don't even have the good grace to be polite to the people from whom they are demanding free help when they haven't even yet lifted a finger to find their own answers. That is not acceptable. It will never be acceptable.
I, and many other long-time Linux users I know, just plain do not want these people using Linux. They ruin it for the rest of us. A number of them were expelled from our LUG because their attitudes nearly destroyed it and permanently drove away some of our most valued members - people whose names are probably well-known to some of you, and who are sorely missed.
Linux is, and shall remain a community. People who do not want to be part of the community, and give back as they are given to, do not belong here. They aren't wanted, and they certainly aren't needed.
You say I'm a jerk, yet you're the one who jumped straight to name-calling rather than put forth any sort of counterargument to my statements. Perhaps because you really can't. I advise you to stop and ask yourself who it is that really comes off looking like a jerk here?
If you can't present reasonable and well-constructed counterarguments to my position, then you should really just stay under your bridge.
There's nothing wrong with bashing Microsoft. People hate Microsoft because Microsoft has worked hard to make them hate it. Remember how popular Microsoft once was? Remember when Bill Gates' "The Road Ahead" was a huge seller? People commonly viewed neither Gates nor his company as being capable of doing wrong in those days. I should know. I was one of them. Things change. People wise up. Now, since Microsoft has worked so hard to earn all of this ill will, we would not want to cheat them out of their so richly deserved reward and disappoint them, would we?
However, I do not view making Linux more "user friendly" as a good thing. What you and many other people really mean by that is "Let's make a Linux for people who don't know anything about computers and don't want to." Maybe you don't realize you mean that, but it's true. The trouble is that apart from the sheer difficulty of doing so, this would not be a Good Thing. Why not? Because doing that to Linux or any other *nix is going to take away so much of what makes it *nix. Stop and think. Linux and the rest of the *nix family is a server operating system, first and foremost. And it has not one but two decent GUIs that are already quite good enough (but still getting better nevertheless) that not only sysadmins like me but many other power users and near power users can use it as their full-time desktop OS. Beyond that, Linux, particularly when running KDE, is good enough for the corporate desktop Right Now. [1] [2]
But Linux for Aunt Mable? Uh-uh. I don't believe you can do that without breaking most of what Linux is today for most of the people who use it. For years, I was an advocate of user-friendly Linux. My mind was gradually changed by the kind of people I saw coming to Linux. Not people who wanted to learn, to give back, to teach those who came after them the way those who went before me taught me. Not people who wanted to improve the product for the sake of improving it. There were some of those, of course, but they were a minority.
What did we get? Whiners. Losers. Trolls. People who came into Linux and said "You owe me something." The whole attitude was/is one of demanding that since they've tried this "Linux thing" that the community - the LUG they found, the author of the package that bugs them this week, somebody, anybody - owes them help, bug fixes, feature requests, whatever. The idea and ideal that this is a self-help community founded on the ideal and idealism of Linux and Free Software is totally lost on them. I really believed in Linux for the masses. Now I've come to my senses. There are many places where Linux or a *BSD is the best tool available, and this includes corporate workstations. But there are places where it just doesn't belong, too. Aunt Mable's desk is one of them.
For people who want to get away from MS but want a vendor they can demand things from (or try to), who want all the user friendliness, etc., I strongly and highly recommend a Mac running OS X. Apple has done a truly marvelous job, and OS X is onlyk going to get better with time. For the typical end-user market, Apple is where it's at now. OS X has a terrific UI, is easy to use (something Apple has always shot for and largely achieved better than MS), and has the power of *nix underneath the hood.
Yes, I know OS X is proprietary, and I'm all for Free Software. But I also know that there are people who just aren't right for Free Software, and it isn't right for them either. The people I described above. There is no such thing as a free lunch, yet that's what they try to get out of Free Software. They are far better off buying a good but proprietary product from a good and innovative company like Apple.
And do you know what? The Free Software community is better off, too. We don't have to deal with it. Free and Open Source software can be present on an OS X system, but Apple is in between them and us. I like it that way. I've never owned a Mac before, but my next computer purchase will be an iBook. Maybe it'll dual-boot Linux and OS X, or maybe not. It might be OS X only. That's how good it is.
There is a lot of business-friendliness in Linux, and a lot of that in OS X, too. I truly believe that most businesses would be better off with a Linux, Apple, or mixed Linux/Apple network than with a Windows network. We should do a lot of this. However, beware of letting too much user friendliness into Linux. You'll be sorry.
You'll have to excuse me while I go off and write some anti-Micro$oft tracts about much Windoze blows chunks and draw Borg attachments on Dr. Evi^H^H^H uh, I mean, Bill Gates. Or is that Winblows? Or just 'doze? Whatever.
Now run along and buy your Aunt Mable a Mac. And maybe a Linux-based PDA to go with it. The embedded market is a place where Linux can really shine. This is, although user-friendly, not a Bad Thing because - as in the Apple case - you have a vendor standing between the community and the people who are using the software but don't want to be in the community. They are the vendor's problem.
[1] By "corporate desktop" I mean an environment where there is a professional administrator (or at least someone who plays one on TV) overseeing the IT operations. Windows networks should have one of these too, of course, and the reason many don't is a combination of tight budgets (or just plain cheapness) combined with technicall non-savvy managers buying into the Microsoft sizzle that tried to make people think you don't really need admins. Lack of admins is a big reason for Code Red, Klez, et al, spreading the way they did.
[2] No, I'm not out to pump up KDE at the expensve of Gnome. In fact, I personally prefer and use Gnome. However, KDE is better for the corporate desktop environment at this point. It's better for new users at this point.
"more freer?"
If more people wrote like you, the world would really be more dumber.
I'm a network engineer with the Japanese ISP division of a large international networking company whose name you would immediately recognize but which I cannot use here.
You have really asked two questions:
1) Is the bandwidth oversold
2) Do I have a true T-1?
Neither of these has anything to do with the other. I will address the first question, well, first.
All ISPs oversell their bandwidth. This is a perfectly acceptable and accepted practice, and hurts no one unless they are peaking their upstreams (an ISP I worked at before was doing that every day and it was ugly). Overselling bandwidth is how they make money. It's how the biggies make money, too.
If the little guy is saying he doesn't, he's either lying or he's runnin deep in the red. If the biggies say they aren't, they are definitely lying. If the biggy sales people say the little ISP does but they don't, they should be shot. No, hanged. No, both.
Generally, you'll get better service from smaller ISPs, where you're not just a number.
As to whether or not you have a true T-1, that falls into two parts: Did the telco provision it as one? If so, you do. If you don't trust them, this can be tested. Second, is it a T-1 but do you think the upstream is throttling you? That can be tested, too. Others have written plenty about how.
My recommendation: do what you should have done before you started this process, and hire a qualified consultant to spend a day with you checking it out and explaining some things.
I've been in the IT industry for over twenty years, first in IBM mainframes, now in *nix administration. My father is a retired systems programmer. In other words, I've seen IT not only for myself for a long-time, but cross-generationally. And I can tell you that the new management attitude toward IT isn't new - it's back to the *old* attitude that they always had.
I started out in bank IT (we called it DP back then - Data Processing) and also worked in hospital and defense and equipment leasing IT operations. One thing they all had in common - but of which banks were by far the worst - is they viewed the computer room as a black hole that sucked up their money and gave them nothing in return.
One can easily suppose they viewed the IT staff in the same way.
One thing few of them seemed to realize is that the actual fact of the matter was that far from sucking up their money and giving nothing back, the IT operations made their entire business possible. Even then. In the 1970s and 1980s.
The bank I worked for, as an example, had three data centers. A main one, an auxiliary one, and a smaller auxiliary one. Plus a cold site contract with a disaster recovery service. These data centers were geographically remote enough from each other that any natural disaster short of an asteroid impact could not destroy more than one of them. Why? Because if their IT operation was destroyed, the bank would have ceased to exist. The bank's money wasn't really in the vault. It was in our 3350s and 3380s and our 3081s. Someone, obviously knew that, and set up the data processing divisions accordingly. But the day-to-day attitude was that IT - the division without which the branches could not operate and the ATMs would all just sit there - was a drain on the company that produced no profits. Never mind that we enabled the frontline people in the branches to do their jobs and they would fail utterly without us.
So in the lament of IT being undervalued today, I see nothing but a return to the way it always was.
I'm a sysadmin at an ISP, and a few things I can tell you about spam are:
:-p But our block list of Korean proxies and relays is longer even than my dick became via the "most advanced and technologically profound penis enlargement program on the Internet."
:-)
* Most spam is not sent by some loser with a modem. It's sent by some loser with DSL, cable, or big pipes from a large ISP or colo shop. DIY spammers are small fry that no one even needs to care about.
* Most of it never gets delivered. Our spam filters see to it that over 80% of the spam that reaches our MXes dies there, either through direct refusal because of RBL use and our own private lists, or later via other spam filters. So how effective is spam gonna be when nobody ever sees the stuff? I hope some spammers are reading this. Better still, I hope some customers of spammers are reading this (but I doubt it, in either case).
* The entire Republic of Korea is an open proxy
Anybody else out there working at an ISP? Are you getting similar reject levels on spam rejection? If not, and you're using Exim, let's compare notes. Or if you are, and you're using Exim, let's compare notes.
Or if you're a spammer, send me your IP block
I almost sprayed pizza on my monitor and it's all your fault :-)
I'm a sysadmin at an ISP, and we have been filtering Klez inbound and outbound for 13 days, and the load basically hasn't tapered off at all. Since we started the Klez filter (thank you, Exim!) the number of bounces in our postmaster box doubled and show no real signs of slowing up.
That is a lot of bounces because we also filter on SirCam (still see some of those everyday), use several RBLs, and have extensive local spam filters and reject lists, as well as optional spam filters for Korean-encoded and Chinese-encoded mail (just rolled them out and over 800 customers have started using them already).
The cost of this is a lot of wasted bandwidth consumed by spam, worms, and viruses, in hardware (we run 4 MXes where two would otherwise suffice, because of the filtering load), and the countless hours we spend each week on defending our mail system and our customers from all this crap.
Besides the usual suspects (MS for their security holes, users for their laxness on applying updates, and the virus writers themselves), I also have to blame a lot of adminstrators for this. Mail admins, listen up! You KNOW Klez is out there and you KNOW it's going through your systems. You probably have a ton of captive specimens of it. Start filtering it inbound and outbound. You're not only helping other admins to control this problem, you're helping yourself.
And let's all be thankful that virus writers and spamware writers come from two camps that aren't likely to like each other, because if they got together and wrote a worm that silently propagated itself and turned Windows boxes into selectively open relays for use by the spammer/authors, that would be a real problem. The scary part is that it wouldn't be all that hard. The worms already have their own SMTP engines these days. The leap is small. Let's hope they don't make it, but let's think about how we're going to control it when they do.
Line of defense number 1: ISPs - if you don't already block port 25 in/out from your dial pools (requiring your dial users to smarthost through your outbound SMTP or send through it directly), start NOW. The ass you save will be your own. If we all do this (my employer has done this for years) we will cut off spam.
Of the hundreds of people who replied to this, a few of them seem to work, as I do, in a large installation with thousands of hosts. It is no coincidence that those few advocate a hierarchical naming scheme. Nothing else can scale to the number of *admins and other people* involved. That's what you need to scale. Sure, you could name hosts after (as one person suggested) 4,000 famous people, but not even the people who assign the names will remember what host does what a week later.
Go with something purely functional, such as mx01.mail.domain.com for the first MX (for example) or ns01.dns.domain.com, etc. Or if you have multiple locations, you can incorporate a geographical reference: mx01.mail.snd.domain.com for the first MX physically located in San Diego.
You can obscure it to something more encoded if you want, but both the safety you get from doing so and the risk you get from making your naming conventions plain are vastly exaggerated. Attackers most typically go after whole netblocks and they scan by IP address, not FQDN.
On the other hand, if someone has it in for your organization specfically, they may try to expressly target important hosts in your network. A person doing this is going to be far more skilled than a script kiddie scanning netblocks.
In this case, having clear host names may help the attacker a little bit, but not much, and having obscured ones may slow the attacker down a little bit, but not much. This attacker *will* find out what your important hosts are, easily, with or without the help of your naming convention.
Bottom line: choose names that are easy for your staff to deal with, then lock down the boxes so they are hard for attackers to deal with.
Our plainly labeled boxes get probed all the time, but not more than our idiosyncratically labeled admins' workstations do. The naming convention hasn't seemed to have made any difference, so go for clarity.
I'm a sysadmin at an ISP. While it is not our *responsibility* to do anything about any virus (security is your responsibility, not your ISP's), as a service to both our customers and the rest of the Internet community, we are filtering SirCam on both inbound and outbound mail. Yes, outbound. If one of our customers sends a SirCam mail, our SMTP servers will bounce it. This not only prevents the customer's computer from spreading the virus, it informs the customer that his/her computer is infected.