I go to a public school in Pennsylvania, and there are quite a few girls taking the computer science courses. I'd say about 25% are taking 'extra' classes (in our school it's required to take Applied Computers I, with Basic/C++/Java programming as optional classes). Still, this is nowhere near a majority, and I've noticed that many girls are taking comp sci courses either because it ties in with Maths or as 'filler' courses. It might be
I think his point was more that Hotmail is *not* running a MSFT product, rather than that it's running Solaris. Hell, does anyone here remember when they tried to switch? It was impossible!
He actually makes a good point on this - I have absolutely no idea why it's been marked as flamebait. My understanding is that IPv6 is going to do a lot to fix stuff like this. IPv6 is going to feature authentication (32 bit MD5 checksum) built-in to the protocol. This means that, for attacks like this, IP spoofing won't be as much of an issue; you'll be sure to know where the attacks are coming from. Once the source of the attacks is found, it won't be too hard to prosecute, and thus stop. At the least, admins can retaliate or deny access from the offending sites, instead of being bombed by packets from hundreds of nonreal hosts (not too pleasent to have thousands of packets originating from your private Class C, eh?).
This whole issue seems to be centering, at least in part, on Naziism... It might do people here well to remember that the wounds in Europe from the two World Wars have not healed as they have in America. There are still many people who remember the period of the Third Reich with fear and hate, and will do whatever is in their power to prevent it from happening again. Just to set the record straight: I'm not advocating censorship, but I can see where this is coming from.
Seriously, I have no idea why this is under the "humor" section. I've known about the Hacker's Diet for quite some time, since I saw fourmilab mentioned in an internet magazine, and I have to say that it isn't a joke. The only really funny thing about it is the title. It's actually a well thought-out guide that Walker has put together for executives and hackers so that they can lose weight, as well as help them get back into shape. I'd suggest that people actually take time to read things before putting it up under the "humor" banner. I don't know about John Walker, but I'd be pretty insulted if my work on whatever serious subject that just happened to have a funny title was made fun of at a popular internet site.
I nominate iptraf. It's an ncurses-based network monitor that does anything the best GUI network monitor could do, and does it better. If you haven't used it, you should try it out.
You are correct; my points were that the biggest flaw in the course (in my eyes) was the use of MSFT's protocol. As a point of clarification, however, I did not consider the course an utter failure, or even anything close to a failure. And yes, I agree that anticipating one's OS preferences should not be the concern of an educational institution. However, by using a MSFT product, they were alienating all non-windows users (I forgot to mention that there was no Mac version at the time, and I'm not sure if there is now). This, I believe,/is/ a flaw, especially considering the new popularity that the Mac is finding.
Last February, I became involved with a distance education course taken from Harvad Extension School on "Communications Protocols and Internet Architectures." The course itself was incredibly informative; I learned a lot from it in the time that I devoted to it. (BTW, if anyone wants a good book on protocols, I recommend Tanenbaum's _Computer Networks_) Now to the meat: This particular course offered its lectures (which were the bulk of the course) only in streaming video. That was all well and good; I had an ISDN line at the time, and was well able to cope with it. However, it utilized MSFT's proprietary streaming video protocol. Furthermore, the Netscape plugin failed to work to any semblance of perfection, so I was forced to use IE. In my opinion, this was the biggest flaw in the course - especially something aimed at one who will be knowledgeable about computers (it was a graduate level course). The use of Real Player would have made me much more willing to participate in the course, as I had to reboot into an environment that I hated to listen to any lectures with Microsoft's protocol. What I want to know is this: when will people learn that using proprietary protocols only hurts their customerbase?
Over the summer, I had an oppurtunity to work with some very nice Sun boxes. In actuality, I was working as an intern for Sun in Europe. I got to work with a number of boxes, including 4-processor AxMPs, CP1500s, and an AXi. One of my tasks over the summer was evaluating how RedHat 5.1 (UltraPenguin 1.1) ran on the AXi. I have to say that installing it was a joy; it was as easy as it is on an x86 machine. In fact, everything was as easy as it was on x86. There were a few differences, mainly in the bootloader (SPARC boxes use SILO which I managed to only slightly figure out over the course of the summer, only enough to get new kernels running), but on the whole everything was the same as it was on an x86. Which, I believe, is one of the major selling points of Linux - having seen how transparent the hardware is to it is quite amazing. After a while of setting it up to perform various tasks that I didn't know how to do using Solaris (such as a RARP server, which turned out to be VERY easy, and UFS works beautifully; I had not one problem setting up NFS to read/write from the UFS partitions), I started using it as a desktop machine. I had a higher resolution on that machine, and so I preferred it for viewing web pages over the others. I ran X with enlightenment 15 for a long time, and I found it to be fairly stable, although I had many more problems with X unexpectedly crashing (happened about 10 times in six weeks) than the kernel itself having an error (which happened not once). Speaking of kernels, the kernels were a cinch to configure. There were a few options that I had never seen before, but other than that, compiling and running a new kernel was easily as easy as it was on an x86 box.
Nontheless, I'm very happy to see RedHat come out with an updated version for SPARC boxes. Maybe when I return to Sun to work this coming summer I'll be able to test it out on my AXi... If anyone has any questions about running Linux on a SPARC system, I'd be happy to answer them (from what I remember).
I agree with the spirit of your letter completely. People like this have no place in a (mostly) intelligent place for discussion. However, you should consider that the way you addressed them does not make you too much better. Moderate them down!
Re:pixar references (CONTAINS SPOILERS)
on
Review:Toy Story 2
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· Score: 1
I can confirm that. I have Bug's Life on tape, and Geri's Game is on right before the main feature.
... is good free secure voice that's compatible with Windows and UNIX. I've used it many times, although unfortunately it doesn't do too well with my soundcard under Linux. You can find it at www.fourmilab.ch or www.speakfreely.org
Anyone who wants to see this sort of stuff live (and happens to be passing through Munich) should definitely check out the Deutsches Museum, Germany's largest technical museum. I highly recommend their exhibits in any case, but they run daily high-voltage shows.
I have to say one thing: I love Microsoft's mouses. Argue with me all you want, but even if it did come from the Devil, the Devil did this exceptionally well. My mouse is still smooth as the first day I got it, and that was three years ago.
I saw this show last night, simply for entertainment purposes. I knew when this story was originally posted on/. that there would be a large response to it, so I decided that I would have to see what would elict such a response for myself. Last night was likely the last time that I watch cable for a long time. That program was not only poor journalism, it was one of the largest pieces of FUD and misconception on Earth. One piece that sticks out in my mind was when some of the "hackers" were doing a webcast for some 31337 h4x0rz, and they got an email from an AOLer. This guy said "I want to know how to get passwords," and the hosts, 31337 as they were, responded that "Man, this is some pretty heavy stuff, and I see that you're someone from AOL. This is not something that you get into when you're such a newbie " That single statement proved what a bunch of (at the risk of this sounding like flamebait) posing wannabes with only slight skills they were... Hacking is about creating, not stealing. But I won't get into the jargon, as I'm sure that everyone here knows about it already. And then everyone was using Windows 95, except for some guy named "Mantis," who had root on some (probably his own) Linux box. Although I do have to say that seeing l0pht was cool.
Re:Mars Trilogy Didn't Grab Me
on
Antarctica
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· Score: 1
Amen, Brother. I'm currently near the end of _River of Blue Fire_ and Tad Williams is definitely a great fantasy writer. Notice that I'm not calling it science-fiction; it doesn't follow that vein. This is more of a story for the story's sake than the point that I tend to see sci-fi making. I love both genres to death, too. If anyone hasn't read Otherland on/., they definitely should try it out... It has a subtle humor, and Williams (although some of the technological concepts are kinda wacky) seems to have a decent enough grasp on the current online community to make some fairly amusing (if not accurate) predictions. It ain't literature, but that's fine by me. --Krit
It might get rid of a lot of the skr1pt k1dd13z that are running around right now... Although considering the effectiveness of the "Don't Do Drugs" campaign (which, at least at my school, has not made too much of an impact), it might just weed out a few of the more benign ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of my best admining has been done while drunk ;)
I go to a public school in Pennsylvania, and there are quite a few girls taking the computer science courses. I'd say about 25% are taking 'extra' classes (in our school it's required to take Applied Computers I, with Basic/C++/Java programming as optional classes). Still, this is nowhere near a majority, and I've noticed that many girls are taking comp sci courses either because it ties in with Maths or as 'filler' courses.
It might be
I think his point was more that Hotmail is *not* running a MSFT product, rather than that it's running Solaris. Hell, does anyone here remember when they tried to switch? It was impossible!
So now I know why I always produce better code at 3 AM after drinking two liters of cherry coke...
Moooooooooooooooof!!
Sorry, I just couldn't resist.
He actually makes a good point on this - I have absolutely no idea why it's been marked as flamebait. My understanding is that IPv6 is going to do a lot to fix stuff like this. IPv6 is going to feature authentication (32 bit MD5 checksum) built-in to the protocol. This means that, for attacks like this, IP spoofing won't be as much of an issue; you'll be sure to know where the attacks are coming from.
Once the source of the attacks is found, it won't be too hard to prosecute, and thus stop. At the least, admins can retaliate or deny access from the offending sites, instead of being bombed by packets from hundreds of nonreal hosts (not too pleasent to have thousands of packets originating from your private Class C, eh?).
This whole issue seems to be centering, at least in part, on Naziism... It might do people here well to remember that the wounds in Europe from the two World Wars have not healed as they have in America. There are still many people who remember the period of the Third Reich with fear and hate, and will do whatever is in their power to prevent it from happening again.
Just to set the record straight: I'm not advocating censorship, but I can see where this is coming from.
I use mine for coasters as well. They're great, especially the small ones that you get in the mail. Got a can of Dew sitting on one right now...
Seriously, I have no idea why this is under the "humor" section. I've known about the Hacker's Diet for quite some time, since I saw fourmilab mentioned in an internet magazine, and I have to say that it isn't a joke. The only really funny thing about it is the title. It's actually a well thought-out guide that Walker has put together for executives and hackers so that they can lose weight, as well as help them get back into shape. I'd suggest that people actually take time to read things before putting it up under the "humor" banner.
I don't know about John Walker, but I'd be pretty insulted if my work on whatever serious subject that just happened to have a funny title was made fun of at a popular internet site.
I nominate iptraf. It's an ncurses-based network monitor that does anything the best GUI network monitor could do, and does it better. If you haven't used it, you should try it out.
You are correct; my points were that the biggest flaw in the course (in my eyes) was the use of MSFT's protocol. As a point of clarification, however, I did not consider the course an utter failure, or even anything close to a failure. /is/ a flaw, especially considering the new popularity that the Mac is finding.
And yes, I agree that anticipating one's OS preferences should not be the concern of an educational institution. However, by using a MSFT product, they were alienating all non-windows users (I forgot to mention that there was no Mac version at the time, and I'm not sure if there is now). This, I believe,
Last February, I became involved with a distance education course taken from Harvad Extension School on "Communications Protocols and Internet Architectures." The course itself was incredibly informative; I learned a lot from it in the time that I devoted to it. (BTW, if anyone wants a good book on protocols, I recommend Tanenbaum's _Computer Networks_)
Now to the meat:
This particular course offered its lectures (which were the bulk of the course) only in streaming video. That was all well and good; I had an ISDN line at the time, and was well able to cope with it. However, it utilized MSFT's proprietary streaming video protocol. Furthermore, the Netscape plugin failed to work to any semblance of perfection, so I was forced to use IE. In my opinion, this was the biggest flaw in the course - especially something aimed at one who will be knowledgeable about computers (it was a graduate level course). The use of Real Player would have made me much more willing to participate in the course, as I had to reboot into an environment that I hated to listen to any lectures with Microsoft's protocol.
What I want to know is this: when will people learn that using proprietary protocols only hurts their customerbase?
Over the summer, I had an oppurtunity to work with some very nice Sun boxes. In actuality, I was working as an intern for Sun in Europe. I got to work with a number of boxes, including 4-processor AxMPs, CP1500s, and an AXi. One of my tasks over the summer was evaluating how RedHat 5.1 (UltraPenguin 1.1) ran on the AXi. I have to say that installing it was a joy; it was as easy as it is on an x86 machine. In fact, everything was as easy as it was on x86. There were a few differences, mainly in the bootloader (SPARC boxes use SILO which I managed to only slightly figure out over the course of the summer, only enough to get new kernels running), but on the whole everything was the same as it was on an x86. Which, I believe, is one of the major selling points of Linux - having seen how transparent the hardware is to it is quite amazing.
After a while of setting it up to perform various tasks that I didn't know how to do using Solaris (such as a RARP server, which turned out to be VERY easy, and UFS works beautifully; I had not one problem setting up NFS to read/write from the UFS partitions), I started using it as a desktop machine. I had a higher resolution on that machine, and so I preferred it for viewing web pages over the others. I ran X with enlightenment 15 for a long time, and I found it to be fairly stable, although I had many more problems with X unexpectedly crashing (happened about 10 times in six weeks) than the kernel itself having an error (which happened not once).
Speaking of kernels, the kernels were a cinch to configure. There were a few options that I had never seen before, but other than that, compiling and running a new kernel was easily as easy as it was on an x86 box.
Nontheless, I'm very happy to see RedHat come out with an updated version for SPARC boxes. Maybe when I return to Sun to work this coming summer I'll be able to test it out on my AXi...
If anyone has any questions about running Linux on a SPARC system, I'd be happy to answer them (from what I remember).
I use my PalmPilot without a keyboard all the time, and it works great.
Granted, it's a PDA, but the basic theory is the same...
I agree with the spirit of your letter completely. People like this have no place in a (mostly) intelligent place for discussion. However, you should consider that the way you addressed them does not make you too much better.
Moderate them down!
I can confirm that. I have Bug's Life on tape, and Geri's Game is on right before the main feature.
I keep my passwords to things on my Palm Pilot. Not the most secure method, granted, but it's secure from being h4x0r3d and it's easily accessible.
... is good free secure voice that's compatible with Windows and UNIX. I've used it many times, although unfortunately it doesn't do too well with my soundcard under Linux.
You can find it at www.fourmilab.ch or www.speakfreely.org
Anyone who wants to see this sort of stuff live (and happens to be passing through Munich) should definitely check out the Deutsches Museum, Germany's largest technical museum. I highly recommend their exhibits in any case, but they run daily high-voltage shows.
I have to say one thing:
I love Microsoft's mouses.
Argue with me all you want, but even if it did come from the Devil, the Devil did this exceptionally well. My mouse is still smooth as the first day I got it, and that was three years ago.
This is one of the reasons that I'm looking to buy a widescreen TV. We're definitely getting a DVD, and I want my widescreen movies ;-)
I stand corrected. I meant to put credit card numbers, but somehow passwords slipped out in its place.
I saw this show last night, simply for entertainment purposes. I knew when this story was originally posted on /. that there would be a large response to it, so I decided that I would have to see what would elict such a response for myself. Last night was likely the last time that I watch cable for a long time. That program was not only poor journalism, it was one of the largest pieces of FUD and misconception on Earth.
One piece that sticks out in my mind was when some of the "hackers" were doing a webcast for some 31337 h4x0rz, and they got an email from an AOLer. This guy said "I want to know how to get passwords," and the hosts, 31337 as they were, responded that "Man, this is some pretty heavy stuff, and I see that you're someone from AOL. This is not something that you get into when you're such a newbie " That single statement proved what a bunch of (at the risk of this sounding like flamebait) posing wannabes with only slight skills they were... Hacking is about creating, not stealing. But I won't get into the jargon, as I'm sure that everyone here knows about it already.
And then everyone was using Windows 95, except for some guy named "Mantis," who had root on some (probably his own) Linux box.
Although I do have to say that seeing l0pht was cool.
Amen, Brother. I'm currently near the end of _River of Blue Fire_ and Tad Williams is definitely a great fantasy writer. Notice that I'm not calling it science-fiction; it doesn't follow that vein. This is more of a story for the story's sake than the point that I tend to see sci-fi making. I love both genres to death, too. If anyone hasn't read Otherland on /., they definitely should try it out... It has a subtle humor, and Williams (although some of the technological concepts are kinda wacky) seems to have a decent enough grasp on the current online community to make some fairly amusing (if not accurate) predictions.
It ain't literature, but that's fine by me.
--Krit
It might get rid of a lot of the skr1pt k1dd13z that are running around right now... Although considering the effectiveness of the "Don't Do Drugs" campaign (which, at least at my school, has not made too much of an impact), it might just weed out a few of the more benign ones.