I am saturated with advertisement. They are on TV, on radio, in almost every magazine I read, on roadside panel, on bus, in cinema (the horror! paying to be fed up advertisement...), everywhere on the Web (unfortunately), ad nauseum. Advertisement make me sick : they are 90% tasteless and mostly senseless, repetive and self-promoting (thats the point of advertising, I suppose). I can do nothing about roadside panel and other invading form of advertisement, but I can do something about advertisement on TV (use a PVR), on radio (I stopped listening to commercial radio a long time ago, I now listen to Radio-Canada [the french-candian public radio]) and on the web (use the "Block image from this server" feature of Mozilla). I am sorry for the content provider, but I am doing an overdose of advertisement; it's a question of keeping my sanity.
What will happen if the TV die because advertisement money dry up ? I suppose I will rent (or buy) more movie, subscribe to a few specialized news and science channels and spend more time browsing the Web.
Wait a sec... that's what I am already doing ! Poor TV channel, poor advertiser...
Thinking about it, if I would not have to pay the cost of all this fscking advertisement with every product I am buying, maybe I would have enough money left to actually PAY FOR CONTENT !
Apache and Perl was the way to go in 1996, but times have changed. Systems like PHP and (here comes the -1 Flamebait mod) ASP are faster and more efficient than Perl CGI. Serious webmasters do it in Java or C anyhow, for serious speed.
Serious Web programmer do not even mention "CGI" and "speed" in the same sentence.
Now,for some serious flamebait : PHP has always stuck me as an adequate, if somewhat anemic, Perl replacement but nothing more. It have a few very good library (PEAR and Horde), but nothing nearly as complete as CPAN. Zend is reputed very fast, but is it faster than mod_perl ? Instead of throwing half-baked opinion, please provide some hard number to back up your claim.
And what's ASP ? Is this some kind of tasty threat ? Never heard of that before...
For the needy, I just made cipherpunk44:cipherpunk44
cipherpunk:cipherpunk used to be the magic account available almost anywhere, but it seems that some careless fellow changed the password for that account on the NYT web site.
Have you had the opportunity to study so-called AI used in computer video games ? Do you think they are of any interest ? Do video game programmer innovate on that front ?
I personnally know next-to-nothing about AI; video games are the only products I use that claim artificial intelligence. I am just wondering how valide the technique used in video games are in regard to the academic research on the subject.
Brand name computer maker (Dell, IBM, Compaq, etc.) do that on many model of business class PC.
You may not know, but there is a whole culture that had developped around cooling and case modification. People do air duct all the time out of cardboard, soft metal, acrylic, etc. There are many other option : mounting a larger fan right on your HS with an adapter, throttling your fan down (7volting, rheostat, voltage regulator [my favorite], PWM), using a quieter fan (Panaflo L1A are popular), etc. Check out the Case and Cooling Fetish forum of Arstechnica. 7 volts is another site I like very much.
White-box builder tend to skimp seriously on the quality of component. If you are like me, you won't be able to make the compromise that will make you home-built system as cheap as these white-box. For 20 more $, the case can be so much better, and another 256 MB of RAM would cost only 40$, etc ad nauseum.
On the other hand, you will *choose* the compromise made. For example, I like to buy the lowest-end possible CPU just before they become unavailable. I like it since you pay 25% of the cost will getting 50% of the performance of the higher-end CPU. Wait 6 month to a year and you can afford the previously top-of-line for less than the difference between the actual lowest and higher-end. Anyway, just an example.
Compromise I don't make :
- Motherboard. It can outlive many CPU if choosed carefully, and this is the most annoying thing to troubleshoot if unstable.
- I buy retail CPU. They come with a right-size fan of good quality that are relatively quiet. A retail will cost you less than an OEM and a good HSF.
- Case design. Good-looking and functionnal make it so much more enjoyable.
To have all your questions on choice of component answered by real maniac of that particuliar field, try the different forum of ArsTechnica at http://arstechnica.infopop.net
Four years ago, I would have answered a resounding "Yes!". Today, I would answer an uninterested no.
Slashdot has becomed the shadow of it's former self; it is now a little more than a news outlet for me. It was'nt always the case. It had been a real community a few years ago. Notice my UID; I have been reading Slashdot for a long time... back when CmdrTaco was actually taking part in the discussion.
If you want to see a real community in action, I suggest you check out Kuro5hin for the political/social stuff and ArsTechnica discussion forum for the technical stuff. These are real community in my mind; not glorified news outlet. They are not the only one; just two good examples.
I totally agree with you, except that unfortunately, after a few year on the job market, you often end up with kid and debt/mortgage wich make it harder to go back to school. That is my situation; I wish I had gone to school back when it was the time.
You're young. You're free. You're careless. WHY DONT YOU GO TO COLLEGE ?
A few point for college:
- Early 20s is the best time to go to school. When you are nearing 30, got debt to pay, kid to feed and a full time job you must keep, going back to school is a major undertaking requiring serious sacrifice. I am speaking from experience here. Why not play it safe and go to college when it is actually EASY to do it ?
- You will actually learn useful thing in school. Unfortunately it is hard to put that into perspective when you dont have much experience.
- It is a common misbelieve that sysadmin don't need programming skill (or anything else taught in CS). That is false. The best sysadmin are at least passable programmer, if only to write an odd script here and there. Also, a little C will go a long way toward understanding those cryptic error you get when you are compiling a new kernel. Plus getting the big picture is important if you want to be polyvalent.
- The chicks. The partys. The network of friend you are building in college.
- Certs are useless. Period. (Ok, maybe if they are backed by serious experience... but then, you don't need the certs anymore to get hired !)
There is a lot more to say, but these are the most important one to me. Personnally, I wish I had gone to college/university back a decade ago. My life would certainly not be the same (probably better).
Of course, they are all incompatible with each other, but the problem remains that the Linux kernel, as shipped by RedHat is insecure when it comes to chroot protection.
I really do not mean to troll, but does any other mainstream OS include good and correct chroot support ?
AFAIAC, "Trusted" version of commercial Unices don't count. They are no more mainstream in regard to their respective Unix brand than SELinux is in regard to RedHat.
It always kind of bug me off when people expect from Linux what they don't get from other OS, then complain about lack of "feature" in Linux. Maybe Linux is really dragging in chroot support compared to other mainstream OS and I am clueless; please enlighten me.
If I had a few $ to burn on esoteric hardware, I would scourge Ebay and local auction house for second-hand Unix workstation (Sun, SGI, maybe an HP or a RS/6K). Relatively recent box can be had for a few hundred bucks.
Sure, and the day they'll decide that the 5% (or probably lower) market share they get from Linux user is'nt worth the effort they put in releasing Linux driver and stop updating their driver for Linux, what am I gonna do ?
I could continue to use the last released driver. But it probably ain't gonna work with newer kernel. I could stick to the latest supported kernel, but I suppose it's going to piss me off when I will want to upgrade to kernel 3.6.8 in a few year to get support for a feature I really need.
But then, I could upgrade my video card to one supported. I suppose that is what the hardware industry would want me to do. Unfortunately for them, I am not fond of spending money on hardware unless it is really necessary. I am still using parts I bought 6 years ago. I don't expect my video card to satisfy me that long, but I want to get at least a few years out of it.
I am shopping for a video card right now. I will not take the risk of being orphaned by Nvidia, so my money will go to ATi.
The article talk about embedding Vim in Konqueror. Unfortunately, I can't reach the site to read the details (/.ed), but if that mean I can use Vim in textbox (such as the one typing in right now), then I am really excited.
That will double my productivity when posting to/.:)
I am not sure I get your point, and by the little I understand you don't get mine either. The type of scenario I was referring to is not a client connecting to a gateway, it's a gateway connecting to another gateway to make both LAN look like they are local to the client. In this scenario, the VPN connection never get NATed; it is initiated by each gateway on their outbound (Internet) interface. Routing become an issue in this scenario: how are gateway supposed to route if both side of the VPN have the same subnet ???
Just to clarify my thought about DHCP: migrating adress that where statically assigned "by hand" is a lot of work since they must be changed on each workstation separately. If you use DHCP, you just have to edit/etc/dhcpd.conf, wait for the lease to expire (at night, on the weekend, whatever) and bingo! all (or most) of your machine now use the subnet wich hopefully you can route thru the VPN link. Get it ?
Right now, outbound PPTP connection are a real pain to NAT with iptables. There is an iptables connection tracking module but it has not yet been integrated in the base patch. Hopefully it will in iptables 1.2.6
Not always. A big problem with private adress space appear when two business (or dept, or whatever) bridge their LAN with a VPN and they are using the same private range. Most LAN use etheir 192.168.[0|1].0/24 or 10.0.0.0/8, so this happen often (it happen to me all the time). Hopefully one or the other use DHCP so they can be migrated to an other adress range (almost) painlessly.
- Left/Right side nomenclature really confuse me; they could have used "peers" or client/server, I don't know
- Recompiling kernel; easy if you have a single box, quite hard when you manage 30+. Plus it require you to commit the sin of rebooting the machine.
At work, we have choosen CIPE for Linux-Linux VPN. It is totally userland, come stock on recent RedHat version and is available as RPM; all that make it is easy to install and upgrade on a lot of machines. Plus the config file is really dumb-proof. We are stuck using PPTP for Windows-Linux VPN because that's all the Windows monkeys know about.
- Decide on the plan, stand back, and let us implement
The problem with this point is that it assume that the coder are competent and have good judgement. I had been on a project where it was'nt the case. Not only was it doomed from the start (since the people involved did'nt had what it take to complete it), but some early technology choices made maintenance and improvement a nightmare. An experienced manager with some insight in database design and programming tools could have vetoed the most blatantly stupid choice early programmer made.
I am paying 45$ CDN (~30$ US), modem included, for 1 Mb/s dl, 40 Kb/s ul. Yes, the upload suck but I don't need it much beside the odd ssh session. My other option was the cable co (Videotron) at a similar price for much greater speed, but the service only allow for 6 Gb download, 2 Gb upload IIRC. Plus Videotron like to block port at random (25 inbound, 80 inbound in the Code Red era). Sympatico are cool about running server (at that speed, there is'nt much point anyway). They only block 25 outbound, so you must relay your mail thru their SMTP server.
Personnally, I am using a Nortel modem but I think (this will have to be confirmed) that those using newer modem (Alcatel) are getting greater speed. I don't complain; the added speed would only be welcome when I download ISO (about 2 hour from a good server).
BTW, this is residential service. Commercial xDSL service is much more expensive (80-200+ CDN$, depending on your SLA).
Slashdot Mirror
I am saturated with advertisement. They are on TV, on radio, in almost every magazine I read, on roadside panel, on bus, in cinema (the horror! paying to be fed up advertisement ...), everywhere on the Web (unfortunately), ad nauseum. Advertisement make me sick : they are 90% tasteless and mostly senseless, repetive and self-promoting (thats the point of advertising, I suppose). I can do nothing about roadside panel and other invading form of advertisement, but I can do something about advertisement on TV (use a PVR), on radio (I stopped listening to commercial radio a long time ago, I now listen to Radio-Canada [the french-candian public radio]) and on the web (use the "Block image from this server" feature of Mozilla). I am sorry for the content provider, but I am doing an overdose of advertisement; it's a question of keeping my sanity.
... that's what I am already doing ! Poor TV channel, poor advertiser ...
What will happen if the TV die because advertisement money dry up ? I suppose I will rent (or buy) more movie, subscribe to a few specialized news and science channels and spend more time browsing the Web.
Wait a sec
Thinking about it, if I would not have to pay the cost of all this fscking advertisement with every product I am buying, maybe I would have enough money left to actually PAY FOR CONTENT !
You should try ASP.NET then. Not only is it precompiled and therefore much faster, it also is cross-browser, cross-platform friendly.
For some totally unfounded reason, I am septikal of this claim ...
Apache and Perl was the way to go in 1996, but times have changed. Systems like PHP and (here comes the -1 Flamebait mod) ASP are faster and more efficient than Perl CGI. Serious webmasters do it in Java or C anyhow, for serious speed.
Serious Web programmer do not even mention "CGI" and "speed" in the same sentence.
Now,for some serious flamebait : PHP has always stuck me as an adequate, if somewhat anemic, Perl replacement but nothing more. It have a few very good library (PEAR and Horde), but nothing nearly as complete as CPAN. Zend is reputed very fast, but is it faster than mod_perl ? Instead of throwing half-baked opinion, please provide some hard number to back up your claim.
And what's ASP ? Is this some kind of tasty threat ? Never heard of that before ...
For the needy, I just made cipherpunk44:cipherpunk44
cipherpunk:cipherpunk used to be the magic account available almost anywhere, but it seems that some careless fellow changed the password for that account on the NYT web site.
www.vim.org
I can't believe peoples recommend emacs ! (humor impaired -> this is a joke)
Have you had the opportunity to study so-called AI used in computer video games ? Do you think they are of any interest ? Do video game programmer innovate on that front ?
I personnally know next-to-nothing about AI; video games are the only products I use that claim artificial intelligence. I am just wondering how valide the technique used in video games are in regard to the academic research on the subject.
Brand name computer maker (Dell, IBM, Compaq, etc.) do that on many model of business class PC.
You may not know, but there is a whole culture that had developped around cooling and case modification. People do air duct all the time out of cardboard, soft metal, acrylic, etc. There are many other option : mounting a larger fan right on your HS with an adapter, throttling your fan down (7volting, rheostat, voltage regulator [my favorite], PWM), using a quieter fan (Panaflo L1A are popular), etc. Check out the Case and Cooling Fetish forum of Arstechnica. 7 volts is another site I like very much.
White-box builder tend to skimp seriously on the quality of component. If you are like me, you won't be able to make the compromise that will make you home-built system as cheap as these white-box. For 20 more $, the case can be so much better, and another 256 MB of RAM would cost only 40$, etc ad nauseum.
On the other hand, you will *choose* the compromise made. For example, I like to buy the lowest-end possible CPU just before they become unavailable. I like it since you pay 25% of the cost will getting 50% of the performance of the higher-end CPU. Wait 6 month to a year and you can afford the previously top-of-line for less than the difference between the actual lowest and higher-end. Anyway, just an example.
Compromise I don't make :
- Motherboard. It can outlive many CPU if choosed carefully, and this is the most annoying thing to troubleshoot if unstable.
- I buy retail CPU. They come with a right-size fan of good quality that are relatively quiet. A retail will cost you less than an OEM and a good HSF.
- Case design. Good-looking and functionnal make it so much more enjoyable.
To have all your questions on choice of component answered by real maniac of that particuliar field, try the different forum of ArsTechnica at http://arstechnica.infopop.net
On top of all this it has a Linux OS installed complete with scandisk and defrag.
[root@cerberus root]# scandisk
bash: scandisk: command not found
[root@cerberus root]# defrag
bash: defrag: command not found
Sh*t, my Linux is not complete ...
Four years ago, I would have answered a resounding "Yes!". Today, I would answer an uninterested no.
Slashdot has becomed the shadow of it's former self; it is now a little more than a news outlet for me. It was'nt always the case. It had been a real community a few years ago. Notice my UID; I have been reading Slashdot for a long time ... back when CmdrTaco was actually taking part in the discussion.
If you want to see a real community in action, I suggest you check out Kuro5hin for the political/social stuff and ArsTechnica discussion forum for the technical stuff. These are real community in my mind; not glorified news outlet. They are not the only one; just two good examples.
I totally agree with you, except that unfortunately, after a few year on the job market, you often end up with kid and debt/mortgage wich make it harder to go back to school. That is my situation; I wish I had gone to school back when it was the time.
You're young. You're free. You're careless. WHY DONT YOU GO TO COLLEGE ?
:
... but then, you don't need the certs anymore to get hired !)
A few point for college
- Early 20s is the best time to go to school. When you are nearing 30, got debt to pay, kid to feed and a full time job you must keep, going back to school is a major undertaking requiring serious sacrifice. I am speaking from experience here. Why not play it safe and go to college when it is actually EASY to do it ?
- You will actually learn useful thing in school. Unfortunately it is hard to put that into perspective when you dont have much experience.
- It is a common misbelieve that sysadmin don't need programming skill (or anything else taught in CS). That is false. The best sysadmin are at least passable programmer, if only to write an odd script here and there. Also, a little C will go a long way toward understanding those cryptic error you get when you are compiling a new kernel. Plus getting the big picture is important if you want to be polyvalent.
- The chicks. The partys. The network of friend you are building in college.
- Certs are useless. Period. (Ok, maybe if they are backed by serious experience
There is a lot more to say, but these are the most important one to me. Personnally, I wish I had gone to college/university back a decade ago. My life would certainly not be the same (probably better).
Of course, they are all incompatible with each other, but the problem remains that the Linux kernel, as shipped by RedHat is insecure when it comes to chroot protection.
I really do not mean to troll, but does any other mainstream OS include good and correct chroot support ?
AFAIAC, "Trusted" version of commercial Unices don't count. They are no more mainstream in regard to their respective Unix brand than SELinux is in regard to RedHat.
It always kind of bug me off when people expect from Linux what they don't get from other OS, then complain about lack of "feature" in Linux. Maybe Linux is really dragging in chroot support compared to other mainstream OS and I am clueless; please enlighten me.
If I had a few $ to burn on esoteric hardware, I would scourge Ebay and local auction house for second-hand Unix workstation (Sun, SGI, maybe an HP or a RS/6K). Relatively recent box can be had for a few hundred bucks.
Sure, and the day they'll decide that the 5% (or probably lower) market share they get from Linux user is'nt worth the effort they put in releasing Linux driver and stop updating their driver for Linux, what am I gonna do ?
I could continue to use the last released driver. But it probably ain't gonna work with newer kernel. I could stick to the latest supported kernel, but I suppose it's going to piss me off when I will want to upgrade to kernel 3.6.8 in a few year to get support for a feature I really need.
But then, I could upgrade my video card to one supported. I suppose that is what the hardware industry would want me to do. Unfortunately for them, I am not fond of spending money on hardware unless it is really necessary. I am still using parts I bought 6 years ago. I don't expect my video card to satisfy me that long, but I want to get at least a few years out of it.
I am shopping for a video card right now. I will not take the risk of being orphaned by Nvidia, so my money will go to ATi.
The article talk about embedding Vim in Konqueror. Unfortunately, I can't reach the site to read the details (/.ed), but if that mean I can use Vim in textbox (such as the one typing in right now), then I am really excited.
/. :)
That will double my productivity when posting to
Personnally, I don't have this kind of problem. I suppose the root of the problem here is the author's choice of OS.
I am not sure I get your point, and by the little I understand you don't get mine either. The type of scenario I was referring to is not a client connecting to a gateway, it's a gateway connecting to another gateway to make both LAN look like they are local to the client. In this scenario, the VPN connection never get NATed; it is initiated by each gateway on their outbound (Internet) interface. Routing become an issue in this scenario: how are gateway supposed to route if both side of the VPN have the same subnet ???
/etc/dhcpd.conf, wait for the lease to expire (at night, on the weekend, whatever) and bingo! all (or most) of your machine now use the subnet wich hopefully you can route thru the VPN link. Get it ?
Just to clarify my thought about DHCP: migrating adress that where statically assigned "by hand" is a lot of work since they must be changed on each workstation separately. If you use DHCP, you just have to edit
Right now, outbound PPTP connection are a real pain to NAT with iptables. There is an iptables connection tracking module but it has not yet been integrated in the base patch. Hopefully it will in iptables 1.2.6
It made internal routing *far* easier.
Not always. A big problem with private adress space appear when two business (or dept, or whatever) bridge their LAN with a VPN and they are using the same private range. Most LAN use etheir 192.168.[0|1].0/24 or 10.0.0.0/8, so this happen often (it happen to me all the time). Hopefully one or the other use DHCP so they can be migrated to an other adress range (almost) painlessly.
Complicated thing with FreeSWAN :
- Client behind NAT
- Left/Right side nomenclature really confuse me; they could have used "peers" or client/server, I don't know
- Recompiling kernel; easy if you have a single box, quite hard when you manage 30+. Plus it require you to commit the sin of rebooting the machine.
At work, we have choosen CIPE for Linux-Linux VPN. It is totally userland, come stock on recent RedHat version and is available as RPM; all that make it is easy to install and upgrade on a lot of machines. Plus the config file is really dumb-proof. We are stuck using PPTP for Windows-Linux VPN because that's all the Windows monkeys know about.
Windows XP is irrevelant anyway ...
- Decide on the plan, stand back, and let us implement
The problem with this point is that it assume that the coder are competent and have good judgement. I had been on a project where it was'nt the case. Not only was it doomed from the start (since the people involved did'nt had what it take to complete it), but some early technology choices made maintenance and improvement a nightmare. An experienced manager with some insight in database design and programming tools could have vetoed the most blatantly stupid choice early programmer made.
I am paying 45$ CDN (~30$ US), modem included, for 1 Mb/s dl, 40 Kb/s ul. Yes, the upload suck but I don't need it much beside the odd ssh session. My other option was the cable co (Videotron) at a similar price for much greater speed, but the service only allow for 6 Gb download, 2 Gb upload IIRC. Plus Videotron like to block port at random (25 inbound, 80 inbound in the Code Red era). Sympatico are cool about running server (at that speed, there is'nt much point anyway). They only block 25 outbound, so you must relay your mail thru their SMTP server.
Personnally, I am using a Nortel modem but I think (this will have to be confirmed) that those using newer modem (Alcatel) are getting greater speed. I don't complain; the added speed would only be welcome when I download ISO (about 2 hour from a good server).
BTW, this is residential service. Commercial xDSL service is much more expensive (80-200+ CDN$, depending on your SLA).
The "Gearheads Only" section of Linux Magazine have a few interesting article :
http://www.linux-mag.com/depts/gear.html
syslogd -r