Microsoft will never produce anything to take the "crown" away from
Netscape in the browser market. Also, Navigator, given 1 or maybe even 2
years to mature, will prove itself as the dominant browser. Anyone
who's surfed the web knows this. Oh and no, browsing MSN.com or
whatever in a Wal-Mart doesn't count. I'm talking about comparing
comparable sites, like Slashdot or Themes.org, both compatible with
several browsers.
After seeing their latest offerings (the N64 and Gamecube) lose money hand
over fist, Nintendo finally learned that their core competency was in
creating mediocre handheld gaming systems, and blaming a dearth of features
on the "compromises" they needed to make in order to accomodate the
handheld form factor. This strategy worked very well... until now. Sega
couldn't beat them with a color unit, and many others tried and
failed to emulate the success of the Game Boy.
Unfortunately, Nintendo's poor business sense and lack of R&D has finally
caught up to them. They are fighting an 800-lb gorilla that has billion$
of dollars to spend on dominating every area of the market that it enters.
And it looks like Microsoft is about to release a very versatile,
multipurpose handheld device that will blow all of Nintendo's offerings
right out of the water.
On the plus side, this means that consumers will have easier access to more
advanced technology than before. On the minus side, Microsoft tends to
release these products to reinforce their other monopolies. And that is
exactly why Microsoft's corporate charter needs to be revoked: they do not
play fair. They don't innovate just to create a better product; they
innovate to improve sales of their other products. It's the same reason
why Windows XP tries to con you into creating a Passport account and using
Hotmail and MSN Messenger. Once they make all of the competitors
disappear, they can start charging for their crappy services.
So, it would probably be an excellent idea to avoid this new device like
the plague. "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" won't work with us because
we are better than them.
Last year, I was responsible for reinstalling a large cluster of Sun Ultra
machines, which were NIS and NFS for distributed authentication and file
sharing. There were a couple of pitfalls along the way, but now we have a
very fast, secure system up and running. A couple of points are:
Use Linux on the client end. It is scads more maintainable than
Solaris, and its remote filesystem capabilities are very well-refined and
debugged.
Stay away from NIS+. Support is limited and the protocol itself is
complex and insecure.
Stay away from AFS and Coda. They are very difficult to set up
properly, require running buggy code in kernel space, and force you to make
dedicated hard drive partitions to support them. They also overwhelm your
network to the breaking point.
Use Kerberos for authentication. I've tried many different
implementations and found (surprisingly enough) that the UI and stability
on the Win2k Active Directory server is second to none. The MIT K5 KDC is
pretty nice too, but our admins prefer a GUI for user management.
Use NFS tunneled over SSH for file distribution. Avoid having more
than one or two NFS mounts on each client machine, and always mount with
"-o soft,bg".
Change host keys frequently to prevent trouble. I have set up scripts
to do this automatically every week.
Set up your Kerberos server to log all activity to an SQL database, and
use any of the excellent pattern analysis tools (such as UserEye) to alert
you to suspicious activity.
Make sure you use a switched network, so that nobody can sniff traffic
or engage in ARP spoofing.
Since the time when I set up this system, we have had zero security
breaches, and I earned a large (double digit percent) raise.
Having been on the internet since the late 1980s, and a Linux user since
1993, I have seen many changes that Linux has brought to the computing
world. I saw Linux grow, from an alternative server OS to a viable
contender for the desktop; I saw mindshare grow, from my niche LUG to Wall
Street to the audience of Jay Leno's show. Change is often good, and I
wouldn't trade the resources that our community has today for the comfort
of the close, friendly Linux community of yesteryear.
Unfortunately, the economics of a capitalist society are changing
things, and the results are a mixed bag. On one hand, far fewer
professional programmers will be employed, full time, to develop open
source software that everyone can use for free. On the other hand, though,
Corporate America will no longer control key parts of the Linux development
effort. As it stands right now, many Linux coders are dependent on
corporations for their paychecks; and these corporations choose which
projects the open source coders get to work on, and how those projects are
to develop. The funding is always welcome, but it has come at the expense
of independence from the capitalist society that we shun. Linux was never
about money; it was about coders developing the best product they can out
of pride and the desire to make their hard work available to everyone.
Companies like SGI, Corel, and LNUX have corrupted the open source ideal.
Money is power and power corrupts. Although SGI's contributions to Linux
development cannot be understated, nor can their influence be ignored. And
when they inevitably go out of business, it will be another nail in the
coffin of high end computer graphics, and another notch for freedom in the
axe of the open source movement. But life is often bittersweet.
Well, I didn't mean to be misleading, but I do subscribe to the least expensive package that TW offers, simply because I do not need anything better. They also offer a business-class service that provides unlimited transfers, for about $90 more per month. For T3 speeds, that's really an excellent deal unless you happen to live in a cage at Exodus.
As for your comparison with satellite access - I am not sure why you brought this up, but IIRC it costs about $70/month and has horrible latency. Contrast with my 8ms ping times to Yahoo for half the price, and the cable modem wins hands down.
The simple fact remains that your cable company has to pay for a lot of extra T1s every time a handful of warez kiddies join their network. And anything they can do to keep their costs down (and avoid raising rates or going bankrupt) is just swell. Especially if it keeps my level of service high.
In my area, Time Warner service is letting us burst at 20Mbps/3Mbps, and
transfer steadily at 10Mbps/1.5Mbps. Needless to say, their service is
very snappy. How are they able to do this?
Well, as my warez kiddie neighbor's son found out last week, they are
capping uploads to 10MB/day and downloads to 150MB/day. After that point,
their filters drop about 25% of your packets and the connection is pretty
much useless until midnight.
Since I am a responsible internet user who does not try to download
gigabytes of stuff that I don't want to be 1337, I am getting more than my
money's worth (especially that 20Mbps burst rate). And Time Warner is
making a special effort to punish the jerks who just leech all day and
waste bandwidth. The result? The network has been extremely
responsive, and reliable to boot.
I will be sticking with TW for the forseeable future because this is one
company that has finally figured out how to provide excellent cable modem
service.
was from my tax accountant. He said that in many situations, it is best to
work as a contractor and neglect to report your income. Why? Because the
IRS is very busy chasing rich
assholes and doesn't have time to bother computer geeks (who, as some
of society's best and brightest individuals, usually cover their tracks
immaculately).
So, with no further ado, here are the pointers I learned:
If you are on an H1-B visa or otherwise not a permanent resident of
the USA, you can get away without reporting most of your income. Why?
Because by the time the IRS figures out what hit them, you'll be back home.
And they don't extradite for silly "crimes" like tax evasion.
If you never plan to make more than $250k per year, you will probably
never get audited. OTOH, if you plan to ever make more than that amount,
the chances that the IRS will look into your background are pretty high and
you might get audited for the three years prior to the first year when you
struck it big.
Change addresses often so that you never get W2s or 1099's. Don't fill
out mail forwarding cards. This gives you plausible deniability.
Especially if you have lots of different contract positions in the same
year.
Some of you may be saying, "isn't that cheating?" Well, as a sometimes
Libertarian, I can tell you that the government would only waste your money
on lazy poor people, pork barrel missile defense systems, and $600 toilet
seats anyway. So why bother paying your fair share if your fair share only
buys junk? Maybe it will be time for us to pay taxes when our government
starts caring about us.
I've been following the discussion about this show on USENET, and the speculation about who
the cast members will be is rampant and very interesting. Here are some of
the more likely possibilities:
Sarah Michelle Geller is likely to be cast as an alien, as
the obligatory 7-of-9 clone.
Wil Wheaton, in an effort to rescue his foundering career, will
probably be one of the main characters. He will work for cheap and he's
easily recognizable, so why not?
David Duchovney will probably also have many guest appearances,
although keeping him on full-time will probably put the show waaaay over
budget.
Ryan Phillippe will probably be the token pretty-boy character,
because, well, that's just what he does best.
There were many other names mentioned, of course, but these seemed to be
the most credible.
Giving people the ability to spy on each other from several miles above the
Earth is just begging for abuse. Imagine how much easier it is to be a
stalker or an asshole cop nowadays; just watch your target for activity
until they do something wrong.
Incidentally, that happened to one of my cousins; he farmed several acres
of land that were passed down from our great grandfather, and devoted a
small patch to growing marijuana. One of the local troublemakers got into
an argument with him once, and started watching him with a satellite
imaging service (cf Enemy of the State). Sure enough, he
mysteriously got turned in for growing pot by an anonymous caller and lost
the entire farm. When he got out of prison, he went on welfare and has
been living off the government dole for quite a while now because he has
few skills and a nasty criminal record that he doesn't deserve.
I really feel bad for him, and I think we should all oppose this horrible
tool of surveillance before it is used against one of us.
I hate the RIAA and their supporters just as much as the next guy, but this
policy is really only common sense. The fees are outrageous, but contrary
to popular belief, there's no reason why webcasters should be able to reach
an enormous new audience on the internet and get away without paying
any additional fees. And if they feel that the fees are unfair, our free
market system will let them make the conscious decision to just stop
webcasting and not have to pay another dime.
For instance, consider the following scenario: radio stations N and L,
located in New York and L.A., are owned by the same person. N webcasts
their content (for free, under the old regulations), and L rebroadcasts it.
Why wouldn't L get to rebroadcast it for free, considering that everybody
in L.A. already has access to it? ASCAP is there for a reason: the more
you distribute the music, the higher the price, because: the more you
distribute the music, the more you can charge your advertisers.
There is a time and a place to bash the RIAA but let's choose our battles a
little more wisely, okay?
I'd just like to start out by saying that banning a freakin video
game is not going to solve the world's problems, and is completely
absurd.
However, I do see where their government is going with this. It has been a
disturbing trend for several decades in this country that criminals feed on
the public's attention, and when the public gives much attention to
criminals, it encourages people with self esteem issues to become
criminals.
That, then, is the problem with GTA: it encourages car theft. Not in the
sense that a GTA player is likely to go out and steal a car, but rather
that it allows a culture to slip steadily closer to a hellish society in
which crime is tolerated in order to entertain the public. This is not
unlike the Colosseum in ancient Rome, in which murders took place between
god-fearing christians for the sake of the public's amusement. Compare
this to the instant notoriety of serial killers like John Wayne Gacy, who
make a killing selling paintings from prison, and you can see why the
government wants to stop glorifying crime now.
Something must be done about this morbid situation. But it doesn't involve
banning games. Perhaps it is a media problem; if the government owned a
few media outlets, it would be able to put writers and producers with old
fashioned values back on the TV, replacing the ratings whores we have
today. That is a bit closer to socialism than we should be, but it might
be better for society in the long run.
Online anonymity is a tool to facilitate open discussions. It is not here to help people break copyright laws with impunity. Don't you realize that the more privileges we abuse, the fewer privileges we will have? Or are you one of the people who constantly reposts "OT III" here just because you can get away with it?
Breaking the law anonymously is not an act of civil disobedience; it is an act of cowardice, and it will bring little sympathy from the public or from the people who are in positions of power.
I am a part-time Solaris administrator who has several machines that are
affected by this flaw. When I read about it on BUGTRAQ yesterday, I went
to the "free Solaris" download page, grabbed the source tree, and patched
and rebuilt my version of/bin/login. The whole process took about half an
hour (excluding download time).
But I am not an "average administrator." Months ago, I faxed Sun a really
long contract that gave me the right to download their source distribution.
This was a major PITA but I needed to modify some other parts of the OS at
the time, so I had no choice.
I simply cannot believe that Sun is taking over two months to patch this
very simple problem. It's an unchecked buffer, for God's
sake. Most C coders can fix a problem like this in their sleep.
And that is why I believe that open source has a future and Sun does not.
Regardless of what your stance is on the "many eyes makes all problems
shallow" doctrine, it is beyond debate that fixing this sort of bug in
Linux is extremely easy for the average C programmer. Unfortunately, that
programmer may not have signed Sun's NDAs and sold their soul, and they
would not have the source access that it takes to protect their
machines.
I really wish I could post my patch here, but that is a violation of my
NDA. Sun's absolutist stance on intellectual property may sell them a lot
of copies of Solaris, but it leaves us administrators exposed and looking
stupid. My group will be moving to Linux as soon as all of our
applications are available for it, and we will be giving Sun the boot. The
nicer machines and OS just aren't worth the risk of getting rooted.
Slashdot Mirror
Bill
Unfortunately, Nintendo's poor business sense and lack of R&D has finally caught up to them. They are fighting an 800-lb gorilla that has billion$ of dollars to spend on dominating every area of the market that it enters. And it looks like Microsoft is about to release a very versatile, multipurpose handheld device that will blow all of Nintendo's offerings right out of the water.
On the plus side, this means that consumers will have easier access to more advanced technology than before. On the minus side, Microsoft tends to release these products to reinforce their other monopolies. And that is exactly why Microsoft's corporate charter needs to be revoked: they do not play fair. They don't innovate just to create a better product; they innovate to improve sales of their other products. It's the same reason why Windows XP tries to con you into creating a Passport account and using Hotmail and MSN Messenger. Once they make all of the competitors disappear, they can start charging for their crappy services.
So, it would probably be an excellent idea to avoid this new device like the plague. "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" won't work with us because we are better than them.
Bill
- Use Linux on the client end. It is scads more maintainable than
Solaris, and its remote filesystem capabilities are very well-refined and
debugged.
- Stay away from NIS+. Support is limited and the protocol itself is
complex and insecure.
- Stay away from AFS and Coda. They are very difficult to set up
properly, require running buggy code in kernel space, and force you to make
dedicated hard drive partitions to support them. They also overwhelm your
network to the breaking point.
- Use Kerberos for authentication. I've tried many different
implementations and found (surprisingly enough) that the UI and stability
on the Win2k Active Directory server is second to none. The MIT K5 KDC is
pretty nice too, but our admins prefer a GUI for user management.
- Use NFS tunneled over SSH for file distribution. Avoid having more
than one or two NFS mounts on each client machine, and always mount with
"-o soft,bg".
- Change host keys frequently to prevent trouble. I have set up scripts
to do this automatically every week.
- Set up your Kerberos server to log all activity to an SQL database, and
use any of the excellent pattern analysis tools (such as UserEye) to alert
you to suspicious activity.
- Make sure you use a switched network, so that nobody can sniff traffic
or engage in ARP spoofing.
Since the time when I set up this system, we have had zero security breaches, and I earned a large (double digit percent) raise.Good luck!
Bill
Unfortunately, the economics of a capitalist society are changing things, and the results are a mixed bag. On one hand, far fewer professional programmers will be employed, full time, to develop open source software that everyone can use for free. On the other hand, though, Corporate America will no longer control key parts of the Linux development effort. As it stands right now, many Linux coders are dependent on corporations for their paychecks; and these corporations choose which projects the open source coders get to work on, and how those projects are to develop. The funding is always welcome, but it has come at the expense of independence from the capitalist society that we shun. Linux was never about money; it was about coders developing the best product they can out of pride and the desire to make their hard work available to everyone.
Companies like SGI, Corel, and LNUX have corrupted the open source ideal. Money is power and power corrupts. Although SGI's contributions to Linux development cannot be understated, nor can their influence be ignored. And when they inevitably go out of business, it will be another nail in the coffin of high end computer graphics, and another notch for freedom in the axe of the open source movement. But life is often bittersweet.
Bill
As for your comparison with satellite access - I am not sure why you brought this up, but IIRC it costs about $70/month and has horrible latency. Contrast with my 8ms ping times to Yahoo for half the price, and the cable modem wins hands down.
The simple fact remains that your cable company has to pay for a lot of extra T1s every time a handful of warez kiddies join their network. And anything they can do to keep their costs down (and avoid raising rates or going bankrupt) is just swell. Especially if it keeps my level of service high.
Bill
Well, as my warez kiddie neighbor's son found out last week, they are capping uploads to 10MB/day and downloads to 150MB/day. After that point, their filters drop about 25% of your packets and the connection is pretty much useless until midnight.
Since I am a responsible internet user who does not try to download gigabytes of stuff that I don't want to be 1337, I am getting more than my money's worth (especially that 20Mbps burst rate). And Time Warner is making a special effort to punish the jerks who just leech all day and waste bandwidth. The result? The network has been extremely responsive, and reliable to boot.
I will be sticking with TW for the forseeable future because this is one company that has finally figured out how to provide excellent cable modem service.
Bill
So, with no further ado, here are the pointers I learned:
- If you are on an H1-B visa or otherwise not a permanent resident of
the USA, you can get away without reporting most of your income. Why?
Because by the time the IRS figures out what hit them, you'll be back home.
And they don't extradite for silly "crimes" like tax evasion.
- If you never plan to make more than $250k per year, you will probably
never get audited. OTOH, if you plan to ever make more than that amount,
the chances that the IRS will look into your background are pretty high and
you might get audited for the three years prior to the first year when you
struck it big.
- Change addresses often so that you never get W2s or 1099's. Don't fill
out mail forwarding cards. This gives you plausible deniability.
Especially if you have lots of different contract positions in the same
year.
Some of you may be saying, "isn't that cheating?" Well, as a sometimes Libertarian, I can tell you that the government would only waste your money on lazy poor people, pork barrel missile defense systems, and $600 toilet seats anyway. So why bother paying your fair share if your fair share only buys junk? Maybe it will be time for us to pay taxes when our government starts caring about us.Just my 2c.
Bill
- Sarah Michelle Geller is likely to be cast as an alien, as
the obligatory 7-of-9 clone.
- Wil Wheaton, in an effort to rescue his foundering career, will
probably be one of the main characters. He will work for cheap and he's
easily recognizable, so why not?
- David Duchovney will probably also have many guest appearances,
although keeping him on full-time will probably put the show waaaay over
budget.
- Ryan Phillippe will probably be the token pretty-boy character,
because, well, that's just what he does best.
There were many other names mentioned, of course, but these seemed to be the most credible.Bill
Incidentally, that happened to one of my cousins; he farmed several acres of land that were passed down from our great grandfather, and devoted a small patch to growing marijuana. One of the local troublemakers got into an argument with him once, and started watching him with a satellite imaging service (cf Enemy of the State). Sure enough, he mysteriously got turned in for growing pot by an anonymous caller and lost the entire farm. When he got out of prison, he went on welfare and has been living off the government dole for quite a while now because he has few skills and a nasty criminal record that he doesn't deserve.
I really feel bad for him, and I think we should all oppose this horrible tool of surveillance before it is used against one of us.
Bill
For instance, consider the following scenario: radio stations N and L, located in New York and L.A., are owned by the same person. N webcasts their content (for free, under the old regulations), and L rebroadcasts it. Why wouldn't L get to rebroadcast it for free, considering that everybody in L.A. already has access to it? ASCAP is there for a reason: the more you distribute the music, the higher the price, because: the more you distribute the music, the more you can charge your advertisers.
There is a time and a place to bash the RIAA but let's choose our battles a little more wisely, okay?
Bill
However, I do see where their government is going with this. It has been a disturbing trend for several decades in this country that criminals feed on the public's attention, and when the public gives much attention to criminals, it encourages people with self esteem issues to become criminals.
That, then, is the problem with GTA: it encourages car theft. Not in the sense that a GTA player is likely to go out and steal a car, but rather that it allows a culture to slip steadily closer to a hellish society in which crime is tolerated in order to entertain the public. This is not unlike the Colosseum in ancient Rome, in which murders took place between god-fearing christians for the sake of the public's amusement. Compare this to the instant notoriety of serial killers like John Wayne Gacy, who make a killing selling paintings from prison, and you can see why the government wants to stop glorifying crime now.
Something must be done about this morbid situation. But it doesn't involve banning games. Perhaps it is a media problem; if the government owned a few media outlets, it would be able to put writers and producers with old fashioned values back on the TV, replacing the ratings whores we have today. That is a bit closer to socialism than we should be, but it might be better for society in the long run.
Bill
Breaking the law anonymously is not an act of civil disobedience; it is an act of cowardice, and it will bring little sympathy from the public or from the people who are in positions of power.
Bill
But I am not an "average administrator." Months ago, I faxed Sun a really long contract that gave me the right to download their source distribution. This was a major PITA but I needed to modify some other parts of the OS at the time, so I had no choice.
I simply cannot believe that Sun is taking over two months to patch this very simple problem. It's an unchecked buffer, for God's sake. Most C coders can fix a problem like this in their sleep.
And that is why I believe that open source has a future and Sun does not. Regardless of what your stance is on the "many eyes makes all problems shallow" doctrine, it is beyond debate that fixing this sort of bug in Linux is extremely easy for the average C programmer. Unfortunately, that programmer may not have signed Sun's NDAs and sold their soul, and they would not have the source access that it takes to protect their machines.
I really wish I could post my patch here, but that is a violation of my NDA. Sun's absolutist stance on intellectual property may sell them a lot of copies of Solaris, but it leaves us administrators exposed and looking stupid. My group will be moving to Linux as soon as all of our applications are available for it, and we will be giving Sun the boot. The nicer machines and OS just aren't worth the risk of getting rooted.
Bill