If the box is configured properly, it shouldn't be a security risk. A poorly configured firewall can be just as bad a security risk as a poorly configured firewall/router/server.
Routers have limited features; I should have added that I'd probably also put other stuff on it (ie, run an NFS/Samba server, Apache + anything else I feel like).
Anyone know how noisy (or quiet) these are? With only one fan, I'd expect it to be pretty good.
Reason I ask is that I'm looking to get ADSL soon (on order, actually) and I'd like to run a linux box as gateway/router/firewall on the ADSL and this looks ideal provided it's quiet enough.
I think part of the problem with some companies is the problem of certifying the safety and working state of the systems. In short, donating an electrically unsafe computer is a problem for a company. I'm sure the systems are 99% safe, but the litigation prospects are somewhat scary to these companies. In these cases, it's safer (and probably cheaper) just to throw them in the skip.
A broken computer is less of an issue as I'm sure your mom's school would be happy to get 10 working computers out of a batch of 20 if they got them for free!
Perhaps a motivation for companies would be to maintain a log (ie, a web page) of who donates computers to schools/charities etc and those who refuse. The bad press associated with the non-donating companies ought to persuade a few to at least look into donations.
It's called TSC, and I registered on it. However, it's not overly effective, as marketers can still call for "market research".
Worst case was fairly recently. Got called up, said, not interested, please remove me from your list. "Oh, if you don't want to be called, register with TSC". "I have!" I replied. Drone promptly mutters goodbye and hangs up. I was not impressed.
What we really need to stop telemarketers is Hastur in the answering machine (see "Good Omens").
XMMS isn't just a linux MP3 player; there are now plugins for Solaris, AIX, IRIX and other Unixes.
Perhaps more importantly (for linux users, at least) is that the open source nature make developing plugins easier.
What would be good would be binary compatibilty between XMMS and Winamp plugins. Having not looked at Winamp plugin development, I don't know how hard that would be; anyone know how compatible they are/could be?
I think someone proposed an idea like this in order to test the GPL, but this counts as something like collusions, which the courts don't like. In any event, I'd rather not see the EFF stoop to these depths, as it would lose a lot of legitimacy.
That would seem to be the case; certainly the main crux of their argument is that action under the DMCA has not happened and has not been threatened, therefore no free speech rights have been infringed.
Personally, I think it might be an idea to forget about this case until there is a real threat of prosecution; otherwise the EFF have a potentially long and costly battle to even get the original case into court.
Well, after some toing and froing, the threat was dropped and Felten was allowed to publish. However, the wording by the DoJ is either poorly written or deliberately misleading (take your pick). There is no current threat to Felten AFAIK, but he has been threatened (implied or directly) with prosecution.
Hrm, not sure I agree with that. It's basically a modified Visual C++ or Visual Basic (*puke*) on Pocket PC. The development software is only about $15 from MS as well (this is something they did right, for a change). You can even download it, but I couldn't be bothered taking 3 days to download it on my 56k Modem and tying up my phone line. Porting other software to it could be a hassle, but porting is always an issue.
I'm not aware of any 'license' restrictions on distributing software from the Embedded toolkit; if there is something which limits distributing software made with it, let me know...
Both TSM (formerly ADSM; from IBM) and Legato Networker have linux and NT servers/clients. However, the license fees for them are somewhat steep, reaching into the 4 figure area quite quickly.
Javascript doesn't actually change the function of back or close; it just traps "windowclose" or "exitframe" (no, I don't know Javascript, but I do know there are events which handle these things). The JS traps this and launches a new window where the author wants you to be.
FWIW, the only time I've seen this implemented to a fully irritating degree was the home page of Rev Don Kool (a notorious web troll on comp.unix.*).
Oh, and as has been pointed out, several browsers have options to limit this behaviour, such as Konquerer. I'm sure someone could get a comprehensive list together of which browser do and don't have some support for disabling openWindow()
Never crashes? Dunno about Pocket PC 2002, but I've seen an iPaq 3630 get hosed with itself such that I couldn't start up Contacts. A soft reset cured that, though (i.e. a reboot).
As for why use linux, well:
Because you can. Some people will try and run linux on everything that has a CPU and RAM.:) It's a geek thing, I think...
Custom uses; here you have nicely packaged hardware with a reasonable amount of RAM (go back 2-3 years and 64MB was a privilege!); I'm sure you could develop some good custom utilities that require portability (e.g. stock inventories in a warehouse). Using linux allows a custom kernel to be deployed making such tools more efficient (hopefully!) and/or making integration with an existing linux/Unix infrastructure easier. That said, many tools could simply be deployed as Pocket PC apps.
Your point about being custom made is good, though. I bought mine as a PDA, not as a mobile computing platform. All I need is something to sync up contacts and calender info and the ability to browse the web using IR and a GSM phone. Pocket PC 3.0 lets me do this quite happily with Outhouse (not my choice; company standard) at work.
The 32MB flash is a requirement for Pocket PC 2002; you can fit it on an iPaq 3630/3660, but if you do, you have to install the Media player and some other software into the RAM.
Personally, I'm finding the 32MB RAM in my 3630 adequate for my needs; I'm not using it to lug around dozens of images or large documents, after all! Remember, even new-ish Palms only have around 8MB, although I imagine that Palm apps must be smaller.
I used to play those Mahjongg games on my Spectrum+ and that must have been something like 88/89. The game was called Tai Pei, IIRC, and I got it from a cover tape from a magazine.
I used to spend hours on that game; very simple, but a lot of fun (somewhat like Tetris)! These days, I have free replacements in Gnome and KDE, although I prefer KDE's version, just for the graphics. I find it harder to differentiate the tiles under Gnome.
Where I work, there's some movement towards e-business; in fact, one of my current projects is the setup of a development server for eBusiness using Websphere Application Server under AIX (WAS is an IBM product, FWIW).
Early next year, I expect another project to set up acceptance and live environments; that project should have a hardware budget well into 6 figures (UK pounds), so there's certainly still some money going towards it.
As for globally, we have 3 "centres of excellence" (internal term; basically, the idea is that all the servers and expertise is concentrated in 3 sites; one in Europe, one in America and on in Asia); we're not one, but we're doing things the other centres aren't due to the way the business operates, so we're setting up another centre:)
Much as I'd rather not rise to this, I think certain points have to be made.
"There is a tons of Windows software as well". How many Windows sites actually run anything other than IIS/Exchange/Outlook? I'm pretty sure it's a minority (<10%?), while there aren't any linux programs with as great a market share under linux (except Apache as I said). In any event, I said nothing about quality; a worm relies on homogeneous systems to operate, so variety lowers the infection rate of the worm.
I wasn't comparing Unix to linux in any way, merely stating that linux is likely to coexist with versions of Unix which increases variety and lowers the impact of a worm.
Architecture: see above. Ok, it's probably possible to write the code so it can operate on multiple ISA's, but that's extra work and in any event, some ISA's handle stacks in different ways, so there's the potential that buffer overflows won't work in the same way. Also, Sparc CPU's (possibly only sun4u) have protected stack; set a kernel parameter and buffer overflows can be limited.
Yes, Windows NT has had protected memory and support for multiple users. However, how many IIS sites run as anything other than system? Does IIS even work as an unprivileged user? Compare this with qmail & apache which by default install as an unprivileged user.
Linux has a greater variety of software. Look at mail servers; we have exim, postfix, qmail and sendmail. A vulnerability in one cannot (easily) be exploited in another. The single largest target is Apache, which is by far the most popular web server software (with good reason; it is of very high quality). However, Apache has had almost no serious security flaws that I can think of; most exploits against Apache have exploited password sniff attacks or poorly secured applications hosted on the system, not targets for worms.
On similar notes, even if linux/Unix takes over the world, there is likely to be a greater diversity of OS versions. At the current time, I can't see linux wiping out Solaris and AIX for a few years; I can see them coexisting and hopefully taking back ground from Windows, however.
Even if linux takes over, wiping out proprietary Unix, there are still likely to be different hardware architectures in use (eg, x86, Itanium, Sledgehammer, SPARC, PPC, S/390) limiting the impact of a worm. By contrast Windows is x86 only (at the current time, although Itanium may come in soonish) which provides easier spreading of worms.
While many MS server programs run as system or equivalent "super-user" type user ID's, many linux programs spend most of their time running as a non-privileged user (eg, apache runs as nobody or www, qmail runs as various uid's). Thus, the effect of an exploit is greatly lessened. The use of tools like chroot can also help lessen any impact (although chroot is not a foolproof solution).
*nix worms have already hit; Solaris had the sadmind worm, linux had lion. They hit for the same reasons Code Red hit; unpatched systems. These had less impact, but it has to be asked whether that was due to lower market share or better security policies of administrators.
There is the potential for these worms to hit, but I think the general architecture of linux and the diversity in applications should help to lessen the impact of such worms.
I agree completely. I've done some web development (PHP under Apache, FWIW) and the database was the glue to the whole system, storing user information and all the details in it.
Whether you're using Perl, PHP, ASP, Java, JSP, Python or any other language, the backend database is the most important aspect of what you are working with and the SQL statements are identical under each language.
It's worth being aware, however, that you can generally get by with simple SELECT, INSERT, DELETE and UPDATE commands; outer joins and their ilk are probably less necessary, but can save a lot of programming work if you get them right.
Finally, learn what foreign keys are! They will save the integrity of your database and save a butt-load (imperial) of sanity checks in your program! This was one of my main drives to upgrade PostgreSQL when 7.0 came out as it was, IIRC, the first to support foreign keys.
As an aside, you may not have to understand how to be a DBA. Where I work, we have "infrastructure" and "applications". Infrastructure manage the OS and Oracle DBA stuff (installation, tweaking init paramaters and user creation) while the applications people create the databases, create tables and populate them with data. If you fit into the 'applications' part (which it sounds like you want to), you just need to know where the database is and how to access it.
I doubt you'll be able to write applications for a system like this; how would you tell it how to launch the program? On a similar note, I'd imagine that you couldn't put linux (or another OS) on the system as you probably can't specify the "boot device"; it'll be hardwired to start up the phone "OS".
On a brighter note, you should be able to write something to interface to the system and copy MP3's to the system, but you'd have to work out the USB protocols. I know there are serial sniffers available (ie, tools which listen to all traffic on serial lines which you can then read and use that to reverse engineer the protocol) and I'd imagine similar tools are out for USB.
Whatever you do try, get a web page up and try publicizing your work (eg, on newsgroups, but don't SPAM!) so that you can get others to help out; when I did the Solaris plugin for XMMS, I got several great patches from other users which transformed it from a flaky pile of junk into something which worked nearly flawlessly.
I've heard of cases where the cooling system was actually implemented as a pretty waterfall; this isn't actually a bad idea, as the increased surface area should allow good heat dissipation.
ISTR this was done by Silicon Graphics; they were always the ones for prettifying their systems.:)
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If the box is configured properly, it shouldn't be a security risk. A poorly configured firewall can be just as bad a security risk as a poorly configured firewall/router/server.
I'm worried about sound because this would be on 24/7, unlike the noisy stuff in my room that I can switch off. :)
Routers have limited features; I should have added that I'd probably also put other stuff on it (ie, run an NFS/Samba server, Apache + anything else I feel like).
Reason I ask is that I'm looking to get ADSL soon (on order, actually) and I'd like to run a linux box as gateway/router/firewall on the ADSL and this looks ideal provided it's quiet enough.
It uses "H.323, T.120 and T.127 standards for communicating multimedia and other data between conference participants"
From the FAQ, it looks like it should interoperate with Netmeeting etc if it talks the same language (H.323)
A broken computer is less of an issue as I'm sure your mom's school would be happy to get 10 working computers out of a batch of 20 if they got them for free!
Perhaps a motivation for companies would be to maintain a log (ie, a web page) of who donates computers to schools/charities etc and those who refuse. The bad press associated with the non-donating companies ought to persuade a few to at least look into donations.
Worst case was fairly recently. Got called up, said, not interested, please remove me from your list. "Oh, if you don't want to be called, register with TSC". "I have!" I replied. Drone promptly mutters goodbye and hangs up. I was not impressed.
What we really need to stop telemarketers is Hastur in the answering machine (see "Good Omens").
Perhaps more importantly (for linux users, at least) is that the open source nature make developing plugins easier.
What would be good would be binary compatibilty between XMMS and Winamp plugins. Having not looked at Winamp plugin development, I don't know how hard that would be; anyone know how compatible they are/could be?
I think someone proposed an idea like this in order to test the GPL, but this counts as something like collusions, which the courts don't like. In any event, I'd rather not see the EFF stoop to these depths, as it would lose a lot of legitimacy.
Personally, I think it might be an idea to forget about this case until there is a real threat of prosecution; otherwise the EFF have a potentially long and costly battle to even get the original case into court.
Well, after some toing and froing, the threat was dropped and Felten was allowed to publish. However, the wording by the DoJ is either poorly written or deliberately misleading (take your pick). There is no current threat to Felten AFAIK, but he has been threatened (implied or directly) with prosecution.
I'm not aware of any 'license' restrictions on distributing software from the Embedded toolkit; if there is something which limits distributing software made with it, let me know...
Both TSM (formerly ADSM; from IBM) and Legato Networker have linux and NT servers/clients. However, the license fees for them are somewhat steep, reaching into the 4 figure area quite quickly.
FWIW, the only time I've seen this implemented to a fully irritating degree was the home page of Rev Don Kool (a notorious web troll on comp.unix.*).
Oh, and as has been pointed out, several browsers have options to limit this behaviour, such as Konquerer. I'm sure someone could get a comprehensive list together of which browser do and don't have some support for disabling openWindow()
As for why use linux, well:
- Because you can. Some people will try and run linux on everything that has a CPU and RAM.
:) It's a geek thing, I think...
- Custom uses; here you have nicely packaged hardware with a reasonable amount of RAM (go back 2-3 years and 64MB was a privilege!); I'm sure you could develop some good custom utilities that require portability (e.g. stock inventories in a warehouse). Using linux allows a custom kernel to be deployed making such tools more efficient (hopefully!) and/or making integration with an existing linux/Unix infrastructure easier. That said, many tools could simply be deployed as Pocket PC apps.
Your point about being custom made is good, though. I bought mine as a PDA, not as a mobile computing platform. All I need is something to sync up contacts and calender info and the ability to browse the web using IR and a GSM phone. Pocket PC 3.0 lets me do this quite happily with Outhouse (not my choice; company standard) at work.Personally, I'm finding the 32MB RAM in my 3630 adequate for my needs; I'm not using it to lug around dozens of images or large documents, after all! Remember, even new-ish Palms only have around 8MB, although I imagine that Palm apps must be smaller.
As for the joystick, I only use it for qtris :)
I used to spend hours on that game; very simple, but a lot of fun (somewhat like Tetris)! These days, I have free replacements in Gnome and KDE, although I prefer KDE's version, just for the graphics. I find it harder to differentiate the tiles under Gnome.
Early next year, I expect another project to set up acceptance and live environments; that project should have a hardware budget well into 6 figures (UK pounds), so there's certainly still some money going towards it.
As for globally, we have 3 "centres of excellence" (internal term; basically, the idea is that all the servers and expertise is concentrated in 3 sites; one in Europe, one in America and on in Asia); we're not one, but we're doing things the other centres aren't due to the way the business operates, so we're setting up another centre :)
"There is a tons of Windows software as well". How many Windows sites actually run anything other than IIS/Exchange/Outlook? I'm pretty sure it's a minority (<10%?), while there aren't any linux programs with as great a market share under linux (except Apache as I said). In any event, I said nothing about quality; a worm relies on homogeneous systems to operate, so variety lowers the infection rate of the worm.
I wasn't comparing Unix to linux in any way, merely stating that linux is likely to coexist with versions of Unix which increases variety and lowers the impact of a worm.
Architecture: see above. Ok, it's probably possible to write the code so it can operate on multiple ISA's, but that's extra work and in any event, some ISA's handle stacks in different ways, so there's the potential that buffer overflows won't work in the same way. Also, Sparc CPU's (possibly only sun4u) have protected stack; set a kernel parameter and buffer overflows can be limited.
Yes, Windows NT has had protected memory and support for multiple users. However, how many IIS sites run as anything other than system? Does IIS even work as an unprivileged user? Compare this with qmail & apache which by default install as an unprivileged user.
- Linux has a greater variety of software. Look at mail servers; we have exim, postfix, qmail and sendmail. A vulnerability in one cannot (easily) be exploited in another. The single largest target is Apache, which is by far the most popular web server software (with good reason; it is of very high quality). However, Apache has had almost no serious security flaws that I can think of; most exploits against Apache have exploited password sniff attacks or poorly secured applications hosted on the system, not targets for worms.
- On similar notes, even if linux/Unix takes over the world, there is likely to be a greater diversity of OS versions. At the current time, I can't see linux wiping out Solaris and AIX for a few years; I can see them coexisting and hopefully taking back ground from Windows, however.
- Even if linux takes over, wiping out proprietary Unix, there are still likely to be different hardware architectures in use (eg, x86, Itanium, Sledgehammer, SPARC, PPC, S/390) limiting the impact of a worm. By contrast Windows is x86 only (at the current time, although Itanium may come in soonish) which provides easier spreading of worms.
- While many MS server programs run as system or equivalent "super-user" type user ID's, many linux programs spend most of their time running as a non-privileged user (eg, apache runs as nobody or www, qmail runs as various uid's). Thus, the effect of an exploit is greatly lessened. The use of tools like chroot can also help lessen any impact (although chroot is not a foolproof solution).
- *nix worms have already hit; Solaris had the sadmind worm, linux had lion. They hit for the same reasons Code Red hit; unpatched systems. These had less impact, but it has to be asked whether that was due to lower market share or better security policies of administrators.
There is the potential for these worms to hit, but I think the general architecture of linux and the diversity in applications should help to lessen the impact of such worms.Just remember that on your CV, you spent time working at "a high bandwidth e-commerce site with high availability requirements".
Whether you're using Perl, PHP, ASP, Java, JSP, Python or any other language, the backend database is the most important aspect of what you are working with and the SQL statements are identical under each language.
It's worth being aware, however, that you can generally get by with simple SELECT, INSERT, DELETE and UPDATE commands; outer joins and their ilk are probably less necessary, but can save a lot of programming work if you get them right.
Finally, learn what foreign keys are! They will save the integrity of your database and save a butt-load (imperial) of sanity checks in your program! This was one of my main drives to upgrade PostgreSQL when 7.0 came out as it was, IIRC, the first to support foreign keys.
As an aside, you may not have to understand how to be a DBA. Where I work, we have "infrastructure" and "applications". Infrastructure manage the OS and Oracle DBA stuff (installation, tweaking init paramaters and user creation) while the applications people create the databases, create tables and populate them with data. If you fit into the 'applications' part (which it sounds like you want to), you just need to know where the database is and how to access it.
On a brighter note, you should be able to write something to interface to the system and copy MP3's to the system, but you'd have to work out the USB protocols. I know there are serial sniffers available (ie, tools which listen to all traffic on serial lines which you can then read and use that to reverse engineer the protocol) and I'd imagine similar tools are out for USB.
Whatever you do try, get a web page up and try publicizing your work (eg, on newsgroups, but don't SPAM!) so that you can get others to help out; when I did the Solaris plugin for XMMS, I got several great patches from other users which transformed it from a flaky pile of junk into something which worked nearly flawlessly.
Personally, I don't trust the common citizen as far as I could throw an aeroplane. These are the same people that voted Dubya in, after all.
ISTR this was done by Silicon Graphics; they were always the ones for prettifying their systems. :)