Thanks for the reply, the only one I've had so far:)
1) Get rid of that background picture. The text is unreadable. Or at least brighten it up so it acts more like a watermark than a full picture.
The GIMP has done its work on that image - it's also the right way up now. Much better, thanks.
As for MS Comic Sans, I'm sorry, but I can't agree with you there. "silliness, childish naivete [and] irreverence" suit this site like they don't suit " restaurant signage [] college exams [and] medical information". If you hate that font so much, why not uninstall it and have your browser render it as default instead?
Depends on what you mean by 'studio'. If it's a professional facility with high-end mics and a 64-channel Soundcraft desk, then yes, that's expensive. If it's a rehearsal room under a flyover (still quite well soundproofed) to which you bring your own gear, well this track cost about £20 to lay down.
For more stuff, check sig (I knew it would be relevant one day)
Site is 'all my own work', so props, flames and complaints about how it doesn't render properly in Konqueror to admin[AT]ahymsa.co.uk. Feedback is always useful. Cheers
You beat me to it.
I would add, though, that throughout the Napoleonic wars, and wherever in the world they operated at that time (including the Caribbean and Mediterranean), the Royal Navy's water ration was "one gallon per man, per day, for all purposes". This was an Imperial gallon, about ten US pints, but it shows what can be done if you try:)
Didn't somebody have 'I declare that I have not been required to provide any decryption keys' as their.sig?
I haven't seen it lately - maybe they have had to provide them now?
Interestingly, the AA (Automobile Association) popularised this negative flag technique - they were originally a club to defeat speed traps. An AA patrolman would station himself ahead of a speed trap to warn motorists. This was declared 'obstructing an officer in the course of his duties' and a modification was made. If there was no speed trap, the patrolman would salute the motorist; if there was one the patrolman would fail to salute, the motorist would stop and 'berate him for dereliction of his duty' and, by the way, be informed of the speed trap.
I certainly do not want to be held to what I said then and I certainly don't want to be held to what I say right now 5 years from now
Hmmm. Eight years ago this August, I said a couple of words that changed my life and that of at least one other person. A number of people would be very unhappy were I to say that I didn't want to be held to them anymore.
Nonsense.
Linux is perfect for clueless newbies. Why? 'Cos they can't fuck it up, is why!
A work friend of mine wanted to 'try out this computer thing'. First thought:'Oh, shit. I'm going to have to reinstall this thing for him at least monthly, clean it up even more often, and he'll either get pissed off with the machine for screwing up (when it's his fault) or with me when I finally lose patience and tell him to RTFM.'
Careful questioning, however, revealed that he had barely heard of MS or Windows, and just wanted to 'surf the web, send email, play that funny card game (solitaire)'.
I spotted an opportunity.
I agreed to help him buy an older (PII-266 actually) machine, which would be very cheap, and more than adequate for his needs, and to install an operating system ('What's that?') and some useful programs. After a little thought, I used Mandrake 8.1, since it included lighweight window managers (I used Icewm), and installed Konqueror, Kmail, the Koffice suite, cups set up to use an old printer we'd found, xmms and every single silly little game on the install discs that would run on that ageing hardware (no tuxracer, cannon smash, or GLTron:-()
I then spent about an hour locking everything down as tightly as I could, including user settings.
I set him up with a username and password for himself and each of his two daughters, talked him through logging in and running a few apps, and left him to it. I did not tell him the root password (in fact, I've probably forgotten it myself), the only filesystem mounted rw is/home, and all removable media mounts noexec.
It's now six months since I handed the box over to him. No 'phone calls. No complaints. No 'My computer's gotten awfully slow lately'.
I speak to him quite often at work; occasionally I ask how he's getting on with it. He has no problems using it, his daughters can do school stuff on it, even his mother found it easy to get to grips with.
Nothing has stopped working or become unusable, they haven't been trojaned, contracted any viruses or lost any data.
And they all love those silly little games:)
No, actually I thought it more likely to have something to do with a male chicken, or just a male in general (cf. cock-robin, cock-horse). 'Cocky' and 'cocksure' probably share the same root, too. Not everyone's mind lives in the gutter.
Perhaps it isn't in wide use outside the North of England (I grew up in London, and now live in Wales)?
Comparing Google results for tomfoolery (188,000 results) and cockfoolery (36 and an alternate spelling suggestion), it's easy to see which has greater global usage.
Maybe you ought to consider the possibility that your being right does not, in all cases, make everybody else wrong?
With regards to your keyboard comment, it is not possible to cut out the "middleman", as the manufacturers themselves are acting in that role.
So the manufacturers are selling these devices from their own websites, with their physical addresses and contact information freely available, in the knowledge that poor products or service will be commented on in forums worldwide (including this one) that will be read by the geeky types who are their target market; on top of which, if you're paying by credit card, you enjoy the protection of the Consumer Credit Act, and you still don't trust them?
Sorry, but you don't sound like the kind of customer anyone would want. I think they may be better off without your business.
Mod parent -1 wrong.
I am English and I've never heard that word spoken nor seen it in print.
Back on topic, if you want one of these toys and are not prepared to risk your hard-earned online, despite the many protections available, why not contact the manufacturer? I'm sure they'll be very happy to cut out the middleman.
Rent some time on Goonhilly, Jodrell Bank or similar, and transmit the images, preceded by a brief hello and decompression instructions, toward the centre of the Milky Way, at full power (about half a megawatt).
Depending on who you ask, there's a good chance of them being detected and viewed by an alien civilisation at some time in the future.
I think that beats incinerating a CD-R, don't you?
Ping someone who has one of those idiot "scan all traffic for viruses" packages, and include a short virus signature. That might cause some fun and excitment.
(Don't try this at home, script-kiddies. Each ICMP packet has a source IP field, you know.)
If you can craft a custom packet, you can spoof the source IP field, too.
I suggest using 207.46.130.108
but if you could combine teflon with diamonds, then you'd have a surface that nothing sticks to and that wouldn't scrartch. Of course, diamonds are too expensive for that.
No need for combination - diamond already has all the properties you want; nothing sticks to diamonds, they don't wear appreciably, and best of all, they have excellent thermal conductivity (teflon's is lousy).
The only problem left is how to cheaply coat a pan with it. IIRC, the hard part is not vaporising the pan with the deposition process.
[1] This is annoying/depressing. I can't think of another non-x86 processor useful enough to act as a server, and still in production. Via, Transmeta, AMD64 might as well be x86 since they're all hamstrung by backwards-compatibility requirements, ARM is a toy (but kicks arse in embedded apps), Itanium is dead, as is Alpha. OK, there are probably a few Crays and mainframes kicking about that it would be pointless to replace, and yes, people do run mailservers on Commodore 64s and the like, but realistically there are only three usable architectures out there: x86, Power and Sparc.
Cell had better be worth the hype, because life will get awfully boring otherwise.
'Find the hidden pirate treasure on your parent's computer? '
My kids know there is 'pirate treasure' aka copyright infringing material on my PC. Why? Because they asked for it, and I 'obtained' it.
'Daddy, can you download $LATEST_CHEESY_KIDS_MOVIE for us please?'
'OK, give me a few days'
Three days later
'Here you go, boys - enjoy.'
'Thanks, dad - hey, is Spiderman 3 out yet?'
'Give us a chance, they haven't finished filming it yet!'
These children are seven and five years old. After another seven years of unfettered access to damn near anything they want, how receptive to ideas of IP 'ownership' do you think they will be?
Is this a 'visible hosts' number or do you actually have 76000 open sockets? I'd love to see Win95/98 try to handle that:)
Waiting for netstat to finish it's output could be fun, too.
Fair enough, noobs tend (only tend mind you) to have less exotic hardware than power-users though.
And when they do have exotic hardware, they walk on eggshells:)
My first Gentoo install? A 14-way Sun E4000 with nearly as much RAM as disk (8GB RAM, 9.1GB HD).
First experience of Sparc, too. Yes, I did do a Stage 1. Yes, I was terrified. Yes, I did RTFM, and follow it religiously. Yes, it did work [1].
It took about four hours from fdisk/dev/sda to browsing/. with konqueror (gotta love -J15 and 4GB tmpfs). Along the way, I learned the syntax of/etc/fstab and/etc/init, how to use mkfs and chroot, and gained a much greater understanding of how a GNU/Linux system works. As a result, I'm more able to understand and maintain my other (x86) systems.
[1] There was an initial hiccup when the install CD failed with the message 'insufficient RAM'. Apparently, 4GB, or multiples thereof, overflow and show up as zero, prompting a quick Q&A on #gentoo-sparc:
handpaper: Is 8GB not enough RAM to run $INSTALL_VERSION?
antarus: Is that sarcasm or a typo?
Thankfully, the previous version didn't have that problem.
My probes also used names rather than system accounts (bob, joe, patrick... as well as mysql, www...)
Same here - the log above is just a sample (about 5%) of the attempts made by this idiot alone.
Here's what gets me though - these guys must know they're attacking a Linux box. If they know enough to mount even a trivial attack, they must also know that most distros, by default, log this stuff! They know that they're being watched, that their every lame login attempt is being recorded, yet still they try. The best analogy I can come up with is that of a burglar sitting on your doorstep, in front of a CCTV camera, trying 65535 different keys in your door in the hope that one of them will open it.
Here's the worst part. You give your CCTV tape to the police, along with a full set of prints off your door, and are told "Well, he didn't get in, so no harm done there. Go home."
I'm not in favour of 'hackback' defences or retaliation, preferring to filter this crud out, but bigods I am sometimes tempted.
The reason the Windows GUI appears 'snappier' is because it runs with the highest priority in the system. Microsoft did this to make its OS appear fast and, probably, because that's what many users want - a system that 'feels' quick. The X Windowing System on Linux runs (by default) with priority 0 (zero), where 20 is lowest and -19 is highest, and thus competes equally for system resources with web browsers, word processors and the like. Resource- and time- sensitive stuff like CD/DVD burning, music and video playback, and system processes typically run with higher priorities, but most of these are user- (or root-) tunable.
I don't have a website. I don't run a public server. I do have an old PII box running sshd and proftpd for the use of myself (remote config) and my family/friends (ftp more convenient than email for some things).
I also have about 20MB per month worth of/var/log/messages (yes, all but today and yesterday are gzipped), which mainly look like this:
Apr 25 15:30:08 localhost sshd[14642]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 47961
Apr 25 15:30:10 localhost sshd[14642]: User ftp not allowed because not listed in AllowUsers
Apr 25 15:30:14 localhost sshd[14644]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 48215
Apr 25 15:30:16 localhost sshd[14644]: User nobody not allowed because not listed in AllowUsers
Apr 25 15:30:16 localhost sshd[14646]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 48747
Apr 25 15:30:19 localhost sshd[14646]: Illegal user www from 209.58.101.239
Apr 25 15:30:20 localhost sshd[14648]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 49106
Apr 25 15:30:21 localhost sshd[14648]: User apache not allowed because not listed in AllowUsers
Apr 25 15:30:24 localhost sshd[14650]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 49464
Apr 25 15:30:26 localhost sshd[14650]: Illegal user cyrus from 209.58.101.239
Apr 25 15:30:28 localhost sshd[14652]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 49825
Apr 25 15:30:31 localhost sshd[14652]: Illegal user mysql from 209.58.101.239
Apr 25 15:30:32 localhost sshd[14654]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 50285
Apr 25 15:30:39 localhost sshd[14654]: Illegal user testuser from 209.58.101.239
Apr 25 15:30:40 localhost sshd[14656]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 51054
Apr 25 15:30:44 localhost sshd[14656]: Illegal user postgres from 209.58.101.239
Similar entries exist in/var/log/ftplog, which isn't automatically compressed and archived, and tends to get checked and deleted when it gets to c.50MB
Aside from scrolling my pid counter and wasting a small amount of bandwidth, the bastards haven't done anything noticeable yet, but I can't help feeling that it would be better if they were to just stop.
Does anyone remember the short story about a joint Moon mission where the Brits angled to go home last, thus spending >x months 'out of the country', greatly reducing their tax liability?
Is there more energy available from it or something? Why run on this instead of diesel?
Yes, heavier fuels have greater specific energy, because they contain more Carbon and less Hydrogen.
4C + 4O2 => 4CO2 produces more energy than 4H + O2 => 2H2O
This is one of the reasons why diesel cars get better mileage than petrol, and why LPG and Hydrogen are worse than either.
It's also presents much less of a fire hazard - petrol will happily burn in a puddle, with a little work and pre-heating, so will diesel. You'd be hard pressed to get this stuff to burn on a wick.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Get rid of that background picture. The text is unreadable. Or at least brighten it up so it acts more like a watermark than a full picture.
The GIMP has done its work on that image - it's also the right way up now. Much better, thanks.
As for MS Comic Sans, I'm sorry, but I can't agree with you there. "silliness, childish naivete [and] irreverence" suit this site like they don't suit " restaurant signage [] college exams [and] medical information". If you hate that font so much, why not uninstall it and have your browser render it as default instead?
Cheers for the feedback, though.
For more stuff, check sig (I knew it would be relevant one day)
Site is 'all my own work', so props, flames and complaints about how it doesn't render properly in Konqueror to admin[AT]ahymsa.co.uk. Feedback is always useful.
Cheers
I would add, though, that throughout the Napoleonic wars, and wherever in the world they operated at that time (including the Caribbean and Mediterranean), the Royal Navy's water ration was "one gallon per man, per day, for all purposes". This was an Imperial gallon, about ten US pints, but it shows what can be done if you try
It's called The Beast Of War and is indeed very good.
I haven't seen it lately - maybe they have had to provide them now?
Interestingly, the AA (Automobile Association) popularised this negative flag technique - they were originally a club to defeat speed traps. An AA patrolman would station himself ahead of a speed trap to warn motorists. This was declared 'obstructing an officer in the course of his duties' and a modification was made. If there was no speed trap, the patrolman would salute the motorist; if there was one the patrolman would fail to salute, the motorist would stop and 'berate him for dereliction of his duty' and, by the way, be informed of the speed trap.
Hmmm. Eight years ago this August, I said a couple of words that changed my life and that of at least one other person. A number of people would be very unhappy were I to say that I didn't want to be held to them anymore.
The words? 'I do.'
Nonsense. :-() /home, and all removable media mounts noexec. :)
Linux is perfect for clueless newbies. Why? 'Cos they can't fuck it up, is why!
A work friend of mine wanted to 'try out this computer thing'. First thought:'Oh, shit. I'm going to have to reinstall this thing for him at least monthly, clean it up even more often, and he'll either get pissed off with the machine for screwing up (when it's his fault) or with me when I finally lose patience and tell him to RTFM.'
Careful questioning, however, revealed that he had barely heard of MS or Windows, and just wanted to 'surf the web, send email, play that funny card game (solitaire)'.
I spotted an opportunity.
I agreed to help him buy an older (PII-266 actually) machine, which would be very cheap, and more than adequate for his needs, and to install an operating system ('What's that?') and some useful programs. After a little thought, I used Mandrake 8.1, since it included lighweight window managers (I used Icewm), and installed Konqueror, Kmail, the Koffice suite, cups set up to use an old printer we'd found, xmms and every single silly little game on the install discs that would run on that ageing hardware (no tuxracer, cannon smash, or GLTron
I then spent about an hour locking everything down as tightly as I could, including user settings.
I set him up with a username and password for himself and each of his two daughters, talked him through logging in and running a few apps, and left him to it.
I did not tell him the root password (in fact, I've probably forgotten it myself), the only filesystem mounted rw is
It's now six months since I handed the box over to him. No 'phone calls. No complaints. No 'My computer's gotten awfully slow lately'.
I speak to him quite often at work; occasionally I ask how he's getting on with it. He has no problems using it, his daughters can do school stuff on it, even his mother found it easy to get to grips with.
Nothing has stopped working or become unusable, they haven't been trojaned, contracted any viruses or lost any data.
And they all love those silly little games
Perhaps it isn't in wide use outside the North of England (I grew up in London, and now live in Wales)?
Comparing Google results for tomfoolery (188,000 results) and cockfoolery (36 and an alternate spelling suggestion), it's easy to see which has greater global usage.
Maybe you ought to consider the possibility that your being right does not, in all cases, make everybody else wrong?
With regards to your keyboard comment, it is not possible to cut out the "middleman", as the manufacturers themselves are acting in that role.
So the manufacturers are selling these devices from their own websites, with their physical addresses and contact information freely available, in the knowledge that poor products or service will be commented on in forums worldwide (including this one) that will be read by the geeky types who are their target market; on top of which, if you're paying by credit card, you enjoy the protection of the Consumer Credit Act, and you still don't trust them?
Sorry, but you don't sound like the kind of customer anyone would want. I think they may be better off without your business.
Mod parent -1 wrong.
I am English and I've never heard that word spoken nor seen it in print.
Back on topic, if you want one of these toys and are not prepared to risk your hard-earned online, despite the many protections available, why not contact the manufacturer? I'm sure they'll be very happy to cut out the middleman.
Depending on who you ask, there's a good chance of them being detected and viewed by an alien civilisation at some time in the future.
I think that beats incinerating a CD-R, don't you?
Funniest thing I've read in weeks.
when somebody builds a user-upgradeable console.
That would rule.
Something like this, then?
(Don't try this at home, script-kiddies. Each ICMP packet has a source IP field, you know.)
If you can craft a custom packet, you can spoof the source IP field, too.
I suggest using 207.46.130.108
It's still around, if you know where to look.
No need for combination - diamond already has all the properties you want; nothing sticks to diamonds, they don't wear appreciably, and best of all, they have excellent thermal conductivity (teflon's is lousy).
The only problem left is how to cheaply coat a pan with it. IIRC, the hard part is not vaporising the pan with the deposition process.
I think these people may disagree with you there.[1]
[1] This is annoying/depressing. I can't think of another non-x86 processor useful enough to act as a server, and still in production. Via, Transmeta, AMD64 might as well be x86 since they're all hamstrung by backwards-compatibility requirements, ARM is a toy (but kicks arse in embedded apps), Itanium is dead, as is Alpha. OK, there are probably a few Crays and mainframes kicking about that it would be pointless to replace, and yes, people do run mailservers on Commodore 64s and the like, but realistically there are only three usable architectures out there: x86, Power and Sparc.
Cell had better be worth the hype, because life will get awfully boring otherwise.
My kids know there is 'pirate treasure' aka copyright infringing material on my PC. Why? Because they asked for it, and I 'obtained' it.
'Daddy, can you download $LATEST_CHEESY_KIDS_MOVIE for us please?'
'OK, give me a few days'
Three days later
'Here you go, boys - enjoy.'
'Thanks, dad - hey, is Spiderman 3 out yet?'
'Give us a chance, they haven't finished filming it yet!'
These children are seven and five years old. After another seven years of unfettered access to damn near anything they want, how receptive to ideas of IP 'ownership' do you think they will be?
Is this a 'visible hosts' number or do you actually have 76000 open sockets? :)
I'd love to see Win95/98 try to handle that
Waiting for netstat to finish it's output could be fun, too.
And when they do have exotic hardware, they walk on eggshells :) /dev/sda to browsing /. with konqueror (gotta love -J15 and 4GB tmpfs). Along the way, I learned the syntax of /etc/fstab and /etc/init, how to use mkfs and chroot, and gained a much greater understanding of how a GNU/Linux system works. As a result, I'm more able to understand and maintain my other (x86) systems.
My first Gentoo install? A 14-way Sun E4000 with nearly as much RAM as disk (8GB RAM, 9.1GB HD).
First experience of Sparc, too.
Yes, I did do a Stage 1. Yes, I was terrified. Yes, I did RTFM, and follow it religiously. Yes, it did work [1].
It took about four hours from fdisk
[1] There was an initial hiccup when the install CD failed with the message 'insufficient RAM'. Apparently, 4GB, or multiples thereof, overflow and show up as zero, prompting a quick Q&A on #gentoo-sparc :
handpaper: Is 8GB not enough RAM to run $INSTALL_VERSION?
antarus: Is that sarcasm or a typo?
Thankfully, the previous version didn't have that problem.
Same here - the log above is just a sample (about 5%) of the attempts made by this idiot alone.
Here's what gets me though - these guys must know they're attacking a Linux box. If they know enough to mount even a trivial attack, they must also know that most distros, by default, log this stuff! They know that they're being watched, that their every lame login attempt is being recorded, yet still they try. The best analogy I can come up with is that of a burglar sitting on your doorstep, in front of a CCTV camera, trying 65535 different keys in your door in the hope that one of them will open it.
Here's the worst part. You give your CCTV tape to the police, along with a full set of prints off your door, and are told "Well, he didn't get in, so no harm done there. Go home."
I'm not in favour of 'hackback' defences or retaliation, preferring to filter this crud out, but bigods I am sometimes tempted.
The reason the Windows GUI appears 'snappier' is because it runs with the highest priority in the system. Microsoft did this to make its OS appear fast and, probably, because that's what many users want - a system that 'feels' quick. The X Windowing System on Linux runs (by default) with priority 0 (zero), where 20 is lowest and -19 is highest, and thus competes equally for system resources with web browsers, word processors and the like. Resource- and time- sensitive stuff like CD/DVD burning, music and video playback, and system processes typically run with higher priorities, but most of these are user- (or root-) tunable.
I also have about 20MB per month worth of
Apr 25 15:30:08 localhost sshd[14642]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 47961
Apr 25 15:30:10 localhost sshd[14642]: User ftp not allowed because not listed in AllowUsers
Apr 25 15:30:14 localhost sshd[14644]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 48215
Apr 25 15:30:16 localhost sshd[14644]: User nobody not allowed because not listed in AllowUsers
Apr 25 15:30:16 localhost sshd[14646]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 48747
Apr 25 15:30:19 localhost sshd[14646]: Illegal user www from 209.58.101.239
Apr 25 15:30:20 localhost sshd[14648]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 49106
Apr 25 15:30:21 localhost sshd[14648]: User apache not allowed because not listed in AllowUsers
Apr 25 15:30:24 localhost sshd[14650]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 49464
Apr 25 15:30:26 localhost sshd[14650]: Illegal user cyrus from 209.58.101.239
Apr 25 15:30:28 localhost sshd[14652]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 49825
Apr 25 15:30:31 localhost sshd[14652]: Illegal user mysql from 209.58.101.239
Apr 25 15:30:32 localhost sshd[14654]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 50285
Apr 25 15:30:39 localhost sshd[14654]: Illegal user testuser from 209.58.101.239
Apr 25 15:30:40 localhost sshd[14656]: Connection from 209.58.101.239 port 51054
Apr 25 15:30:44 localhost sshd[14656]: Illegal user postgres from 209.58.101.239
Similar entries exist in /var/log/ftplog, which isn't automatically compressed and archived, and tends to get checked and deleted when it gets to c.50MB
Aside from scrolling my pid counter and wasting a small amount of bandwidth, the bastards haven't done anything noticeable yet, but I can't help feeling that it would be better if they were to just stop.
Does anyone remember the short story about a joint Moon mission where the Brits angled to go home last, thus spending >x months 'out of the country', greatly reducing their tax liability?
Yes, heavier fuels have greater specific energy, because they contain more Carbon and less Hydrogen.
4C + 4O2 => 4CO2 produces more energy than 4H + O2 => 2H2O
This is one of the reasons why diesel cars get better mileage than petrol, and why LPG and Hydrogen are worse than either.
It's also presents much less of a fire hazard - petrol will happily burn in a puddle, with a little work and pre-heating, so will diesel. You'd be hard pressed to get this stuff to burn on a wick.