I disagree. Extradition could be used to get at spamers in other countries. These guys are small potatoes compared to any other industry, I think it's unlikely that a country would try to protect them.
Many people, including many technical people and the US congres, recognize the international nature of spam and are already talking about treaties to prohibit spam. That would put a lot more teeth in an extadition order.
I don't believe that there are any real technical solutions to spam, which is why I don't support them. Filtering seems easy to get around, and it does remove some wanted emails from my inbox. White lists prevent new people from emailing me from an email address on a business card or a website. I don't want to pay per email, and I don't want to encourage ISPs to deliver SPAM by making it profitable for them to do so. Encryption or "CPU cycle tax" is only going to impose overhead on the large number of legitimate emails.
When there is crime, people don't say "Gosh, we need better locks and a redesign of personal transportation discourage theft." They say "Get some more police and increase jail terms" because they know that's what works.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.
...but it's like reading a post by a 12 year old on a forum someplace... or like playing an online game with a bunch of l33t doodz. I hate it.
Weeeeell, not quite. The old Mac HFS kept "resources" in the resource fork, and data (regular binary streams, basically) in the data fork. Resources were things like menus, code chunks, icons, bit maps, etc. All the stuff that Windows does now but DOS didn't do then.
Resource forks are an ugly hack. Look at Apples current implementation of a filesystem on Unix. If you use the cp command to copy a file, you only get the data fork. You have to use the "ditto" command to actually copy the whole file. Ugh.
Alan Cox has a note about this on the kernel web site. He says that if anyone want to implement "multiple streams" on the Linux file system, that's fine, just do it at the user level (i.e., make a library that apps can link to). Leave the file as one single stream to applications like cp, ftp, etc. Can you immagine trying to explain to a nontechnical person why coping a file through say an HTTP browser only gets half the file because HTTP doesn't know what the "ditto" command does? The mind boggles.
Anyway, my point when I started this was going to be that file types in HFS where never stored in the resource fork. They're 4 byte strings that can have mnemonic names like 'TEXT', 'PICT' or 'GIFf' and they were always stored in the HFS equivalent of an inode. That way when doing a directory listing, the file type was right there with the file name and the OS could get right at it. If the file type was stored elsewhere, the OS would have had to fetch an additional disk block just to look at the file type. Since the original Mac shipped with slow 3.5 inch drives, that would have been bad. (No HD's back then, remember?)
The original Apple DOS did the same thing, storing the file type with the file name for easy lookup. In a lot of ways HFS built on DOS and improved it greatly, but some things (like resource forks) just were bad ideas.
There are a couple of unused, reserved fields in the ext2 and ext3 inodes right now, one 2 bytes, and one 4 bytes. If it were me, I'd hoark those for file type info, and point them at a table mime types in/etc/file-mime-types.conf . But that's just me.
I understand the GPL, and I've worked on serveral embedded systems, including ones using WindRiver as the OS.
Let's say that you aren't writing a 100% userspace OS, and you have your own hardware. Let's say you want to redo the networking code. Strip out SMP. And remove the virtual memory support because your system doesn't have a hardware MMU. Oh, and your memory layout is funky and you have to rewrite some of the start-up code (or most of it).
Why not just use NetBSD instead? Not every embedded device is a PC clone. (Actually, IMHO, if your device is a PC clone, it's not embedded.)
Your brief explaination says to me that Linux is in fact not useful unless you have an Intel or AMD cpu and a standard PC architechure.
Scalability?
on
MIT Roofnet
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This is great for dense concentrations of geeks in places like a college campus. But what kind of applicability does this have elsewhere?
Is anyone expecting regular people to put up antennas before there's access? Who goes first? Even if many do, unless there's a critical number in a given area they'll be useless. There's not enough early adopters out there to make this work. And where are most people going to get a static access point in less than 300 hops?
It's cool, but I don't see what else can be done with it than make it a college toy.
Why Linux instead of BSD? If it were me, I'd be concerned that GPL would require me to release some part, or maybe all, of the special code written for the embedded device. I don't want to get into a GPL debate, just assume that someone wasn't careful and did write their code in such a way that it was deamed to be covered under the GPL.
1. Produce crap.
2. Hope enough suckers buy it before it's categorized as crap.
3. Profit!!!
Well, isn't that basically what many dotcoms did, sold their over-hyped stock to people before they could figure out that the company really had little going for it? AOL bought Time-Warner, getting a real company for basically just inflated stock. Now look at them.
What this really means is that Microsoft is smart, and has hired someone who will now find much better reasons to poo-poo open source and Linux. Maybe not good reasons or reasons anyone here would agreee with, but reasons that will make sense to the IT departments and executives that make up Microsofts customers.
On the plus side, if MS does come up with technical reasons against using Linux or other OS projects, that means those reasons can be addressed by technical people. Either rebut, or fix, whatever issues this new lab comes up with. Easy, and good for open source too.
I ain't a biologist either, but "oxidise" means it consumes oxygen, right? What do you breathe again?
I'm sure the good scientist wouldn't be proposing putting these things in your body if they were going to poison you, and I think he may be a biologist.
(Aside: if you let metal rust really fast, do you know what happens? Yes, it burns. Just like wood or gasoline burn, or you burn energy (sugar). In fact, burning metal releases so much energy that aluminum is a primary component of the solid fuel boosters the space shuttle uses.)
Re:Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, Motif is ugly. But it is not ugly because of X, but just because it is ugly. X is just a way to draw on a screen (locally or remotely).
The guy who chimed in on the xfree86.org mailing list said Motif looked like it did because it was designed to use the X protocol efficiently. Everyone else on the list seemed to agree that when a "modern style" GUI is used (i.e., one that looks more like Windows), the number of draw primatives just skyrockets, and performance suffers.
It is more than fast enough for any 2D needs one might have nowadays, even through a LAN.
I've used an X server running GUI apps through a lan and performance sucked.
There are more than enough hardware supported (2D) X windows drivers.
Alan Cox on the XFree86.org list said in his experience laggy GUIs were caused by lack of 2D hardware accelleration in the drivers being used. Many 2D accelleration techniques are apparently proprietary. Someone mentioned a couple of drivers (I think for ATI) where the author had reverse engineered the 2D hardware accelleration by hand tracing through the binary Windows drivers.
Needless to say, reverse engineering drivers by reading assembly language is a tedious process that doesn't happen for every card. There are lots of drivers out there. There are not a lot of good hardware accellerated drivers.
How can you claim that X was designed for and ran well on a 8 Mhz 68000 CPU,
Don't bug me, that's what the guy from DEC said on the list. One of their targets for a server was a Macintosh Plus (remember those?), that was a new machine at the time in the lab, circa 1986 or so IIRC. When they got X performance as good as the native Mac GUI, they felt the were doing well.
and does not run well on current machines which are 100 times as fast?
The whole list agreed here that the X desktop under both Gnome (GTK) and KDE (Qt) "feels laggy". I'm still running Windows becuase of this crap, I have no idea what a heavily loaded X server currently runs like.
As for people wanting desktop machines: "people" in fact want windows machines,
People (users, whatever) will notice a difference in performance however. If you go from a fast 2GHz machine that is at your beck and call, to a server that everyone shares, you are going to hit more slowdowns on that server. The server gets loaded with lots of people, usually at crunch time. For us it was running compile jobs. The server slows down just when you need it most, repsonse time decreases, users get frustrated, and upgrading the server is a major expense and hassle.
Adding users with a PC is easy. You buy them a new PC. No other users are impacted. There's a flat per seat charge, you never have to buy extra capacity until you actually need it. Performance never varies for each user. It's predicable and therefore people just like it better.
Yes, IT suffers with PCs, but that appears to be their lot in life.;)
Re:Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Why maintain a stable of computers when you can have one ubermachine
The thing is, while this is excellent advocacy, almost no one actually does this. Most people, at home, in a small business, or in a large corporation, have desktop machines, not thin client GFX servers. And they want to keep them.
There's a few legacy apps where X is required, but MS own's 90% of the desktop, and the desktop is not migrating to any *nix until the *nix's drop their 10 year old X server technology and move to something more modern.
I've lurked on several X formums for a while now, and there's seems to be a common thread. While X was written to run well on a very low end machine (one person said they had helped develope X on a 8 MHz 68000 CPU), everyone agrees that the current X desktop is rather laggy on much higher end machines. This has two reasons: lack of hardware accelleration support (good video card drivers for X are really hard to find) and the fact that modern apps do not do what X was designed to do.
Motif is a graphical desktop specification that is designed to run well on top of X. But no one likes the way Motif looks anymore, at least no one used to Windows or Apple GUIs. After 10 years, it' time for something new, IMO.
The changes will begin with development lists being made public, and will be followed by return of package maintanence to the developers themselves. Currently, packages are "handed over" to Red Hat developers, who then tune them for inclusion in a particular version. Under the new system, developers will maintain control of the packages.
This sounds like they are downsizing some of their workforce to me. Yes, I know that the article said this move was to improve release cycle times but it sounds like they are just plain getting rid of the retail line and there will be some layoffs too as certain people are no longer needed.
For me the main issue is online play and cheating. The Xbox has a security key on only allow certain programs (i.e., licensed developers) run programs. This really reduces the chances of online cheating. Cheating online has all but ruined SOCOM's online play for the PS2, I don't want that to happen to Xbox games as well.
Eventually, I think all game consoles will have security keys like the Xbox.
Linux is cool, but not every computing device in the world needs to run it. Unlike servers and desktop PCs, game consoles are not mission critical for anything. These Linux hackers should leave the Xbox alone and devote some time to improving X performance on the desktop, or something else useful.
Ditto on the no compete thing is illegal in California. California is a "right to work" state and no way could an employer get a no-compete clause enforced. How do you think all that job hopping in Silicon Valley happens anyway?
I had a no-compete clause in a contract some years ago that specified "no similar industry within 50 miles" (aimed at their competitors across town). A lawyer later told me that even that limited NCA wasn't legal in California.
I can only add a little to what's already been said here. First, learning everything about security is a big job, plan to take it in steps. If you want a quick start guide, here's my best stab:
1. Use a dedicated firewall - I don't believe a fire wall on the machine you are trying to protect is sufficient, especially windows. Get either a router with a built in firewall, or use linux with iptable masquerade firewall. The latter option is more $$ and more trouble than the former, but I think it's untilmately more robust. You should also use a firewall on your PC, just in case.
2. Secure your browser and mail reader - these are the primary "back doors" into your computer. No firewall will protect you if you download and execute a virus attached to an email message. Sorry, no links here, but ask around, and becareful what you download.
3. Read up - Building Internet Firewalls is excellent for the novice. I have their simplest system at home - one dual homed PC that acts as NAT, firewall, and router. Not as secure, but good enough for me. Then just start reading more books as you have time. The O'Rilley series on Ethernet and the various TCP/IP protocols is good, and so are the relavent RFCs. But also consider more academic books like Comer.
Blacks holes lists are not a great thing. They are a necessary thing.
I believe that a black list is something that is loaded into a firewall router by an ISP. It is NOT something that a computer sits there and reads each message to find. Read the article, see where the ISP guy explains that filtering is no good, because if he has to filter it, then it's already costing him money? That's what black lists prevent -- the email from even reaching the ISP WAN link.
What if a spammer gets a new IP address, or bounces his spam email off of someone else's mail server? Well, that's where spam comes from...
In short, this is not something you *could* put in the hands of the user, because then your ISP will have a huge bill paying for all the crap that gets sent to your inbox.
Can I sue yet? Oh -- I need to call SBC or Verizon I guess.
I assume that you need a business license that says Internet Service Provider on it, and some reasonable books to back that up. If you meet these very modest criteria, then I think any court would find that you are an ISP and allowed to sue under this (proposed) law.
Hmmmmmm....
No I don't like proposed law this any more than you do, but I bet there's ways around it if it comes to pass.
Had a (1 -- one) 5 1/4" floppy drive. And 64k of memory. Which had to be shared with the video hardware. And if we wanted to transfer files, we didn't even have a network. We had to copy our data to a floppy and (you guessed it) WALK OUTSIDE IN THE FREAKIN' SNOW FOR FREAKIN' MILES AND MILES.
Slashdot Mirror
Many people, including many technical people and the US congres, recognize the international nature of spam and are already talking about treaties to prohibit spam. That would put a lot more teeth in an extadition order.
I don't believe that there are any real technical solutions to spam, which is why I don't support them. Filtering seems easy to get around, and it does remove some wanted emails from my inbox. White lists prevent new people from emailing me from an email address on a business card or a website. I don't want to pay per email, and I don't want to encourage ISPs to deliver SPAM by making it profitable for them to do so. Encryption or "CPU cycle tax" is only going to impose overhead on the large number of legitimate emails.
When there is crime, people don't say "Gosh, we need better locks and a redesign of personal transportation discourage theft." They say "Get some more police and increase jail terms" because they know that's what works.
Don't ever do this again, Slashdot.
I just click on the "send me my password" button a lot.
Resource forks are an ugly hack. Look at Apples current implementation of a filesystem on Unix. If you use the cp command to copy a file, you only get the data fork. You have to use the "ditto" command to actually copy the whole file. Ugh.
Alan Cox has a note about this on the kernel web site. He says that if anyone want to implement "multiple streams" on the Linux file system, that's fine, just do it at the user level (i.e., make a library that apps can link to). Leave the file as one single stream to applications like cp, ftp, etc. Can you immagine trying to explain to a nontechnical person why coping a file through say an HTTP browser only gets half the file because HTTP doesn't know what the "ditto" command does? The mind boggles.
Anyway, my point when I started this was going to be that file types in HFS where never stored in the resource fork. They're 4 byte strings that can have mnemonic names like 'TEXT', 'PICT' or 'GIFf' and they were always stored in the HFS equivalent of an inode. That way when doing a directory listing, the file type was right there with the file name and the OS could get right at it. If the file type was stored elsewhere, the OS would have had to fetch an additional disk block just to look at the file type. Since the original Mac shipped with slow 3.5 inch drives, that would have been bad. (No HD's back then, remember?)
The original Apple DOS did the same thing, storing the file type with the file name for easy lookup. In a lot of ways HFS built on DOS and improved it greatly, but some things (like resource forks) just were bad ideas.
There are a couple of unused, reserved fields in the ext2 and ext3 inodes right now, one 2 bytes, and one 4 bytes. If it were me, I'd hoark those for file type info, and point them at a table mime types in /etc/file-mime-types.conf . But that's just me.
Sort of, but it's mechanical and usually bigger and heavier than a laptop.
Read Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine to get a good idea of what these are like. I think they are about that old, anyway.
Let's say that you aren't writing a 100% userspace OS, and you have your own hardware. Let's say you want to redo the networking code. Strip out SMP. And remove the virtual memory support because your system doesn't have a hardware MMU. Oh, and your memory layout is funky and you have to rewrite some of the start-up code (or most of it).
Why not just use NetBSD instead? Not every embedded device is a PC clone. (Actually, IMHO, if your device is a PC clone, it's not embedded.)
Your brief explaination says to me that Linux is in fact not useful unless you have an Intel or AMD cpu and a standard PC architechure.
Is anyone expecting regular people to put up antennas before there's access? Who goes first? Even if many do, unless there's a critical number in a given area they'll be useless. There's not enough early adopters out there to make this work. And where are most people going to get a static access point in less than 300 hops?
It's cool, but I don't see what else can be done with it than make it a college toy.
Why Linux instead of BSD? If it were me, I'd be concerned that GPL would require me to release some part, or maybe all, of the special code written for the embedded device. I don't want to get into a GPL debate, just assume that someone wasn't careful and did write their code in such a way that it was deamed to be covered under the GPL.
Why take that chance, why not use BSD instead?
2. Hope enough suckers buy it before it's categorized as crap.
3. Profit!!!
Well, isn't that basically what many dotcoms did, sold their over-hyped stock to people before they could figure out that the company really had little going for it? AOL bought Time-Warner, getting a real company for basically just inflated stock. Now look at them.
What this really means is that Microsoft is smart, and has hired someone who will now find much better reasons to poo-poo open source and Linux. Maybe not good reasons or reasons anyone here would agreee with, but reasons that will make sense to the IT departments and executives that make up Microsofts customers.
On the plus side, if MS does come up with technical reasons against using Linux or other OS projects, that means those reasons can be addressed by technical people. Either rebut, or fix, whatever issues this new lab comes up with. Easy, and good for open source too.
God, I LOVE competition.
I'm sure the good scientist wouldn't be proposing putting these things in your body if they were going to poison you, and I think he may be a biologist.
(Aside: if you let metal rust really fast, do you know what happens? Yes, it burns. Just like wood or gasoline burn, or you burn energy (sugar). In fact, burning metal releases so much energy that aluminum is a primary component of the solid fuel boosters the space shuttle uses.)
The guy who chimed in on the xfree86.org mailing list said Motif looked like it did because it was designed to use the X protocol efficiently. Everyone else on the list seemed to agree that when a "modern style" GUI is used (i.e., one that looks more like Windows), the number of draw primatives just skyrockets, and performance suffers.
It is more than fast enough for any 2D needs one might have nowadays, even through a LAN.
I've used an X server running GUI apps through a lan and performance sucked.
There are more than enough hardware supported (2D) X windows drivers.
Alan Cox on the XFree86.org list said in his experience laggy GUIs were caused by lack of 2D hardware accelleration in the drivers being used. Many 2D accelleration techniques are apparently proprietary. Someone mentioned a couple of drivers (I think for ATI) where the author had reverse engineered the 2D hardware accelleration by hand tracing through the binary Windows drivers.
Needless to say, reverse engineering drivers by reading assembly language is a tedious process that doesn't happen for every card. There are lots of drivers out there. There are not a lot of good hardware accellerated drivers.
How can you claim that X was designed for and ran well on a 8 Mhz 68000 CPU,
Don't bug me, that's what the guy from DEC said on the list. One of their targets for a server was a Macintosh Plus (remember those?), that was a new machine at the time in the lab, circa 1986 or so IIRC. When they got X performance as good as the native Mac GUI, they felt the were doing well.
and does not run well on current machines which are 100 times as fast?
The whole list agreed here that the X desktop under both Gnome (GTK) and KDE (Qt) "feels laggy". I'm still running Windows becuase of this crap, I have no idea what a heavily loaded X server currently runs like.
As for people wanting desktop machines: "people" in fact want windows machines,
People (users, whatever) will notice a difference in performance however. If you go from a fast 2GHz machine that is at your beck and call, to a server that everyone shares, you are going to hit more slowdowns on that server. The server gets loaded with lots of people, usually at crunch time. For us it was running compile jobs. The server slows down just when you need it most, repsonse time decreases, users get frustrated, and upgrading the server is a major expense and hassle.
Adding users with a PC is easy. You buy them a new PC. No other users are impacted. There's a flat per seat charge, you never have to buy extra capacity until you actually need it. Performance never varies for each user. It's predicable and therefore people just like it better.
Yes, IT suffers with PCs, but that appears to be their lot in life. ;)
The thing is, while this is excellent advocacy, almost no one actually does this. Most people, at home, in a small business, or in a large corporation, have desktop machines, not thin client GFX servers. And they want to keep them.
There's a few legacy apps where X is required, but MS own's 90% of the desktop, and the desktop is not migrating to any *nix until the *nix's drop their 10 year old X server technology and move to something more modern.
I've lurked on several X formums for a while now, and there's seems to be a common thread. While X was written to run well on a very low end machine (one person said they had helped develope X on a 8 MHz 68000 CPU), everyone agrees that the current X desktop is rather laggy on much higher end machines. This has two reasons: lack of hardware accelleration support (good video card drivers for X are really hard to find) and the fact that modern apps do not do what X was designed to do.
Motif is a graphical desktop specification that is designed to run well on top of X. But no one likes the way Motif looks anymore, at least no one used to Windows or Apple GUIs. After 10 years, it' time for something new, IMO.
This sounds like they are downsizing some of their workforce to me. Yes, I know that the article said this move was to improve release cycle times but it sounds like they are just plain getting rid of the retail line and there will be some layoffs too as certain people are no longer needed.
Eventually, I think all game consoles will have security keys like the Xbox.
Linux is cool, but not every computing device in the world needs to run it. Unlike servers and desktop PCs, game consoles are not mission critical for anything. These Linux hackers should leave the Xbox alone and devote some time to improving X performance on the desktop, or something else useful.
I had a no-compete clause in a contract some years ago that specified "no similar industry within 50 miles" (aimed at their competitors across town). A lawyer later told me that even that limited NCA wasn't legal in California.
Toodles!
Get a 9500 Pro, not a 9600 Pro.
If you look around hard, you can find a 9700 (not Pro, unfortunately) for under $200. I think newegg.com had some.
Freezip is my favorite zip program. Simple, to the point and does everything I need.
This ipod theme is really nice looking. You should consider updating the front page to use it by default! ^_^
I think that they must have started counterfieting just to pay for those cartridges in the first place. ;-)
1. Use a dedicated firewall - I don't believe a fire wall on the machine you are trying to protect is sufficient, especially windows. Get either a router with a built in firewall, or use linux with iptable masquerade firewall. The latter option is more $$ and more trouble than the former, but I think it's untilmately more robust. You should also use a firewall on your PC, just in case.
2. Secure your browser and mail reader - these are the primary "back doors" into your computer. No firewall will protect you if you download and execute a virus attached to an email message. Sorry, no links here, but ask around, and becareful what you download.
3. Read up - Building Internet Firewalls is excellent for the novice. I have their simplest system at home - one dual homed PC that acts as NAT, firewall, and router. Not as secure, but good enough for me. Then just start reading more books as you have time. The O'Rilley series on Ethernet and the various TCP/IP protocols is good, and so are the relavent RFCs. But also consider more academic books like Comer.
I believe that a black list is something that is loaded into a firewall router by an ISP. It is NOT something that a computer sits there and reads each message to find. Read the article, see where the ISP guy explains that filtering is no good, because if he has to filter it, then it's already costing him money? That's what black lists prevent -- the email from even reaching the ISP WAN link.
What if a spammer gets a new IP address, or bounces his spam email off of someone else's mail server? Well, that's where spam comes from...
In short, this is not something you *could* put in the hands of the user, because then your ISP will have a huge bill paying for all the crap that gets sent to your inbox.
I assume that you need a business license that says Internet Service Provider on it, and some reasonable books to back that up. If you meet these very modest criteria, then I think any court would find that you are an ISP and allowed to sue under this (proposed) law.
Hmmmmmm....
No I don't like proposed law this any more than you do, but I bet there's ways around it if it comes to pass.
There. Now lets see you young 'ums top that. :p