If your server is getting hit with 20Mb/s worth of packets, even if you drop them and don't react at all, that's still 20Mb/s of bandwidth you're losing. It's a little like bandwidth shaping: you can't shape inbound traffic because you have no control over how fast upstream routers deliver data to you. The best you can do is control the rate of your replies and hope that doing so reduces the rate of inbound data.
It's quite possible that incompetence made the attack worse than it should have been, but there's no possible way that SCO could have survived this attack without significantly degraded network performance.
We're being watched, and the full implications of this are scary.
This is so stupid, I don't even know where to begin. Suffice it to say that I find nothing wrong with the government using EZ-Pass to put criminals in jail, and guess what? If you're evading your income taxes, you're a criminal. And you belong in jail, unless you can repay all the taxes you owe.
There are a ton of ways EZ-Pass could be abused by the feds, but this ain't one of them. And to be honest, it kind of alarms me that you view this sort of serious federal crime as being analagous to speeding.
The "vast majority" you're talking about don't buy video cards, they buy computers with built-in video cards. They are also not the driving force behind graphics technology innovation and improvement. Video card manufacturers make no money off them. They are an utterly uninteresting group when discussing aftermarket or high-performance video cards.
Er, no, it's not "simply because [3D] look[s] pretty." It's because 3D performance is what people want. I'm sure NVIDIA et al. could make cards that look better than that old Matrox, but I'm just as sure it would add $50 or so to the card's price. Most people, myself included, would just not be willing to pay for it. One solution would be to keep the card's cost constant by reducing 3D performance, shipping it with less RAM, etc., but I hope you can see why that wouldn't work.
This is not a case of graphics manufacturers tricking us helpless sheep via marketing. This is a case of gamers being the driving market for video cards, and 2D video quality is just not that important for gamers. The extensive marketing of 3D performance isn't the cause of the focus: the focus is the cause of the marketing.
And I'm sure there's a no-CD crack out already. This sort of move really baffles me; I don't see what UbiSoft could possibly hope to gain. Clearly the only users who will be affected by it are those who bought the game, as those who didn't are already using cracks: they have no need for virtual drive software. The only reason for ever using virtual drive software is convenience, and the convenience can be appreciated both by legal and illegal users of the game.
There's a network-able version of wall that uses RPC (I think). It's not a foolproof solution, since it won't work if your users are logged in without an open terminal window, but it's a help. I'm sure it's terrifically insecure, but since you're running NFS you're already insecure (and so hopefully have a firewall).
If that isn't good enough for you, there are a couple other possibilities. You could probably cobble together an utterly trivial Python (or Perl or whatever) script on your client machines, then have the server invoke it via ssh when a shutdown starts. If you aren't a programmer at all, you could try firing off an email to the client machines. As long as you have a periodic mail-checker going, it would alert you to the arrival of a new message. (Since you'd be able to use the local spool, you could have it check every 15 seconds.)
Best way to do BT for this sort of thing is to change your high-bandwidth FTP (or HTTP, but only the part that serves files) into BT seeds. Best of both worlds: even if the mirrors become saturated, cable and DSL leeches will generally ensure a minimum 20k/s download; and two weeks after a spike in popularity, the torrent will still work just fine (in fact, you'll be downloading from all the mirrors simultaneously, so there's primitive load balancing as a fringe benefit).
There are a number of other benefits, like no more wading through pages of mirrors trying to find one that works and isn't full. You could probably use it as an rsync replacement, but I'm not sure that would work well. Still, it will iron out file corruption that gets introduced in mirrors sometimes.
In other words, this is really one of the most boring stories ever, even considering the "let's duplicate the daemonnews slashbox" policy/. recently adopted.
I think the issue here is that most Slashdot editors don't know or care about the BSDs, but they need to post some articles. Since they have no way of distinguishing between interesting news and uninteresting, they rely on other sites to assign importance. The effects of this are obvious: not a lot of replies, over half of them trolls, and people getting their BSD news elsewhere.
You heard it here first: The Slashdot BSD Section is Dying.
I don't know if it's a terrible burden or not, but for very popular torrents (>4000 downloaders, >100 seeds) the trackers will often start choking as they run out of steam. With DNS, though, you have automatic load balancing, so no one server gets hammered as badly.
The basic issue here is twofold. First, how can we get load-sharing for all aspects of BT? And second, how can we do that while keeping BT a "lightweight" program (i.e. one that doesn't require special server programs)? DNS may not be the best answer, but it is an answer.
At issue isn't so much Nintendo's current status as its current trajectory. They have very little margin for error: if their next-gen console is a bust, or if they go a year without any software hits, they may slip to a distant 3rd in the rankings. At which point companies like EA might stop porting their EA Sports line to Nintendo's consoles, etc. Nobody's saying that's going to happen, but... just look at Sega if you need proof that it can, and that past success is no indicator of future existence.
Incidentally, you picked some bad examples. Pepsi owns several other drink brands as well as Frito-Lay, and Dr Pepper is owned by Cadbury-Schweppes in the US (who also own 7up; somewhat oddly, Dr Pepper is owned by Coca-Cola in the UK). Pepsi and Coca-Cola also have distributor agreements, which is why you always have one of two selections in movie theaters and restaurants: in other words, even where they don't own all the brands being sold, they get a cut from them.
You also make a bit of a straw man. Nobody is suggesting that Nintendo "give in." We just think it might be a good idea for them to stop defining itself in terms of a battle it appears likely to lose (the battle of remaining a contender for the #1 spot in console gaming).
Clearly we need some way to move away from traditional passwords, but RSA keys isn't the way to go. They're impossible to remember, which means you need to store them on a computer. That makes them vulnerable to copying. You can password-protect them, of course, but then you're in the same situation as before (actually worse, for the same reason/etc/passwd is less secure than/etc/shadow).
That's not to say that RSA or some similar system won't be part of a good solution... but there definitely needs to be some other component. (For example, the private key might be encrypted by a biometric signature or keycard or similar. While that still leaves the system vulnerable to physical attacks, it more or less eliminates network-based ones as long as you use secure protocols.)
I don't know if that's even the intended purpose. Think kidnapping and similar. If the kidnappers are stupid the police might be able to track them right to where they've got the kid; if they're smarter, then maybe they will take the kid outside the "fence" before they get rid of the computer. That could get the authorities looking hours before they might otherwise begin to suspect kidnapping, and I don't need to say how important that could be.
There's no way of saying how effective this will be until it happens, but it at least looks like it could be effective. I strongly suspect that every parent would say the mere possibility of effectiveness is enough to make it a selling point.
I get about 180 spam mails a day. Now I can get Mozilla to block all but 2 or 3 of those... but it also classifies every NON-spam message I get as spam. So I have to weaken the filters, and now about 20-30 messages a day get through. And unfortunately that's still over my limit of how much I can effectively filter mentally. As much as I stress to people that any emails they send me with generic subject lines (like "Hello" or "Last night") are going to get thrown in the trash by accident, they still do it. And I still space out when manually filtering out spam and delete their messages.
It still only qualifies as an annoyance because I seldom do anything important over email. But the reason I don't do anything important over email is because I know spam makes it unreliable. Bit of a Catch 22 there. Seems like the reason spam is an annoyance and not a serious issue is that it's increasing fairly gradually. If there were this much spam back in '95, there'd be riots. (Among the nerds, which I guess means lots of really heated USENET posts about how Captain Kirk is so much better than Captain Picard.)
"Warning!
You are now installing Windows XP. If you have previously installed any third-party Internet browsers or email programs, they may not function properly after the upgrade. Microsoft does not support the use of third-party Internet browsers and email programs. If you want to use those functions, you must use Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, or use an operating system not published by Microsoft.
<I Understand and Agree>"
It's kind of funny to see how Slashdotters race to the defense of Apple when they start acting like a monopoly, but when MS does it, the sky is falling. (Probable defense by Apple zealots: "Apple isn't anywhere near as bad as Microsoft." Problem with that defense: That doesn't justify defending Apple, that justifies criticizing them more selectively.)
Font support is fine out of the box for me, and the Linux disto's I use.
Here's the deal. In Windows, if you turn on font AA, all fonts are AA. If you turn on the high quality font AA, then all fonts are high quality AA. In Linux, on the other hand, KDE, GNOME, and whatever else all use their own, completely distinct settings. Controlling fonts via GNOME will not change them in Konqueror, and there's no possible way to get antialiasing in programs like Emacs which don't use either desktop widget library. (No way short of porting those programs to the desktop manager of your choice, at least.)
Copy and past work fine.
Definitely do not work here. Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V do not work in every control. It's so irritating to have it work sometimes, but not always. Of course, clicking the middle mouse button works, but that requires me to take my hands off the keyboard when typing.
How many linux distributions do you use? I use one. It's also amazing when I see commercial applications that run on Linux all over the place, without any modifications.
I used one - Debian. It was a hassle to get commercial applications to run, because they are inevitably packaged as rpms. So I have to convert them to debs, which is fine except that the dependencies don't convert correctly. So you have to disable dependency checking, at which point you may as well use a plain-vanilla tarball. Even worse, the rpm install/remove scripts work on a different FHS, so they would create all sorts of crazy directories and symlinks which pointed nowhere. I spent three times as long cleaning up the mess it created than it would have taken to install a simple tarball. Of course, tarballs have their own problems, in particular the high degree of user intervention required.
Games? I can run a large number of popular games on my computer.
I see you don't run Linux, then. Because if you did, then no, you can't. There is a very small number of good games for Linux (such as NWN, Q3, and UT2003), and they are fun to play and everyone should buy them all to promote gaming development for Linux. But by no stretch of the imagination do the pathetically small crop of popular games for Linux constitute a "large number."
Does anyone really have a justification for more than 50fps?
Yes, higher detail. More polygons, more features, higher resolution. If you get 50fps in a highly-detailed scene, you'll get >200fps in minimally-detailed ones. Benchmarks work on the theory that the reverse is true as well (if P then Q; Q, therefore P; that's simplified, it's not actually fallacious reasoning). This is why Q3 benchmarks that yield >100fps for all cards still matter, because the benchmarks usually don't test highly-detailed scenes.
You can tell the difference between 50fps and 80fps, but usually it's so minimal that it's not worth worrying about. But the difference between 40fps and 50fps is a pretty big one in games where reflexes matter, especially when your framerate is bouncing between 30fps and 60fps depending on where you're looking. Especially when the game you're playing uses framerate-bounded physics calculations - that would be all FPS games - so people with high framerates can jump higher, gain super speed by bunny-hopping, and stay in the air forever with jetpacks.
No. It is never acceptable for anyone to do anything on my computer without my express prior permission, end of story. It's not "somewhat reasonable," it's not reasonable at all. We need to clamp down on this hard before people start acting on their "good wishes." It only takes one or two people to cripple the entire Internet nowadays; we need to make it perfectly clear that this sort of thing is simply not acceptable and never will be.
I will cheer just as loudly when the makers of "benevolent worms" are sent to prison as when makers of destructive worms are, because they are exactly the same thing in every way.
Well, go here and compare Australia to the US. I think your idea of "urban sprawl" differs significantly from what we have over here. I'm sure you see it in places, especially around Sydney, but ours covers nearly the entire country.
We also have this image of what it's like to have a family, and it's basically what you see in 60s sitcoms. Owning a house with a yard and a white picket fence in a nice neighborhood, it's really important to us, and a lot of people are willing to make big sacrifices to get it. I don't know if that's quite as big a deal to you guys down under.
I suppose there are a few, but the bigger concern is whether you can plug your car in at work. So your question needs to be revised to "whose average one-way commute is longer than 50 miles," and there are a pretty high number of those. Don't forget that you absolutely need some margin of error in case you have to take a detour or want to drive someplace for lunch, so perhaps the question should be "who will sometimes drive more than 100 miles in an ordinary day?" I suspect by now we're talking about nearly half the commuter workforce.
And when you are sitting in traffic, do you need to go 0-60 in 4.1 seconds?
0-60 times aren't very useful for most people most of the time, true, but there aren't many cars that just stop accelerating at 60. Generally it gives you a good idea of how quickly the car can accelerate at all sorts of speeds, in particular the 40-60 range and the 60-80 range (the two most common speed ranges for passing cars, which is where you actually need good acceleration).
Why can cars with a relatively low range not be used for commuting to and from work?
Because more and more people commute long distances to work. They'd rather live in the suburbs and have an hour-long commute than live in the city and have a ten-minute one.
You are skirting the issue by saying that the appearance of free will is rendered by an inability to introspect. If free will is true, then necessarily a decision can not be predetermined no matter how high an intelligence is brought to bear.
You're going a little far, there. Clearly we do not have "perfect" free will. Human beings are rational creatures, which means our decisions are influenced to at least some extent by our past experiences. So at best we have a limited kind of free will: the grain of sand that tips the balances now and then.
So no, it's not necessary that our actions cannot be predetermined even if we have free will. Sometimes that might be the case, but it still seems that a highly complex computer or superintelligent mind would be capable of predicting the actions of a human with near-perfect accuracy.
For myself, there is one huge huge hole in determinism... consciousness itself. If everything is pre-determined, why are we conscious? Can't life evolve according to instinct without this consciousness?
One possible answer is "it has." We aren't conscious, we just have highly advanced and generalized instincts.
To those who would say introspection is not objective, I say there is no objectivity.
If a scientific determinist claims objectivity exists, he's being inconsistent. Objectivity would require the existence of an external entity who by definition cannot interact with the universe. Science clearly shows that observation is a type of interaction, so we can't even have any impartial observers.
You are still subject to the rules of your consciousness and brain whether or not you choose to acknowledge their validity.
This seems like a pretty inescapable part of determinism, to me. If your will is not objective and it is governed by rules of your brain, then how is that not determinism? Perhaps your point is hinging on "subject to" rather than "governed by," but I question the exact distance between the two.
This religious devotion to Newtonian physics makes me a little sick to my stomach, open your minds people.
This isn't science, here, although scientific principles and knowledge are certainly being used. You can wait your whole life for conclusive evidence and not get it. The only reasonable thing to do is pick a belief and go with it, but be ready to change your mind.
Lack of an integrated software environment- What is that supposed to mean? Does it mean that I can choose what stuff I want to use? With MS, there's one choice. With linux, there's multiple choices for software to use. I don't quite get what they're saying with this one. If someone knows, then I'd like to understand better.
I think what these admins are talking about is that in Windows, configuration is fairly centralized. Most configuration is done using one tool (Microsoft Management Console). This has two big advantages: you don't have to worry about config file syntaxes, and you don't have to worry about where the config files all are.
That said, there are a few programs for Linux which work like MMC. The problem is that the onus for updates is presently on the authors of those programs, when it belongs on groups like Apache and MySQL. Unless and until some configuration framework is adopted as a de facto Linux standard, this will continue to be a serious gripe with Linux.
By the way, regarding your comments on choice, there's no reason there can't be a choice in the frontend program. Basically what we are talking about is having all programs use a common configuration file format. Then you can write 50 programs to work with that file format, including web-based interfaces and whatever else you want. So you see, we aren't looking at an either/or here. This is simply something that Linux developers don't care much about.
Can you state with absolute certainty that every program I will ever want to run will come out for the Mac first, or at least not more than a week later? No? Because I can do that about Windows, despite all its flaws.
You might want to take off your green-tinted iGlasses before you start talking about the grass over there, friend, because it looks pretty brown from here.
(Karma bonus elided because nobody cares about snarkiness.)
The more layers there are in a solution like this, the more work is required to maintain it and the greater the chances are that something could go wrong. Just because execs aren't computer geeks doesn't mean they don't know this fundamental principle. Also consider that they don't want some "weird" setup that no other sysadmins will understand or be able to maintain. And reread the original comment. It seems to me like they are upgrading to Exchange 2003 for some other reasons, and the boss only wants to know if he can kill two birds with one stone here.
I think it's a question that's definitely worth asking, and even though I'm not a fan of MS by a long shot, it's what I'd be asking in his place. I'm afraid I don't really have anything else to contribute, since I have zero experience with xchg2003, but I felt like I needed to defend the guy's boss.
Re:Isn't an NDA supposed to be limited in time ?
on
Of NDAs and Resumes?
·
· Score: 1
Every NDA I've ever seen has been time-limited too. Most of them also have clauses releasing you when the NDA-covered topic becomes public knowledge. So an NDA regarding a software product, for example, would expire when that product is available to the public.
I am, of course, not a lawyer, I just play one on the Internet. But I have had lawyers explain past NDAs to me, and that's what they've told me.
I'm definitely split on this one. I'm definitely not a fan of non-compete clauses since they can really make it impossible to get another job in your chosen field. But obviously companies should have the right to keep employees from quitting and stealing ideas/products at the same time.
So are Ubisoft the good guys, keeping the four defectors from giving trade secrets to EA? Or are Ubisoft the bad guys, trying to fuck over innocent guys for the unbearable crime of not wanting to work for Ubisoft? And more importantly, is there some better way out there of balancing the rights of employees with the rights of companies?
Slashdot Mirror
It's quite possible that incompetence made the attack worse than it should have been, but there's no possible way that SCO could have survived this attack without significantly degraded network performance.
There are a ton of ways EZ-Pass could be abused by the feds, but this ain't one of them. And to be honest, it kind of alarms me that you view this sort of serious federal crime as being analagous to speeding.
The "vast majority" you're talking about don't buy video cards, they buy computers with built-in video cards. They are also not the driving force behind graphics technology innovation and improvement. Video card manufacturers make no money off them. They are an utterly uninteresting group when discussing aftermarket or high-performance video cards.
This is not a case of graphics manufacturers tricking us helpless sheep via marketing. This is a case of gamers being the driving market for video cards, and 2D video quality is just not that important for gamers. The extensive marketing of 3D performance isn't the cause of the focus: the focus is the cause of the marketing.
And I'm sure there's a no-CD crack out already. This sort of move really baffles me; I don't see what UbiSoft could possibly hope to gain. Clearly the only users who will be affected by it are those who bought the game, as those who didn't are already using cracks: they have no need for virtual drive software. The only reason for ever using virtual drive software is convenience, and the convenience can be appreciated both by legal and illegal users of the game.
If that isn't good enough for you, there are a couple other possibilities. You could probably cobble together an utterly trivial Python (or Perl or whatever) script on your client machines, then have the server invoke it via ssh when a shutdown starts. If you aren't a programmer at all, you could try firing off an email to the client machines. As long as you have a periodic mail-checker going, it would alert you to the arrival of a new message. (Since you'd be able to use the local spool, you could have it check every 15 seconds.)
There are a number of other benefits, like no more wading through pages of mirrors trying to find one that works and isn't full. You could probably use it as an rsync replacement, but I'm not sure that would work well. Still, it will iron out file corruption that gets introduced in mirrors sometimes.
You heard it here first: The Slashdot BSD Section is Dying.
The basic issue here is twofold. First, how can we get load-sharing for all aspects of BT? And second, how can we do that while keeping BT a "lightweight" program (i.e. one that doesn't require special server programs)? DNS may not be the best answer, but it is an answer.
Incidentally, you picked some bad examples. Pepsi owns several other drink brands as well as Frito-Lay, and Dr Pepper is owned by Cadbury-Schweppes in the US (who also own 7up; somewhat oddly, Dr Pepper is owned by Coca-Cola in the UK). Pepsi and Coca-Cola also have distributor agreements, which is why you always have one of two selections in movie theaters and restaurants: in other words, even where they don't own all the brands being sold, they get a cut from them.
You also make a bit of a straw man. Nobody is suggesting that Nintendo "give in." We just think it might be a good idea for them to stop defining itself in terms of a battle it appears likely to lose (the battle of remaining a contender for the #1 spot in console gaming).
That's not to say that RSA or some similar system won't be part of a good solution... but there definitely needs to be some other component. (For example, the private key might be encrypted by a biometric signature or keycard or similar. While that still leaves the system vulnerable to physical attacks, it more or less eliminates network-based ones as long as you use secure protocols.)
There's no way of saying how effective this will be until it happens, but it at least looks like it could be effective. I strongly suspect that every parent would say the mere possibility of effectiveness is enough to make it a selling point.
It still only qualifies as an annoyance because I seldom do anything important over email. But the reason I don't do anything important over email is because I know spam makes it unreliable. Bit of a Catch 22 there. Seems like the reason spam is an annoyance and not a serious issue is that it's increasing fairly gradually. If there were this much spam back in '95, there'd be riots. (Among the nerds, which I guess means lots of really heated USENET posts about how Captain Kirk is so much better than Captain Picard.)
You are now installing Windows XP. If you have previously installed any third-party Internet browsers or email programs, they may not function properly after the upgrade. Microsoft does not support the use of third-party Internet browsers and email programs. If you want to use those functions, you must use Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, or use an operating system not published by Microsoft.
<I Understand and Agree>"
It's kind of funny to see how Slashdotters race to the defense of Apple when they start acting like a monopoly, but when MS does it, the sky is falling. (Probable defense by Apple zealots: "Apple isn't anywhere near as bad as Microsoft." Problem with that defense: That doesn't justify defending Apple, that justifies criticizing them more selectively.)
You can tell the difference between 50fps and 80fps, but usually it's so minimal that it's not worth worrying about. But the difference between 40fps and 50fps is a pretty big one in games where reflexes matter, especially when your framerate is bouncing between 30fps and 60fps depending on where you're looking. Especially when the game you're playing uses framerate-bounded physics calculations - that would be all FPS games - so people with high framerates can jump higher, gain super speed by bunny-hopping, and stay in the air forever with jetpacks.
I will cheer just as loudly when the makers of "benevolent worms" are sent to prison as when makers of destructive worms are, because they are exactly the same thing in every way.
We also have this image of what it's like to have a family, and it's basically what you see in 60s sitcoms. Owning a house with a yard and a white picket fence in a nice neighborhood, it's really important to us, and a lot of people are willing to make big sacrifices to get it. I don't know if that's quite as big a deal to you guys down under.
So no, it's not necessary that our actions cannot be predetermined even if we have free will. Sometimes that might be the case, but it still seems that a highly complex computer or superintelligent mind would be capable of predicting the actions of a human with near-perfect accuracy.
One possible answer is "it has." We aren't conscious, we just have highly advanced and generalized instincts. If a scientific determinist claims objectivity exists, he's being inconsistent. Objectivity would require the existence of an external entity who by definition cannot interact with the universe. Science clearly shows that observation is a type of interaction, so we can't even have any impartial observers. This seems like a pretty inescapable part of determinism, to me. If your will is not objective and it is governed by rules of your brain, then how is that not determinism? Perhaps your point is hinging on "subject to" rather than "governed by," but I question the exact distance between the two. This isn't science, here, although scientific principles and knowledge are certainly being used. You can wait your whole life for conclusive evidence and not get it. The only reasonable thing to do is pick a belief and go with it, but be ready to change your mind.That said, there are a few programs for Linux which work like MMC. The problem is that the onus for updates is presently on the authors of those programs, when it belongs on groups like Apache and MySQL. Unless and until some configuration framework is adopted as a de facto Linux standard, this will continue to be a serious gripe with Linux.
By the way, regarding your comments on choice, there's no reason there can't be a choice in the frontend program. Basically what we are talking about is having all programs use a common configuration file format. Then you can write 50 programs to work with that file format, including web-based interfaces and whatever else you want. So you see, we aren't looking at an either/or here. This is simply something that Linux developers don't care much about.
You might want to take off your green-tinted iGlasses before you start talking about the grass over there, friend, because it looks pretty brown from here.
(Karma bonus elided because nobody cares about snarkiness.)
I think it's a question that's definitely worth asking, and even though I'm not a fan of MS by a long shot, it's what I'd be asking in his place. I'm afraid I don't really have anything else to contribute, since I have zero experience with xchg2003, but I felt like I needed to defend the guy's boss.
I am, of course, not a lawyer, I just play one on the Internet. But I have had lawyers explain past NDAs to me, and that's what they've told me.
So are Ubisoft the good guys, keeping the four defectors from giving trade secrets to EA? Or are Ubisoft the bad guys, trying to fuck over innocent guys for the unbearable crime of not wanting to work for Ubisoft? And more importantly, is there some better way out there of balancing the rights of employees with the rights of companies?