Nope, their "single point of failure" was VA Linux. har har har;-)
Seriously though, what's up with the word on the street that this company is tanking? All that I've heard so far is rumors. Does anyone have any substantiated evidence?
Great job on the story selection there, timothy. I read about this after lunch on Yahoo!. Surely there are better things in the submission queue than stories recycled from the major portals.
It's "IP Filter", not "ipf". 'ipf' is a binary included in the package that is used to control the firewall, not the proper name of the package. It's like calling Linux "vmlin" because the Linux kernel is often named 'vmlinuz'.
I can't speak for the model 100 but my father (in his lifelong quest for a decent cordless phone) bought a bunch of their 3000-series phones for his house. They turned out to be complete peices of crap. Every time I call him, it sounds like I'm talking to him over a radio link from a remote outpost in Antarctica. It's horrible. And it's the phones, not the lines--when he picks up a conventional corded handset, the quality is great. I've done a bit of cordless phone searching myself and I've always been very pleased with Panasonic phones. Motorolas were ok but the battery life was awesome. If you plan on using multiple cordless phones in your house, make sure that the frequencies are sufficiently different to help prevent interference.
"What up" with all the redundant moderation around here lately? When I replied to this story, there were only a few comments posted, none about djbdns. I spent a few minutes researching my claim that there are no known exploits for this software and unbeknownst to me, others have posted similar comments to the story already.
I've seen a lot of folks making good comments getting screwed by moderators on this lately. Wake up folks, Slashdot gets a ton of traffic these days and there's no reason to penalize folks who don't get "first post".
I'm tired of dealing with the root exploit de jour. I'm switching our nameservers to djbdns. It's ightweight, fast, stripped-down, and (presumably) more secure than BIND. At least, I've yet to see an exploit for djbdns.
In addition to being a notable geek, William Hewlett was also a member of theKappa Sigma Fraternity. And I'll bet you thought that all fraternity guys were dumb geeks who couldn't turn on a computer to save their asses.:-)
Well, sort of. When Stalin was in power, Russia attempted to dig a tunnel from the mainland Siberia to Sahkahlin island which (if I recall correctly) is about 20 or so miles from shore on the Pacific side. They used prisoners from forced labor camps (aka the Gulag) to dig this but they didn't get very far. In fact, I don't think they got more than a few hundred feet. You can read about this in a recent issue of National Geographic. I believe the article was about the Amur river but I may be wrong on this one... It was about the river that divides northeastern China from Russia.
I was able to convince my company to buy me two nice monitors--an SGI 1600SW flatpanel and a top-of-the-line Sony GDM-F500R 21" CRT. My reasoning for these monitors is that my eyesight is beginning to go bad and the eye strain from hours in front of a crappy 15" monitor was more than I could handle. Considering this, these nice moniotrs really do increase my efficiency.
Back to the topic of this story... I had no problems whatsoever getting my 1600SW working with the old #9 card (PCI) under FreeBSD. E-mail me if you want the XFree86 configuration file. Not suprisingly, I found I prefered the SGI flatpanel over my nice Sony CRT even though they are both top-of-the-line monitors. Since I read my mail on my Win2k machine and thus, spend most of my time staring at it, I decided to put the flatpanel on this Win2k box. This worked out rather nicely because the 21" CRT is better suited to typical X11 usage, IMHO. It's not practical to have very wide xterms open but it's nice to have very tall ones. Remember, the SGI flatpanel is a cinema-style display and doesn't have a whole lot of top-to-bottom desktop space.
PSI had taken (and deserved) a ton of flak in the past because of their crumby handling of UCE and abuse complaints. Fortunately, I think that the pressure of MAPS and others is finally forcing some changes at the companies.
Last week, I had a problem with a PSI customer with a stuck browser who was (accidentally) hammering our shopping cart script. I called up the number listed in the WHOIS record for PSI.net. A few simple keypresses and maybe 20 seconds later, I was connected with the abuse department. I was speaking to a real, live person! The representative was friendly and understanding and willing to take immediate action against the abuse. She requested that I send logs to abuse@psi.net and while I still had her on the phone, I was to wait for a trouble ticket number. A few seconds later, I gave her my trouble ticket number and she took action while I was still on the phone with her. Amazing.
I used to work for a large cable modem ISP and our "Abuse" department at the time was one lady and an always-full voicemail system and mail queue. Keep up the good work, UCE crusaders. It's finally paying off.
If I recall correctly, the Junkbuster proxy does not work as a transparent proxy but rather, requires that the users configure their browsers to use the Junkbuster proxy manually. I haven't installed Opera yet to verify this but I'm guessing that it pays no attention to the proxy server settings when fetching its banner ads.
This behaviour is similar to the popular windows bannerware program, Napigator. Napigator gives you no options to choose a proxy and thus, no way to disable the banner ads. However, there is a way around it. I installed AdZapper on my firewall box and configured ip-filter to send all outbound port 80 connections through the AdZapper proxy. This "transparency" required a patch to AdZapper, and the author (Adam Feuer) sent it to me. Now that I had a transparent banner ad filter running, it was time to figure out how to filter the banner ads out of the application. For this, I used tcpdump (see the manpage for the exact options) to snoop all outbound connections from the machine running Napigator. I logged all of the traffic to a file and was able to find an outbound connection to an http server that had something similar to this:
GET/bannerad.php?userid=AB34C2D7F HTTP/1.1
So, I wrote a quick Zaplet to block this banner ad fetch. Presto, no more ads in Napigator.
There are, of course, ethical obligations when using free software and you should certainly take these in mind before blocking Opera's ads.
You should learn a little more about software management in a university setting. Most universities have site licenses for their commonly-used applications like Microsoft Office. Some site licenses renew anually, some are good for the life of the version. Some site licensed apps rely on a central license server to automatically manage their licenses.
How is this "blackmail"? If you know that your subscription is going to running out, what would keep you from saving your Word document to the Wordperfect format? What would keep you from opening this same document in Staroffice? Nothing! Your document file is still there!
And please, explain to me how you do not own the Microsoft software that you buy? Unless I've been missing something for the last six years, I think I have the right to continue using all of the Microsoft packages that I've bought. As for the new licensing terms of Office, this is not called _buying_ the software, it's called _renting_ the software. There's nothing wrong with that, either. Are you going to go off on Ford now because you don't/own/ the car that you are leasing? Puhleeze.
It's kind of sad to go to Netscape's home page and see that a news story about the Florida election battles has better page placement than an announcement about a major new version of their flagship product. Well, that is, if they still consider Communicator to be their flagship product.
I'll be interested to see how their windowmanager looks and functions. Earlier this year, the lead developer of Blackbox moved to Norway to work for TrollTech. Blackbox is a nice lightweight wm and I think it will be interesting to see if this new windowmanager bears any resemblance to blackbox.
Your assertion that RedHat doesn't make closed-source software is entirely incorrect. CCVS is closed source. I think they also have some clustering/HA software that is closed source.
I don't discount your story. On some hardware, Win2k may be flaky. Same goes for Linux and FreeBSD, believe it or not.
I run Win2k here on 40 Dell machines and I've never had a crash. You might look into upgrading your firmware on your Dells. We had a horrible time with buggy BIOSes on our machines (both Win2k and FreeBSD) until we upgraded BIOS revision.
As for your father, is he now overcharging his customers? Is he giving bicycles away free to push his competitors out of the market?
Actually, no. Our online sales have brought prices down in our store to unheard of levels. As I said, in 1985, you'd pay close to $100 for a really good saddle for your bike. You'll pay $70 for the same saddle . This is not just at my father's store--this is at all good bicycle stores. Yep, our competitors are (mostly) still around. They still have the moldy-smelling poorly-lit stores with high prices that they did back then. But why should you, as the consumer, settle for that?
Like it or not, this is what the consumers of this country are demanding. This is exactly why stores like Borders and Barnes and Noble are so popular. People were sick of going to the local record shop and getting a crappy selection and paying high prices for their purchases.
And no, my father's store didn't come on the scene like Border's with millions of dollars of investors' money. He started in a room of an old house with a few bikes, fixing tubes. It's really not about my father, though. There are thousands of good businessmen and women like him. In this day and age, the world of business is survival of the fittest.
Your reply is so typical of your party affiliation. So, let me get this straight. You want my father to purposefully do a crappy job running his business so that his competitors can be successful? *laugh* The world just doesn't work that way, buddy. If you believe in evolution (hell, maybe YOU don't), you believe in competition. For the everyday Joe, competition is wonderful. The competition amongst bicycle stores here in town has been wonderful for the consumer. They used to pay $100 for a nice saddle for their bike--now they pay $70. In 1985, most bicycle stores in this country were small and poorly stocked. Walk in any sucessful bicycle store nowadays and you will be amazed. The good stores now have damned near every product on the market and they have them in large quantities, with good prices. The stores are clean and well-lit with knowledgable staff. And you say this is BAD? Fine, Nader boy, live as if it was 1975 if you want. Me, I'm happy with the low prices and selection that our free market has given us all.
It's important to remember the difference between Win95/98/ME and WinNT/Win2k. These are two different product lines. Apples and oranges. Minivans and sports cars.
I'll be the first to agree with you and say that Windows ME is complete and total horse dung. I cannot wait until every home user is running an operating system with a server-quality kernel.
Win2k, however, is a different beast. My Win2k box has *never* crashed on me in the 10 months I've been running it. The TCP/IP stack seems quite fast and solid and the usability over NT has improved beyond words. It does, as you mentioned, require a lot of RAM. Perhaps a problem for some but I think the average CompUSA computer will be equipped with 256M RAM by the time Whistler (Win2k-based home OS) goes on the shelf.
It matters not how good the software is. Slashdot is (supposed to be anyways) a community of open source advocates and MS is the antichrist to open source.
I disagree. Slashdot is "news for nerds", nothing else. Yes, there are many open source advocates here but that is not what this forum is about. Open Source, however noble, is not the end-all be-all. The common (but not formally sanctioned) belief amongst the open source crowd is that big business is inherently bad. This is something that I used to believe strongly back in 94 or so but since I left college and went into the real world, I'm beginning to see that there is a place for both open source and closed source.
What is good about Windows? Well, for one, it's very easy to use when compared to *BSD and Linux. As much as I love UNIX, I'd never install it on my grandparents' computer. I'd like to say that KDE and GNOME were "there" and ready to be used by folks like my grandmother but they just aren't. And really, the windowing environment is only the beginning. If my grandmother saw the disk partitioning tools included with most UNIX OSes (even the newer versions of RedHat), she'd probably keel over. Never mind user accounts and setting up networking. It just ain't happening right now. Maybe in 5 years but not now.
These people are nasty evil people who got to the top by crushing anybody who got in their way.
I hate to say it, my friend, but that is business for you. Most successful companies got that way by edging less dominant competitors out of the markey. My father, who owns some bicycle stores, is now the largest dealer in South Texas not because he kept expanding his store (he did) but because his cuthroat prices have driven his competitors out of business. There is nothing wrong with this! It's life. Business is not fair!
Giving these people absolute control of any key technology is the same as shooting yourself in the head.
Pardon? Who said that anyone has absolute control over the browser market? Have the police knocked on your door and told you that you cannot use Netscape (or links, mosaic, etc)? If you don't like it, don't use it.
I've been reading Slashdot for a long, long time and I resent your claim that supporting IE is "ridiculous".
Historically, Microsoft made some pretty crappy software. Things are changing, however, and they don't deserve the flaming that they get on this site. Yes, they're closed-source. Hell, RedHat makes closed-source software. **MOST** companies make closed-source software. But in terms of stability and quality, Win2k and IE 5.01 are awesome products.
Before you get your panties in a knot, let me tell you that I ran Linux from early 1994 until 1998, when I switched to FreeBSD. My job title is "Senior UNIX Administrator" and I've spent more than my share of time at a bash prompt. I've played with nearly every OS out there, both open and closed-source. I stand by my opinion that IE and Win2k are excellent products.
And for your statement that "IE will never compete with Mozilla", well, you're just plain wrong. IE's user base is growing daily. IE came farther along in a matter of a year than Mozilla has done in its lifetime. Like it or not, most of the world uses (and will continue to use) Microsoft Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, their "single point of failure" was VA Linux. har har har
Seriously though, what's up with the word on the street that this company is tanking? All that I've heard so far is rumors. Does anyone have any substantiated evidence?
--
Great job on the story selection there, timothy. I read about this after lunch on Yahoo!. Surely there are better things in the submission queue than stories recycled from the major portals.
How about some "Stuff that matters"?
It's "IP Filter", not "ipf". 'ipf' is a binary included in the package that is used to control the firewall, not the proper name of the package. It's like calling Linux "vmlin" because the Linux kernel is often named 'vmlinuz'.
Maybe what he meant to say was...
"I have just founded a company that sells..."
:-)
errr s/battery life was awesome/the battery life was horrible/g
I can't speak for the model 100 but my father (in his lifelong quest for a decent cordless phone) bought a bunch of their 3000-series phones for his house. They turned out to be complete peices of crap. Every time I call him, it sounds like I'm talking to him over a radio link from a remote outpost in Antarctica. It's horrible. And it's the phones, not the lines--when he picks up a conventional corded handset, the quality is great. I've done a bit of cordless phone searching myself and I've always been very pleased with Panasonic phones. Motorolas were ok but the battery life was awesome. If you plan on using multiple cordless phones in your house, make sure that the frequencies are sufficiently different to help prevent interference.
"What up" with all the redundant moderation around here lately? When I replied to this story, there were only a few comments posted, none about djbdns. I spent a few minutes researching my claim that there are no known exploits for this software and unbeknownst to me, others have posted similar comments to the story already.
I've seen a lot of folks making good comments getting screwed by moderators on this lately. Wake up folks, Slashdot gets a ton of traffic these days and there's no reason to penalize folks who don't get "first post".
I'm tired of dealing with the root exploit de jour. I'm switching our nameservers to djbdns. It's ightweight, fast, stripped-down, and (presumably) more secure than BIND. At least, I've yet to see an exploit for djbdns.
In addition to being a notable geek, William Hewlett was also a member of theKappa Sigma Fraternity. And I'll bet you thought that all fraternity guys were dumb geeks who couldn't turn on a computer to save their asses. :-)
Well, sort of. When Stalin was in power, Russia attempted to dig a tunnel from the mainland Siberia to Sahkahlin island which (if I recall correctly) is about 20 or so miles from shore on the Pacific side. They used prisoners from forced labor camps (aka the Gulag) to dig this but they didn't get very far. In fact, I don't think they got more than a few hundred feet. You can read about this in a recent issue of National Geographic. I believe the article was about the Amur river but I may be wrong on this one... It was about the river that divides northeastern China from Russia.
Linux is more scalable than BSD? Please, support this argument. First, define scalability. Next, describe how Linux is more scalable than *BSD.
I was able to convince my company to buy me two nice monitors--an SGI 1600SW flatpanel and a top-of-the-line Sony GDM-F500R 21" CRT. My reasoning for these monitors is that my eyesight is beginning to go bad and the eye strain from hours in front of a crappy 15" monitor was more than I could handle. Considering this, these nice moniotrs really do increase my efficiency.
Back to the topic of this story... I had no problems whatsoever getting my 1600SW working with the old #9 card (PCI) under FreeBSD. E-mail me if you want the XFree86 configuration file. Not suprisingly, I found I prefered the SGI flatpanel over my nice Sony CRT even though they are both top-of-the-line monitors. Since I read my mail on my Win2k machine and thus, spend most of my time staring at it, I decided to put the flatpanel on this Win2k box. This worked out rather nicely because the 21" CRT is better suited to typical X11 usage, IMHO. It's not practical to have very wide xterms open but it's nice to have very tall ones. Remember, the SGI flatpanel is a cinema-style display and doesn't have a whole lot of top-to-bottom desktop space.
Chris
PSI had taken (and deserved) a ton of flak in the past because of their crumby handling of UCE and abuse complaints. Fortunately, I think that the pressure of MAPS and others is finally forcing some changes at the companies.
Last week, I had a problem with a PSI customer with a stuck browser who was (accidentally) hammering our shopping cart script. I called up the number listed in the WHOIS record for PSI.net. A few simple keypresses and maybe 20 seconds later, I was connected with the abuse department. I was speaking to a real, live person! The representative was friendly and understanding and willing to take immediate action against the abuse. She requested that I send logs to abuse@psi.net and while I still had her on the phone, I was to wait for a trouble ticket number. A few seconds later, I gave her my trouble ticket number and she took action while I was still on the phone with her. Amazing.
I used to work for a large cable modem ISP and our "Abuse" department at the time was one lady and an always-full voicemail system and mail queue. Keep up the good work, UCE crusaders. It's finally paying off.
If I recall correctly, the Junkbuster proxy does not work as a transparent proxy but rather, requires that the users configure their browsers to use the Junkbuster proxy manually. I haven't installed Opera yet to verify this but I'm guessing that it pays no attention to the proxy server settings when fetching its banner ads.
/bannerad.php?userid=AB34C2D7F HTTP/1.1
This behaviour is similar to the popular windows bannerware program, Napigator. Napigator gives you no options to choose a proxy and thus, no way to disable the banner ads. However, there is a way around it. I installed AdZapper on my firewall box and configured ip-filter to send all outbound port 80 connections through the AdZapper proxy. This "transparency" required a patch to AdZapper, and the author (Adam Feuer) sent it to me. Now that I had a transparent banner ad filter running, it was time to figure out how to filter the banner ads out of the application. For this, I used tcpdump (see the manpage for the exact options) to snoop all outbound connections from the machine running Napigator. I logged all of the traffic to a file and was able to find an outbound connection to an http server that had something similar to this:
GET
So, I wrote a quick Zaplet to block this banner ad fetch. Presto, no more ads in Napigator.
There are, of course, ethical obligations when using free software and you should certainly take these in mind before blocking Opera's ads.
You should learn a little more about software management in a university setting. Most universities have site licenses for their commonly-used applications like Microsoft Office. Some site licenses renew anually, some are good for the life of the version. Some site licensed apps rely on a central license server to automatically manage their licenses.
How is this "blackmail"? If you know that your subscription is going to running out, what would keep you from saving your Word document to the Wordperfect format? What would keep you from opening this same document in Staroffice? Nothing! Your document file is still there!
/own/ the car that you are leasing? Puhleeze.
And please, explain to me how you do not own the Microsoft software that you buy? Unless I've been missing something for the last six years, I think I have the right to continue using all of the Microsoft packages that I've bought. As for the new licensing terms of Office, this is not called _buying_ the software, it's called _renting_ the software. There's nothing wrong with that, either. Are you going to go off on Ford now because you don't
It's kind of sad to go to Netscape's home page and see that a news story about the Florida election battles has better page placement than an announcement about a major new version of their flagship product. Well, that is, if they still consider Communicator to be their flagship product.
I'll be interested to see how their windowmanager looks and functions. Earlier this year, the lead developer of Blackbox moved to Norway to work for TrollTech. Blackbox is a nice lightweight wm and I think it will be interesting to see if this new windowmanager bears any resemblance to blackbox.
http://www.redhat.com/products/software/ecommerce/ ccvs/
Your assertion that RedHat doesn't make closed-source software is entirely incorrect. CCVS is closed source. I think they also have some clustering/HA software that is closed source.
I don't discount your story. On some hardware, Win2k may be flaky. Same goes for Linux and FreeBSD, believe it or not.
I run Win2k here on 40 Dell machines and I've never had a crash. You might look into upgrading your firmware on your Dells. We had a horrible time with buggy BIOSes on our machines (both Win2k and FreeBSD) until we upgraded BIOS revision.
As for your father, is he now overcharging his customers? Is he giving bicycles away free to push his competitors out of the market?
Actually, no. Our online sales have brought prices down in our store to unheard of levels. As I said, in 1985, you'd pay close to $100 for a really good saddle for your bike. You'll pay $70 for the same saddle . This is not just at my father's store--this is at all good bicycle stores. Yep, our competitors are (mostly) still around. They still have the moldy-smelling poorly-lit stores with high prices that they did back then. But why should you, as the consumer, settle for that?
Like it or not, this is what the consumers of this country are demanding. This is exactly why stores like Borders and Barnes and Noble are so popular. People were sick of going to the local record shop and getting a crappy selection and paying high prices for their purchases.
And no, my father's store didn't come on the scene like Border's with millions of dollars of investors' money. He started in a room of an old house with a few bikes, fixing tubes. It's really not about my father, though. There are thousands of good businessmen and women like him. In this day and age, the world of business is survival of the fittest.
Your reply is so typical of your party affiliation. So, let me get this straight. You want my father to purposefully do a crappy job running his business so that his competitors can be successful? *laugh* The world just doesn't work that way, buddy. If you believe in evolution (hell, maybe YOU don't), you believe in competition. For the everyday Joe, competition is wonderful. The competition amongst bicycle stores here in town has been wonderful for the consumer. They used to pay $100 for a nice saddle for their bike--now they pay $70. In 1985, most bicycle stores in this country were small and poorly stocked. Walk in any sucessful bicycle store nowadays and you will be amazed. The good stores now have damned near every product on the market and they have them in large quantities, with good prices. The stores are clean and well-lit with knowledgable staff. And you say this is BAD? Fine, Nader boy, live as if it was 1975 if you want. Me, I'm happy with the low prices and selection that our free market has given us all.
It's important to remember the difference between Win95/98/ME and WinNT/Win2k. These are two different product lines. Apples and oranges. Minivans and sports cars.
I'll be the first to agree with you and say that Windows ME is complete and total horse dung. I cannot wait until every home user is running an operating system with a server-quality kernel.
Win2k, however, is a different beast. My Win2k box has *never* crashed on me in the 10 months I've been running it. The TCP/IP stack seems quite fast and solid and the usability over NT has improved beyond words. It does, as you mentioned, require a lot of RAM. Perhaps a problem for some but I think the average CompUSA computer will be equipped with 256M RAM by the time Whistler (Win2k-based home OS) goes on the shelf.
It matters not how good the software is. Slashdot is (supposed to be anyways) a community of open source advocates and MS is the antichrist to open source.
I disagree. Slashdot is "news for nerds", nothing else. Yes, there are many open source advocates here but that is not what this forum is about. Open Source, however noble, is not the end-all be-all. The common (but not formally sanctioned) belief amongst the open source crowd is that big business is inherently bad. This is something that I used to believe strongly back in 94 or so but since I left college and went into the real world, I'm beginning to see that there is a place for both open source and closed source.
What is good about Windows? Well, for one, it's very easy to use when compared to *BSD and Linux. As much as I love UNIX, I'd never install it on my grandparents' computer. I'd like to say that KDE and GNOME were "there" and ready to be used by folks like my grandmother but they just aren't. And really, the windowing environment is only the beginning. If my grandmother saw the disk partitioning tools included with most UNIX OSes (even the newer versions of RedHat), she'd probably keel over. Never mind user accounts and setting up networking. It just ain't happening right now. Maybe in 5 years but not now.
These people are nasty evil people who got to the top by crushing anybody who got in their way.
I hate to say it, my friend, but that is business for you. Most successful companies got that way by edging less dominant competitors out of the markey. My father, who owns some bicycle stores, is now the largest dealer in South Texas not because he kept expanding his store (he did) but because his cuthroat prices have driven his competitors out of business. There is nothing wrong with this! It's life. Business is not fair!
Giving these people absolute control of any key technology is the same as shooting yourself in the head.
Pardon? Who said that anyone has absolute control over the browser market? Have the police knocked on your door and told you that you cannot use Netscape (or links, mosaic, etc)? If you don't like it, don't use it.
</rant>
I've been reading Slashdot for a long, long time and I resent your claim that supporting IE is "ridiculous".
Historically, Microsoft made some pretty crappy software. Things are changing, however, and they don't deserve the flaming that they get on this site. Yes, they're closed-source. Hell, RedHat makes closed-source software. **MOST** companies make closed-source software. But in terms of stability and quality, Win2k and IE 5.01 are awesome products.
Before you get your panties in a knot, let me tell you that I ran Linux from early 1994 until 1998, when I switched to FreeBSD. My job title is "Senior UNIX Administrator" and I've spent more than my share of time at a bash prompt. I've played with nearly every OS out there, both open and closed-source. I stand by my opinion that IE and Win2k are excellent products.
And for your statement that "IE will never compete with Mozilla", well, you're just plain wrong. IE's user base is growing daily. IE came farther along in a matter of a year than Mozilla has done in its lifetime. Like it or not, most of the world uses (and will continue to use) Microsoft Windows.