How can I possibly be intimidated by the CIA or FBI if I think they are basically a bunch of clueless government workers with a remarkably small percentage of incredibly talented people?
I'm not falling into anyone's trap, becoming intimidated by anyone, etc. Pushing your paranoid theories on the populace only creates unnecessary panic. Who's doing more harm? Me or you?
I'm nowhere near complacent. If the government was keeping detailed records on me, they'd probably have some idea that I'm more of an anarchist than a complacent, lazy citizen.
Watch the movie Cube. It's quite good, and it might open your paranoid eyes.
Usenet is not supposed to be anonymous, and I find attempts to make it anonymous really annoying. Every time you falsely modify your Usenet headers, you're breaking several RFCs.
Why not just start using illegal TCP packets, modify your IRC client to send false info, and, in general, make life hell for everyone else on the internet?
People who want to be anonymous that bad make me wonder what they're hiding, and also annoy the hell out of me, because of all the RFCs they disdainfully break.
Want my e-mail address, street address, or phone number? It's on public record in numerous places, including my ICQ profile.
Re:Just One Little Problem - I Can't Find It
on
FreeBSD 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the info. It'll help a lot of newbies. If anyone does have an ISO available for ftp, can they post the address?
Download some X Rated pics from your news server (alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.female.*)
Set up an adult site on a free server or your own server (say, on a DSL line)
Spam the hell out of AOL
Get some people to pay $10 for a one-time sign-up fee, with lifetime subscription
Take down the site
Wait a few days, weeks, or whatever
Repeat
You can just repeat the last few steps... don't even need to change the pictures or the HTML, unless you want to scam the same people over and over. Just make sure to change the name of the site and the name of the management.
I would set up an adult site of my own, but it's too much bother. Oh yeah, and my girlfriend would kill me.:)
What I meant by 'irrevocably" was that future generations may very well have the technology to resurrect themselves. It's not really that far-fetched, if you consider that we can already bring people back from brain death today, as long as they are lucky.
Nope, not really... just some stupid guy with a bone in his mouth talking about how he and some other people worked for 12 hours a day and thought they weren't being taken advantage of.
Huh?
I wish I could find people like that. I'd build up an army of them, then take over the world.
You tried to cheat someone out of something, and they figured it out? And then had the gall to offer you a gift certificate to keep your business? The assholes! BOYCOTT TIME!
Why do you think we'd all get scared and hide? We don't do that now, and we have a much better (worse?) chance of irrevocably dying than any future generation does. How many people smoke cigarettes, fully knowing that it shortens their life? You think people would hide in their houses if they were offered a chance to live as long as they wanted?
No, I seriously doubt it. In fact, I take the opposite view. People would became incredible risk-takers. If you've lived 300 years, you'd probably become pretty bored and start jumping out of airplanes (or space shuttles or whatever), because you just didn't care any more.
Why don't you just uninstall Shockware support from your browser? Or install a proxy server like WebWasher or the Internet JunkBuster? They both run under Win32 and Linux.
I never really had a problem with Solaris/x86. I know that everyone says it sucks, it's insanely slow, it doesn't support any PC hardware, etc... but I had two systems running it quite successfully. One of them was a P233MMX with 64MB RAM and Adaptec Ultra SCSI, and the other was a dual processor 450 MHz Pentium III with 256MB RAM and Symbios Ultra2 Wide SCSI.
I can honestly say that the P233MMX was usable. I won't pretend that it was a speed demon, of course. My other system is always fast, no matter what operating system is loaded on it (even Win2K Advanced Server ran surprising well).
I'm planning on upgrading the memory to 512MB or 1GB soon, though. It's sort of sad, but 256MB isn't as much as it used to be.
They can use an IRC client (blech), Yahoo! Messenger (for Win32/Mac/Unix/Java), a web-based app, a Java app (often the same thing as the web-based thing), any number of cheesy open source projects, or -- my favorite -- just plain old talk/ntalk. I don't see what's so bad about talk. Seriously. I type and someone else sees it. That's all I need... well, that and e-mail file attachments.
The standard Pentium III processors can only scale up to two processors, but then you are limited to the BX/GX chipset (aging, only officially supports 100Mhz FSB), the Via chipset (I'm still a little wary of it), or the i820/i840 (requires Rambus memory). The Xeon allows you to scale well above 2 processors, but then you have to pay through the nose for a decent motherboard and the processor.
There's nothing wrong with the 440BX chipset, really. If you get a recent revision of the Asus or Tyan dual BX boards, you can support Coppermine CPUs all the way up to the 850E (depending on your BIOS, revision, etc). You don't get PC133 RAM or AGP4X, but who really cares? AGP4X is all about marketing, and PC100 memory on a BX will probably outperform PC133 memory on a VIA chipset. VIA chipsets suck royally.
Not having a 133 MHz FSB is a bit of a drag, but I haven't had trouble supporting five Ultra2 Wide SCSI hard drives (four 7200 RPM and one 10K RPM), AGP 2X, and two 100Mb/s NICs on my 440BX. This is obviously a lot more than the typical load placed on a BX motherboard... or even a KT133A.
The i840 isn't such a bad choice now that RAMBUS memory is so cheap. Cheap?! Yep. It's cheaper than DDR SDRAM in some cases. Check it out on pricewatch.com.
What about the Serverworks HE and SL chipsets, if you don't like using PC100 or RAMBUS memory? You get dual or quad processor motherboards; 64 bit, 66 MHz PCI; multiple independant PCI busses; PC133 RAM; and some really awesome other stuff, all for around $300 or $1000 (dual P3 vs quad Xeon). Add another $100-$150 for integrated 64 bit Ultra160 SCSI. Wow.
I dunno about you, but I'd get excited over a motherboard that cool for just $300. I paid $250 for my dual Asus P2B-D in October of 99. My KT133A board was about $125 a month ago. So, for just a little bit over the price of a dual BX or two KT133As, you can get a monster server board. Nice deal.
Integrated 440GX, 450NX, and beyond can be prohibitively expensive. Try buying them from ebay cheap if you want a killer Xeon board from Intel. The 450NX supports four Xeons. Nice. Not cheap, though.
You can also look at workstations/servers from Micron (they make their own cool chipsets). Some awesome stuff never makes it to the public, because of non-competition clauses Intel makes people (like Micron) sign.
And, one last thing: don't ever trust marketing. Just because it's new doesn't mean it's better. Sometimes the best solution is older technology. It has proven reliability, lowered cost, *known* issues (rather than unknown issues), and more mature driver support.
As an addendum to the one last thing: watch out for diminishing returns.
If Linux or BSD can be coded and given away for free, then someone can type in some text without including half a megabyte of useless graphics.
Some people really do want to make a job out of their former hobby, and I applaud this. In this situation, taking on advertisers or charging fees makes perfect sense. How else will you make money from your work? Consider, however, that this is actual work, not a hobby. When something moves from the realm of being a hobby to being work, you usually expect a certain degree of skill, professionalism, and (in this context) content. Most web sites seriously lack in all three areas. I think that there will be a great shakedown (that's just such a cool phrase) in the number of useless web sites in the coming years.
Why do we need GardenKnowledge.com, GardenPower.com, GardenSecrets.com, and GardenPlus.com, when they all suck royally and have dozens of annoying ads? Will anyone ever miss them? Nope, I don't think so.
p.s. Those are all just example domain names. No offense to actual web sites if they truly exist.
Mosaic Netscape Back before you had heard of Netscape, I was responsible for the Unix versions of Netscape Navigator through release 1.1.
Netscape Mail & News Next, I designed, and Terry Weissman and I implemented, the Netscape Mail and News clients, versions 2.0 through 3.0. This was our contribution to the proof of the Law of Software Envelopment:
``Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.''
Basically, he ported Netscape 1.0 and 1.1 to UNIX, then wrote the Communicator mail and news clients. That's pretty cool and all, but it doesn't make him an authority on anything... at least, in my mind. He's more of the old-guard than anything else, to my way of thinking.
I didn't think I posted enough on Slashdot for anyone to take notice of me, much less my name.:)
Use an ultra-secure kernel, where even root's permissions are limited
Don't use Sendmail, wuftpd, or other commonly hacked daemons.
Make a hardcopy version of your syslog using a printer
Don't use the Intel x86 architecture
Use the immutable flag
Don't allow remote power-cycling, reboots, etc
Some of this is actually security through obscurity (such as not using Intel x86), but it works sometimes. Also, you lose some functionality, such as remote manageability, but you always have to make trade-offs for a truly secure machine.
Don't forget to remove the floppy drive, CDROM, and all other bootable media.
What is so difficult about renaming OpenSSH to something like SecureTelnet or SecureLogin or SecureRSH? It doesn't have to have SSH in the name of the product. Nobody is saying that the OpenSSH filename can't be "ssh" or that Theo has to stop writing an SSH clone.
I like OpenSSH a lot, but if this is the way they're going to conduct themselves, then I'll switch back to SSH. SSH is guaranteed to be around in a year; OpenSSH, OTOH, might face legal problems if they keep going down this road.
Hey, guys, you know about the Internet Junkbuster, right? It's a proxy server that will filter cookies, ads, referer information, and lots of other stuff. It's incredibly useful if you desire privacy on the net, not to mention saving your eyes from those aforementioned strobe-light ads.
The IJB is available for UNIX, Microsoft Windows, and Linux. Configuration is just a little bit complicated, but no more so than any other standard UNIX daemon.
Alos, there's a truly wonderful program by the name of WebWasher that will do that same thing under Microsoft Windows. It's got a very slick interface, awesome features, and some very friendly guys working on it. If you have any Microsoft Windows clients, I would highly recommend installing WebWasher on them.
Definitely check out Squid as well. It's a caching proxy server that runs under UNIX and Linux. I've used it for years.
JWZ wrote part of the bloated Netscape add-ons that nobody wanted (ie, mail and news). AFAIK, he didn't do any work on the core browser itself. For this reason, his comments don't really hold any more weight to me than do any other random (ex-)Mozilla developer.
As long as someone is using Mozilla, then it will never die. I have a feeling that a lot of UNIX systems have Mozilla (or, at least, Netscape) installed as the default (only?) browser. That's a very small minority of web users, of course, but it's probably enough to keep the momentum going.
Maybe Stallman himself will take over writing Mozilla, rather than see it fail. Heh. That would be somewhat amusing.
The easiest solution, one which I have recommended to the company for which I work, is to statically link commercial products. That way, you don't need to worry at all about what libraries are installed. It's much easier for the users and the tech support people. IMHO, more Linux apps should be distributed as both static and dynamic, so that more intelligent/experienced users have a choice.
Also, it's a fairly good idea for people to have older libraries installed on their system. I don't see why you wouldn't, except if you're out of disk space. In that case, just go out and buy a 20GB IDE hard drive for $99.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose you know all about my life.
Hey, you're not one of THEM are you??
How can I possibly be intimidated by the CIA or FBI if I think they are basically a bunch of clueless government workers with a remarkably small percentage of incredibly talented people?
I'm not falling into anyone's trap, becoming intimidated by anyone, etc. Pushing your paranoid theories on the populace only creates unnecessary panic. Who's doing more harm? Me or you?
I'm nowhere near complacent. If the government was keeping detailed records on me, they'd probably have some idea that I'm more of an anarchist than a complacent, lazy citizen.
Watch the movie Cube. It's quite good, and it might open your paranoid eyes.
There is nobody out to get you. There is no "THEM". There is nobody trying to frame you for accidentally clicking on obscene porn links.
Get a life, people. This isn't the X Files.
Usenet is not supposed to be anonymous, and I find attempts to make it anonymous really annoying. Every time you falsely modify your Usenet headers, you're breaking several RFCs.
Why not just start using illegal TCP packets, modify your IRC client to send false info, and, in general, make life hell for everyone else on the internet?
People who want to be anonymous that bad make me wonder what they're hiding, and also annoy the hell out of me, because of all the RFCs they disdainfully break.
Want my e-mail address, street address, or phone number? It's on public record in numerous places, including my ICQ profile.
Thanks for the info. It'll help a lot of newbies. If anyone does have an ISO available for ftp, can they post the address?
You can just repeat the last few steps... don't even need to change the pictures or the HTML, unless you want to scam the same people over and over. Just make sure to change the name of the site and the name of the management.
I would set up an adult site of my own, but it's too much bother. Oh yeah, and my girlfriend would kill me.
What I meant by 'irrevocably" was that future generations may very well have the technology to resurrect themselves. It's not really that far-fetched, if you consider that we can already bring people back from brain death today, as long as they are lucky.
If they want to talk to you, they will switch.
Nope, not really... just some stupid guy with a bone in his mouth talking about how he and some other people worked for 12 hours a day and thought they weren't being taken advantage of.
Huh?
I wish I could find people like that. I'd build up an army of them, then take over the world.
You tried to cheat someone out of something, and they figured it out? And then had the gall to offer you a gift certificate to keep your business? The assholes! BOYCOTT TIME!
We could always use them to power the computers in the beowulf cluster. Hey, it worked in The Matrix...
Why do you think we'd all get scared and hide? We don't do that now, and we have a much better (worse?) chance of irrevocably dying than any future generation does. How many people smoke cigarettes, fully knowing that it shortens their life? You think people would hide in their houses if they were offered a chance to live as long as they wanted?
No, I seriously doubt it. In fact, I take the opposite view. People would became incredible risk-takers. If you've lived 300 years, you'd probably become pretty bored and start jumping out of airplanes (or space shuttles or whatever), because you just didn't care any more.
It's really basic psych.
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying that the world should give in to your desires and reshape itself so that you're never inconvenienced?
If so, then you're in for a rude awakening.
Depending on the story, that's true...
Did you know that Slashdot is censored? It's true. People who you have never met in person are controlling which stories you can see on Slashdot.
(in case you don't get it and decide to label me a troll, I'll make it obvious: CmdrTaco can reject any story he doesn't like)
Why don't you just uninstall Shockware support from your browser? Or install a proxy server like WebWasher or the Internet JunkBuster? They both run under Win32 and Linux.
I never really had a problem with Solaris/x86. I know that everyone says it sucks, it's insanely slow, it doesn't support any PC hardware, etc... but I had two systems running it quite successfully. One of them was a P233MMX with 64MB RAM and Adaptec Ultra SCSI, and the other was a dual processor 450 MHz Pentium III with 256MB RAM and Symbios Ultra2 Wide SCSI.
I can honestly say that the P233MMX was usable. I won't pretend that it was a speed demon, of course. My other system is always fast, no matter what operating system is loaded on it (even Win2K Advanced Server ran surprising well).
I'm planning on upgrading the memory to 512MB or 1GB soon, though. It's sort of sad, but 256MB isn't as much as it used to be.
Huh?
Nobody is locked into AIM and ICQ.
They can use an IRC client (blech), Yahoo! Messenger (for Win32/Mac/Unix/Java), a web-based app, a Java app (often the same thing as the web-based thing), any number of cheesy open source projects, or -- my favorite -- just plain old talk/ntalk. I don't see what's so bad about talk. Seriously. I type and someone else sees it. That's all I need... well, that and e-mail file attachments.
There's nothing wrong with the 440BX chipset, really. If you get a recent revision of the Asus or Tyan dual BX boards, you can support Coppermine CPUs all the way up to the 850E (depending on your BIOS, revision, etc). You don't get PC133 RAM or AGP4X, but who really cares? AGP4X is all about marketing, and PC100 memory on a BX will probably outperform PC133 memory on a VIA chipset. VIA chipsets suck royally.
Not having a 133 MHz FSB is a bit of a drag, but I haven't had trouble supporting five Ultra2 Wide SCSI hard drives (four 7200 RPM and one 10K RPM), AGP 2X, and two 100Mb/s NICs on my 440BX. This is obviously a lot more than the typical load placed on a BX motherboard... or even a KT133A.
The i840 isn't such a bad choice now that RAMBUS memory is so cheap. Cheap?! Yep. It's cheaper than DDR SDRAM in some cases. Check it out on pricewatch.com.
What about the Serverworks HE and SL chipsets, if you don't like using PC100 or RAMBUS memory? You get dual or quad processor motherboards; 64 bit, 66 MHz PCI; multiple independant PCI busses; PC133 RAM; and some really awesome other stuff, all for around $300 or $1000 (dual P3 vs quad Xeon). Add another $100-$150 for integrated 64 bit Ultra160 SCSI. Wow.
I dunno about you, but I'd get excited over a motherboard that cool for just $300. I paid $250 for my dual Asus P2B-D in October of 99. My KT133A board was about $125 a month ago. So, for just a little bit over the price of a dual BX or two KT133As, you can get a monster server board. Nice deal.
Integrated 440GX, 450NX, and beyond can be prohibitively expensive. Try buying them from ebay cheap if you want a killer Xeon board from Intel. The 450NX supports four Xeons. Nice. Not cheap, though.
You can also look at workstations/servers from Micron (they make their own cool chipsets). Some awesome stuff never makes it to the public, because of non-competition clauses Intel makes people (like Micron) sign.
And, one last thing: don't ever trust marketing. Just because it's new doesn't mean it's better. Sometimes the best solution is older technology. It has proven reliability, lowered cost, *known* issues (rather than unknown issues), and more mature driver support.
As an addendum to the one last thing: watch out for diminishing returns.
I don't think we're too big for "the old days".
If Linux or BSD can be coded and given away for free, then someone can type in some text without including half a megabyte of useless graphics.
Some people really do want to make a job out of their former hobby, and I applaud this. In this situation, taking on advertisers or charging fees makes perfect sense. How else will you make money from your work? Consider, however, that this is actual work, not a hobby. When something moves from the realm of being a hobby to being work, you usually expect a certain degree of skill, professionalism, and (in this context) content. Most web sites seriously lack in all three areas. I think that there will be a great shakedown (that's just such a cool phrase) in the number of useless web sites in the coming years.
Why do we need GardenKnowledge.com, GardenPower.com, GardenSecrets.com, and GardenPlus.com, when they all suck royally and have dozens of annoying ads? Will anyone ever miss them? Nope, I don't think so.
p.s. Those are all just example domain names. No offense to actual web sites if they truly exist.
Ah, but his page lists the following:
:)
Mosaic Netscape Back before you had heard of Netscape, I was responsible for the Unix versions of Netscape Navigator through release 1.1.
Netscape Mail & News Next, I designed, and Terry Weissman and I implemented, the Netscape Mail and News clients, versions 2.0 through 3.0. This was our contribution to the proof of the Law of Software Envelopment:
``Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.''
Basically, he ported Netscape 1.0 and 1.1 to UNIX, then wrote the Communicator mail and news clients. That's pretty cool and all, but it doesn't make him an authority on anything... at least, in my mind. He's more of the old-guard than anything else, to my way of thinking.
I didn't think I posted enough on Slashdot for anyone to take notice of me, much less my name.
Some of this is actually security through obscurity (such as not using Intel x86), but it works sometimes. Also, you lose some functionality, such as remote manageability, but you always have to make trade-offs for a truly secure machine.
Don't forget to remove the floppy drive, CDROM, and all other bootable media.
This is exactly my opinion, too.
What is so difficult about renaming OpenSSH to something like SecureTelnet or SecureLogin or SecureRSH? It doesn't have to have SSH in the name of the product. Nobody is saying that the OpenSSH filename can't be "ssh" or that Theo has to stop writing an SSH clone.
I like OpenSSH a lot, but if this is the way they're going to conduct themselves, then I'll switch back to SSH. SSH is guaranteed to be around in a year; OpenSSH, OTOH, might face legal problems if they keep going down this road.
Hey, guys, you know about the Internet Junkbuster, right? It's a proxy server that will filter cookies, ads, referer information, and lots of other stuff. It's incredibly useful if you desire privacy on the net, not to mention saving your eyes from those aforementioned strobe-light ads.
The IJB is available for UNIX, Microsoft Windows, and Linux. Configuration is just a little bit complicated, but no more so than any other standard UNIX daemon.
Alos, there's a truly wonderful program by the name of WebWasher that will do that same thing under Microsoft Windows. It's got a very slick interface, awesome features, and some very friendly guys working on it. If you have any Microsoft Windows clients, I would highly recommend installing WebWasher on them.
Definitely check out Squid as well. It's a caching proxy server that runs under UNIX and Linux. I've used it for years.
JWZ wrote part of the bloated Netscape add-ons that nobody wanted (ie, mail and news). AFAIK, he didn't do any work on the core browser itself. For this reason, his comments don't really hold any more weight to me than do any other random (ex-)Mozilla developer.
As long as someone is using Mozilla, then it will never die. I have a feeling that a lot of UNIX systems have Mozilla (or, at least, Netscape) installed as the default (only?) browser. That's a very small minority of web users, of course, but it's probably enough to keep the momentum going.
Maybe Stallman himself will take over writing Mozilla, rather than see it fail. Heh. That would be somewhat amusing.
The easiest solution, one which I have recommended to the company for which I work, is to statically link commercial products. That way, you don't need to worry at all about what libraries are installed. It's much easier for the users and the tech support people. IMHO, more Linux apps should be distributed as both static and dynamic, so that more intelligent/experienced users have a choice.
Also, it's a fairly good idea for people to have older libraries installed on their system. I don't see why you wouldn't, except if you're out of disk space. In that case, just go out and buy a 20GB IDE hard drive for $99.