Furthermore, holding down option while rebooting lets you choose the drive your computer will boot from--which is a fix for the problem.
Does your choice get safed when you do that? The way the article was written, it sounded like it did not, and in that case, I would agree with them that it's not a fix. I'm not a Mac user, though, so I don't know.:)
He may be referring to an older qmail version - I assume that he made the observation when he evaluated different MTAs and then didn't bother checking newer versions after he decided on one.
That being said, I think his comments about blacklists pretty much hit the nail on the head. Think about it: what you're ultimately doing is give some complete stranger near-complete control over what email is or isn't accepted by your system. Blacklists are something that might seem like a good idea in theory, but when you really think about them, they're not anymore. There's just too many ways they can be subverted in one way or another.
It's a Slashdot story because Slashdot needs to have a certain amount of stories each day to keep readers happy - because if readers go away, so will advertisers (i.e., the money).:)
On a less cynic note, it seems to be true that while Paul Graham has written some very insightful articles on spam, this blog entry does leave you with the feeling that the topic wasn't explored in-depth at all - that, rather, it was merely written out of frustration after finding himself as an (innocent) victim of one of the blacklists.
That *is* rather unfortunate, and I would certainly have preferred a better article, but it's still an interesting discussion starter at least, and personally, I'm quite happy to see that the dangers of blacklists are being pointed out again to the general (Slashdot-reading) public.
Interestingly enough, the owner of the acme.com domain who was recently featured in a story due to his getting more than a million spam mails (well, attempts to send spam) a day, agrees:
DNS-RBLs - Domain Name System Realtime Black Lists. In theory the idea is fine. You have a set of sites that you blacklist, and you want to let other folks use the same list so you distribute it using DNS, which is a nice efficient de-centralized database. What's not to like?
Well, I don't know why, but in practice every single DNS-RBL eventually comes under the control of power-hungry weenies. They start listing sites unreliably, and if you complain you find yourself listed. And there's usually no way to get off the list.
A lot of people tell me I'm wrong about this. They say that certain DNS-RBLs are ok, with objective criteria for inclusion and simple procedures for getting off the list. The thing is, they give conflicting recommendations for which lists are good and which are bad. Some of these folks recommend lists which I know from personal experience are bad.
This problem is really inherent in the way DNS-RBLs are set up. You cede control of your mail system to a third party, with no real possibility of checking how they are doing. The people running the lists get overwhelmed with bogus feedback from spammers and/or idiots, to the point where they assume all their mail about the lists is from spammers and/or idiots.
If the lists you use have not yet descended into corruption and chaos, consider yourself temporarily lucky.
As any fule kno, the most notorious spam blacklist is SPEWS.
ORBS, and its later reincarnation, ORBZ, also weren't exactly the nicest players on the field. I remember one incident where I couldn't send email to someone from a GMX account, because GMX - a webmail provider not unlike Hotmail etc., with several million users - had ended up on their blacklists (I'm not sure anymore whether it was ORBS or ORBZ at the point that happened, but it matters little, anyway).
This articleon the death of ORBZ has some more interesting points regarding the controversy surrounding these lists.
What's really bad (or good, depending on one's point of view, I assume) about the NSA is not just the computing power they likely wield (they're the biggest consumer of electric power in the entire state of Maryland, so they probably do have some big iron there on site), but also the theoretical power in the form of mathematicians. The NSA is the single biggest employer of mathematicians in the world, and it's probably safe to say that they are at least a couple of years ahead of the rest of the world as far as cryptography and cryptanalysis is concerned.
Remember, for example, that the NSA invented public-key cryptography before Diffie and Hellman did; or remember that they made some changes to the S-boxes for DES when it first was submitted that noone understood back then but that did turn out to eliminate weaknesses in the original design later on.
I dare say that this theoretical advantage is actually more important than the pure number crunching power they wield. There's virtually no limit on the computing power you can buy if you have enough money at your disposal (for example, there is no real reason why IBM shouldn't be able to build a system roughly a thousand times as fast as the BG/W system if someone paid the necessary 40 billion dollars), but you can't buy advances in mathematics with money.
[...] its temperature probably tops 400 to 750 degrees Fahrenheit (200 to 400 degrees Celsius)--oven-like temperatures far too hot for life as we know it.
Um, no, that's not true - there certainly are bacteria which can survive these temperatures and have adapted to them (those living near hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, for example). Whether this new planet could (even theoretically) host life is another question entirely, of course, but the statement that we do not know life that can endure such temperatures is simply not true.
Actually, Linux does support CPU hotplugging. Or at least on some architectures - namely, the "big" ones, like S390, IA64, ppc64 etc.
That aside, you're right about support for really big iron being less advanced compared to that in Solaris, for example, but in a way, you're comparing apples with oranges here, because that only goes for the "vanilla", main-line kernel. I think it would be more fair to compare Solaris with what Linux versions are being offered by other vendors such as SGI or IBM; SGI at least has a number of patches that have not gone into mainline (yet?), because most developers aren't that concerned with tweaks that make the kernel run smoother on 512-cpu systems.
Of course, there still is a lot that Linux can learn from Solaris - but learn we will, because we don't strive to be better than anyone or anything, we strive to be *good*.:)
If some moderator sees this, please give the parent a +1 Insightful. It's a very good point - there is no need to extradite someone when what they did is already a crime in your own country, especially not when they're a citizen of said country.
There unfortunately seems to be a trend to demand extradition to the USA whenever the USA are affected by the crime committed in any way at all (and it's hard to imagine a computer crime where this is not the case), but doing so would set a dangerous precedent.
"Bands like Coldplay will make enough money for their company to help them discover around 50 or 100 bands."
Excuse me? EXCUSE ME??? The point of a band is to make money for its label???
You've got a good point, but the statement's even worse - it's also misleading in that it suggests that economic success leads to the "discovery" of more new bands, and in fact, it even suggests that economic success is *crucial* for that.
I think that the opposite is true, actually. The amount of money people are willing to spend on music (and related merchandise) doesn't magically increase if there're more bands (or acts, or whatever they call them these days); rather, each individual band will be less successful. From a label's point of view, each band has a number of associated costs - CD manufacturing, music videos, promotion, payments for the band itself, etc. -, so having more bands increases the amount of money a label has to spend.
Of course, having more bands gives an advantage over one's competitors, but that only works for so long - there's a point where the extra costs cannot be justified by the possible extra income anymore. And of course, there's also another important factor: in order to create a really successful band, there has to be a lot of hype, which has a rather low saturation point - you can hype a handful of bands for each target group, maybe, but not more than that, because if you try to, none of them will get to the critical mass that you need.
So the idea that labels have an interest (any interest!) in increasing the number of bands they have under contract is simply wrong.
Yeah, it will be the next Internet - because there is nothing else on the Internet except for web content - and static web content, for that matter. Things like email, IMs, news, ftp, BitTorrent and so on don't exist, and dynamic websites don't exist, either.
Since when does having addressable content mean something's gonna be the next Internet? It sounds more like a networked hash to me.
Make sshd(8) re-execute itself on accepting a new connection. This security measure ensures that all execute-time randomisations are reapplied for each connection rather than once, for the master process' lifetime. This includes mmap and malloc mappings, shared library addressing, shared library mapping order, ProPolice and StackGhost cookies on systems that support such things.
The article's (or at least the summary's; TFA is slashdotted) assertion that using two screens will increase your productivity by a substantial amount is, to be blunt, outright rubbish: if it really did, then we'd all be using dual-screen setups at work, anyway, since the cost for another screen is negligible compared to what an employee costs a company per year otherwise, so even a small increase in productivity would mean that the extra screen would quickly amortise itself.
Furthermore, I can also draw upon personal experience here: I used to use two screens at work for a long time (21" CRTs), and while it was nice to be able to put things like xload windows etc. on the second screen so you could keep an eye on them without wasting screen real estate on the primary screen, having a second screen is overrated.
The only exception I can think of is when you need to debug an application and can run the debugger on one screen while the application outputs to the second screen - but that's really a very special case.
Or, for that matter, don't post news. It's not like Slashdot is a printed publication that just *has* to fill this and that many pages each day, no matter whether there's actually news or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't complain about it, it happens, especially if all you do is point to a news story on another site.
Does your choice get safed when you do that? The way the article was written, it sounded like it did not, and in that case, I would agree with them that it's not a fix. I'm not a Mac user, though, so I don't know. :)
He may be referring to an older qmail version - I assume that he made the observation when he evaluated different MTAs and then didn't bother checking newer versions after he decided on one.
That being said, I think his comments about blacklists pretty much hit the nail on the head. Think about it: what you're ultimately doing is give some complete stranger near-complete control over what email is or isn't accepted by your system. Blacklists are something that might seem like a good idea in theory, but when you really think about them, they're not anymore. There's just too many ways they can be subverted in one way or another.
It's a Slashdot story because Slashdot needs to have a certain amount of stories each day to keep readers happy - because if readers go away, so will advertisers (i.e., the money). :)
On a less cynic note, it seems to be true that while Paul Graham has written some very insightful articles on spam, this blog entry does leave you with the feeling that the topic wasn't explored in-depth at all - that, rather, it was merely written out of frustration after finding himself as an (innocent) victim of one of the blacklists.
That *is* rather unfortunate, and I would certainly have preferred a better article, but it's still an interesting discussion starter at least, and personally, I'm quite happy to see that the dangers of blacklists are being pointed out again to the general (Slashdot-reading) public.
Interestingly enough, the owner of the acme.com domain who was recently featured in a story due to his getting more than a million spam mails (well, attempts to send spam) a day, agrees:
(from http://www.acme.com/mail_filtering/shame_frameset. html)
ORBS, and its later reincarnation, ORBZ, also weren't exactly the nicest players on the field. I remember one incident where I couldn't send email to someone from a GMX account, because GMX - a webmail provider not unlike Hotmail etc., with several million users - had ended up on their blacklists (I'm not sure anymore whether it was ORBS or ORBZ at the point that happened, but it matters little, anyway).
This articleon the death of ORBZ has some more interesting points regarding the controversy surrounding these lists.
More on this here; also see Simon Singh's The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, which, IIRC, has a section about this.
That's beside the point. The point *is* that you can't just go out and buy knowledge and scientific progress like you can buy fast computers.
What's really bad (or good, depending on one's point of view, I assume) about the NSA is not just the computing power they likely wield (they're the biggest consumer of electric power in the entire state of Maryland, so they probably do have some big iron there on site), but also the theoretical power in the form of mathematicians. The NSA is the single biggest employer of mathematicians in the world, and it's probably safe to say that they are at least a couple of years ahead of the rest of the world as far as cryptography and cryptanalysis is concerned.
Remember, for example, that the NSA invented public-key cryptography before Diffie and Hellman did; or remember that they made some changes to the S-boxes for DES when it first was submitted that noone understood back then but that did turn out to eliminate weaknesses in the original design later on.
I dare say that this theoretical advantage is actually more important than the pure number crunching power they wield. There's virtually no limit on the computing power you can buy if you have enough money at your disposal (for example, there is no real reason why IBM shouldn't be able to build a system roughly a thousand times as fast as the BG/W system if someone paid the necessary 40 billion dollars), but you can't buy advances in mathematics with money.
From TFA:
Um, no, that's not true - there certainly are bacteria which can survive these temperatures and have adapted to them (those living near hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, for example). Whether this new planet could (even theoretically) host life is another question entirely, of course, but the statement that we do not know life that can endure such temperatures is simply not true.
It can't be worse than the real world, at least...
Actually, Linux does support CPU hotplugging. Or at least on some architectures - namely, the "big" ones, like S390, IA64, ppc64 etc.
:)
That aside, you're right about support for really big iron being less advanced compared to that in Solaris, for example, but in a way, you're comparing apples with oranges here, because that only goes for the "vanilla", main-line kernel. I think it would be more fair to compare Solaris with what Linux versions are being offered by other vendors such as SGI or IBM; SGI at least has a number of patches that have not gone into mainline (yet?), because most developers aren't that concerned with tweaks that make the kernel run smoother on 512-cpu systems.
Of course, there still is a lot that Linux can learn from Solaris - but learn we will, because we don't strive to be better than anyone or anything, we strive to be *good*.
RTFA.
BitTorrent for the movie, in case of Slashdotting: here
Ah, OK. 300 million really seemed a bit high... :)
Wait, let me get that straight. You got 300 million spams a month (10 million per day) back in 2000?
If some moderator sees this, please give the parent a +1 Insightful. It's a very good point - there is no need to extradite someone when what they did is already a crime in your own country, especially not when they're a citizen of said country. There unfortunately seems to be a trend to demand extradition to the USA whenever the USA are affected by the crime committed in any way at all (and it's hard to imagine a computer crime where this is not the case), but doing so would set a dangerous precedent.
You've got a good point, but the statement's even worse - it's also misleading in that it suggests that economic success leads to the "discovery" of more new bands, and in fact, it even suggests that economic success is *crucial* for that.
I think that the opposite is true, actually. The amount of money people are willing to spend on music (and related merchandise) doesn't magically increase if there're more bands (or acts, or whatever they call them these days); rather, each individual band will be less successful. From a label's point of view, each band has a number of associated costs - CD manufacturing, music videos, promotion, payments for the band itself, etc. -, so having more bands increases the amount of money a label has to spend.
Of course, having more bands gives an advantage over one's competitors, but that only works for so long - there's a point where the extra costs cannot be justified by the possible extra income anymore. And of course, there's also another important factor: in order to create a really successful band, there has to be a lot of hype, which has a rather low saturation point - you can hype a handful of bands for each target group, maybe, but not more than that, because if you try to, none of them will get to the critical mass that you need.
So the idea that labels have an interest (any interest!) in increasing the number of bands they have under contract is simply wrong.
Yeah, it will be the next Internet - because there is nothing else on the Internet except for web content - and static web content, for that matter. Things like email, IMs, news, ftp, BitTorrent and so on don't exist, and dynamic websites don't exist, either.
Since when does having addressable content mean something's gonna be the next Internet? It sounds more like a networked hash to me.
From the Changelog for OpenSSH 3.9:
Hope this helps. :)
The article's (or at least the summary's; TFA is slashdotted) assertion that using two screens will increase your productivity by a substantial amount is, to be blunt, outright rubbish: if it really did, then we'd all be using dual-screen setups at work, anyway, since the cost for another screen is negligible compared to what an employee costs a company per year otherwise, so even a small increase in productivity would mean that the extra screen would quickly amortise itself.
Furthermore, I can also draw upon personal experience here: I used to use two screens at work for a long time (21" CRTs), and while it was nice to be able to put things like xload windows etc. on the second screen so you could keep an eye on them without wasting screen real estate on the primary screen, having a second screen is overrated.
The only exception I can think of is when you need to debug an application and can run the debugger on one screen while the application outputs to the second screen - but that's really a very special case.
Actually, copyright violation is a civil matter as well.
Obviously, if you're using BitTorrent, you're a terrorist, and if you're downloading Linux, you're a communist, too.
Hmmm. That might also explain the usual flood of dupes. :)
Or, for that matter, don't post news. It's not like Slashdot is a printed publication that just *has* to fill this and that many pages each day, no matter whether there's actually news or not.