Since this is Slashdot, this will quickly turn into a stupid bashing of Intel in favor of gcc, since everyone likes Free stuff and hates corporations. And everyone will talk out of their asses about how the Intel compilers couldn't possibly be faster than gcc. So, I figured I'd throw out some real numbers:
I had this problem about a year ago with a company. I asked three times to be removed, threatened lawsuits, etc. Each time I was ignored, or told that I would be removed in 2 weeks. After about a year of this I wrote a procmail rule. Basically, it forwarded each spam I received through their servers, along with a note requesting to be removed, to all of their contact addresses (they had several). Within a week or two I was removed.
The goal is to sell images. Would he have used a digital camera? Of course. It's a great way to preview a shot, kinda how photographers used to carry a polaroid. But keep in mind that people value things that are unique (hence limited-edition prints, hand-made items, etc). Each of Ansel's prints was unique, and could not be duplicated, which adds to the value. So, for final prints, they'd probably still be on film.
For people currently learning to shoot, go with digital. It's a much better way to learn. My father (who used to teach at Nikon School) says he would have learned to shoot in 1/4 the time.
Typically they've been releasing patches every couple of days. Typically their patches require a reboot. Rebooting every couple of days is annoying. By switching to a monthly schedule, they allow admins to keep their systems fully patched, and have month-long uptimes.
Everyone's looking at this like it's some crazy publicity stunt to do physics for every waking hour for 3 days. Maybe so, but for those of us who are in physics, this isn't any big deal. I've gone for months at a time thinking about physics every minute I was awake (and losing sleep to it too). Would this have been reported as big news if it were 3 days of biology lectures, I wonder? What about art history?
The virus in question (mimail.L) offers porn, claims to be sending you child porn, attacks anti-spam sites, and tries to associate those anti-spam domains AS CRIMINALS in the minds of the target.
Huh? Care to back this up? I haven't found any evidence of an intentional attack against anti-spam sites. Yes, they're having problems. But that's to be expected when the overall volume of email goes up, right?
RHEL is to be tested for EAL2, which is rather different from EAL3 OSes (IRIX and Trusted IRIX/CMW) and EAL4 OSes (AIX5, HP-UX 11, Solaris8 and Trusted Solaris8, and Win2k Pro). In fact, the *only* OS RHEL will be "alongside" is SuSE.
See this site for details.
Note that EAL2 is something that provides essentially no assurance of security. You can find details of this in Google's cache (www.commoncriteria.org is no longer alive).
During a family vacation in New England, we were driving on some windy mountain road somewhere near the border of NH and VT. We came across an accident (motorcycler ran into a tree). Well, there were lots of tourists there, and all had cell phones. But nobody knew where we were (not even which state, since we were near the border). Spent about 15 minutes arguing with operators who wouldn't send an ambulance without a specific location, while the guy lay bleeding on the pavement.
That was about 10 years ago, but certainly shows how cell-phone signal triangulation can save lives.
I was about to make the same comment, since trying one of my local webservers also crashed the app. Then I discovered the webserver was down. (Apparently it didn't start after a scheduled reboot.)
However, even apache webservers that are up are causing the script to fail on occasion....
I'm pretty much the only computer user in my (extended) family, so any searches on my last name (Menscher) are pretty much guaranteed to point to me. For as long as I remember, a google search on "Menscher" would return my home page as its first hit.
Paranoid about losing that ranking, I have always been careful to have any other pages I create (on various servers in different domains) point back to that home page. Now, it would appear that doing so is harming me. A search on my last name alone point to a site that I just happened to visit and put my last name on. Including both first and last names goes to some other site.
I think this pretty much rules out specific highly-commercial keywords as the ones being targeted by google.
IANACryptographer, but here are the problems I see:
They say this is encrypted with a one time pad, and is therefore secure. Where does their OTP come from?
They're using public key encryption. But, one concern with PKE is that if you are trying to communicate one of two messages (Republican or Democrat) then you're only going to get one of two results. I suppose they could add some randomness to the encrypted names, but that might cause problems further down the road.
After several transformations, it looks like they want to get something that's human-readable, for the final vote tally. That will be subject to being mis-read, just like anything else. Perhaps more-so.
They give you a receipt with a bar-code. Supposedly this can be used to prove you voted, but not who you voted for. So you can confirm your vote was counted, but not that it was counted correctly. What happens if someone disputes how their vote was tallied?
I don't think the law prohibits selling your opt-out list to other spammers, for use as their new spam list.
Perhaps you should read Section 5(a)(4)(A)(iv). It says there that they can't do that.
Not that I believe any spammers will actually follow the law. Personally, I'd like to see a provision for consumers to be able to sue. Then I could opt-out using a unique email address, and when it gets spammed, sue the hell outta them.
Using Intel motherboard, Intel CPU, Intel case. Fairly default install of RedHat9. When you see hangs on 2-3 different machines, it's hard to blame hardware.
And yes, I know that hardware *can* cause problems. I even found bad ram on one of the boxes. I'm just saying it's silly to claim that Linux is totally stable. It's just not true.
Current plans are to try using the Magic SysRq keys to get more information next time a hang occurs, but thankfully it's been a while. (The last hang, which happened last week, occurred when I was unavailable, so the machine was rebooted before I could check it out.)
If you can't ssh in (or sometimes even ping the machine) then it's hard to blame XFree86. No keyboard response either, of course.
Of course, it's hard to rule out hardware problems, though I've seen it on enough different machines (all with high-quality hardware) that I highly doubt hardware is the culprit.
Most hangs seem to occur when doing memory-intensive operations (and therefore swapping). I've also managed to cause hangs by running 5 or more simultaneous copies of Bonnie++ (a disk benchmarker). It would hang after a couple hours.
Only managed to get a pic of one once, because usually Linux just hangs. At least Windoze has the courtesy to tell you when the power switch is your only option.
[Someone who's frustrated with Linux boxes hanging all the time.]
Bittorrent works well, because it doesn't matter if one of your peers dies. There are lots of others. (When I downloaded the Fedora ISOs, for example, there were hundreds of peers.)
This new thing looks like each site has a piece of your data. If one site loses everything, then wouldn't any file that had even a piece of it in that site be forever lost? Sounds like a distributed RAID0 (stripe) array to me. And everyone knows that reliability of those goes down as you add more stripes....
I'm at a major university, and we're now trying to figure out what to do. Support ends soon, which means we must upgrade. Some people suggest upgrading to RH9, since that's known, and supported for a few more months. I typically recommend upgrading to Fedora. There was some discussion of a campus-wide program to get RHEL at reduced cost, but it's only the WS version, which is insufficient for most people's needs. I suppose we'll look at recompiling RHEL from source next. And yes, there was discussion of SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, Solaris, etc.
It's a sorry state of affairs, and the Dec31 deadline does NOT help!
It takes more than just snapping photos to be a wedding photographer.
Just to elaborate a little on why the photographer is paid so much:
Equipment: cameras are not cheap. You could easily bring $20,000 in equipment to a wedding. You can't just go in with a single camera, you know... you need AT LEAST three. Two always on you, with different lenses, etc, so there's never a risk of needing to change film at a critical moment. You also take pictures of important events using two cameras, in case one malfunctions, the lab screws up the processing, etc. A third camera is in the car in case on of the two primaries fails. Of course, that's the simple scenario, assuming you're just shooting one type of film. Add to that digital, or slides/prints, and you need more equipment. Want decent lighting? Have an assistant (who has to be paid) follow you around with a second flash (wireless). Oh, and you probably have to buy (no, not rent) your own tux. Furthermore, you're providing the film.
Experience: knowing how to pose the bride isn't easy. I'm always amused when watching them get arranged. There are things that the average person just doesn't see, like position of hands, what's in the background, lighting (and proper placement of shadows!), etc.
Yes, you can do it yourself with your little disposable. But I can guarantee they'll look crappy. You won't know why the pro's pictures look better, because you're not trained to see it. All you'll know is that gut feeling that he did something you didn't.
Of course, I'm slightly biased, having a father who is a pro photographer. I'll acknowledge that there are many crappy photographers out there. But it's an art, so don't attack the entire field.
Finally here's my proof that I am qualified to make the above statements.;)
I can't be the only one that finds it disturbing that the FBI uses AOL.
What I found more disturbing was that they don't have any clue about computers whatsoever. I interacted with them once to report progress on tracking an intruder, and to request help. They didn't understand anything I was telling them, since I was using advanced words like "DoS", "packet sniffer", etc. They asked me to mail them my logs... as in print them out an send them by post. They said they didn't have the ability to receive email.
Needless to say, I didn't bother. It was much more productive (and enjoyable!) to track the intruder myself, and make him suffer.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Now, you can take whatever you want outta that, but my view is that having your programs run three times faster just might be useful.
Disclaimer: these results are for a specific program (dealing with computational astrophysics). Obviously your application may see other speedups.
I had this problem about a year ago with a company. I asked three times to be removed, threatened lawsuits, etc. Each time I was ignored, or told that I would be removed in 2 weeks. After about a year of this I wrote a procmail rule. Basically, it forwarded each spam I received through their servers, along with a note requesting to be removed, to all of their contact addresses (they had several). Within a week or two I was removed.
For people currently learning to shoot, go with digital. It's a much better way to learn. My father (who used to teach at Nikon School) says he would have learned to shoot in 1/4 the time.
Typically they've been releasing patches every couple of days. Typically their patches require a reboot. Rebooting every couple of days is annoying. By switching to a monthly schedule, they allow admins to keep their systems fully patched, and have month-long uptimes.
How long before someone directs the webcam-bearing robot into the women's bathroom?
Female physicists are better than female art historians. Haven't you ever seen a James Bond movie?
Everyone's looking at this like it's some crazy publicity stunt to do physics for every waking hour for 3 days. Maybe so, but for those of us who are in physics, this isn't any big deal. I've gone for months at a time thinking about physics every minute I was awake (and losing sleep to it too). Would this have been reported as big news if it were 3 days of biology lectures, I wonder? What about art history?
Huh? Care to back this up? I haven't found any evidence of an intentional attack against anti-spam sites. Yes, they're having problems. But that's to be expected when the overall volume of email goes up, right?
Nice job karma-whoring, but TCT does NOT work with journaled filesystems.
Note that EAL2 is something that provides essentially no assurance of security. You can find details of this in Google's cache (www.commoncriteria.org is no longer alive).
That was about 10 years ago, but certainly shows how cell-phone signal triangulation can save lives.
However, even apache webservers that are up are causing the script to fail on occasion....
Paranoid about losing that ranking, I have always been careful to have any other pages I create (on various servers in different domains) point back to that home page. Now, it would appear that doing so is harming me. A search on my last name alone point to a site that I just happened to visit and put my last name on. Including both first and last names goes to some other site.
I think this pretty much rules out specific highly-commercial keywords as the ones being targeted by google.
They say this is encrypted with a one time pad, and is therefore secure. Where does their OTP come from?
They're using public key encryption. But, one concern with PKE is that if you are trying to communicate one of two messages (Republican or Democrat) then you're only going to get one of two results. I suppose they could add some randomness to the encrypted names, but that might cause problems further down the road.
After several transformations, it looks like they want to get something that's human-readable, for the final vote tally. That will be subject to being mis-read, just like anything else. Perhaps more-so.
They give you a receipt with a bar-code. Supposedly this can be used to prove you voted, but not who you voted for. So you can confirm your vote was counted, but not that it was counted correctly. What happens if someone disputes how their vote was tallied?
Perhaps you should read Section 5(a)(4)(A)(iv). It says there that they can't do that.
Not that I believe any spammers will actually follow the law. Personally, I'd like to see a provision for consumers to be able to sue. Then I could opt-out using a unique email address, and when it gets spammed, sue the hell outta them.
And yes, I know that hardware *can* cause problems. I even found bad ram on one of the boxes. I'm just saying it's silly to claim that Linux is totally stable. It's just not true.
Current plans are to try using the Magic SysRq keys to get more information next time a hang occurs, but thankfully it's been a while. (The last hang, which happened last week, occurred when I was unavailable, so the machine was rebooted before I could check it out.)
Of course, it's hard to rule out hardware problems, though I've seen it on enough different machines (all with high-quality hardware) that I highly doubt hardware is the culprit.
Most hangs seem to occur when doing memory-intensive operations (and therefore swapping). I've also managed to cause hangs by running 5 or more simultaneous copies of Bonnie++ (a disk benchmarker). It would hang after a couple hours.
[Someone who's frustrated with Linux boxes hanging all the time.]
This new thing looks like each site has a piece of your data. If one site loses everything, then wouldn't any file that had even a piece of it in that site be forever lost? Sounds like a distributed RAID0 (stripe) array to me. And everyone knows that reliability of those goes down as you add more stripes....
http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/hep-ex/0308044
- Get toner cartrige spam
- Get 800 number
- Call 800 number
- Ask about deals for universities
- Place a $300 order
- Give fake name
- Give fake address
- Ask for bill to be sent (they trust you, since you're in a large organization)
- Hang up
Yes, this actually works, and hits them in their pocketbooks. Not sure about the legalities of it, though...A slightly less illegal tactic:
- Get spam
- Get 800 number
- Tell modem to call 800 number
- Leave for the day
Note: works best on numbers where a human answers.I'm at a major university, and we're now trying to figure out what to do. Support ends soon, which means we must upgrade. Some people suggest upgrading to RH9, since that's known, and supported for a few more months. I typically recommend upgrading to Fedora. There was some discussion of a campus-wide program to get RHEL at reduced cost, but it's only the WS version, which is insufficient for most people's needs. I suppose we'll look at recompiling RHEL from source next. And yes, there was discussion of SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, Solaris, etc.
It's a sorry state of affairs, and the Dec31 deadline does NOT help!
Just to elaborate a little on why the photographer is paid so much:
- Equipment: cameras are not cheap. You could easily bring $20,000 in equipment to a wedding. You can't just go in with a single camera, you know... you need AT LEAST three. Two always on you, with different lenses, etc, so there's never a risk of needing to change film at a critical moment. You also take pictures of important events using two cameras, in case one malfunctions, the lab screws up the processing, etc. A third camera is in the car in case on of the two primaries fails. Of course, that's the simple scenario, assuming you're just shooting one type of film. Add to that digital, or slides/prints, and you need more equipment. Want decent lighting? Have an assistant (who has to be paid) follow you around with a second flash (wireless). Oh, and you probably have to buy (no, not rent) your own tux. Furthermore, you're providing the film.
- Experience: knowing how to pose the bride isn't easy. I'm always amused when watching them get arranged. There are things that the average person just doesn't see, like position of hands, what's in the background, lighting (and proper placement of shadows!), etc.
Yes, you can do it yourself with your little disposable. But I can guarantee they'll look crappy. You won't know why the pro's pictures look better, because you're not trained to see it. All you'll know is that gut feeling that he did something you didn't.Of course, I'm slightly biased, having a father who is a pro photographer. I'll acknowledge that there are many crappy photographers out there. But it's an art, so don't attack the entire field.
Finally here's my proof that I am qualified to make the above statements. ;)
What I found more disturbing was that they don't have any clue about computers whatsoever. I interacted with them once to report progress on tracking an intruder, and to request help. They didn't understand anything I was telling them, since I was using advanced words like "DoS", "packet sniffer", etc. They asked me to mail them my logs... as in print them out an send them by post. They said they didn't have the ability to receive email.
Needless to say, I didn't bother. It was much more productive (and enjoyable!) to track the intruder myself, and make him suffer. ;)