Last year I got a phone call paired with an email saying that I needed to make an appointment to meet with the Dean of Student Affairs of my smallish liberal arts school (and yes I realize I'm an idiot for even thiking about doing CS at a liberal arts school, but its too late now.)
Anyway I figure its something to do with my grades or something and I go to his office that afternoon. I'm sitting out in the waiting room, waiting for him to get done with whatever he's doing and I picked up one of the newsweeks on the Yahoo DDoS stuff and look at how the mainstream media presents the issue to the average Joe. Then he calls me into the room and tells me that they have evidence that I launched a DoS attack on a "Canadian Website". I am completely dumbfounded. They said that they needed to find out what happened or I would have the FBI knocking on my door.
I'm not script kiddie. Never have been. I have a little bit of an interest in security, but more in the areas of detection and protection, definitely not exploitation. Anyway, they want me to sign forms permitting the school to search my computer. This really freaked me out all these stories of people's equipment being raided flashed by in my head. I almost said no so I could call my parents and a lawyer, because I didn't know if that was the best thing to do, but then I realized I didn't have anything to hide.
So we march back to my dorm room and meet up with the people from the campus Computer Center (Motto: COBOL is our friend) who are going to search my PC. Well we get to my room and they want to have a look at my computer. I opened up a terminal window and their "UNIX guy" sits down stares at the screen for a few seconds then gets back up and asks me to pull up the machines IP address. I type ifconfig and highlight the address for him. Then there's some confusion. They figure out that my rommates Pentium 133 laptop running Win95 has the source address of the attack. I find it funny that their hard evidence thats pointed to me is the source address of a computer that isn't mine and on a DoS attack where it is most likely spoofed. They then start lecturing me for running Linux on my computer. They said they don't support Linux. I said that's great, I don't need support. In fact, I am paid to be their support in the dorms.
Anyway, they confiscated my rommates' computer, who is the classic stupid user, and "searched" it. They claimed that there was a virus on it that did it. You know, those pesky Canadian Website DoSing virii.
I had a meeting with The Dean of Student Affairs later and told him that I thought it was pretty crappy that they accused me basically because they knew I was a geek. He told me "thats what I get for being on the edge of technology". Yeah, that would be a shame for me to learn at an institution of higher learning. Then again, what do I know? I'm just a college student.
First off not many apps "require" GNOME. Most are GTK+ with GNOME optional becuase there are a lot of people out there who don't want to be running GNOME, but want to use GTK+ apps. The only things that require GNOME are usually things that are made for GNOME by the GNOME project.
Second, what are you talking about? A lot of people use blackbox with GNOME. E used to be standard issue with GNOME. GNOME is not a window manager. It is a desktop environment.
I use Sawfish (because its fast, lightweight, and perdy) with GNOME. Mostly what I use is Netscape or Mozilla, XEmacs, and a bunch of terminals. The only GNOME apps I use are gnumeric and XChat, which is GNOME optional, and the panel if that really counts as an app.
The reason the middle-button menu takes so long is that it is a seperate executable. There was a message on the mailing list (archived at http://inanna.starseed.com/sawmill/) yesterday or today. I believe there is a setting where you can make it so you only experience this once per session.
Is there anything odd with your configuration? Was there something in particular you found slow?
Because I personally haven't found a pixmap themeable window manager that has come close to sawmill in terms of speed and definitely not one that has come close in terms of configurability. This is also what I hear from most people who have used or do use it.
You might want to send an email to the mailing list if you find one thing or another particularly slow or if you have a problem with the implementation of somehting in particular.
I'm thinking sawmill as it has a plethora of themes that change based on the GTK theme, it has converted a significant number of former E users, and John Harper is a coding God.
Is there another WM that someone else finds viable?
note: by post-modern I don't mean actually post-modern in an artistic sense, I just mean the natural progession after E. Less bloat, easy config, equal graphic capabilities.
>If you're looking for Bang-for-the-buck storage, you can't go wrong.
Yes... if you mean Bang in the Batman and Robin, Crash Bang Boom sense. SCSI doesn't just offer performance, it offers reliability. Compare the number of SCSI drives you've replaced with the number of IDE drives you've replaced. (If you do that kind of work.) I know people are gonna say, but for that price I can have 2 IDE drives or whatever, but the value there is not just about price, its about the possibility of data loss.
IDE is a holdover from the early PCs. Like serial ports. Its fine for a home PC or a lab PC, but for a computer that has to do "real" work, IDE just doesn't cut it.
John Harper rocks. The man has a vision. Sawmill is E + more configurability - bloat - more bloat. The only things Sawmill doesn't do are the eye candy stuff (like Eppelets, pager, and iconbox) which are easily, and usually, supplied by something else (GNOME, KDE, etc.). It runs fast and pretty. And the man develops like a mad man. I can practically set my watch by his releases. I read about sawmill and its goals around version 0.11 or so. I was switching between it and E until about 0.14 and now I'm addicted. If you get sick of E being slow and bloated, or if you wish your WM had the graphical prowess of E and you can't afford the bloat, check out sawmill. http://sawmill.sourceforge.net http://sawmill.themes.org
I've never actively crashed a Mac either, but I've seen them go down all the time. In the lab I have to work in at school to make spare cash, its half Mac, a quarter NT, and a quarter 95. I would say that the 95 machines and the Macs go down about the same amount followed by the NT machines, which are newer and haven't been messed with/up as much. It's all due to various software problems, usually Netscape, Cricket graph, or MS Office on the Macs and almost always Explorer on the PC's. These machines take a real beating, being used from 7:00am to 2:00am by a lot of different people who tend to know little about what they are doing.
My point here? People dispute whether or not the MacOS or Winders is better (in this case crash less), but in a real world situation they perform about the same for average users. Of course this is different if you're a graphic designer or programmer or whatever but I'm talking average Word Processing/Email/Web browsing, AOL instant messenger is really cool, type users.
Now, if only they'd let me throw Debian on those PC's:-).
Normally I would agree with you. But this situation is a little different. Macromedia has been trying to push Flash for some time now. The fact that they are opening up the Flash file format is not new news either.
from http:// www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/2000/index_ flash4_print.fhtml: "Macromedia published its Flash file format as an open Web standard in 1998, allowing other companies to both export the Flash file format or playback Flash content within their applications. Macromedia also makes the Flash Player source code available at zero cost to platform and device developers, further extending Flash's broad reach."
Also this was not presented as fact, but as a rumor. Thats why words like "appears" and "purported" are used. There is also no reason why Slashdot should contact Macromedia. They themselves are not a news organization nor are they the source of this information.
I think the fact that this was a rumor was adequately explained. If you are not interested in reading industry rumors then don't. I'm also tired of anybody who complains about the articles being posted getting an automatic mark up from the moderators.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I even appreciated you packaging insight:-). Chalk up a couple more reasons for me to get around to switching distros.
Is this a joke? Using "Wrong.", "NEWS FLASH:" and "Here's the secret:". Are you following the step by step jack ass HOW-TO. You claim you've written 2 operating systems to support your argument.... and those would be? And you're referring to him as "kid" but writing more like a child.
His point is that a server provides services and a workstation does things like CAD work. You could turn off a workstation at night and no one would care. The same could not be done with a server.
Thats great if you disagree with this having a significance, but grow up.
I also have been messing around with RedHat for some time now and am interested in trying Debian. I am more than willing to start from scratch. I wanted to know, though, what advantages Debian has other than the packaging system. I think the advantages of apt etc. over rpm have been more than covered below. Also, I don't want to be informed here why Redhat is bad (I already know that:-) I just want to know why Debian is good, details that you've noticed and appreciated, things like that.
What the hell does this have to do with the topic??? Why don't you just disagree with him, metamoderate often, post complaints where appropriate, and get on with your life. The fact that he has high karma means nothing. If you have a personal problem with the guy discuss that with him where I don't have to sift through it. I would have done that with you except you are an anonymous COWARD. Grow up.
Last semester one of my Math/Comp. Sci. profs showed a really good Nova special on the solving of Fermat's last theorem. For those of you don't know, this simply came from a note that was written in the margin of one of Fermat's books in his library that he could solve this. No proof included. Anyone who says they think they know how he solved it would only be guessing. You get a lot of really good background information on alot of the names involved in this article such as Wiles, Shimura, and Taniyama.
Here's the address of the pbs page on the episode (Nova #2414)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/proof/
It also has some links to some good math resources including Wiles' page.
Actually no... id has a habit of putting back doors in their servers and doing other fun things... check out http://www.insecure.org and see the vulnerbility listed there for yourself.
Yeah, I got a few choice words for him. Like why did he take down PSS and how does he feel now that its been reincarnated. I'll stop there for now. I don't want to get sued or anything.
Do you use PERL? Or Linux? Or any flavor of Unix for that matter? When does an idea have to be original to be good? It just has to be better than the idea that came before it. That's the whole open source idea.
I personally like the installing NT on the wrong hardware one. I think the answer on this one should be "a computer".
I also like the excuse that the abstraction layer is for "security". I belive at the time it was being developed it was for portibility. I'm so glad NT runs on MIPS (whoops, not supported anymore), Alpha (whoops, not supported anymore, oh yeah and its only 32 bit on a 64 bit platform), and of course it will be ready for the new Merced chip (running on all 32 of 64 cylinders) (BTW I refuse to recognise the new name).
Slashdot Mirror
Last year I got a phone call paired with an email saying that I needed to make an appointment to meet with the Dean of Student Affairs of my smallish liberal arts school (and yes I realize I'm an idiot for even thiking about doing CS at a liberal arts school, but its too late now.)
Anyway I figure its something to do with my grades or something and I go to his office that afternoon. I'm sitting out in the waiting room, waiting for him to get done with whatever he's doing and I picked up one of the newsweeks on the Yahoo DDoS stuff and look at how the mainstream media presents the issue to the average Joe. Then he calls me into the room and tells me that they have evidence that I launched a DoS attack on a "Canadian Website". I am completely dumbfounded. They said that they needed to find out what happened or I would have the FBI knocking on my door.
I'm not script kiddie. Never have been. I have a little bit of an interest in security, but more in the areas of detection and protection, definitely not exploitation. Anyway, they want me to sign forms permitting the school to search my computer. This really freaked me out all these stories of people's equipment being raided flashed by in my head. I almost said no so I could call my parents and a lawyer, because I didn't know if that was the best thing to do, but then I realized I didn't have anything to hide.
So we march back to my dorm room and meet up with the people from the campus Computer Center (Motto: COBOL is our friend) who are going to search my PC. Well we get to my room and they want to have a look at my computer. I opened up a terminal window and their "UNIX guy" sits down stares at the screen for a few seconds then gets back up and asks me to pull up the machines IP address. I type ifconfig and highlight the address for him. Then there's some confusion. They figure out that my rommates Pentium 133 laptop running Win95 has the source address of the attack. I find it funny that their hard evidence thats pointed to me is the source address of a computer that isn't mine and on a DoS attack where it is most likely spoofed. They then start lecturing me for running Linux on my computer. They said they don't support Linux. I said that's great, I don't need support. In fact, I am paid to be their support in the dorms.
Anyway, they confiscated my rommates' computer, who is the classic stupid user, and "searched" it. They claimed that there was a virus on it that did it. You know, those pesky Canadian Website DoSing virii.
I had a meeting with The Dean of Student Affairs later and told him that I thought it was pretty crappy that they accused me basically because they knew I was a geek. He told me "thats what I get for being on the edge of technology". Yeah, that would be a shame for me to learn at an institution of higher learning. Then again, what do I know? I'm just a college student.
First off not many apps "require" GNOME. Most are GTK+ with GNOME optional becuase there are a lot of people out there who don't want to be running GNOME, but want to use GTK+ apps. The only things that require GNOME are usually things that are made for GNOME by the GNOME project.
Second, what are you talking about? A lot of people use blackbox with GNOME. E used to be standard issue with GNOME. GNOME is not a window manager. It is a desktop environment.
I use Sawfish (because its fast, lightweight, and perdy) with GNOME. Mostly what I use is Netscape or Mozilla, XEmacs, and a bunch of terminals. The only GNOME apps I use are gnumeric and XChat, which is GNOME optional, and the panel if that really counts as an app.
The reason the middle-button menu takes so long is that it is a seperate executable. There was a message on the mailing list (archived at http://inanna.starseed.com/sawmill/) yesterday or today. I believe there is a setting where you can make it so you only experience this once per session.
Because I personally haven't found a pixmap themeable window manager that has come close to sawmill in terms of speed and definitely not one that has come close in terms of configurability. This is also what I hear from most people who have used or do use it.
You might want to send an email to the mailing list if you find one thing or another particularly slow or if you have a problem with the implementation of somehting in particular.
Is there another WM that someone else finds viable?
Amen... and its easier to configure, more extensible, MUCH faster. Sawmill is incredible. Check it out if you haven't already.
Sawmill
Sawmill.t.o
How bout a post-modern window manager like Sawmill
note: by post-modern I don't mean actually post-modern in an artistic sense, I just mean the natural progession after E. Less bloat, easy config, equal graphic capabilities.
>If you're looking for Bang-for-the-buck storage, you can't go wrong.
Yes... if you mean Bang in the Batman and Robin, Crash Bang Boom sense. SCSI doesn't just offer performance, it offers reliability. Compare the number of SCSI drives you've replaced with the number of IDE drives you've replaced. (If you do that kind of work.) I know people are gonna say, but for that price I can have 2 IDE drives or whatever, but the value there is not just about price, its about the possibility of data loss.
IDE is a holdover from the early PCs. Like serial ports. Its fine for a home PC or a lab PC, but for a computer that has to do "real" work, IDE just doesn't cut it.
John Harper rocks. The man has a vision. Sawmill is E + more configurability - bloat - more bloat. The only things Sawmill doesn't do are the eye candy stuff (like Eppelets, pager, and iconbox) which are easily, and usually, supplied by something else (GNOME, KDE, etc.). It runs fast and pretty. And the man develops like a mad man. I can practically set my watch by his releases. I read about sawmill and its goals around version 0.11 or so. I was switching between it and E until about 0.14 and now I'm addicted. If you get sick of E being slow and bloated, or if you wish your WM had the graphical prowess of E and you can't afford the bloat, check out sawmill.
http://sawmill.sourceforge.net
http://sawmill.themes.org
I've never actively crashed a Mac either, but I've seen them go down all the time.
:-).
In the lab I have to work in at school to make spare cash, its half Mac, a quarter NT, and a quarter 95. I would say that the 95 machines and the Macs go down about the same amount followed by the NT machines, which are newer and haven't been messed with/up as much. It's all due to various software problems, usually Netscape, Cricket graph, or MS Office on the Macs and almost always Explorer on the PC's. These machines take a real beating, being used from 7:00am to 2:00am by a lot of different people who tend to know little about what they are doing.
My point here? People dispute whether or not the MacOS or Winders is better (in this case crash less), but in a real world situation they perform about the same for average users. Of course this is different if you're a graphic designer or programmer or whatever but I'm talking average Word Processing/Email/Web browsing, AOL instant messenger is really cool, type users.
Now, if only they'd let me throw Debian on those PC's
Normally I would agree with you. But this situation is a little different. Macromedia has been trying to push Flash for some time now. The fact that they are opening up the Flash file format is not new news either.
_ flash4_print.fhtml:
r d.html
from http:// www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/2000/index
"Macromedia published its Flash file format as an open Web standard in 1998, allowing other companies to both export the Flash file format or playback Flash content within their applications. Macromedia also makes the Flash Player source code available at zero cost to platform and device developers, further extending Flash's broad reach."
or if you want to read the press release from 1998 go here:
http://www.ma cromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/1998/flashstanda
Also this was not presented as fact, but as a rumor. Thats why words like "appears" and "purported" are used. There is also no reason why Slashdot should contact Macromedia. They themselves are not a news organization nor are they the source of this information.
I think the fact that this was a rumor was adequately explained. If you are not interested in reading industry rumors then don't. I'm also tired of anybody who complains about the articles being posted getting an automatic mark up from the moderators.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I even appreciated you packaging insight :-). Chalk up a couple more reasons for me to get around to switching distros.
Is this a joke? Using "Wrong.", "NEWS FLASH:" and "Here's the secret:". Are you following the step by step jack ass HOW-TO. You claim you've written 2 operating systems to support your argument.... and those would be? And you're referring to him as "kid" but writing more like a child.
His point is that a server provides services and a workstation does things like CAD work. You could turn off a workstation at night and no one would care. The same could not be done with a server.
Thats great if you disagree with this having a significance, but grow up.
I also have been messing around with RedHat for some time now and am interested in trying Debian. I am more than willing to start from scratch. I wanted to know, though, what advantages Debian has other than the packaging system. I think the advantages of apt etc. over rpm have been more than covered below. Also, I don't want to be informed here why Redhat is bad (I already know that :-) I just want to know why Debian is good, details that you've noticed and appreciated, things like that.
What the hell does this have to do with the topic??? Why don't you just disagree with him, metamoderate often, post complaints where appropriate, and get on with your life. The fact that he has high karma means nothing. If you have a personal problem with the guy discuss that with him where I don't have to sift through it. I would have done that with you except you are an anonymous COWARD. Grow up.
Last semester one of my Math/Comp. Sci. profs showed a really good Nova special on the solving of Fermat's last theorem. For those of you don't know, this simply came from a note that was written in the margin of one of Fermat's books in his library that he could solve this. No proof included. Anyone who says they think they know how he solved it would only be guessing. You get a lot of really good background information on alot of the names involved in this article such as Wiles, Shimura, and Taniyama.
Here's the address of the pbs page on the episode (Nova #2414)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/proof/
It also has some links to some good math resources including Wiles' page.
Actually no... id has a habit of putting back doors in their servers and doing other fun things... check out http://www.insecure.org and see the vulnerbility listed there for yourself.
Why did you decide to let Slashdot interview you? How did the response you got compare to what you expected?
Harvard not Stanford. Sorry to be anal.
Yeah, I got a few choice words for him. Like why did he take down PSS and how does he feel now that its been reincarnated. I'll stop there for now. I don't want to get sued or anything.
Do you use PERL? Or Linux? Or any flavor of Unix for that matter? When does an idea have to be original to be good? It just has to be better than the idea that came before it. That's the whole open source idea.
thanks Justin for making late night posts to keep us college kids and insomniacs informed before the rest of the world.
It doesn't take a 3 step proof for most people.
I personally like the installing NT on the wrong hardware one. I think the answer on this one should be "a computer".
I also like the excuse that the abstraction layer is for "security". I belive at the time it was being developed it was for portibility. I'm so glad NT runs on MIPS (whoops, not supported anymore), Alpha (whoops, not supported anymore, oh yeah and its only 32 bit on a 64 bit platform), and of course it will be ready for the new Merced chip (running on all 32 of 64 cylinders) (BTW I refuse to recognise the new name).
Is the PDP-502MX related to my PDP-10? :-)