Re:In college I went through a Mac phase
on
Mac OS X 10.3 vs. Linux
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I eventually grew out of my 'rainbow' phase and am back using Windows and sometimes even Linux (Yellow Dog, for when I'm feeling a little 'crazy'!), but the experience just isn't the same. We Mac users are a happy community, and sometimes I just want to give old Steve Jobs a hand.
I never even considered buying a Mac until I had played with OS X quite a bit. The classic MacOS sucked balls and it showed when one faulty application could lockup the entire OS. As far as I can tell that's still the case with OS 9 which I've tried for a grand total of 45 minutes.
I'm still mixed on whether I will ever buy another Mac (I currently have a 800MHz G3 iBook). I look back at the Windows world and for the same price as a high end iBook or the low end Powerbook I can get a screaming fast Dell P4 laptop.
The laptop I really want (15" Powerbook w/superdrive) comes out to around $2900 when you add in everything you need like Applecare for three year warranty (yes, you MUST get this... they don't even want to talk to you after 90 days of phone support is up even though you have 1 year of hardware support.), an extra battery, 1 512meg dimm instead of 2x256 (this seems stupid IMHO) etc.
Second, in the "server environment" you can expect to pay a lot more than $129 for constant attention. Sun's offerings run thousands.
Solaris 8 was free, so I don't know what you're talking about with this "thousands". I'm still getting patches for Solaris 2.6 from Sun. They support their older products just dandy. Granted, it takes 6 months to patch a mission critical vulnerability, but eventually they get around to it. On second thought, Sun sucks too. Use Debian.
Re:I love the smell of GNUpalm in the morning. . .
on
Vietnam Going Open Source
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· Score: 0, Insightful
We had to destroy IIS in order to save us^H^Hit.
I'm not sure why everyone is rejoicing. The only countries that seem to be looking at this type of thing are extremely socialist or totalitarian in nature (Vietnam, China, European Union, etc.). This is a very bad thing for the American software industry (and by extension programmers.. you know, some of these companies give you a paycheck?). Commercial software is NOT a bad thing, only the abuse of a monopoly on commercial software. For example, Microsoft forcing all PC vendors to use Windows would be a bad thing. Providing excellent business productivity software like Office is a good thing. We shouldn't discourage companies from producing quality software by threatening to boycott them.
The problem is that there is a growing number of components that do automated guru tasks, because there isn't enough gurus, enough time, or enough money to take a guru out to each house or even work each machine remotely.
True, but there are plenty of unemployed "web developers" (html or frontpage monkeys) who could be perhaps taught to troubleshoot these enough to run adaware and cleanup a machine.
You know, if you start playing around with frequencies, you could just as easily make a high ringing noise out of it all rather than a deep hum, it makes no difference because in both cases those are not the "original" sound waves anyway.
You know, all the copyrighted music in existence is really just variations on the original sound produced by the Big Bang. I say they ripped it off and that we can pira^H^H^H^Hshare all the music we want now.
With this "black-box" technology, the option to count the votes is not even there. There is no way to publically check the output from these machines to verify concordance with the voters' wishes.
Oh, you mean inducing human error into the equation by hundreds of people manually counting, recounting, and then recounting again punchcards? Punch cards worked absolutely fine up until the 2000 election. If you're too stupid to punch a punch card cleanly then you shouldn't be voting. I know it's not a popular opinion, but for crying out loud, it isn't difficult to do. We need to quit treating citizens like they are 5 year old morons and expect them to have some sense of fscking common sense.
Gator is more like telemarketing than tv commercials. If I am paying for internet access they have no legal right to hijack my internet connection just to bombard me with ads.
Gator is basically just malware like any other virus or trojan. Just because a company produces it and claims it has a valid purpose doesn't make it any less evil. The CDC started claiming BackOrifice2k was a remote administration tool, but that didn't make it any less frustrating to find someone had compromised your system and installed it on there without your knowledge to take control of your machine.
Everyone whose computer I have ever found Gator (and tons of other spyware) on has had no idea what it does or how they installed it. They click on some link (these are teenagers for example.. they're click happy) and suddenly they have a wonderful new time syncing app or a datebook! Great right? Well, until their computer eventually slows to a halt and starts crashing, personal information is spewed out across the Internet without their consent, and/or their computer is used as some kind of distributed cracking node without their knowledge. McAfee, Symantec and others need to be forced to accept that malware like Gator IS a virus and needs to be cleaned from a system. We shouldn't have to use yet another malware cleaner like Adaware to get rid of it. If Gator and other spyware made it VERY clear they were installed and cooperated 100% with the add/remove programs in Win2k to completely remove themselves and ALL their components when you remove them then I wouldn't have such a huge issue with shareware software installing it. It's an annoyance at that point, but easily remedied like having an AOL icon created on your desktop.
I'm at a hospital that intends to move 3000 machines to "some alternative" (basically the options at the moment are linux and linux) inside the next 5 years.
That's all well and good, but within the same time frame there will be 300,000 new computer users who will experience Windows as their first OS. I'm sorry, but Linux has never, is not, and will never be a mainstream operating system. I would love to see it as much as the next guy, but it's just a hacked up UNIX-like OS built by a bunch of volunteers. Most people do NOT care about the free-software ideology, they just want to turn on their computer, read their e-mail, browse the web, and look at porn/pictures of their grandkids (not necessarily the same people). Why screw around with Linux when Windows comes for free on their computer?
I assume the old ones where nothing more than an infared flashlight, and the "upgraded" ones use some sort of modulation something like a TV remote. The picture in the article shows what looks like a 3rd brake light with a lighter plug. It probably costs $20. They're basically charging $300-$500 for a long range TV remote control
It had to happen sooner or later. If they don't already the next versions will just employ strong encryption to foil the morons buying these.
So say the NSA does take this patented technology and use it without a liscence. Certicom discovers this. Well, then they'll take them to court. Yes, government agencies can be taken to court for some things.
It is much easier, safer, ultimately cheaper, and also the legal way, to simply liscence the technology.
All I'm saying is, how would you know? How would Certicom know? The NSA's entire existence is built on secrecy. Snitches don't survive long there (professionally or otherwise I would imagine).
PS. I could be wrong, but from the article it seems that "intellectual property" and "This is the first time that the NSA has endorsed any sort of public-key cryptography system." that they are not actually lisencing software but are in fact lisencing the cryptosystem. If I am wrong, I humbly apologize.
Well, before they just used it and didn't bother asking for permission. This isn't that big of a deal. The only thing out of the ordinary is they asked before using it. Nothing is stopping the NSA from ignoring a license for anything. Who are you going to call, the BSA to battle the NSA? Licensing applies to corporations and individuals.. governments can choose whether to obey them or not. We'd like for them to obey them, but who watches the watchers?
This seems to be just something you'd install on top of an already installed Red Hat system. Are they going to provide complete minimized disk images? I couldn't tell from a quick glance at the site and screenshots. Basically it's just a web interface to the tools already included in Red Hat (Samba, NFS, etc.). I was really hoping for some all-in-one optimized and minimized distribution that you'd install on a CF card and just reflashed to update it to a newer version. Then throw in a 3ware or SCSI RAID card, a bunch of disks, and be off. If this is just a web interface for Red Hat it isn't that interesting.
I do not follow US politic very much, but isn't there a conflict of interrest in between a politcian with an official function, and being the ehad of a firm, *and* proposing law which directly impact your firm ?
Well he would of course be expected to resign from Congress to take this position. Being a congressional representative hasn't been a part time job in a long time (at least over a century). Acting as head of the MPAA is definitely a full time job for Jack Valenti... you just can't garner that much hatred by working 20 hours a week you know.
I think it's a tad bit early to write it off. 350 Mbits of updates isn't really THAT much. One package like the kernel source or XFree86 could account for 350 Mbits. When it gets up to the range of about half a CD, or 325 Megabytes, then I'd say it's big problem.
So if you break your jig, or it gets stolen, you can phone up and ask for a replacement.
Why not just make a backup copy of it? If the whole point of it is to replicate itself then you can use it to make a backup of itself. Then if it breaks, just use the backup... or use the backup exclusively and store the original in a safe location. Or store your backup on Karpentryzaa (har har) for secure off-site backup.
Given some of the crap that Windows programs leave when you try to uninstall them, I don't think I'd trust an email to be completely removed from the system.
Yea, because I really hate when an e-mail message comes along and installs a bunch of DLLs and registry entries. WTF are you talking about? It's an e-mail message for Pete's sake. There's no reason it can't be safely deleted and even have the space used wiped cleanly several times. Have a little faith that Microsoft's high paid software developers aren't complete idiots and can handle deleting an e-mail message securely.
You can tell where this is leading. Today it's e-mail, tomorrow it will be web traffic. If your web traffic isn't proxied through your ISP's web proxy then you will be blocked from visiting web sites at some other provider. Only major providers' web proxies will get added to the other providers' firewall rules to allow incoming web traffic. Corporate America just took a little longer to fuck over the little guy on the Internet. Now they're full steam ahead, and the anti-spam crusaders are their spearhead.
In the dark world of the future you'll have to fight your way through bureaucracy and stupid sysadmins (and yes, the vast majority of sysadmins are fucking idiots, though I know that's not a popular opinion around here) for each and every company, organization or domain you want to send email to. That sounds like an infeasible, unmaintainable system to me.
We're probably all over-reacting a bit since the first time the CEO of AT&T misses an important e-mail message because his ISP blocks the incoming mail, this will go away. I would say by 2pm on Friday at the latest. This is one of those idiotic things to do on the scale of Verisign's Sitefinder "service".
I think of spam the way I think of pornography or any other offensive speech: if you don't like it, don't fucking listen. But don't infringe on other's rights to expression. Yes, much of what spammers do is illegal - but every single spam is sent representing someone who wants money.
Would you have a problem if I would instead send hard-core pornography, penis pill advertisements, and credit schemes directly to your children via snail-mail instead of over e-mail? "Hey look daddy, this postcard is shaped like a big penis and says I can add 3" of girth and 4" of length within a month... do I have a penis?" I'd probably go to fscking jail if I did through postal mail what spammers send through e-mail. It's outright fraud. Prosecute them based on the fraud they send though, not the act of sending it.
The amount of spam coming out of rr.com is about equal to the amount of spam coming out of korea. At least for me it is. Charter isn't as bad, but it's a major source too.
The trouble with spam is, we're all complaining about it, but most of the time it isn't illegal! Until spam is illegal than blocking it through technical means and blocking IP address ranges carpet-bomb style to try to prevent it hurts legitimate users more than it hurts the spammers. The spammers will just be moved by their spam-friendly ISP to an unblocked range and resume their activity while leaving a scorched earth of address space behind them. That's the problem with all these god damn blacklists, especially ones like SPEWS who actively seek to punish everyone getting service from an ISP for the sake of hurting a couple of people.
The biggest problem is ATT will have to administrate this. If a (legitimate) domain switches IP addresses on their outgoing SMTP server (it happens), ATT will have to deal with it by setting up some kind of structure to accomodate such changes.
A bigger problem is this is a stupid idea if they expect third-party mail servers to contact them and get added to a whitelist before they can send to them. 95% of the servers aren't going to bother, mail will bounce, and they will cause more headaches. If this idea catches on, everytime I want to send mail out I need to go make sure AOL, AT&T, MSN, Earthlink, etc. all have my SMTP server in their whitelist so I can send shit to my family? If it isn't automated through SPF:Sender or something then I can't see this as being workable for more than a couple days until they take major flak from their customers for blocking their e-mail.
And what the recourse for the Customer? Call or email the ISP to get xxx.com on their whitelist?
Switch ISPs apparently. AT&T doesn't want to be in the ISP business anymore from the looks of things. Next thing you know they will block everything except outbound port 80/tcp to their "premium content servers". Run away very fast from idiotic ISPs who do shit like this to screw their customers.
It's not exactly sacrifice on your part if you aren't currently using either of those two programs (which I assume you aren't, since you're willing to see them cut).
Why did you cut defense spending out of the quote? You're misrepresenting what I said. I'm for cutting ALL government bloat, including defense spending, not just social programs. And yes, I would be willing to pay more local and state taxes to subsidize my roads, schools, and emergency services if it meant cutting the federal bloat out of my paycheck.
Voters want lower taxes, more spending, and less debt, and will vote for those things no matter how contradictory they appear to be.
Wrong, some voters want lower taxes, some voters want more spending. Most people know the two are mutually exclusive. I as a citizen am well aware that in lowering my taxes there will be less government services available as a cost. I am willing to sacrifice things like welfare, social security, and even defense budgets if it means cutting the pork out of the government so I can take home more of what I earn.
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I never even considered buying a Mac until I had played with OS X quite a bit. The classic MacOS sucked balls and it showed when one faulty application could lockup the entire OS. As far as I can tell that's still the case with OS 9 which I've tried for a grand total of 45 minutes.
I'm still mixed on whether I will ever buy another Mac (I currently have a 800MHz G3 iBook). I look back at the Windows world and for the same price as a high end iBook or the low end Powerbook I can get a screaming fast Dell P4 laptop.
The laptop I really want (15" Powerbook w/superdrive) comes out to around $2900 when you add in everything you need like Applecare for three year warranty (yes, you MUST get this... they don't even want to talk to you after 90 days of phone support is up even though you have 1 year of hardware support.), an extra battery, 1 512meg dimm instead of 2x256 (this seems stupid IMHO) etc.
Solaris 8 was free, so I don't know what you're talking about with this "thousands". I'm still getting patches for Solaris 2.6 from Sun. They support their older products just dandy. Granted, it takes 6 months to patch a mission critical vulnerability, but eventually they get around to it. On second thought, Sun sucks too. Use Debian.
I'm not sure why everyone is rejoicing. The only countries that seem to be looking at this type of thing are extremely socialist or totalitarian in nature (Vietnam, China, European Union, etc.). This is a very bad thing for the American software industry (and by extension programmers.. you know, some of these companies give you a paycheck?). Commercial software is NOT a bad thing, only the abuse of a monopoly on commercial software. For example, Microsoft forcing all PC vendors to use Windows would be a bad thing. Providing excellent business productivity software like Office is a good thing. We shouldn't discourage companies from producing quality software by threatening to boycott them.
True, but there are plenty of unemployed "web developers" (html or frontpage monkeys) who could be perhaps taught to troubleshoot these enough to run adaware and cleanup a machine.
You know, all the copyrighted music in existence is really just variations on the original sound produced by the Big Bang. I say they ripped it off and that we can pira^H^H^H^Hshare all the music we want now.
Oh, you mean inducing human error into the equation by hundreds of people manually counting, recounting, and then recounting again punchcards? Punch cards worked absolutely fine up until the 2000 election. If you're too stupid to punch a punch card cleanly then you shouldn't be voting. I know it's not a popular opinion, but for crying out loud, it isn't difficult to do. We need to quit treating citizens like they are 5 year old morons and expect them to have some sense of fscking common sense.
Gator is basically just malware like any other virus or trojan. Just because a company produces it and claims it has a valid purpose doesn't make it any less evil. The CDC started claiming BackOrifice2k was a remote administration tool, but that didn't make it any less frustrating to find someone had compromised your system and installed it on there without your knowledge to take control of your machine.
Everyone whose computer I have ever found Gator (and tons of other spyware) on has had no idea what it does or how they installed it. They click on some link (these are teenagers for example.. they're click happy) and suddenly they have a wonderful new time syncing app or a datebook! Great right? Well, until their computer eventually slows to a halt and starts crashing, personal information is spewed out across the Internet without their consent, and/or their computer is used as some kind of distributed cracking node without their knowledge. McAfee, Symantec and others need to be forced to accept that malware like Gator IS a virus and needs to be cleaned from a system. We shouldn't have to use yet another malware cleaner like Adaware to get rid of it. If Gator and other spyware made it VERY clear they were installed and cooperated 100% with the add/remove programs in Win2k to completely remove themselves and ALL their components when you remove them then I wouldn't have such a huge issue with shareware software installing it. It's an annoyance at that point, but easily remedied like having an AOL icon created on your desktop.
That's all well and good, but within the same time frame there will be 300,000 new computer users who will experience Windows as their first OS. I'm sorry, but Linux has never, is not, and will never be a mainstream operating system. I would love to see it as much as the next guy, but it's just a hacked up UNIX-like OS built by a bunch of volunteers. Most people do NOT care about the free-software ideology, they just want to turn on their computer, read their e-mail, browse the web, and look at porn/pictures of their grandkids (not necessarily the same people). Why screw around with Linux when Windows comes for free on their computer?
It had to happen sooner or later. If they don't already the next versions will just employ strong encryption to foil the morons buying these.
It is much easier, safer, ultimately cheaper, and also the legal way, to simply liscence the technology.
All I'm saying is, how would you know? How would Certicom know? The NSA's entire existence is built on secrecy. Snitches don't survive long there (professionally or otherwise I would imagine).
Well, before they just used it and didn't bother asking for permission. This isn't that big of a deal. The only thing out of the ordinary is they asked before using it. Nothing is stopping the NSA from ignoring a license for anything. Who are you going to call, the BSA to battle the NSA? Licensing applies to corporations and individuals.. governments can choose whether to obey them or not. We'd like for them to obey them, but who watches the watchers?
This seems to be just something you'd install on top of an already installed Red Hat system. Are they going to provide complete minimized disk images? I couldn't tell from a quick glance at the site and screenshots. Basically it's just a web interface to the tools already included in Red Hat (Samba, NFS, etc.). I was really hoping for some all-in-one optimized and minimized distribution that you'd install on a CF card and just reflashed to update it to a newer version. Then throw in a 3ware or SCSI RAID card, a bunch of disks, and be off. If this is just a web interface for Red Hat it isn't that interesting.
Well he would of course be expected to resign from Congress to take this position. Being a congressional representative hasn't been a part time job in a long time (at least over a century). Acting as head of the MPAA is definitely a full time job for Jack Valenti... you just can't garner that much hatred by working 20 hours a week you know.
I think it's a tad bit early to write it off. 350 Mbits of updates isn't really THAT much. One package like the kernel source or XFree86 could account for 350 Mbits. When it gets up to the range of about half a CD, or 325 Megabytes, then I'd say it's big problem.
Why not just make a backup copy of it? If the whole point of it is to replicate itself then you can use it to make a backup of itself. Then if it breaks, just use the backup... or use the backup exclusively and store the original in a safe location. Or store your backup on Karpentryzaa (har har) for secure off-site backup.
Yea, because I really hate when an e-mail message comes along and installs a bunch of DLLs and registry entries. WTF are you talking about? It's an e-mail message for Pete's sake. There's no reason it can't be safely deleted and even have the space used wiped cleanly several times. Have a little faith that Microsoft's high paid software developers aren't complete idiots and can handle deleting an e-mail message securely.
That's why that intarweb thingy never took off and Pointcast now dominates the online arena.
You can tell where this is leading. Today it's e-mail, tomorrow it will be web traffic. If your web traffic isn't proxied through your ISP's web proxy then you will be blocked from visiting web sites at some other provider. Only major providers' web proxies will get added to the other providers' firewall rules to allow incoming web traffic. Corporate America just took a little longer to fuck over the little guy on the Internet. Now they're full steam ahead, and the anti-spam crusaders are their spearhead.
We're probably all over-reacting a bit since the first time the CEO of AT&T misses an important e-mail message because his ISP blocks the incoming mail, this will go away. I would say by 2pm on Friday at the latest. This is one of those idiotic things to do on the scale of Verisign's Sitefinder "service".
Would you have a problem if I would instead send hard-core pornography, penis pill advertisements, and credit schemes directly to your children via snail-mail instead of over e-mail? "Hey look daddy, this postcard is shaped like a big penis and says I can add 3" of girth and 4" of length within a month... do I have a penis?" I'd probably go to fscking jail if I did through postal mail what spammers send through e-mail. It's outright fraud. Prosecute them based on the fraud they send though, not the act of sending it.
The trouble with spam is, we're all complaining about it, but most of the time it isn't illegal! Until spam is illegal than blocking it through technical means and blocking IP address ranges carpet-bomb style to try to prevent it hurts legitimate users more than it hurts the spammers. The spammers will just be moved by their spam-friendly ISP to an unblocked range and resume their activity while leaving a scorched earth of address space behind them. That's the problem with all these god damn blacklists, especially ones like SPEWS who actively seek to punish everyone getting service from an ISP for the sake of hurting a couple of people.
A bigger problem is this is a stupid idea if they expect third-party mail servers to contact them and get added to a whitelist before they can send to them. 95% of the servers aren't going to bother, mail will bounce, and they will cause more headaches. If this idea catches on, everytime I want to send mail out I need to go make sure AOL, AT&T, MSN, Earthlink, etc. all have my SMTP server in their whitelist so I can send shit to my family? If it isn't automated through SPF:Sender or something then I can't see this as being workable for more than a couple days until they take major flak from their customers for blocking their e-mail.
Switch ISPs apparently. AT&T doesn't want to be in the ISP business anymore from the looks of things. Next thing you know they will block everything except outbound port 80/tcp to their "premium content servers". Run away very fast from idiotic ISPs who do shit like this to screw their customers.
Why did you cut defense spending out of the quote? You're misrepresenting what I said. I'm for cutting ALL government bloat, including defense spending, not just social programs. And yes, I would be willing to pay more local and state taxes to subsidize my roads, schools, and emergency services if it meant cutting the federal bloat out of my paycheck.
Wrong, some voters want lower taxes, some voters want more spending. Most people know the two are mutually exclusive. I as a citizen am well aware that in lowering my taxes there will be less government services available as a cost. I am willing to sacrifice things like welfare, social security, and even defense budgets if it means cutting the pork out of the government so I can take home more of what I earn.