Imagine if an RFID kiosk at the entrance identified that you were wearing stain blocker Dockers and announced "I see you are wearing stain blocker pants...we stock a complete selection in your size, and today they are on sale".
Unless, of course, the store you bought the pants from removed the rfid tag when you leave the store, as they do with all other magnetic security devices. RFID tags are cheap, but not so cheap that retailers won't want to reuse them.
What I don't understand about the SCO/IBM case, is why IBM isn't taking action to immediately stop SCO from doing what they are doing. I am sure it must be affecting their AIX business, and I can't believe that there isn't a legal method they can use to take some kind of cease and desist out on SCO.
In our system, it makes more sense for IBM to lay low for the moment and let SCO do all the work. It will cost SCO a fair amount of money to actually execute a lawsuit against anyone, much more so against IBM. IBM knows that SCO can't win; why would they initiate a bunch of legal action on their own?
IBM recently refused to settle with SCO, meaning that this lawsuit will actually go to court and IBM is actually going to defend itself. If you know anything about Wal-Mart, you'll see the similarity. Wal-Mart has a corporate policy of never settling a lawsuit unless they agree that they are culpable (which they have done on occasion, so no "evil corporation" diatribe, please). This has saved them lots of $$ over time, because they discourage a lot of lawsuits, and many of the brave (or ignorant) souls who actually try to dig $$ out of Wal-Mart's deep pockets eventually drop their cases.
I think IBM's strategy is correct in this case, particularly because IBM knows that SCO can't prove anything and that SCO can't possibly outlast them in a court battle. It's nice to have big blue on the side of open-source, even if it is only because it directly affects IBM's interests.
It isn't the operating system controlling the grinding of lenses or correcting the tilt of the TGV. It is a function of the hardware to do these things. That they report back to some software (which could frankly be run on any embedded OS) which then tells them what to do next is almost irrelevant.
Ummm...it is the operating system that matters -- the O.S. is the software that controls the hardware. Just like software on a PC can make the hardware do things it ought not do, software can make a precision laser be off by 1/100 of a millimeter, destroying someone's retina in the process.
I don't see any problem with bugtraq. I'm happily subscribed and read the emails I get. I don't really see the need for effort to duplicate a system that exists and works, more or less. For the parts that don't work so great, there are already several other groups/systems/sites out there (that have been mentioned in this thread), and individuals and very small groups fill in the cracks even further.
Make your manager read dilbert for as much time as you have to work overtime. At the end of every day, drop increasingly not-so-subtle hints that he is a phb.
I remember there was a time when many of my friends used icq instead of aol, and I liked it better. ICQ was/is more flexible and is just better all around. I'm glad to see that AOL is going to integrate the two. Now I could use ICQ to keep my aol buddy list!
Of course, trillian has made all of these things moot, I think. Trillian offeres almost all of the same features that ICQ offered and integrates more than just AOL/ICQ.
First of all, microsoft doesn't chase and fix bugs, and they are not out of business. In fact, they are the most profiting company in this half of the world (probably the whole world).
just to inject a little reality: Yes, MS _does_ chase and fix bugs. They have 2,500 full time developers and 2,500 full time testers devoted to that one task. I know. I used to work at MS in the windows division while windows xp was under development. Even when they create a new branch in their revision control for the next release of windows, the number of devs initially working on it is small. They don't even put the bulk of their team on the next release until a couple service packs are released to fix major stuff in the current release. If they didn't do this, they would most certainly lose a ton of business, if not all of it. Also, they aren't the most "profiting" (try profitable) company in the world. They aren't even in the most profitable industry (pharmaceuticals), and they aren't the most profitable in the software industry (http://www.worldtechtribune.com/worldtechtribune/ asparticles/buzz/bz12102002.asp; InfoSys Technologies, EDS).
If you don't like MS for whatever reason, that's fine --- but be rational.
I work in a research lab at a very large research university ( > 45,000). We use almost exclusively open source software. RH 8/9 is the order of the day for our OSs. We rarely have to control any custom or obscure hardware, however (we do research on networks and security,hardware evaluation, and virtual teaching techniques). This is neither here nor there; the real key to success for any research lab is technically skilled slave labor ( == graduate assistants)!
Yeah, I think DVD-R is probably the safest way to go if you want ot make sure your disc is playable. I just got through shopping for and buying a DVD player for my new plasma television, and almost every player listed DVD-R as a supported format, and a few listed DVD-rw. Hardly any of them listed DVD+r/rw as a supported format, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it won't play those formats.
"There are all kinds of arguments I could make regarding the war", but you didn't. I'd love to hear a rational explanation for the USA invasion of Iraq...
Alright, I'll respond to some of your comments. I have neither the time nor enough knowledge to make all arguments that could be made (and indeed have been made).
No WMD's have been found (lies or intelligence blunder?)
Actually, WMD's (or physical evidence of them) have been found. It's been largely ignored by the media AFAIK, but several caches of weapons that are chemical or biological in nature have been found. For example, (And I can't remember if this was right before the war or during the first week or so) a bunch (~2 dozen?) of missles with chemical tips were found armed and ready to be used. This was mentioned in the media the day they were found, and I've heard nothing of it since. There was a large underground nuclear facility found at the beginning of the war by the US forces. Whether or not they found weaponry or that kind of thing there, I'm not sure. They did find a ton of waste material. I think it's significant since Hussein wasn't supposed to have nuclear capabilities at all according to the UN. Again, it was only mentioned for a day or two. Two trailers that are reportedly mobile weapons labs have been found. They too were mentioned only briefly. The president has not been claiming the "smoking gun" on any of these finds, but I think (and this is totally my theory) it's a political move to avoid making that claim. On each of the previous examples, the report from the field was basically this: "The specialists on site claim this to be the real thing, but they say it needs to be tested more thoroughly", and then it's not heard from again (probably because the president isn't bringing it up). You are free to draw your own conclusions. My point in all of this is just to show that there is reason to believe the way I do and that the war wasn't irrational.
No strong links to al Qaeda were found...
I think there were. Several terrorist training facilities were found inside Iraq, including a 747 fuselage, assumedly for the purpose of hijacking training. This alone only proves that there were ties to terrorists, not necessarily Al Queda. But then again, Al Queda aren't the only enemies we're trying to defeat. There are several terrorist groups like Al Queda that are our enemies also. Also, Mohammed Atta (I think) was reported to meet with an Iraqi intelligence official in Germany; it's been confirmed by a couple of European intelligence agencies independently of any of the US intelligence agencies. These are the most obvious things I can think of, but there are other lower-profile tidbits on the 17th page of the newpapers that are relevant. Again, draw your own conclusions. I have no reason to believe that there wasn't a connection.
Why Iraq?
I think this is a question that I hope the US administration asked themselves (and I think they did). In my mind there are a number of reaons for invading Iraq over other countries. One that many people think is significant is that Iraq has been flouting UN resolutions that claim consequences (17 resolutions in 13 years including the two most recent ones). The UN doesn't carry a lot of credibility with me for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that the vast majority of member states are not democratically ruled...but that's a topic for another discussion. So anyway, my reasons: I believe there has been a connection drawn between Iraq and terrorists. I believe Iraq would have sold or "donated" its WMDs to terrorists who are more than willing to use them. Another reason is that Iraq had the most powerful military in the middle east. By promptly defeating Iraq, it may save us from having to have conflict with some of the other terrorist-supporting (e.g., Syria, Iran) dictators in the region (just my theory). The idea is to have the most impact with the least bloodshed.
Maybe because you're wrong? There are all kinds of arguments I could make regarding the war. However, I agree with one of the previous posters that this has more to do with American power in general. The Eurocrats are jealous of the fact that the U.S. has the power to act in its own interest with or without anyone's help, which makes them feel particularly irrelevant. Their response to this irrelevancy is to form a more federal E.U. with a common foreign policy and a single currency, with the ultimate goal of being a superpower counterweight to the U.S.
err...let me correct myself. Craddick isn't a Democrat.:-)
Re:3 days to a week to compile?
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
--- however, after the first couple installs, I had the whole process down to about 4 hours from stage 1 (bootstrap)
The systems I mentioned are full systems, including X11, Gnome, window managers, a full development environment (gcc, gdb, etc), emacs, mozilla, etc. My system at home is an Athlon 1700+ with 256 MB RAM (almost identical to yours) on a 768K dsl line (btw, I would love to know how your cable modem gets 2MB!). It was finished within 5 hours, give or take half an hour.
Bear in mind that when I say 3 days, that's starting from Stage 1 tarball with a USE clause a mile long and all the goodies. Compiling large pieces of software like Mozilla or OpenOffice (as opposed to grabbing the binary-only packages) can take even longer.
Bear in mind when I say 4-5 hours, that's starting from a stage 1 tarball with a USE clause 14 miles long and all the goodies, mozilla (source) included. OpenOffice (source) took another 13 hours. All in all, even with the largest package (OpenOffice), it's still less than 1 day.
Bill Owens is the man. Hopefully Tom Craddick and all the other yellow-bellied Texas democrats (the ones who recently hid out in Oklahoma because they were going to lose a vote on redistricting) and naive sponsoring republicans will get a clue and realize that if Bill Owens will veto this bill, so will Rick Perry.
My university has been doing this sort of thing for over a decade. We have a graduate-level security class accompanied by a "live" network environment where there are no rules (except that nothing done inside the "sandbox" is to be exposed to the public internet). While many specific techniques like virus writing how-to's might present aren't formally taught, learning them is part of the course, as well as successfully using them against real machines that are actively defended.
Insisting on correctness has absolutely nothing in common with wearing vulcan ears in public.
It is almost always a worthwhile effort to insist on being correct and precise, as well as not losing the language to those who don't know any better.
-- from a "narrow-minded Southern whitey"
Re:3 days to a week to compile?
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
uh...I keep hearing from various sources that it takes days upon days to install gentoo. I used to only see it in irc channels; now slashdot too?
I've been using gentoo for a few months now, and I installed in on several (4-5) systems, some more than once. Granted, the first couple of times you do it, it can take a while, especially if you're on a slow network link --- however, after the first couple installs, I had the whole process down to about 4 hours from stage 1 (bootstrap).
The computers I acoomplished this on aren't fantabulous or anything: cpus ranging from 733 MHz to 1.4 GHz, RAM ranging from 128 - 396 MB.
Anyway, now for my general comments:
Previously, I was a RedHat user for about 4 years. I liked RedHat (and still do), but Gentoo just really does it for me. I've tried a couple of other distros too. Slackware is terrible. Mandrake is a lot like redhat, except they push bleeding edge software in their rpms and don't test nearly as much as RH, and it isn't nearly as pretty or well supported. I think I liked Debian, but it was awkward to me, even with apt-get.
Then I found Gentoo. The package management system is almost everything I would ask for in such a system, managing config files, runlevels, and all the other tedium of linux administration is made intuitive and mostly easy to deal with without abstracting what's really going on. Another big plus to me is that it's much easier with Gentoo to keep unneccessary software of my system. With the other distributions, there seems to be more bloat that is unavoidable.
There's my 2 cents. Of course, I'm still a young'un though.
North Korea: 120,540 sq km [photius.com] South Korea: 98,480 sq km [photius.com]
USA: 9,629,091 sq km (CIA World Factbootk)
how 'bout people who argue over trivia to avoid the point shut up? Oh, and for the dude who brought up canada having 2x the bandwidth of the USA....95% of Canadians live in the southernmost part of Canada, and there are only 31 million Canadians anyway.
The USA has nearly 300 million people spread over nearly 10 million square kilometers. Canada and South Korea have clear logistical advantages in terms of getting bandwidth throughout their population.
Of course, they're wrong. All you would have to do is put a mechanism in SMTP that would require the point of origin to have a valid IP and perform some sort of lightweight handshake for confirmation.
Maybe something like this:
1. mta1 @ valid ip (1.1.1.1) -> email -> mta @ valid ip (2.2.2.2)
2. mta2 -> (email_id,email_md5) -> mta1
3. mta1 -> ok -> mta2
4. mta2 delivers email normally
If mta1 is a spammer and they are trying to spoof an ip, then the handshake will fail because either (a) the host at the spoofed ip will reject the connection or (b) the host at the spoofed ip will accept the connection, but will fail the handshake because the email_id or email_md5 aren't in its records.
e.g.:
1. mta1 @ spoofed ip (1.1.1.1) -> email -> mta2
2. mta2 -> (email_id,email_md5) -> host @ 1.1.1.1
3. host -> reject || wtf? -> mta2
4. mta2 drops email and makes a note in the logs
a scheme of this sort would provide some level of accountability for spammers by preventing spoofing. They would be trackable. End of a lot of spam. the extra steps wouldn't require that much more processing power, especially for low-volume servers (e.g., 1000 emails/sec ).
When your post is so long that I have to click again to see the rest of it, your argument has already been lost.
The contraction for "you are" is spelled "you're", not "your". Did you catch that? Simple spelling analysis. Clearly, by spelling "you're" "your", you indicated that you have not been affected by Websterian influence in modern society.
On a more serious note: the RIAA is never going to win this war. Take Madonna's latest fiasco, for example. I'm sure you've heard about this: songs from her latest then-unreleased album were distributed on p2p networks, but the songs were actually audio clips of her cursing the people who downloaded them ("wtf do you think you're doing", etc). Within just a few short days, her website was defaced and links to downloads of her actual unreleased songs were placed there. An RIAA break-in to someone's computer would cause a massive backlash, multiple times the proportion of the one against Madonna. They may as well just turn their computers off if they try this stuff.
Since RIAA can't win this war (even in court), they should roll with it: offer a monthly subscription-based download service so that the songs are actually affordable. If the artists can't make a living this way, they should get real jobs like the rest of us and worry about their music in their free time. Incidentally, I think this would help do away with some of the rediculous celebrity culture we have in the U.S. Of course, there would be less music, but I think that the music that would be lost is the CD-filling crap that most RIAA artists write (Britney and Christina are 100% CD-filler, so they would just go by the wayside, which is fine with me). Not only would we do away with the celebrity culture and skim the world of music of a ton of crappy stuff that shouldn't see the light of day, but the artists themselves would be more grounded in reality and it would be reflected in their songs, further raising the quality of the music they would have time to write.
P.S. -- I apologize if anyone has to click again to see all of this;-)
I've noticed a number of good points in this thread, but many more kneejerk reactions to the whole issue because Theo is an OSS guy and we like the OpenBSD project (or you're anti-war, anti-military, whatever, etc, etc.).
They cancelled funding for a project he was working on. That looks like cesure to me.
m-w.com:
: a judgment involving condemnation
: OPINION, JUDGMENT
: the act of blaming or condemning sternly
: an official reprimand
Based on this definition, whether or not cutting funding can be considered censure is debatable at best, IMNSHO. The point was made previously that they aren't preventing him from a) voicing his views publicly or b) continuing his project
Another thing to consider: Is Theo a U.S. citizen? I thought I saw something earlier about him being Canadian... If he isn't a U.S. citizen, then it's perfectly reasonable behavior for DARPA to not "contract" him because they have no guarantee of his loyalty to the country (although, I admit that if this has anything to do with it, it would have made sense not to fund it in the first place).
I don't pretend to know the reasons that DARPA cut the funding, but since I don't know the reasons, I take their word (or the word of their spokesperson) at face value until I have a reason not to. More information will be forthcoming, I hope.
this is pretty nifty, but i think I'll stick with openoffice. I won't have to pay $100 to upgrade it when the next version is released and it's interoperable with MS Office.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine if an RFID kiosk at the entrance identified that you were wearing stain blocker Dockers and announced "I see you are wearing stain blocker pants...we stock a complete selection in your size, and today they are on sale".
Unless, of course, the store you bought the pants from removed the rfid tag when you leave the store, as they do with all other magnetic security devices. RFID tags are cheap, but not so cheap that retailers won't want to reuse them.
What I don't understand about the SCO/IBM case, is why IBM isn't taking action to immediately stop SCO from doing what they are doing. I am sure it must be affecting their AIX business, and I can't believe that there isn't a legal method they can use to take some kind of cease and desist out on SCO.
In our system, it makes more sense for IBM to lay low for the moment and let SCO do all the work. It will cost SCO a fair amount of money to actually execute a lawsuit against anyone, much more so against IBM. IBM knows that SCO can't win; why would they initiate a bunch of legal action on their own?
IBM recently refused to settle with SCO, meaning that this lawsuit will actually go to court and IBM is actually going to defend itself. If you know anything about Wal-Mart, you'll see the similarity. Wal-Mart has a corporate policy of never settling a lawsuit unless they agree that they are culpable (which they have done on occasion, so no "evil corporation" diatribe, please). This has saved them lots of $$ over time, because they discourage a lot of lawsuits, and many of the brave (or ignorant) souls who actually try to dig $$ out of Wal-Mart's deep pockets eventually drop their cases.
I think IBM's strategy is correct in this case, particularly because IBM knows that SCO can't prove anything and that SCO can't possibly outlast them in a court battle. It's nice to have big blue on the side of open-source, even if it is only because it directly affects IBM's interests.
It isn't the operating system controlling the grinding of lenses or correcting the tilt of the TGV. It is a function of the hardware to do these things. That they report back to some software (which could frankly be run on any embedded OS) which then tells them what to do next is almost irrelevant.
Ummm...it is the operating system that matters -- the O.S. is the software that controls the hardware. Just like software on a PC can make the hardware do things it ought not do, software can make a precision laser be off by 1/100 of a millimeter, destroying someone's retina in the process.
I don't see any problem with bugtraq. I'm happily subscribed and read the emails I get. I don't really see the need for effort to duplicate a system that exists and works, more or less. For the parts that don't work so great, there are already several other groups/systems/sites out there (that have been mentioned in this thread), and individuals and very small groups fill in the cracks even further.
Make your manager read dilbert for as much time as you have to work overtime. At the end of every day, drop increasingly not-so-subtle hints that he is a phb.
I remember there was a time when many of my friends used icq instead of aol, and I liked it better. ICQ was/is more flexible and is just better all around. I'm glad to see that AOL is going to integrate the two. Now I could use ICQ to keep my aol buddy list!
Of course, trillian has made all of these things moot, I think. Trillian offeres almost all of the same features that ICQ offered and integrates more than just AOL/ICQ.
First of all, microsoft doesn't chase and fix bugs, and they are not out of business. In fact, they are the most profiting company in this half of the world (probably the whole world).
/ asparticles/buzz/bz12102002.asp; InfoSys Technologies, EDS).
just to inject a little reality: Yes, MS _does_ chase and fix bugs. They have 2,500 full time developers and 2,500 full time testers devoted to that one task. I know. I used to work at MS in the windows division while windows xp was under development. Even when they create a new branch in their revision control for the next release of windows, the number of devs initially working on it is small. They don't even put the bulk of their team on the next release until a couple service packs are released to fix major stuff in the current release. If they didn't do this, they would most certainly lose a ton of business, if not all of it. Also, they aren't the most "profiting" (try profitable) company in the world. They aren't even in the most profitable industry (pharmaceuticals), and they aren't the most profitable in the software industry (http://www.worldtechtribune.com/worldtechtribune
If you don't like MS for whatever reason, that's fine --- but be rational.
I work in a research lab at a very large research university ( > 45,000). We use almost exclusively open source software. RH 8/9 is the order of the day for our OSs. We rarely have to control any custom or obscure hardware, however (we do research on networks and security,hardware evaluation, and virtual teaching techniques). This is neither here nor there; the real key to success for any research lab is technically skilled slave labor ( == graduate assistants)!
Yeah, I think DVD-R is probably the safest way to go if you want ot make sure your disc is playable. I just got through shopping for and buying a DVD player for my new plasma television, and almost every player listed DVD-R as a supported format, and a few listed DVD-rw. Hardly any of them listed DVD+r/rw as a supported format, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it won't play those formats.
I always thought the Myst trilogy was pretty creative, although it wasn't the first puzzle game.
"There are all kinds of arguments I could make regarding the war", but you didn't. I'd love to hear a rational explanation for the USA invasion of Iraq...
Alright, I'll respond to some of your comments. I have neither the time nor enough knowledge to make all arguments that could be made (and indeed have been made).
No WMD's have been found (lies or intelligence blunder?)
Actually, WMD's (or physical evidence of them) have been found. It's been largely ignored by the media AFAIK, but several caches of weapons that are chemical or biological in nature have been found. For example, (And I can't remember if this was right before the war or during the first week or so) a bunch (~2 dozen?) of missles with chemical tips were found armed and ready to be used. This was mentioned in the media the day they were found, and I've heard nothing of it since. There was a large underground nuclear facility found at the beginning of the war by the US forces. Whether or not they found weaponry or that kind of thing there, I'm not sure. They did find a ton of waste material. I think it's significant since Hussein wasn't supposed to have nuclear capabilities at all according to the UN. Again, it was only mentioned for a day or two. Two trailers that are reportedly mobile weapons labs have been found. They too were mentioned only briefly. The president has not been claiming the "smoking gun" on any of these finds, but I think (and this is totally my theory) it's a political move to avoid making that claim. On each of the previous examples, the report from the field was basically this: "The specialists on site claim this to be the real thing, but they say it needs to be tested more thoroughly", and then it's not heard from again (probably because the president isn't bringing it up). You are free to draw your own conclusions. My point in all of this is just to show that there is reason to believe the way I do and that the war wasn't irrational.
No strong links to al Qaeda were found...
I think there were. Several terrorist training facilities were found inside Iraq, including a 747 fuselage, assumedly for the purpose of hijacking training. This alone only proves that there were ties to terrorists, not necessarily Al Queda. But then again, Al Queda aren't the only enemies we're trying to defeat. There are several terrorist groups like Al Queda that are our enemies also. Also, Mohammed Atta (I think) was reported to meet with an Iraqi intelligence official in Germany; it's been confirmed by a couple of European intelligence agencies independently of any of the US intelligence agencies. These are the most obvious things I can think of, but there are other lower-profile tidbits on the 17th page of the newpapers that are relevant. Again, draw your own conclusions. I have no reason to believe that there wasn't a connection.
Why Iraq?
I think this is a question that I hope the US administration asked themselves (and I think they did). In my mind there are a number of reaons for invading Iraq over other countries. One that many people think is significant is that Iraq has been flouting UN resolutions that claim consequences (17 resolutions in 13 years including the two most recent ones). The UN doesn't carry a lot of credibility with me for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that the vast majority of member states are not democratically ruled...but that's a topic for another discussion. So anyway, my reasons: I believe there has been a connection drawn between Iraq and terrorists. I believe Iraq would have sold or "donated" its WMDs to terrorists who are more than willing to use them. Another reason is that Iraq had the most powerful military in the middle east. By promptly defeating Iraq, it may save us from having to have conflict with some of the other terrorist-supporting (e.g., Syria, Iran) dictators in the region (just my theory). The idea is to have the most impact with the least bloodshed.
I'm sure I'll get blasted for this...
Maybe because you're wrong? There are all kinds of arguments I could make regarding the war. However, I agree with one of the previous posters that this has more to do with American power in general. The Eurocrats are jealous of the fact that the U.S. has the power to act in its own interest with or without anyone's help, which makes them feel particularly irrelevant. Their response to this irrelevancy is to form a more federal E.U. with a common foreign policy and a single currency, with the ultimate goal of being a superpower counterweight to the U.S.
err...let me correct myself. Craddick isn't a Democrat. :-)
--- however, after the first couple installs, I had the whole process down to about 4 hours from stage 1 (bootstrap)
The systems I mentioned are full systems, including X11, Gnome, window managers, a full development environment (gcc, gdb, etc), emacs, mozilla, etc. My system at home is an Athlon 1700+ with 256 MB RAM (almost identical to yours) on a 768K dsl line (btw, I would love to know how your cable modem gets 2MB!). It was finished within 5 hours, give or take half an hour.
Bear in mind that when I say 3 days, that's starting from Stage 1 tarball with a USE clause a mile long and all the goodies. Compiling large pieces of software like Mozilla or OpenOffice (as opposed to grabbing the binary-only packages) can take even longer.
Bear in mind when I say 4-5 hours, that's starting from a stage 1 tarball with a USE clause 14 miles long and all the goodies, mozilla (source) included. OpenOffice (source) took another 13 hours. All in all, even with the largest package (OpenOffice), it's still less than 1 day.
just my two cents: cups has been much nicer in my experience. One of my favorites: lp -o prettyprint -o number-up=2
Bill Owens is the man. Hopefully Tom Craddick and all the other yellow-bellied Texas democrats (the ones who recently hid out in Oklahoma because they were going to lose a vote on redistricting) and naive sponsoring republicans will get a clue and realize that if Bill Owens will veto this bill, so will Rick Perry.
My university has been doing this sort of thing for over a decade. We have a graduate-level security class accompanied by a "live" network environment where there are no rules (except that nothing done inside the "sandbox" is to be exposed to the public internet). While many specific techniques like virus writing how-to's might present aren't formally taught, learning them is part of the course, as well as successfully using them against real machines that are actively defended.
Insisting on correctness has absolutely nothing in common with wearing vulcan ears in public.
It is almost always a worthwhile effort to insist on being correct and precise, as well as not losing the language to those who don't know any better.
-- from a "narrow-minded Southern whitey"
uh...I keep hearing from various sources that it takes days upon days to install gentoo. I used to only see it in irc channels; now slashdot too?
I've been using gentoo for a few months now, and I installed in on several (4-5) systems, some more than once. Granted, the first couple of times you do it, it can take a while, especially if you're on a slow network link --- however, after the first couple installs, I had the whole process down to about 4 hours from stage 1 (bootstrap).
The computers I acoomplished this on aren't fantabulous or anything: cpus ranging from 733 MHz to 1.4 GHz, RAM ranging from 128 - 396 MB.
Anyway, now for my general comments:
Previously, I was a RedHat user for about 4 years. I liked RedHat (and still do), but Gentoo just really does it for me. I've tried a couple of other distros too. Slackware is terrible. Mandrake is a lot like redhat, except they push bleeding edge software in their rpms and don't test nearly as much as RH, and it isn't nearly as pretty or well supported. I think I liked Debian, but it was awkward to me, even with apt-get.
Then I found Gentoo. The package management system is almost everything I would ask for in such a system, managing config files, runlevels, and all the other tedium of linux administration is made intuitive and mostly easy to deal with without abstracting what's really going on. Another big plus to me is that it's much easier with Gentoo to keep unneccessary software of my system. With the other distributions, there seems to be more bloat that is unavoidable.
There's my 2 cents. Of course, I'm still a young'un though.
North Korea: 120,540 sq km [photius.com]
South Korea: 98,480 sq km [photius.com]
USA: 9,629,091 sq km (CIA World Factbootk)
how 'bout people who argue over trivia to avoid the point shut up? Oh, and for the dude who brought up canada having 2x the bandwidth of the USA....95% of Canadians live in the southernmost part of Canada, and there are only 31 million Canadians anyway.
The USA has nearly 300 million people spread over nearly 10 million square kilometers. Canada and South Korea have clear logistical advantages in terms of getting bandwidth throughout their population.
Of course, they're wrong. All you would have to do is put a mechanism in SMTP that would require the point of origin to have a valid IP and perform some sort of lightweight handshake for confirmation.
Maybe something like this:
1. mta1 @ valid ip (1.1.1.1) -> email -> mta @ valid ip (2.2.2.2)
2. mta2 -> (email_id,email_md5) -> mta1
3. mta1 -> ok -> mta2
4. mta2 delivers email normally
If mta1 is a spammer and they are trying to spoof an ip, then the handshake will fail because either (a) the host at the spoofed ip will reject the connection or (b) the host at the spoofed ip will accept the connection, but will fail the handshake because the email_id or email_md5 aren't in its records.
e.g.:
1. mta1 @ spoofed ip (1.1.1.1) -> email -> mta2
2. mta2 -> (email_id,email_md5) -> host @ 1.1.1.1
3. host -> reject || wtf? -> mta2
4. mta2 drops email and makes a note in the logs
a scheme of this sort would provide some level of accountability for spammers by preventing spoofing. They would be trackable. End of a lot of spam. the extra steps wouldn't require that much more processing power, especially for low-volume servers (e.g., 1000 emails/sec ).
P.S. -- I apologize if anyone has to click again to see all of this
They cancelled funding for a project he was working on. That looks like cesure to me. m-w.com:
- : a judgment involving condemnation
- : OPINION, JUDGMENT
- : the act of blaming or condemning sternly
- : an official reprimand
Based on this definition, whether or not cutting funding can be considered censure is debatable at best, IMNSHO. The point was made previously that they aren't preventing him from a) voicing his views publicly or b) continuing his projectAnother thing to consider: Is Theo a U.S. citizen? I thought I saw something earlier about him being Canadian... If he isn't a U.S. citizen, then it's perfectly reasonable behavior for DARPA to not "contract" him because they have no guarantee of his loyalty to the country (although, I admit that if this has anything to do with it, it would have made sense not to fund it in the first place).
I don't pretend to know the reasons that DARPA cut the funding, but since I don't know the reasons, I take their word (or the word of their spokesperson) at face value until I have a reason not to. More information will be forthcoming, I hope.
this is pretty nifty, but i think I'll stick with openoffice. I won't have to pay $100 to upgrade it when the next version is released and it's interoperable with MS Office.
err.. "...the graduate class he teaches."