One of the reasons why cell phones are more common here is that the quality of the land line phone service is sometimes absolutely awful. I personally live in the Czech Republic, and SPT Telecom, the PTT here, is crap. It costs less to own a mobile than a land line, the quality is better, and international calls are cheaper than calling a mobile from a land line now (thanks to voice over IP).
I'm sorry, but just because a company doesn't support an operating system, I still think it's fairly stupid to restrict access to just windows. Providing a way for people using "alternative" OSes to connect would not cost a vast amount of money (connecting to an ISP is a fairly common procedure) and they can still claim "We don't support linux" to users who have problems with that. How many slashdot readers use a free unix? Lots - and none of them can use Qwest.
Scary. It says it uses a "Intel® Flex ATX Mini Tower with 4 USB ports & 1 Serial port," so maybe Intel have a whole range of disgusting new designs for us.
By reading this reply to the article posted on Slashdot "NSI Changes the WHOIS Rules" you agree to take off all your clothes, run round the world naked 3 times shouting "I'm a penguin!" and eat bananas for the rest of your life. I reserve the right to modify these terms at any time. By reading this article you agree to abide by this policy.
The contest isn't as valuable to the community as it would be if w2k was open source, but it is nevertheless valuable. Yes, by attempting to crack the site, you are helping Microsoft, but you're also helping to produce a more secure operating system. Like it or not, w2k is going to be snapped up by millions of companies, and I for one would be much happier if all those millions of companies had a secure operating system instead of the bug ridden piece of bloatware they have right now.
One of the major criticisms against Microsoft is that they don't learn from their mistakes - as I remember someone saying once, you'd think that they would figure out that the scrollbar doesn't have to snap back to the top of the screen just because you've moved your mouse a certain distance from it - but they are actively saying here "hey, we want you to show us how we're doing things wrong".
By cracking the site, you are giving back to the community by providing the community with a more secure operating system, albeit one you have to pay for. Marketing departments are going to take advantage of the situation either way, but hey, that's what marketing departments do.
It sounds like Qmail & FreeBSD running on a high-spec PC would be an pretty good solution to your problem, as has been suggested elsewhere already. Some benefits:
Qmail's maildir format means that you the machine wouldn't bog down as soon as the users started getting large mailboxes - each mail is stored individually, and the pop daemon doesn't have to read through huge files to find out how many messages are there
The fact that users' maildirs are stored in their home directory also means you can spread them across filesystems easily.
the configuration and management of qmail scales a lot easier than sendmail's - much more sensible config files / config file names, seperate config files for different things
global aliases are stored as seperate files (although you can use a hack to use the/etc/aliases format if you like) so managing aliases is easier
I say FreeBSD because I know that it's reputation of stability and fast networking are true from experience, but I guess Linux or another open source operating system (OS OS, heh) would do the job fine. I've seen a system at a commercial ISP running with about 15K users on FreeBSD & Qmail, which is why I'm recommending it. They switched from sendmail when it started becoming too slow because of massive mailboxes; every time a user with a 50Mb mailbox logged on the mail server would chug until it had gone through the whole file. If someone gets sent one 50Mb attachment, that means that the pop3d gone through 50Mb of data to say "1 New Message" - it's not an issue with the maildir format.
I guess you could achieve the same effect with a clustering solution, but I think that's probably unnecessary.
There are two other secure linux projects, Bastille Linux ( www.bastille-linux.org), and an as yet unnamed "Secure Linux" ( http://www.reseau.nl/securelinux, you can vote for a name there). They've both been in progress for quite some time.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the reasons why cell phones are more common here is that the quality of the land line phone service is sometimes absolutely awful. I personally live in the Czech Republic, and SPT Telecom, the PTT here, is crap. It costs less to own a mobile than a land line, the quality is better, and international calls are cheaper than calling a mobile from a land line now (thanks to voice over IP).
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I'm sorry, but just because a company doesn't support an operating system, I still think it's fairly stupid to restrict access to just windows. Providing a way for people using "alternative" OSes to connect would not cost a vast amount of money (connecting to an ISP is a fairly common procedure) and they can still claim "We don't support linux" to users who have problems with that. How many slashdot readers use a free unix? Lots - and none of them can use Qwest.
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There is already a java version of install shield - Netbeans uses it. Doesn't that count as an "easy install"?
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http://www.instinct.org/~pgl/freebsd-i sos.html
There are a few sites out there that carry the full set of CDs, and the official distribution site has the first and most important CD image (ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub /FreeBSD/releases/i386/ISO-IMAGES/).
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http://www.barbiepc.com/
Scary. It says it uses a "Intel® Flex ATX Mini Tower with 4 USB ports & 1 Serial port," so maybe Intel have a whole range of disgusting new designs for us.
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By reading this reply to the article posted on Slashdot "NSI Changes the WHOIS Rules" you agree to take off all your clothes, run round the world naked 3 times shouting "I'm a penguin!" and eat bananas for the rest of your life. I reserve the right to modify these terms at any time. By reading this article you agree to abide by this policy.
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http://www.cybercomm.net/~alindsey/rw97/
with pictures of all the robots, different matches and stuff. Like someone else said, fighting robots is cool .
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Are there any pictures of the cluster available?
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What about female hackers? Are they not getting any too? Any females out there care to comment?
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For those of you who haven't been able to view the site, there's a partial copy from my cache at:
http://www.instinct.org/~pgl/ww w.windows2000test.com/
if anyone can send me the other pages, I'll add them (pgl@instinct.org).
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The contest isn't as valuable to the community as it would be if w2k was open source, but it is nevertheless valuable. Yes, by attempting to crack the site, you are helping Microsoft, but you're also helping to produce a more secure operating system. Like it or not, w2k is going to be snapped up by millions of companies, and I for one would be much happier if all those millions of companies had a secure operating system instead of the bug ridden piece of bloatware they have right now.
One of the major criticisms against Microsoft is that they don't learn from their mistakes - as I remember someone saying once, you'd think that they would figure out that the scrollbar doesn't have to snap back to the top of the screen just because you've moved your mouse a certain distance from it - but they are actively saying here "hey, we want you to show us how we're doing things wrong".
By cracking the site, you are giving back to the community by providing the community with a more secure operating system, albeit one you have to pay for. Marketing departments are going to take advantage of the situation either way, but hey, that's what marketing departments do.
Just my 2Kc.
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I say FreeBSD because I know that it's reputation of stability and fast networking are true from experience, but I guess Linux or another open source operating system (OS OS, heh) would do the job fine. I've seen a system at a commercial ISP running with about 15K users on FreeBSD & Qmail, which is why I'm recommending it. They switched from sendmail when it started becoming too slow because of massive mailboxes; every time a user with a 50Mb mailbox logged on the mail server would chug until it had gone through the whole file. If someone gets sent one 50Mb attachment, that means that the pop3d gone through 50Mb of data to say "1 New Message" - it's not an issue with the maildir format.
I guess you could achieve the same effect with a clustering solution, but I think that's probably unnecessary.
You might also want to check out postfix.
URLS:
- http://www.qmail.org/ - Qmail
- http://www.postfix.org/ - Postfix (by Wietse Venema)
- http://www.freebsd.org/
Good luck!--
There are two other secure linux projects, Bastille Linux ( www.bastille-linux.org), and an as yet unnamed "Secure Linux" ( http://www.reseau.nl/securelinux, you can vote for a name there). They've both been in progress for quite some time.
There's a book all about the 'hologramic' nature of the human brain at: http://www.inst inct.org/texts/shufflebrain/shufflebrain-book00.ht ml.