I'm glad so many others agree with me, though a bit depressed I wasted my money on Crossroads of Twilight.
DULL DULL DULL. I'm about 500 pages in, and nothing has happened yet! And I don't suppose anything will happen in the last 200-odd pages of the book, other than a hundred new minor characters spending a couple of pages each thinking about something entirely inconsequential.
It's a real shame, the first 3 books of the series were great. The next 3 were OK, if getting a little bogged down, but the last 4 have been a real disappointment: nothing but introducing new characters (as if there weren't enough already) and new subplots (likewise). No sense of resolution anywhere in sight, it's just a confusing mess which is more of an effort than a pleasure to read.
I don't think I'll be buying the 11th book. I've given Jordan the benefit of the doubt for long enough now, hoping that each new book might actually start working toward some kind of resolution, but I doubt he knows himself where this whole mess is going to end up.
How will a firewall prevent a malicious downloaded program overwriting/etc/passwd? Or, for that matter, how would it prevent such a program switching off the firewall? The simple answer is that it doesn't. When the user is running as root, all bets are off; maybe its convenient in the short term, but it's not so nice when you've had your machine trashed by downloading the wrong piece of software.
Red Hat 8 does things in a reasonably elegant way: if you launch a program which requires root privileges (e.g. the user add/remove tool, the system time tool or ethereal), you get a graphical prompt for the root password. Assuming you know it, it gets cached for a few minutes, and a key icon appears on the panel. It's a good compromise between convenience and security.
That simply isn't true. Example: if I want to pipe the output of lynx to a file, I need to use -source on the command line. If I want to do the exact same thing in wget, it's -o. In netcat, I can just use the redirection of the shell.
How would I do the equivalent task with a script in Windows? Not a troll or a flame, an honest question: what's the Windows equivalent of lynx -source http://slashdot.org/ > file.html ?
What on earth are you on about? He searched 8/1/2003 - 10/1/2003 - that's 8th-10th January. It's you who brought up this August red herring (assuming you're the same AC who posted first time).
If it does require a server side piece, it's not a web browser, per se; but as a general question, is it worthwhile to look into "compressed" web pages, e.g., foo.html.zlib?
Sure is. So much so, that its already been done. Mozilla, for example sends a HTTP header Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, compress;q=0.9. If the server understands that (e.g. Apache with mod_gzip), it's free to compress the data on the wire. IE (as of 5.5 anyway, don't know about 6.0) doesn't appear to send any "Accept-encoding" headers. I'd very surprised though, if this led to anything like a 400% speedup in anything but highly controlled test conditions.
I'd hazard a guess that this new browser is quietly doing some background-caching. What articles I could find about this, however, are short on detail and kinda long on BS (web browsing and watching DVD's at the same time is a revolutionary feature? riiight), so it's really difficult to tell what substance there is behind all this. Time will tell, though...
Did you even bother read Ethan's responses? I quote:
I've only had a cursory look at TNG and OpenView, but I think its safe to say that they will always do more than Nagios. That's okay though - they'll cost you a bit more than Nagios will too. I have no intention of trying to make Nagios a "one app for everything" type of project.
Nagios most certainly is not billed as a replacement for TNG. It's still a damn useful product though, and even more so given its pricetag (or lack thereof).
Someone else said it, and I'll agree: if you actually have the skills to match your System Administrator tag, the documentation explains pretty much everything you'll need for day-to-day operation of Nagios. If you have some exotic requirement, you either figure it out yourself (after all, you have the source, and you're getting paid to show some initiative, right?), or you find a company who'll do it for you and pay some cash.
Not sure if you're trolling or just dismally stupid (or both!), but:
You don't need to decrypt a DVD to copy it. What decryption allows you to do is 1) play DVD's on hardware not licensed by the DVD-CCA, and 2) circumvent region restrictions. In other words, to play DVD's which you have purchased on hardware which you own.
As for the second paragraph of your post, it's irrelevant, rambling nonsense.
When you compare the local display mechanisms of X to something like Quartz or the Windows local display engine then X comes up seriously lacking
Not really. There's little in the X Protocol that is particularly network-dependent (implementations of X which use purely shared memory for message passing exist, for example). For regular windowing usage, X is perfectly capable of doing its job. For high-performance graphics requirements, extensions exist to permit clients to directly access video hardware.
The true problem with X is that it is very configurable in appearance and configurable on a per-app basis.
Ho hum. Of course X is very configurable - it's a driver framework, not a desktop specification. You could make the same claim about GDI, PDF, PostScript, etc.
The real problem is that the reference toolkit which ships with X (Xt & Athena) sucks and the commercial "standard" - Motif - is/was an absolute nightmare to program and severely lacking in aesthetics or functionality. Inevitably, superior but mutually incompatible toolkits sprung up, of which Qt/KDE and Gtk/GNOME are only two.
The holy grail, IMHO, is not a single toolkit, but a single UI specification that everybody can agree upon so that apps developed in any toolkit behave consistently at all times. KDE & GNOME have made a few tentative steps toward peaceful co-existence, but there's a long way to go.
Another hotel which offer WiFi is the San Francisco Hyatt Regency at Burlingame (or at least it did when I stayed there last July). No extra charge, easy access, nice fast 100KByte/sec transfer rates. Can't argue with that:-)
You're [sic] computer is broadcasting an IP that can be used to attack you
False. Even if I didn't have a NAT'ing firewall in front on my machine, it still wouldn't be "broadcasting" an address. Its IP address might be visible to those servers to which it connects, but that's not at all the same as broadcasting, which implies advertising it to all and sundry.
So, yes, this is deception. Even more so when you consider that it's obviously aimed at the less computer-literate.
I notice you don't publish your email address with your username. Don't want to get spammed? I know I don't.
Are you seriously suggesting that 1000 seconds per day devoted to deleting spam is not a big deal? That's over 16 minutes every day doing nothing else. Over 100 hours per year of spotting and deleting spam, assuming it only takes 2 seconds per message. Admittedly 500 spams/day is extreme, but it's steadily getting worse.
So, yes, it is that important as far as I'm concerned.
Seriously, all you appear to be suggesting is writing a replacement for X for the sake of it.
I don't believe there is such a thing as a "simple X replacement" - a full-featured windowing system is an inherently complex beast. Porting gdk & Qt is not impossible, but why? What does a GNOME/Gtk or KDE/QT app running on your "simple X replacement" suddenly give you that you don't have today? Nothing, that's what.
Since you're suggesting that we just use XFree's driver system plus "large amounts of X code", why don't you just carry on running X?
I should have done some more research:-) Yes, it looks like it will work just fine on a Unix-type OS. It does indeed appear as a regular serial device.
If it's like other PCMCIA GPRS cards I've encountered, it might work under Linux/BSD/etc. - simply appearing as a serial device to which you send AT commands (and thus available to run pppd on).
The Windows-only sticker may just refer to some cutesy control centre applet which will (obviously) only run on Windows. Every modem needs its own control centre on Windows these days, it seems.
The actual MAC address in the Ethernet frame the server receives is going to be the MAC address of the gateway nearest the server. But that's not very relevant (I should have been clearer about that in the first place).
The client's MAC address is presumably part of the authentication packet that COGS sends (i.e. it's encoded as part of the payload), and that's what the server will be interested in.
Neither. The server will see the MAC address of its closest neighbour, which will be a router at the ISP. MAC addresses are layer 2 - not part of the IP protocol. Each time a packet is forwarded through an IP gateway, the MAC address changes.
I'd guess what this software (COGS) is doing is including the MAC address of your local machine (but which ethernet card if you have more than one?) in the application-level data (i.e. the TCP/UDP payload) it sends to the server. If it sends a MAC address which is on the server's ban list, you don't get to play.
As someone else pointed out, this is pretty braindamaged and obviously designed by someone lacking the first clue about security. It's very easy to spoof - either by changing the MAC address of your ethernet card, or by cracking the client-side part of COGS. Yeah, I know it's not open-source... so? Someone will crack it and cracked COGS clients will appear on Warez sites within days.
And I'm not totally clear on what happens if you don't have an ethernet card and connect with PPP over a serial connection, like analog or ISDN. PPP doesn't have MAC addresses.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad so many others agree with me, though a bit depressed I wasted my money on Crossroads of Twilight.
DULL DULL DULL. I'm about 500 pages in, and nothing has happened yet! And I don't suppose anything will happen in the last 200-odd pages of the book, other than a hundred new minor characters spending a couple of pages each thinking about something entirely inconsequential.
It's a real shame, the first 3 books of the series were great. The next 3 were OK, if getting a little bogged down, but the last 4 have been a real disappointment: nothing but introducing new characters (as if there weren't enough already) and new subplots (likewise). No sense of resolution anywhere in sight, it's just a confusing mess which is more of an effort than a pleasure to read.
I don't think I'll be buying the 11th book. I've given Jordan the benefit of the doubt for long enough now, hoping that each new book might actually start working toward some kind of resolution, but I doubt he knows himself where this whole mess is going to end up.
How will a firewall prevent a malicious downloaded program overwriting /etc/passwd? Or, for that matter, how would it prevent such a program switching off the firewall? The simple answer is that it doesn't. When the user is running as root, all bets are off; maybe its convenient in the short term, but it's not so nice when you've had your machine trashed by downloading the wrong piece of software.
Red Hat 8 does things in a reasonably elegant way: if you launch a program which requires root privileges (e.g. the user add/remove tool, the system time tool or ethereal), you get a graphical prompt for the root password. Assuming you know it, it gets cached for a few minutes, and a key icon appears on the panel. It's a good compromise between convenience and security.
How would I do the equivalent task with a script in Windows? Not a troll or a flame, an honest question: what's the Windows equivalent of lynx -source http://slashdot.org/ > file.html ?
What on earth are you on about? He searched 8/1/2003 - 10/1/2003 - that's 8th-10th January. It's you who brought up this August red herring (assuming you're the same AC who posted first time).
You try again. Ireland doesn't use the US's MM/DD/YYYY date system. 8/1/2003 is the 8th of January in Ireland.
Sure is. So much so, that its already been done. Mozilla, for example sends a HTTP header Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, compress;q=0.9. If the server understands that (e.g. Apache with mod_gzip), it's free to compress the data on the wire. IE (as of 5.5 anyway, don't know about 6.0) doesn't appear to send any "Accept-encoding" headers. I'd very surprised though, if this led to anything like a 400% speedup in anything but highly controlled test conditions.
I'd hazard a guess that this new browser is quietly doing some background-caching. What articles I could find about this, however, are short on detail and kinda long on BS (web browsing and watching DVD's at the same time is a revolutionary feature? riiight), so it's really difficult to tell what substance there is behind all this. Time will tell, though...
I've only had a cursory look at TNG and OpenView, but I think its safe to say that they will always do more than Nagios. That's okay though - they'll cost you a bit more than Nagios will too. I have no intention of trying to make Nagios a "one app for everything" type of project.
Nagios most certainly is not billed as a replacement for TNG. It's still a damn useful product though, and even more so given its pricetag (or lack thereof).
Someone else said it, and I'll agree: if you actually have the skills to match your System Administrator tag, the documentation explains pretty much everything you'll need for day-to-day operation of Nagios. If you have some exotic requirement, you either figure it out yourself (after all, you have the source, and you're getting paid to show some initiative, right?), or you find a company who'll do it for you and pay some cash.
Not sure if you're trolling or just dismally stupid (or both!), but:
You don't need to decrypt a DVD to copy it. What decryption allows you to do is 1) play DVD's on hardware not licensed by the DVD-CCA, and 2) circumvent region restrictions. In other words, to play DVD's which you have purchased on hardware which you own.
As for the second paragraph of your post, it's irrelevant, rambling nonsense.
Not really. There's little in the X Protocol that is particularly network-dependent (implementations of X which use purely shared memory for message passing exist, for example). For regular windowing usage, X is perfectly capable of doing its job. For high-performance graphics requirements, extensions exist to permit clients to directly access video hardware.
The true problem with X is that it is very configurable in appearance and configurable on a per-app basis.
Ho hum. Of course X is very configurable - it's a driver framework, not a desktop specification. You could make the same claim about GDI, PDF, PostScript, etc.
The real problem is that the reference toolkit which ships with X (Xt & Athena) sucks and the commercial "standard" - Motif - is/was an absolute nightmare to program and severely lacking in aesthetics or functionality. Inevitably, superior but mutually incompatible toolkits sprung up, of which Qt/KDE and Gtk/GNOME are only two.
The holy grail, IMHO, is not a single toolkit, but a single UI specification that everybody can agree upon so that apps developed in any toolkit behave consistently at all times. KDE & GNOME have made a few tentative steps toward peaceful co-existence, but there's a long way to go.
For being the first Slashdot poster to understand the meaning of the word "ironic".
Another hotel which offer WiFi is the San Francisco Hyatt Regency at Burlingame (or at least it did when I stayed there last July). No extra charge, easy access, nice fast 100KByte/sec transfer rates. Can't argue with that :-)
Yep, you're right. What they definitely didn't choose, though, was the Quicktime player, which the original comment implied...
You might want to check your facts...
1) As has already been pointed out, they didn't choose Quicktime, they chose MPEG-4.
2) Windows load times are utterly irrelevant to this discussion since we're talking about mobile phones here.
3) The latest version of MPlayer for Linux will play Quicktime (or more accurately, the Sorenson 3 codec), as well as RealVideo9 and WMA9.
Really? I always thought 1's were a bit more than 0's...
False. Even if I didn't have a NAT'ing firewall in front on my machine, it still wouldn't be "broadcasting" an address. Its IP address might be visible to those servers to which it connects, but that's not at all the same as broadcasting, which implies advertising it to all and sundry.
So, yes, this is deception. Even more so when you consider that it's obviously aimed at the less computer-literate.
Are you seriously suggesting that 1000 seconds per day devoted to deleting spam is not a big deal? That's over 16 minutes every day doing nothing else. Over 100 hours per year of spotting and deleting spam, assuming it only takes 2 seconds per message. Admittedly 500 spams/day is extreme, but it's steadily getting worse.
So, yes, it is that important as far as I'm concerned.
iNsects.
and "4) Profit!!!" ?
Seriously, all you appear to be suggesting is writing a replacement for X for the sake of it.
I don't believe there is such a thing as a "simple X replacement" - a full-featured windowing system is an inherently complex beast. Porting gdk & Qt is not impossible, but why? What does a GNOME/Gtk or KDE/QT app running on your "simple X replacement" suddenly give you that you don't have today? Nothing, that's what.
Since you're suggesting that we just use XFree's driver system plus "large amounts of X code", why don't you just carry on running X?
I'm looking forward to the release of 10GHz chips. 'Cos then we can overclock them and say, "But this one goes up to 11".
Check out this link (and the followups to it)
If it's like other PCMCIA GPRS cards I've encountered, it might work under Linux/BSD/etc. - simply appearing as a serial device to which you send AT commands (and thus available to run pppd on).
The Windows-only sticker may just refer to some cutesy control centre applet which will (obviously) only run on Windows. Every modem needs its own control centre on Windows these days, it seems.
The original comment gets a +3 funny even though it's wrong, and a reply which gets it right gets a -1? Sigh.
I agree :)
The actual MAC address in the Ethernet frame the server receives is going to be the MAC address of the gateway nearest the server. But that's not very relevant (I should have been clearer about that in the first place).
The client's MAC address is presumably part of the authentication packet that COGS sends (i.e. it's encoded as part of the payload), and that's what the server will be interested in.
Not disagreeing with you (I think you're right), but that's pretty much what I said, isn't it? :-)
Neither. The server will see the MAC address of its closest neighbour, which will be a router at the ISP. MAC addresses are layer 2 - not part of the IP protocol. Each time a packet is forwarded through an IP gateway, the MAC address changes.
I'd guess what this software (COGS) is doing is including the MAC address of your local machine (but which ethernet card if you have more than one?) in the application-level data (i.e. the TCP/UDP payload) it sends to the server. If it sends a MAC address which is on the server's ban list, you don't get to play.
As someone else pointed out, this is pretty braindamaged and obviously designed by someone lacking the first clue about security. It's very easy to spoof - either by changing the MAC address of your ethernet card, or by cracking the client-side part of COGS. Yeah, I know it's not open-source... so? Someone will crack it and cracked COGS clients will appear on Warez sites within days.
And I'm not totally clear on what happens if you don't have an ethernet card and connect with PPP over a serial connection, like analog or ISDN. PPP doesn't have MAC addresses.