Here's my one-up comment. My first modem was a 2400 baud modem as well, but I used it until 2000 when I could afford a 56k modem. I'm pretty sure I was one of the very last people who's only connection to the net was 2400 baud.
Perhaps a better analogy can be found in the airline industry (also a service). Historically airlines have routinely oversold seating because more often than not it works out for them. Some people will cancel the fight, some people won't show up for the flight, and sometimes they won't be able to sell all the seats in first class and can bump overbooked coach passengers to first class. In the event that they can't put you on your purchased flight, they will put you on the next one, or refund your ticket. Either way generally sucks for you, but you're at their mercy. So there is at least one industry that has been overselling a service for a very long time.
In modern society, the best and easiest way to acquire large sums of money is to inherit it.
While inheriting wealth is certainly the easiest way to be rich, it isn't the "best" way as the vast majority of wealthy people did not inherit their money. From a quick google search I found this from globalpolicy.org.
The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index rose 24% last year, while many overseas markets rose even more, accounting for much of the gains for the wealthy. In the U.S., the Bush tax cuts, which included a reduction in the top tax rate, as well as reductions in taxes on estates, capital gains and dividends, also helped bolster the fortunes of the fortunate. A 2002 study by Capgemini found that more than half of the high-net-worth individuals in the U.S. were "new money," or self-made millionaires. Inherited money is declining as a share of wealth in the U.S., according to the study, accounting for less than 20% of high-net-worth individuals in 2002.
So 80+% of all millionaires in America are "new money".
Can somebody who has actually used either UnixWare or OpenServer say if they have any redeeming qualities at all?
I'll do what I can to the best of my ability. One of my clients has an OpenServer box, but it is very old and even predates the buyout of SCO UNIX by Caldera. Therefor most of my knowledge is rather dated and may not apply to what is current.
From what I've read, they are actually the least capable of the modern unixes or unix-clones, even on x86(except perhaps for minix - which was just a teaching project anyway). Is there any reason why anybody would choose UnixWare or OpenServer for a new deployment?
OpenServer is a joke compared to modern UNIX and UNIX work-a-likes such as Linux or the BSDs. Clients I've known who have had OpenServer have invariably migrated away from it with one exception, and they will likely do so soon. Those people who are still using OpenServer are doing so not because they necessarily choose it, but because they chose some proprietary application for their business that was created to run on SCO OpenServer during it's hayday.
For example, my client has been using OpenServer for probably close to ten years. They purchased it as part of a software package to handle certain needs. The company that produced this software is still in business, but no longer supports OpenServer. This has created a need for my client to migrate away from OpenServer, though perhaps not from the specific software. Naturally they will be involving us in their evaluation of a new software suite to handle their needs, and OpenServer will be immediately shot down. Even had The SCO Group never sued Linux users (we actually got one of their cease-and-desist letters) we would not consider them for the following primary reasons:
Lack of hardware support
Lack of software support
Uncertain future
The last is a bit of a misnomer. I'm almost 100% certain that OpenServer will cease to be developed at all within the next two years and will probably be abandonware Real Soon Now. Even if there was only say a 20% chance that SCO will loose it all, why would anyone bet their hard-earned cash on something with those odds when other products are equally fit for the task and don't have one foot in the grave?
It sounds like they think they have is a niffty middle-ware stack for cellphones and they want to use that as a hook for selling their Unix stuff. But if their middle-ware stack is so niffty that it would attract developers, why not port it to other systems to widen the audience and build a new business on that? That was the strategy taken by 'old SCO' aka Tarantella before they unloaded unix on Caldera.
Probably because their middle-ware is really vaporware. I mean come on! Custom ring-tones? Even if the ring-tone business is as big as they claim to be, I have a hard time believing corporations will be interested in "biztones". IMHO, custom ring tones are popular only to teenagers and people in their early twenties. These people are not business managers and probably aren't involved in business beyond starting the timer on the fry cooker. Moreover, The SCO Group doesn't have any established means of targetting this crowd. The SCO Group has always been a business-to-business corporation, not a business-to-consumer corporation. This entire move reeks of a company attempting to convince others that they are innovating and breaking into a whole new market with a new killer product. Of course, they don't have the means to do this, so even if it is feasible for some one to do, it isn't going to be The SCO Group that accomplishes it. Other businesses know this, so SCO tacked on the whole "we're courting UNIX developers with huge prizes including a new BMW and/or $100,000".
I'm all for the command line, and in fact like the flexibility of the command line, set-up files, etc.
But there's no doubt that with flexibility comes a lot of responsibility. And if you put responsibility in the hands of humans, then there will be an error somewhere along the way.
I could not agree with you more so far. I'd just like to point out that ultimately all matters of security are up to flawed human beings.
If you want reliable security, not just potential security, it's a lot better to be able to just click the checkbox next to 'FTP' on a firewall dialogue than have to slog through iptable entries.
Now you've stepped far off the path of sanity and into irrational thinking. Why exactly is it better to check a box and assume the machine is doing the right thing? In reality, you're not trusting the machine; you're trusting the OS developers. Who says they know more about what's "secure" than you do? Obviously you can make that choice for yourself, but leaving the idea of securing my box up to a limited number of options chosen by my OS developer doesn't strike me as a smart thing to do. In fact, it down-right reeks of the things that so-called Windows sysadmins do.
Also, you seem to be thinking of security as a state of being. Security is not something you are; it's something you do. Security is a never-ending process of keeping one step ahead of problems. This idea that you can just check a box, have your firewall setup properly, and not spend time and energy thinking about and testing the setup will net you nothing long-term but security problems. The admin that does not know how the ends and outs of his machine to the best of his abilities, and who does not continually strive to further develop these abilities is the admin who soon has given up root on his boxen to a script kiddie or worse.
Sounds like these guys have the wrong philosophy. A server built for security makes sure that dumb administrators can't mess it up.
Yeap, I knew I smelled the stench of the Windows "do it for me" theology. What you are propossing is an inflexible machine that "dumb" administrators can use and make claims that they are smart and secure 'cause they're using the latest and 13373$7 technology, but that "smart" administrators will detest because it handcuffs them and prevents them from following the true path of security, continual evolution of one's skills and defenses.
Walk into the average office building and you'll see a bunch of HP departmental laser printers that all have parallel ports (and very few if any have USB). If you think of the on-site salesman or consultant, they want to be able to print without worrying about how to get on someone's network.
I found myself in the position of needing a parallel port on my laptop just last week, and I was perturbed that I didn't have one. Granted, it's the only time in 3 years I've ever needed a parrallel port on a laptop. I was troubleshooting an HP DesignJet printer for a client that was connected to an HP printserver. I couldn't be certain that the printserver or the centronics cable wasn't bad, and the only way to test was to hook up a computer to the printer via a known-good centronics cable. I had to lug a desktop out into the hall, along with keyboard, mouse, and monitor just to test. This would have been much easier had my laptop possessed a parallel port.
I first heard about this on two-hour special on either the History Channel or the Discovery Channel. The program is called "Big Chill: The Little Ice Age" and is a great watch. I highly recommend it. The program will help give anyone who doesn't have much of a grounding in climatology (I count myself in that crowd) something to think about when everyone yells that our current change in climate is a human-caused catastrophy.
To sum it up, they site empirical evidence showing how Europe was once much warmer, even a little warmer than it is today, then suddenly got very cold. The causes of this climate change are unknown, but as this occured before the industrial revolution, are considered to be some natural phenomina.
Highlights from the program: - Thames river freezes year after year after year - Cold weather brings famine to people unable or unwilling to change their lifestyles - Cold weather influences politics and leads to war - Cold weather brings about the downfall of the once might Vikings - Year without a summer, snow falls in July in America and Europe - Eskimos sail as far south as Scotland!
Before the 2004 elections, I asked people who supported Bush to name five issues on which they thought Bush was wrong
1- Immigration. Of course, neither party seems interested in any real change on this yet.
2- Prescription Drug Plan. Not only is this, IMHO, not the government's business, it's completely doomed to failure. The latest cost estimates are already triple the initial estimation.
3- Spending. I think this says it all.
4- Social Security Reform. Instead of privatizing it, we should face the facts that it is simply income redistribution and regardless of your moral leanings there, completely unsustainable in the long term. My suggeted fix? Tell everyone 30 years of age and younger you'll never get SS and phaze it out as old people die off.
5- Education. School vouchers are a good idea, IMHO, but don't go near far enough. It's not an issue of money like everyone likes to think, it's an issue of parents using public schools as free daycare. Without parents taking a real interest in their kids' education, no amount of funding is going to help, no standardized tests are going to help, and focusing on things like computers in the classroom is simply stupid. I learned to read "See Dick run" and can read and write as well as anyone. Focus on parents and the fundamentals of the three "R"s and things may improve.
The moderation system is doing the job it was meant to do: whiners and trolls get left at the bottom and content actually rises to the higher levels where I see it. Some days I feel like I'm sponging off those who have mod points, but I mysteriously lost my mod abilities years ago...
The moderation system is inherently flawed. It works to some extent, but not effectively enough. In order for the moderation system to work, moderators must see the disruptive posts to mod them down. In your case, you don't have to bother with this as you never get them. For those of us who do have mod points, we don't have the luxury of browsing at Score: 3. None of the insightful posts would be moderated up from the default, and none of the disruptive posts would be moderated down.
I don't know of a way to fix this though. Usenet kill files work because they filter not by post, but by poster. ISPs' news servers add headers that can be filtered on (even if you're forced to use expensive filtering) so even if the troll changes nicks, he's still ranked below your threshold. With/., anyone can get a new IP or a new nick, so moderation posters (not their posts) just isn't feasible, IMHO.
I always favor the submission that comes in first. If I have 5 stories that are the same subject matter, I open all 5 in tabs, and start at the first tab. If it's really bad i'll check #2 or #3. But if it's even close to workable, i'll choose it.
I prefer to reward speed over quality. But that is a flexible rule too.
I can understand that certainly, but our little experiment showed otherwise. However, it was certainly not large enough to be a statistical sampling! Perhaps one day we'll continue it.
As for the rest of your comments, I disagree with Slashdot going downhill. I disagree with editors trying or not. But I will say that what we post is largely reflected by what is submitted by our readers. IF you don't like the stories we select, post more technical ones. As it stands, I can't post what isn't in my bin.
Allow me to apologize for the flame on the editors; it was unwarranted.
As for/. going downhill, I can only speak for myself. I just don't find it as an enjoyable news/discussion site on my primary interests. The depth of news and discussion on open source and computers in general has fallen greatly, IMHO. I primarily read/. through RSS these days and pick out the few stories I haven't seen elsewhere: primarily articles on space and astronomy.
Perhaps most of the hackers (and I hope hubris isn't the only thing making me count myself among them) have moved onto other venues, resulting in a drop in articles of keen interest to hackers. Indeed, where once one could find hackers aplenty here, it seems most of them have little praise for/. anymore. I'm not sure what can rectify this, but I hope it can and will be.
But if the link is good, why NOT share it with the audience?
I'm going to get a new hole in my ass ripped open for this, but here goes.
Most of the articles (and discussion for that matter) really aren't up to snuff. To illustrate this, a friend and I did a little experiment. We both submitted the same stories and in each case mine was more well written, lacked grammar and spelling mistakes, and in general was much better presented. They were submitted within a few minutes of each other. In each case when one of the articles was published on/., it was the more poorly written article. This held true even when I was the maintainer of the content being linked to.
I don't know how others feel, but/. has really gone way downhill over the last three or four years. It feels like the editors aren't even trying anymore. Articles that are well-written are not preferred over something that was just slapped together. The subject matter isn't as good anymore. Where before there would be a story about a change in the virtual memory layer of the linux kernel, now we get "Linus Says GNOME Sucks" or "How to Get Free Stuff at Trade Shows".
So naturally when readers see the same people getting their submissions posted over and over again, and the articles truly suck, people think something's up. My advice, start looking for real geek news. MontaVista is looking for a new CEO. Linux may soon have all its semaphores replaced with mutexs. There's plenty of real hard core geek news out there; I can't believe that it's not being submitted to/., unless most of the real geeks have moved onto other venues.
Lead point bullets creates awfully lot of damage to tissue, and it doesn't surprise me one bit that the head was so severed. Even with a.222/3/* you can get that kind damage with the right bullet. I assume the hunter was using.308 or.30-06 or larger ammunition, which can effectively cut a small sized human in two when hit from the right angle with the right bullet.
Bullshit. Complete, utter bullshit, and the kind that most geeks won't know a damn thing about and simply assume to be correct.
Soft point lead bullets do expand (the term is mushroom) on impact, but the truth of your story ends there. A.222 is a varmit gun, used for shooting praire dogs out west and not much else. The.30-06 is a deer rifle, typically used with hard pointed rounds for accuracy. Soft lead rounds have a flat nose to assist in slowing the bullet, but has the unfortunate side-effect of making it less accurate. To show the differences, let's look at perhaps the two most commonly used rounds for big game hunting in North America, the.30-06 and the.30-30.
The.30-06 round is a pointed high-velocity big game cartridge and looks a bit like this. It's a non-mushrooming hard point even at higher grains for long-distance accuracy. The bullet creates an entry and exist wound of average size and kills mostly by hemoraging. Most.30-06 rifles are bolt-action with a vertical magazine that holds the rounds with their sides touching.
The.30-30 rounds is a soft flat-pointed lead high-velocity big game cartridge and looks a bit like the one on the left. You'll notice the flat-point to allow the head to mushroom on impact and the grey lead in the bullet. Entry and exit wounds tend to be larger with the.30-30 than with the.30-06 due to the mushrooming. Most.30-30 rifles are lever action with a tubular magazine in which the bullets are alid end to end in a spring loaded tube. This is highly dangerous with.30-06 and similar rounds as the possibility of the pointed tip detonating the next bullet's primer is great.
So, as some one speaking who's used both of these rounds to feel whitetail deer, it's bullshit that a shot in the chest will down game instantly. Most hunters go for a chest shot and seek to take out both lungs with one bullet. This causes mortal trama to the game and it dies soon, but not immediately. For this reason, it's recomended that you do not immediately begin tracking game that has been shot in the chest and didn't fall. Deer can run a long way with two collapsed lungs, and they will run further if they detect you following them.
In fact, I've used both of these rounds to kill hogs and coyotes as well. Shots in the chest on these animals never cause immediate death unless you're lucky enough to hit the heart with enough trauma. The only reasonably sure way to down anything instantly is to shoot it in the neck, which is my prefered way of killing as the game almost always collapses immediately. In no case does this sever the head. This is immaterial to whether the bullet is soft or hard, pointed or flat, and I back up those statements with real life experience the likes of which most/.'ers simply can't.
Just remember, it's better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
I was looking for the point at which they switched to bootable CDs and more info on the boot/root floppy situation, but Slackware.com is coming up blank. Maybe somebody else knows.
Ask and ye shall recieve.
Slackware has had bootable CDs since at least 3.9/4.0 (4.0 was basically 3.9 with a 2.2 kernel) using floppy emulation all the way up to 8.0 (which gave you a choice of a 2.2 or 2.4 kernel). Starting with 8.1, Slackware has used el torito (I think I spelled that right) bootable CD images. Lots of older BIOS's won't boot an el torito CD, so I always keep one 8.0 live CD handy for rescue operations on those. IIRC, some AMD64 724-in motherboards shipping with a flakey BIOS that didn't like el torito CDs either. Again, IIRC, these were mostly Emachines, which would explain everything.
My God no! Friends don't let friends use qmail. Want reasons why?
1) It's a bitch to install. Won't even compile on modern Linux distributions. You have to patch it to compile it and the patch isn't even hosted on qmail's site.
2) It's a bitch to configure. Rather than parsing a single configuration file, qmail relies heavily on the presence of individual files in a directory.
3) Not not not not scalable! That's a myth. Doesn't properly batch jobs together. Hell! qmail was originally designed to be run from inetd!
4) Heavy reliance on other daemontools.
5) Breaks well-known and understood UNIX standards.
6) Security through lack-of-functionality.
7) Not really secure despite the claims.
8) No longer maintained.
9) No features. Adding them requires patching, and patching, and more patching.
Serious sysadmins don't use qmail and for damn good reason. I don't give a damn if Yahoo did manage to string it together and make it work well. In short, qmail isn't particularly suited for deployment in any capacity.
people are still busted with fingerprints every single day.
Myth (at least in the US). Fingerprint "evidence" is rarely ever used in practice these days. Police still dust for prints though, because it's easier to dust for them than it is to explain the following to the irrate victim who just lost his TV.
1. Fingerprints are never pristine. Every one of them is a blurred smudge except in the rarest of situations. The chances of finding even a single print reliable enough to ID some one are small.
2. Your local sheriff or police chief doesn't have a database of finger prints. This information has to be retrieved from the FBI, which doesn't even have prints for everyone in the country. Illegal aliens are particularly immune from a fingerprint database search.
3. The FBI has more requests for fingerprint checks than they can handle, so you're at the tail end of a long line.
4. Searching the database isn't exactly a sure fire thing. Tons of false positives are hit all the time, particularly if you have limited information. Thus the FBI rarely accepts a request to run a fingerprint scan unless you have a complete set of fingerprints for one hand, and they'd better be clear prints too, not smudged.
Ask your local detective sometime to talk to you about it, or ask the D.A.'s office to give you the cold hard truth about how often they admit fingerprint "evidence" in a trial, and how often it helps lead to a conviction.
I don't post here often but I heard about this this morning and saw there was a/. article, so I read it. As for replying, I can't resist tearing your argument apart in public.
in this case the poor saps had million dollar homes that had refused for years to redevelop their properties
What exactly is wrong with not "redeveloping" your property? What gives you the right to tell some one to renovate their home if it's up to code? Why should some one be forced to "improve" their home, and who is the judge of what exactly qualifies as an "improvement"?
this has been allowed for blighted areas for years, so now it is happening to people that are "rich". i say its about time
Now we get to the heart of this: class warfare. "Oh my God those people have way more money than me; they are evil! You should all just give your money away to the poor because they aren't as well off as you! I'm jealous of your money and because I can't have it you shouldn't either! Those are the feelings behind arguments like yours. For your information, this ruling affects everyone, rich and poor alike. And one other thing. Just because some one has more money than you damn sure don't make them less than you, nor does it make them evil. There's a helluvalot of filthy rich people in this world who are good people, who worked hard for their money and worked themselves up from the bottom of the economic food chain.
the new uses will improve tax revenue for the city greatly which is good for everyone
Whether that's good for everyone is debatable, but it damn sure ain't good for the people whom are being evicted from their homes. Put yourself in their shoes. If some one came to you, wanted to pay you a quarter for your home, and when you didn't pay up the county forced you to sell it for twenty-five cents you'd damn sure be squeeling like a stuck hog! It's high time people like yourself grew up and realized this ain't an us-vs-them problem here. This effects all Americans, rich, poor, or inbetween.
if these homes were ghetto/minority then nobody would have brought suit and the land would have been razed years ago for redevlopment
I'm calling bullshit here. If anyone living in the "ghetto" was in this position there are plenty of lawyers who would take this case pro bono to make a name for themselves, twice as many if this was a minority. And here's another thing for you to wrap your pea brain around. How many minorities are specifically affected by this case? I bet you don't even know. You just blindly assume this is only "rich white people".
Honestly, how did some one with so little common sense manage to get online?
It doesn't discuss many things that me as an admin of a printer and file server need to know.
That's not a bug; it's a feature. Seriously.
The book isn't intended for a file and print server admin. It's intended to introduce newbies to GNU/Linux in general, and Slackware in particular. If you're already capable of running your own file and print server, you're probably past the scope of the book.
Google did a study of how many people used [the "I'm Feeling Lucky"] button.
I no that I rarely ever use it, and when I do, it's typically for something that I already know it will take me to, or for flaming.
One example is the download page for PuTTY. I know the first link for "download putty" in Google is always the page I want, even though I can never remember the URL for that page. It's a convienent way for me to get what I need quickly.
The second way is much more fun. When n00bs on IRC, usenet, or mailing lists ask questions that quite easily could have been answered with a google search, I typically do a quick search and see what's in the first few links. If the very first link comes up with the information, I'll flame 'em and tell them to drop "blah blah 123" into google and tell it you're feeling lucky, and not to come back again until they learn to do this always.
Slashdot Mirror
About ten years ago or so my family were raters for Neilson for two or three different weeks.
Here's my one-up comment. My first modem was a 2400 baud modem as well, but I used it until 2000 when I could afford a 56k modem. I'm pretty sure I was one of the very last people who's only connection to the net was 2400 baud.
Perhaps a better analogy can be found in the airline industry (also a service). Historically airlines have routinely oversold seating because more often than not it works out for them. Some people will cancel the fight, some people won't show up for the flight, and sometimes they won't be able to sell all the seats in first class and can bump overbooked coach passengers to first class. In the event that they can't put you on your purchased flight, they will put you on the next one, or refund your ticket. Either way generally sucks for you, but you're at their mercy. So there is at least one industry that has been overselling a service for a very long time.
While inheriting wealth is certainly the easiest way to be rich, it isn't the "best" way as the vast majority of wealthy people did not inherit their money. From a quick google search I found this from globalpolicy.org.
So 80+% of all millionaires in America are "new money".There's a Sci-Fi Original Picture there somewhere.
I'll do what I can to the best of my ability. One of my clients has an OpenServer box, but it is very old and even predates the buyout of SCO UNIX by Caldera. Therefor most of my knowledge is rather dated and may not apply to what is current.
OpenServer is a joke compared to modern UNIX and UNIX work-a-likes such as Linux or the BSDs. Clients I've known who have had OpenServer have invariably migrated away from it with one exception, and they will likely do so soon. Those people who are still using OpenServer are doing so not because they necessarily choose it, but because they chose some proprietary application for their business that was created to run on SCO OpenServer during it's hayday.
For example, my client has been using OpenServer for probably close to ten years. They purchased it as part of a software package to handle certain needs. The company that produced this software is still in business, but no longer supports OpenServer. This has created a need for my client to migrate away from OpenServer, though perhaps not from the specific software. Naturally they will be involving us in their evaluation of a new software suite to handle their needs, and OpenServer will be immediately shot down. Even had The SCO Group never sued Linux users (we actually got one of their cease-and-desist letters) we would not consider them for the following primary reasons:
The last is a bit of a misnomer. I'm almost 100% certain that OpenServer will cease to be developed at all within the next two years and will probably be abandonware Real Soon Now. Even if there was only say a 20% chance that SCO will loose it all, why would anyone bet their hard-earned cash on something with those odds when other products are equally fit for the task and don't have one foot in the grave?
Probably because their middle-ware is really vaporware. I mean come on! Custom ring-tones? Even if the ring-tone business is as big as they claim to be, I have a hard time believing corporations will be interested in "biztones". IMHO, custom ring tones are popular only to teenagers and people in their early twenties. These people are not business managers and probably aren't involved in business beyond starting the timer on the fry cooker. Moreover, The SCO Group doesn't have any established means of targetting this crowd. The SCO Group has always been a business-to-business corporation, not a business-to-consumer corporation. This entire move reeks of a company attempting to convince others that they are innovating and breaking into a whole new market with a new killer product. Of course, they don't have the means to do this, so even if it is feasible for some one to do, it isn't going to be The SCO Group that accomplishes it. Other businesses know this, so SCO tacked on the whole "we're courting UNIX developers with huge prizes including a new BMW and/or $100,000".
I could not agree with you more so far. I'd just like to point out that ultimately all matters of security are up to flawed human beings.
Now you've stepped far off the path of sanity and into irrational thinking. Why exactly is it better to check a box and assume the machine is doing the right thing? In reality, you're not trusting the machine; you're trusting the OS developers. Who says they know more about what's "secure" than you do? Obviously you can make that choice for yourself, but leaving the idea of securing my box up to a limited number of options chosen by my OS developer doesn't strike me as a smart thing to do. In fact, it down-right reeks of the things that so-called Windows sysadmins do.
Also, you seem to be thinking of security as a state of being. Security is not something you are; it's something you do. Security is a never-ending process of keeping one step ahead of problems. This idea that you can just check a box, have your firewall setup properly, and not spend time and energy thinking about and testing the setup will net you nothing long-term but security problems. The admin that does not know how the ends and outs of his machine to the best of his abilities, and who does not continually strive to further develop these abilities is the admin who soon has given up root on his boxen to a script kiddie or worse.
Yeap, I knew I smelled the stench of the Windows "do it for me" theology. What you are propossing is an inflexible machine that "dumb" administrators can use and make claims that they are smart and secure 'cause they're using the latest and 13373$7 technology, but that "smart" administrators will detest because it handcuffs them and prevents them from following the true path of security, continual evolution of one's skills and defenses.
I found myself in the position of needing a parallel port on my laptop just last week, and I was perturbed that I didn't have one. Granted, it's the only time in 3 years I've ever needed a parrallel port on a laptop. I was troubleshooting an HP DesignJet printer for a client that was connected to an HP printserver. I couldn't be certain that the printserver or the centronics cable wasn't bad, and the only way to test was to hook up a computer to the printer via a known-good centronics cable. I had to lug a desktop out into the hall, along with keyboard, mouse, and monitor just to test. This would have been much easier had my laptop possessed a parallel port.
I first heard about this on two-hour special on either the History Channel or the Discovery Channel. The program is called "Big Chill: The Little Ice Age" and is a great watch. I highly recommend it. The program will help give anyone who doesn't have much of a grounding in climatology (I count myself in that crowd) something to think about when everyone yells that our current change in climate is a human-caused catastrophy.
To sum it up, they site empirical evidence showing how Europe was once much warmer, even a little warmer than it is today, then suddenly got very cold. The causes of this climate change are unknown, but as this occured before the industrial revolution, are considered to be some natural phenomina.
Highlights from the program:
- Thames river freezes year after year after year
- Cold weather brings famine to people unable or unwilling to change their lifestyles
- Cold weather influences politics and leads to war
- Cold weather brings about the downfall of the once might Vikings
- Year without a summer, snow falls in July in America and Europe
- Eskimos sail as far south as Scotland!
The moderation system is inherently flawed. It works to some extent, but not effectively enough. In order for the moderation system to work, moderators must see the disruptive posts to mod them down. In your case, you don't have to bother with this as you never get them. For those of us who do have mod points, we don't have the luxury of browsing at Score: 3. None of the insightful posts would be moderated up from the default, and none of the disruptive posts would be moderated down.
I don't know of a way to fix this though. Usenet kill files work because they filter not by post, but by poster. ISPs' news servers add headers that can be filtered on (even if you're forced to use expensive filtering) so even if the troll changes nicks, he's still ranked below your threshold. With /., anyone can get a new IP or a new nick, so moderation posters (not their posts) just isn't feasible, IMHO.
I can understand that certainly, but our little experiment showed otherwise. However, it was certainly not large enough to be a statistical sampling! Perhaps one day we'll continue it.
Allow me to apologize for the flame on the editors; it was unwarranted.
As for /. going downhill, I can only speak for myself. I just don't find it as an enjoyable news/discussion site on my primary interests. The depth of news and discussion on open source and computers in general has fallen greatly, IMHO. I primarily read /. through RSS these days and pick out the few stories I haven't seen elsewhere: primarily articles on space and astronomy.
Perhaps most of the hackers (and I hope hubris isn't the only thing making me count myself among them) have moved onto other venues, resulting in a drop in articles of keen interest to hackers. Indeed, where once one could find hackers aplenty here, it seems most of them have little praise for /. anymore. I'm not sure what can rectify this, but I hope it can and will be.
I'm going to get a new hole in my ass ripped open for this, but here goes.
Most of the articles (and discussion for that matter) really aren't up to snuff. To illustrate this, a friend and I did a little experiment. We both submitted the same stories and in each case mine was more well written, lacked grammar and spelling mistakes, and in general was much better presented. They were submitted within a few minutes of each other. In each case when one of the articles was published on /., it was the more poorly written article. This held true even when I was the maintainer of the content being linked to.
I don't know how others feel, but /. has really gone way downhill over the last three or four years. It feels like the editors aren't even trying anymore. Articles that are well-written are not preferred over something that was just slapped together. The subject matter isn't as good anymore. Where before there would be a story about a change in the virtual memory layer of the linux kernel, now we get "Linus Says GNOME Sucks" or "How to Get Free Stuff at Trade Shows".
So naturally when readers see the same people getting their submissions posted over and over again, and the articles truly suck, people think something's up. My advice, start looking for real geek news. MontaVista is looking for a new CEO. Linux may soon have all its semaphores replaced with mutexs. There's plenty of real hard core geek news out there; I can't believe that it's not being submitted to /., unless most of the real geeks have moved onto other venues.
Bullshit. Complete, utter bullshit, and the kind that most geeks won't know a damn thing about and simply assume to be correct.
Soft point lead bullets do expand (the term is mushroom) on impact, but the truth of your story ends there. A .222 is a varmit gun, used for shooting praire dogs out west and not much else. The .30-06 is a deer rifle, typically used with hard pointed rounds for accuracy. Soft lead rounds have a flat nose to assist in slowing the bullet, but has the unfortunate side-effect of making it less accurate. To show the differences, let's look at perhaps the two most commonly used rounds for big game hunting in North America, the .30-06 and the .30-30.
The .30-06 round is a pointed high-velocity big game cartridge and looks a bit like this. It's a non-mushrooming hard point even at higher grains for long-distance accuracy. The bullet creates an entry and exist wound of average size and kills mostly by hemoraging. Most .30-06 rifles are bolt-action with a vertical magazine that holds the rounds with their sides touching.
The .30-30 rounds is a soft flat-pointed lead high-velocity big game cartridge and looks a bit like the one on the left. You'll notice the flat-point to allow the head to mushroom on impact and the grey lead in the bullet. Entry and exit wounds tend to be larger with the .30-30 than with the .30-06 due to the mushrooming. Most .30-30 rifles are lever action with a tubular magazine in which the bullets are alid end to end in a spring loaded tube. This is highly dangerous with .30-06 and similar rounds as the possibility of the pointed tip detonating the next bullet's primer is great.
So, as some one speaking who's used both of these rounds to feel whitetail deer, it's bullshit that a shot in the chest will down game instantly. Most hunters go for a chest shot and seek to take out both lungs with one bullet. This causes mortal trama to the game and it dies soon, but not immediately. For this reason, it's recomended that you do not immediately begin tracking game that has been shot in the chest and didn't fall. Deer can run a long way with two collapsed lungs, and they will run further if they detect you following them.
In fact, I've used both of these rounds to kill hogs and coyotes as well. Shots in the chest on these animals never cause immediate death unless you're lucky enough to hit the heart with enough trauma. The only reasonably sure way to down anything instantly is to shoot it in the neck, which is my prefered way of killing as the game almost always collapses immediately. In no case does this sever the head. This is immaterial to whether the bullet is soft or hard, pointed or flat, and I back up those statements with real life experience the likes of which most /.'ers simply can't.
Just remember, it's better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Ask and ye shall recieve.
Slackware has had bootable CDs since at least 3.9/4.0 (4.0 was basically 3.9 with a 2.2 kernel) using floppy emulation all the way up to 8.0 (which gave you a choice of a 2.2 or 2.4 kernel). Starting with 8.1, Slackware has used el torito (I think I spelled that right) bootable CD images. Lots of older BIOS's won't boot an el torito CD, so I always keep one 8.0 live CD handy for rescue operations on those. IIRC, some AMD64 724-in motherboards shipping with a flakey BIOS that didn't like el torito CDs either. Again, IIRC, these were mostly Emachines, which would explain everything.
My God no! Friends don't let friends use qmail. Want reasons why?
1) It's a bitch to install. Won't even compile on modern Linux distributions. You have to patch it to compile it and the patch isn't even hosted on qmail's site.
2) It's a bitch to configure. Rather than parsing a single configuration file, qmail relies heavily on the presence of individual files in a directory.
3) Not not not not scalable! That's a myth. Doesn't properly batch jobs together. Hell! qmail was originally designed to be run from inetd!
4) Heavy reliance on other daemontools.
5) Breaks well-known and understood UNIX standards.
6) Security through lack-of-functionality.
7) Not really secure despite the claims.
8) No longer maintained.
9) No features. Adding them requires patching, and patching, and more patching.
Serious sysadmins don't use qmail and for damn good reason. I don't give a damn if Yahoo did manage to string it together and make it work well. In short, qmail isn't particularly suited for deployment in any capacity.
Myth (at least in the US). Fingerprint "evidence" is rarely ever used in practice these days. Police still dust for prints though, because it's easier to dust for them than it is to explain the following to the irrate victim who just lost his TV.
1. Fingerprints are never pristine. Every one of them is a blurred smudge except in the rarest of situations. The chances of finding even a single print reliable enough to ID some one are small.
2. Your local sheriff or police chief doesn't have a database of finger prints. This information has to be retrieved from the FBI, which doesn't even have prints for everyone in the country. Illegal aliens are particularly immune from a fingerprint database search.
3. The FBI has more requests for fingerprint checks than they can handle, so you're at the tail end of a long line.
4. Searching the database isn't exactly a sure fire thing. Tons of false positives are hit all the time, particularly if you have limited information. Thus the FBI rarely accepts a request to run a fingerprint scan unless you have a complete set of fingerprints for one hand, and they'd better be clear prints too, not smudged.
Ask your local detective sometime to talk to you about it, or ask the D.A.'s office to give you the cold hard truth about how often they admit fingerprint "evidence" in a trial, and how often it helps lead to a conviction.
I don't post here often but I heard about this this morning and saw there was a /. article, so I read it. As for replying, I can't resist tearing your argument apart in public.
What exactly is wrong with not "redeveloping" your property? What gives you the right to tell some one to renovate their home if it's up to code? Why should some one be forced to "improve" their home, and who is the judge of what exactly qualifies as an "improvement"?
Now we get to the heart of this: class warfare. "Oh my God those people have way more money than me; they are evil! You should all just give your money away to the poor because they aren't as well off as you! I'm jealous of your money and because I can't have it you shouldn't either! Those are the feelings behind arguments like yours. For your information, this ruling affects everyone, rich and poor alike. And one other thing. Just because some one has more money than you damn sure don't make them less than you, nor does it make them evil. There's a helluvalot of filthy rich people in this world who are good people, who worked hard for their money and worked themselves up from the bottom of the economic food chain.
Whether that's good for everyone is debatable, but it damn sure ain't good for the people whom are being evicted from their homes. Put yourself in their shoes. If some one came to you, wanted to pay you a quarter for your home, and when you didn't pay up the county forced you to sell it for twenty-five cents you'd damn sure be squeeling like a stuck hog! It's high time people like yourself grew up and realized this ain't an us-vs-them problem here. This effects all Americans, rich, poor, or inbetween.
I'm calling bullshit here. If anyone living in the "ghetto" was in this position there are plenty of lawyers who would take this case pro bono to make a name for themselves, twice as many if this was a minority. And here's another thing for you to wrap your pea brain around. How many minorities are specifically affected by this case? I bet you don't even know. You just blindly assume this is only "rich white people".
Honestly, how did some one with so little common sense manage to get online?
P.S. Learn to use capital letters!
I'm guessing Bitch.
That's not a bug; it's a feature. Seriously.
The book isn't intended for a file and print server admin. It's intended to introduce newbies to GNU/Linux in general, and Slackware in particular. If you're already capable of running your own file and print server, you're probably past the scope of the book.
Hey! I should get something! :-)
216.250.128.12 ;^)
That would be a huge step back from the Pentium 2010 (MMX).
I no that I rarely ever use it, and when I do, it's typically for something that I already know it will take me to, or for flaming.
One example is the download page for PuTTY. I know the first link for "download putty" in Google is always the page I want, even though I can never remember the URL for that page. It's a convienent way for me to get what I need quickly.
The second way is much more fun. When n00bs on IRC, usenet, or mailing lists ask questions that quite easily could have been answered with a google search, I typically do a quick search and see what's in the first few links. If the very first link comes up with the information, I'll flame 'em and tell them to drop "blah blah 123" into google and tell it you're feeling lucky, and not to come back again until they learn to do this always.