Throwing in a shameless plug here. Myself and some of the other BOZOs on alt.os.linux.slackware have been sort on-again off-again working on an updated release of that book. You can find that project here.
Well, price and power is also a downside, especially if you run the boxes 24x7. All of our dual-cpu boxes (primarily DELL-2550's and some old VALinux boxes [running FreeBSD or DragonFly]) eat power like there was no tomorrow. Our single-cpu AMD64 boxes, on the otherhand, are twice as fast (as both cpus in the dell put together) and eat half the power (or less).
I can't speak for whatever you're VA-Linux machines are, but aren't those Dells 2U rack mounts with something like 800 Mhz processors. Comparing that to a modern Athlon64 or Opteron isn't exactly fair.
For the record, my purely anecdotal evidence follows. SMP machines are an order of magnitude better than a single UP, even at a lower combined clock rate. They just seem to work better, balance things better, and never get particularly bogged down by any single process like a UP machine.
That's not exactly how it works. In fact, this has absolutely no baring unless you are changing DNS servers, or changing DNS names. These are the only changes they are now synching every five minutes. Any additional DNS servers you add can point at your new co-loc's IP addresses, and gently migrate over to the new location, same as always before.
It's rather obvious that MSN's new search engine is going to be both more complete and more up-to-date than anything else that's out there. I love google right now, but I wonder how they're going to stand up to MS.
Repeat after me. A spider is not a search engine. A search engine is not a spider.
You seem to be all up in alarm because Microsoft might come out and beat up google. I wouldn't worry about it myself. To begin with, all those videos are going to be mostly useless unless they do a "video search" similar to google's "image search". What good that would be I don't know. You seem to have forgotten that even though MS may have more content to search than google, they still have to sift through all that stuff. They still have to grep it, grok it, cull it, and then format the results in a high-availability high-performance cluster of database servers in order to compete with google. Even for MS that's a herculean task.
As other people are constantly pointing out whenever somebody posts an idea like this, "non-volatile" memory like MemorySticks and CompactFlash has a limited lifespan.
Correct, and that is the main limitation of such devices. Just off the top of my head here, I can come up with an idea that just might work, but the OP had better be damn well prepared to use a very lightweight distro.
Step 1: Partition that USB drive. You're going to need a very small / partition, and a much larger/usr partition. These are not to be messed with. You'll also need a/home-flash partition large enough for your personal use, and of course, a backup plan for when that drive fails.
Step 2: Build your kernel. This can be tricky. Building a kernel that accesses the USB drive can't be that difficult, but you'll also need initrd support. Why? Well, because you've got 128 MB of RAM, and you certainly don't want to write to that flash drive all the time. Make a small, perhaps 32 MB initrd and mount it at/var. You can modify your init scripts to populate this directory safely. Symlink/tmp to/var/tmp, and now you've cut down a lot of your writes to your flash device.
Step 3: Make yourself another 32MB initrd and mount it a/home. Again, your init scripts can safely populate this with all your dot-files. Anything you definately want to save must be manually copied to the/home-flash partition. Optionally you can take a look at the scripts included with Slax. One script (IIRC configsave) will make a tar.gz of all those pertinant files and save them to a partition on a USB flash drive.
It should be noted that I don't know if the linux kernel can make and support multiple RAM drives at once. If not, just make one RAM drive, mount it a/var, and make/home a symlink to/var/home.
I personally witnessed $300 million of VC money come to naught. And our product worked. Even a good idea which is completely implemented is no guarantee of success.
And really that's exactly how it should sometimes work. Venture capital is an adventure. No one knows if the outcome will be good or bad. People should try to find things that are very likely to work and very likely to fill a need in the marketplace. But even when a company does both of those, there's still no gaurantee of success. Your's is the classic "we gave it our best shot, it did what we said it would do, but that wasn't quite good enough" scenario, and really that's the best anyone can do. The rest is dumb luck playing the marketplace game.
i think it's not surprising that Bush who he and his aids (and IT people) have been in a corporate environment since they were born have a corporate system. It's all about rich white men helping out other rich white men. Where as Kerry's and the people he has chosen to have around himself probably know something about OSS, and that is why they have it.
Oh Puh-leeze! Do you really believe that Bush is more involved in corporate matters than Kerry? The DNC and Kerry campaign both need websites, so they go out and ask $BIG_COMPANY what they should use. The rest is a simple if-then statement.
if [ "${BIG_COMPANY}" = "Microsoft" ]; then WEB_SERVER="IIS" elif [ "${BIG_COMPANY}" = "IBM" ]; then WEB_SERVER="Apache" fi
Or don't you use your time when you're unemployed to pick up new skills?
Wouldn't know. I've never had trouble finding a job. Even when the economy is down there's always a need for cheap manual labor like cutting pulp wood.
Yes I did. I conversed with them via e-mail on several occassions. I was not particularly happy with their answers. They said it was a bug they had known about for some time, but couldn't seem to resolve. Several people had asked about it, but they at that time had no solution.
If I was rich, I wouldn't be running a server operating system on hardware it wasn't designed for either.
If you're not rich and you're currently unemployed how did you afford Windows Server 2003? As for your hardware, what's stopping you from running 2000, NT, or Slackware?
I also installed IE so I could preview websites I'm working on in IE natively without having to go to another windows computer.
Can you confirm whether or not they've fixed the IE encryption key bug yet? Importing encryption keys into IE running under Crossover wouldn't work. I'm not talking about regular ssl keys signed by third parties. What I'm referring to are self-signed keys like what Bank of America uses to communicate with bankruptcy officers.
IIRC, the key jsut wouldn't install. You'd go through the wizard's steps, and they would all run, but dump some error message right at the last and fail. I believe this was with both IE 5 and IE 6, but it's been over a year so I simply don't recall.
Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?
Nothing. I never said to fine them without a trial after all. And for the record, it's presumed innocent until proven guilty.
And how on earth is a company to prove that it didn't pay for a spam run?
Again it doesn't have to prove that it didn't pay for a spam run. The FTC or DOJ or whoever has to prove that the company did. Courts have been dealing with the tracing of company money for years now. The methods are well established and it's my understanding (IANAL or anything) that they work reasonably well. I don't think that will be a major problem.
That's just too dangerous: i could put any company i don't like in the fireing line by spamming on their behalf and without their knowledge or consent.
I've considered the grandparents poster's proposition many times and feel it is the only way we're going to stop spam. The only problem I've found with that solution is what you mention above. Personally, I don't think it will be a major problem. A company under investigation for spaming should be able to prove whether they did or did not pay for that spam. Yeah it's a bitch for whoever's in those shoes, but no solution is going to be perfect.
Is `my data base cannot export' a "sound legal basis" for refusing (until after the election) this FOI request?
Maybe, if it's the truth. I'm not going to speculate because I'm not their DBA (I'm not anyone's for that matter), but if they can't export the data without brining that system down, perhaps it is a solid legal reason. And whether or not it's a legal reason it could damn well be a good reason that it *can't* be done. Think about that court ruling that says IP addresses must be portable like phone numbers. Law says you gotta do it, but it just ain't possible, and that's a pretty damn good reason not to do it if you ask me.
If you had read the article you would have noticed that it is the searchable index that is 12 months behind, not the actual records. The records are there, it's just that finding them is a bitch.
Ashcroft issued a directive upon taking office that F.O.I.A. requests should be obstructed as far as possible
Allow me to call bullshit on this one, and quote directly from the linked article.
Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered federal agencies in October 2001 to review more closely which documents they release. Ashcroft's policy lets officials withhold information on any "sound legal basis." Under looser policies issued in 1993, agencies could hold back information to prevent "foreseeable harm."
So before Ashcroft took office, the Clinton administration created a policy for denying FOI requests of "foreseeable harm." For all I know they may have later changed that to something much more restrictive, but after 9/11/2001 Ascroft changed it to "sound legal basis." I don't know about you, but if there's "sound legal basis" for denying an FOI request I don't see where the problem is. There can and will always be stupid laws that say something like "FOI requests can be denied if the request is made by some one who has eaten cotton-candy within six months", but our government is set up with checks and balances to work those out of the system. No it's not perfect, but I challenge anyone to do any better.
I do not feel any more secure knowing some hack has information on 98% of the U.S. population on a glorified palm pilot, what if this device "walks away"?
Here you state something jsut about anyone will agree on. No one feels safe if a tiny, easily lost device holds that much information. There's simply too much risk involved. Lotsa trolls like yours start off with premises such as this.
I hate the fact that when 19 foreign citizens do some bad shit, 300 million legal Americans have to pay for the incompetance of our government to stop it. It is a classic kneejerk reaction
Now you've taken something that everyone agrees on and twisted it into a political agenda. Great job. I bet your Mom's real proud.
the current administration has eroded 200 years of balanced liberty and security in 4 years, that has to be some kind of record.
Let me tell you, it's not, not even for this country. If you want to talk about knee-jerk reactions, you just displayed one my friend. Saying that the current President's policies have destroyed all the progress this country has made in civil liberty over the last 200 years is ridiculous. At best it shows you are ignorant of history, at worst it shows you are lying to drum up support for your political viewpoint. Do I agree with the President's policies? Not always, but I don't go around saying that we've degenerated into a freeless big-brother society either.
The way the little guy has taken it in the ass in these past 4 years is astounding. Where to begin? The overtime ripoff, outsourcing, tax cuts for the rich, PATRIOT act, PATRIOT II, TIA, DMCA, "show me your papers", and that is just the beginning.
Now you're definately pushing the far left agenda by saying the 'little man' is getting reemed everywhere he turns. Get a clue. The economy is up, and not just for the upper crust. Employment has been rising overall (tech is just still down thanks to the dot-com days). The largest percentage of Americans in living memory now own their own homes, and for the first time ever a majority of minorities own their own homes.
Concerning the so-called tax cuts only for the rich, I am definately not rich, and I received a substantial tax cut. There goes that theory. Back when Bush was pushing those tax cuts you heard about how many dollars this man making 100,000 a year would get back, compared to the $24 or so this single mother making 24,000 a year would get back. The simple fact is that some one making that little (with at least two dependants) hardly paid anything in taxes before the Bush tax cuts, and they pay even less now.
Need I remind you that the PATRIOT act pretty much received a unanimous vote when it was rushed through the legislature, so I don't see how you can lay the blame for that on any one party, much less any one person.
Another little history lesson for you. Bill Clinton signed the DMCA way back in 1998. George Bush has never touched the thing. As for the recent SCOTUS ruling that a private citizen must identify himself to a police officer if asked, might I remind you that George W Bush has never appointed a Supreme Court Justice? The closest you'll come is David Hackett Souter who was nominated by George Bush Sr.
It is not fair that my web/mail server should be bogged down by heavy computation just to send an email when it's legitimate email to begin with.
I totally agree. Technical solutions to spam arne't going to work in the short run if they rely on the unauthenticated SMTP protocol to send e-mail. I'm all for fining the company who's product is advertised. $100 per reported spam. We might not be able to make spaming unprofitable for the scumbags that do it, but we can make it unprofitable for the companies that pay these scumbags.
On a side-note, why should I pay for nothing? I already run my own e-mail servers, I don't pay anyone a dime for that. Such a "tax" does me absolutely no good. My personal rule is never give anyone something for nothing. We shouldn't force people to pay to do something they are already doing for free.
The difference is that the personal security gaurd works. People who are committing crimes simply don't think about the repercussions until they are faced with them.
Typical example is the death penalty (which I support, but think we should fix). People claim the death penalty deters crime, but that ignores much evidence to the contrary, such as thieves in medievil times robbing spectators at a public execution for a thief.
Unless the deterant is right there in a very real "you won't get away with this" way, it's not going to stop people from committing the crime. A personal security gaurd can be an effective deterant, but police aren't (because they can't be with you at all times).
I'm gonna argue this one becuase I think it's a point of view that needs to be considered, even if rejected, so bare with the devil's advocate here.
Police ain't here to protect you, except in limited circumstances. Police certainly protect a stalled car by slowing down traffic with their lights and similar instances, but when it comes to criminal investigations the police have no duty to protect you. The police man's only duty is to find out who committed the crime, and arrest him. In this regaurd, police are reactionary elements, not proactive gaurds of your security. Police show up after a crime has been committed, and at that point you're already a victum. How is this protection?
Slashdot Mirror
Throwing in a shameless plug here. Myself and some of the other BOZOs on alt.os.linux.slackware have been sort on-again off-again working on an updated release of that book. You can find that project here.
the name is way too long to pronouce
DFly.
I can't speak for whatever you're VA-Linux machines are, but aren't those Dells 2U rack mounts with something like 800 Mhz processors. Comparing that to a modern Athlon64 or Opteron isn't exactly fair.
For the record, my purely anecdotal evidence follows. SMP machines are an order of magnitude better than a single UP, even at a lower combined clock rate. They just seem to work better, balance things better, and never get particularly bogged down by any single process like a UP machine.
That's not exactly how it works. In fact, this has absolutely no baring unless you are changing DNS servers, or changing DNS names. These are the only changes they are now synching every five minutes. Any additional DNS servers you add can point at your new co-loc's IP addresses, and gently migrate over to the new location, same as always before.
Repeat after me. A spider is not a search engine. A search engine is not a spider.
You seem to be all up in alarm because Microsoft might come out and beat up google. I wouldn't worry about it myself. To begin with, all those videos are going to be mostly useless unless they do a "video search" similar to google's "image search". What good that would be I don't know. You seem to have forgotten that even though MS may have more content to search than google, they still have to sift through all that stuff. They still have to grep it, grok it, cull it, and then format the results in a high-availability high-performance cluster of database servers in order to compete with google. Even for MS that's a herculean task.
Correct, and that is the main limitation of such devices. Just off the top of my head here, I can come up with an idea that just might work, but the OP had better be damn well prepared to use a very lightweight distro.
Step 1: Partition that USB drive. You're going to need a very small / partition, and a much larger /usr partition. These are not to be messed with. You'll also need a /home-flash partition large enough for your personal use, and of course, a backup plan for when that drive fails. /var. You can modify your init scripts to populate this directory safely. Symlink /tmp to /var/tmp, and now you've cut down a lot of your writes to your flash device. /home. Again, your init scripts can safely populate this with all your dot-files. Anything you definately want to save must be manually copied to the /home-flash partition. Optionally you can take a look at the scripts included with Slax. One script (IIRC configsave) will make a tar.gz of all those pertinant files and save them to a partition on a USB flash drive.
Step 2: Build your kernel. This can be tricky. Building a kernel that accesses the USB drive can't be that difficult, but you'll also need initrd support. Why? Well, because you've got 128 MB of RAM, and you certainly don't want to write to that flash drive all the time. Make a small, perhaps 32 MB initrd and mount it at
Step 3: Make yourself another 32MB initrd and mount it a
It should be noted that I don't know if the linux kernel can make and support multiple RAM drives at once. If not, just make one RAM drive, mount it a /var, and make /home a symlink to /var/home.
And really that's exactly how it should sometimes work. Venture capital is an adventure. No one knows if the outcome will be good or bad. People should try to find things that are very likely to work and very likely to fill a need in the marketplace. But even when a company does both of those, there's still no gaurantee of success. Your's is the classic "we gave it our best shot, it did what we said it would do, but that wasn't quite good enough" scenario, and really that's the best anyone can do. The rest is dumb luck playing the marketplace game.
Oh Puh-leeze! Do you really believe that Bush is more involved in corporate matters than Kerry? The DNC and Kerry campaign both need websites, so they go out and ask $BIG_COMPANY what they should use. The rest is a simple if-then statement.
Please note that tin and aluminum are not the same thing.
X11?
Wouldn't know. I've never had trouble finding a job. Even when the economy is down there's always a need for cheap manual labor like cutting pulp wood.
Yes I did. I conversed with them via e-mail on several occassions. I was not particularly happy with their answers. They said it was a bug they had known about for some time, but couldn't seem to resolve. Several people had asked about it, but they at that time had no solution.
If you're not rich and you're currently unemployed how did you afford Windows Server 2003? As for your hardware, what's stopping you from running 2000, NT, or Slackware?
Can you confirm whether or not they've fixed the IE encryption key bug yet? Importing encryption keys into IE running under Crossover wouldn't work. I'm not talking about regular ssl keys signed by third parties. What I'm referring to are self-signed keys like what Bank of America uses to communicate with bankruptcy officers.
IIRC, the key jsut wouldn't install. You'd go through the wizard's steps, and they would all run, but dump some error message right at the last and fail. I believe this was with both IE 5 and IE 6, but it's been over a year so I simply don't recall.
Nothing. I never said to fine them without a trial after all. And for the record, it's presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Again it doesn't have to prove that it didn't pay for a spam run. The FTC or DOJ or whoever has to prove that the company did. Courts have been dealing with the tracing of company money for years now. The methods are well established and it's my understanding (IANAL or anything) that they work reasonably well. I don't think that will be a major problem.
I've considered the grandparents poster's proposition many times and feel it is the only way we're going to stop spam. The only problem I've found with that solution is what you mention above. Personally, I don't think it will be a major problem. A company under investigation for spaming should be able to prove whether they did or did not pay for that spam. Yeah it's a bitch for whoever's in those shoes, but no solution is going to be perfect.
Maybe, if it's the truth. I'm not going to speculate because I'm not their DBA (I'm not anyone's for that matter), but if they can't export the data without brining that system down, perhaps it is a solid legal reason. And whether or not it's a legal reason it could damn well be a good reason that it *can't* be done. Think about that court ruling that says IP addresses must be portable like phone numbers. Law says you gotta do it, but it just ain't possible, and that's a pretty damn good reason not to do it if you ask me.
If you had read the article you would have noticed that it is the searchable index that is 12 months behind, not the actual records. The records are there, it's just that finding them is a bitch.
Allow me to call bullshit on this one, and quote directly from the linked article.
So before Ashcroft took office, the Clinton administration created a policy for denying FOI requests of "foreseeable harm." For all I know they may have later changed that to something much more restrictive, but after 9/11/2001 Ascroft changed it to "sound legal basis." I don't know about you, but if there's "sound legal basis" for denying an FOI request I don't see where the problem is. There can and will always be stupid laws that say something like "FOI requests can be denied if the request is made by some one who has eaten cotton-candy within six months", but our government is set up with checks and balances to work those out of the system. No it's not perfect, but I challenge anyone to do any better.
Since nearly everyone in this thread is being anal retentive about something (i.e. the SSN#), I'd like to point out that should be 4813th.
Here you state something jsut about anyone will agree on. No one feels safe if a tiny, easily lost device holds that much information. There's simply too much risk involved. Lotsa trolls like yours start off with premises such as this.
Now you've taken something that everyone agrees on and twisted it into a political agenda. Great job. I bet your Mom's real proud.
Let me tell you, it's not, not even for this country. If you want to talk about knee-jerk reactions, you just displayed one my friend. Saying that the current President's policies have destroyed all the progress this country has made in civil liberty over the last 200 years is ridiculous. At best it shows you are ignorant of history, at worst it shows you are lying to drum up support for your political viewpoint. Do I agree with the President's policies? Not always, but I don't go around saying that we've degenerated into a freeless big-brother society either.
Now you're definately pushing the far left agenda by saying the 'little man' is getting reemed everywhere he turns. Get a clue. The economy is up, and not just for the upper crust. Employment has been rising overall (tech is just still down thanks to the dot-com days). The largest percentage of Americans in living memory now own their own homes, and for the first time ever a majority of minorities own their own homes.
Concerning the so-called tax cuts only for the rich, I am definately not rich, and I received a substantial tax cut. There goes that theory. Back when Bush was pushing those tax cuts you heard about how many dollars this man making 100,000 a year would get back, compared to the $24 or so this single mother making 24,000 a year would get back. The simple fact is that some one making that little (with at least two dependants) hardly paid anything in taxes before the Bush tax cuts, and they pay even less now.
Need I remind you that the PATRIOT act pretty much received a unanimous vote when it was rushed through the legislature, so I don't see how you can lay the blame for that on any one party, much less any one person.
Another little history lesson for you. Bill Clinton signed the DMCA way back in 1998. George Bush has never touched the thing. As for the recent SCOTUS ruling that a private citizen must identify himself to a police officer if asked, might I remind you that George W Bush has never appointed a Supreme Court Justice? The closest you'll come is David Hackett Souter who was nominated by George Bush Sr.
I totally agree. Technical solutions to spam arne't going to work in the short run if they rely on the unauthenticated SMTP protocol to send e-mail. I'm all for fining the company who's product is advertised. $100 per reported spam. We might not be able to make spaming unprofitable for the scumbags that do it, but we can make it unprofitable for the companies that pay these scumbags.
On a side-note, why should I pay for nothing? I already run my own e-mail servers, I don't pay anyone a dime for that. Such a "tax" does me absolutely no good. My personal rule is never give anyone something for nothing. We shouldn't force people to pay to do something they are already doing for free.
The difference is that the personal security gaurd works. People who are committing crimes simply don't think about the repercussions until they are faced with them.
Typical example is the death penalty (which I support, but think we should fix). People claim the death penalty deters crime, but that ignores much evidence to the contrary, such as thieves in medievil times robbing spectators at a public execution for a thief.
Unless the deterant is right there in a very real "you won't get away with this" way, it's not going to stop people from committing the crime. A personal security gaurd can be an effective deterant, but police aren't (because they can't be with you at all times).
I'm gonna argue this one becuase I think it's a point of view that needs to be considered, even if rejected, so bare with the devil's advocate here.
Police ain't here to protect you, except in limited circumstances. Police certainly protect a stalled car by slowing down traffic with their lights and similar instances, but when it comes to criminal investigations the police have no duty to protect you. The police man's only duty is to find out who committed the crime, and arrest him. In this regaurd, police are reactionary elements, not proactive gaurds of your security. Police show up after a crime has been committed, and at that point you're already a victum. How is this protection?