I think some of his best laughs are the ones that deal with current events or fads.
Example: Today's comic
Guy stays late to play rainbow 6 and positions his men for about 9 hours and then caps a terrorist...
May not sound funny to you, but we had a co-op game here at work the other night and we had to do a level over about 20 times due to that:)
As well:
November 1; Guy tells everyone about new policy to decrease traffic and then goes and tells his buddies they can now download their mp3's at high speeds.
Heh. Guess why we need a t3 where I work? ----------
No this isn't the case. If you want to be a compulsive extreme gamer maybe, but a lot of older video cards do very well in current games. The TNT1 as well as the banshee (voodoo2) are pretty cheap as well as being more than enough for games coming out today. ----------
Try the drivers on the NVIDIA web site. They work very well with opengl games. The current drivers have some problems with video overlays though. The 208 detonator drivers also work very well. ----------
I've directly compared ATi cards in the past, and image quality has been terrible. Now, I haven't tried the new MAXX, but I'll assume it's similar due to the fact that it's two Rage Fury chipsets on the same board. Really, the image quality on these boards sucks. First, it's like viewing a game with 10/10 vision. Textures arent detailed until you're like 2 feet away. You can also see the texture qualities directly changing because the most detailed is limited to that which is directly in front of the player. I've tried this on a variety of games and directly compared it to tnt1, tnt2 and voodoo banshee cards, and there's a world of difference.
Now, they may have the "power" to display at similar frame rates, but I've noticed many artifacts in opengl and direct3d. They do seem to use a lot of trickery to achieve similar frame rates, and it doesn't really bode well for picture quality. This is hardly what I would expect from a 32mb video card. ----------
ipchains has no stateful inspection, good nat connection tracking, a variety of application proxies, vpn protocols, better rule tables, any kind of comparable speed in nat firewalling...
Of course, the applications built upon netfilter in newer versions of Linux will be better, but it's going to be a while before it's even close to checkpoints product.
It is, however, good enough for the home and small business applications. ----------
Hopefully this bubble will gradually deflate instead of an eventual burst.
Cobalt is a good company with some nice products -- but looking at their profit potential, they are being bought at many time over their worth.
Of course, ask any idiot trader and they will tell you that tech stocks are the new wave because we're having a "revolution".
What's happened is that there has been a supply and demand shift for this industry in the past 3 years -- so people just think they can ride it for all they can get. However, the economy as a whole doesn't have too much to worry about unless inflation creeps back up again. It's quite possible, but I think Greenspan has the macroeconomy under control. ----------
er. U9 is gold now. It should be in stores by November 24. I've also played the cd demo and it's an ok game. The controls are sort of action oriented, but they've eliminated many of the stupidities put into ultima 8 (such as jumping problems). Fighting is all sword swinging action (or bow and arrow) and easy to cast spells though. Go here for the official site.
I'm off topic, oh well. Actually, I think it would be nice if half life was finally properly ported to linux as well as the counter-strike mod. Either that or team fortress 2. I can just imagine the lost hours now. ----------
If the iso demo that's out for u9 is any indicator of the final performance, it's going to be complete crap. 15fps on pII 690 with a tnt2 ultra and similar but only slightly better fps using a voodoo based card with glide. I think they should get it to perform well under windows first:). Nice looking game though.
As for heroes III; Nice little game that warrants a couple of days of compulsive playing. I got incredibly bored after building every upgrade for every town type though. ----------
Naw. The market for hardware and components manufacturers is a lot larger than market penetration. The problem is just that profit margins are very low now -- so companies have to achieve very good commodities of scale.
As well, there isn't much room for product differentiation, so the fact that Packard Bell's products and support were inferior doesn't really help. In other words, they didn't react to changing market conditions. This situation is vastly different than it was 3-7 years ago. ----------
While there is plenty to worry about in our macro-economic situation, fear inducing allusions to the great depression are transparent to those who have even briefly studied economics.
Yes, the tech sector may have be an inflating bubble that will eventually burst -- but remember that as long as inflation is at "acceptable" levels, the economy is in no danger of such an event. Also note that while advancements like in the IT field are being treated almost as they can create money magically, they are still real and DO cause shifts in the economy. ----------
That trick doesn't work most of the time unless it's 3am or 11 in the morning. Having a fast net link myself, I prefer uploading something decent so that the site will be as such next time I come -- however, though it may seem useful to modem users, the admin will usually come and kick you right off in time (downloading on a modem takes a long time). I've found the majority of the better sites have compulsive admins who seemingly sit by their ftp server status window half the day.
Heck, I've even been kicked off sites after uploading 300 megs of stuff the guy wanted:) ----------
"but I'd say that if you're looking for warez, the first rule is that it won't be online"
Naa. There are plenty of sites out there. Many that make you click on porn sites actually have a lot of albums -- as well, there are tons of ratio sites on cable modems and university links. If you have a fast link yourself you can amass a gigantic collection within a couple of weeks. I sat down one day and downloaded over 60 punk albums. All I needed was www.audiogalaxy.com and an ok uplink to upload to ratio sites. I've found a few with over 70 full albums each and ratios like 1:100 (most are 1:3 or 1:4); so theres plenty out there:)
BTW, you can also get mp3 releases of cd's that are due to come out as far as a month away via irc. *cough* I won't tell anywone here where though. ----------
There are virus scanners for linux that could be considered up to date. These scanners are quite capable of running in linux -- They just aren't made by network associates. ----------
The rogers problems have to do with the backbone they use. You have to traverse the @home backbone which is actually pretty fast within itself -- but once you try to get to the internet you'll find incredibly oversold links and/or mae or sprint-nap connections that are terrible. Note that rogers subscribers all around the country have this problem. As well, many @home subscribers in the US suffer from below average service also. I'm sure glad shaw decided to keep their links local with teleglobe, sprint and uunet. Otherwise I'd be stuck connecting to this page at an oversaturated mae-east link. ----------
Yeah exactly. I pay 40 dollars a month for shaw cable access and it's an incredibly good service [at least in my area]. While upload speeds usually top out at 520kbps (65 KB/s), I've seen up to 5.6mbps downlink from a variety of sites (conXion ms update, unh.edu, dn.net, local universities here in toronto, etc).
I'd say it's worth the 40 dollars CDN. They offer business services which allow you to have 5 static ip's and dns for extra as well (70 dollars extra). ----------
Re:Learning perl programming
on
Which BSD?
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, programming perl is great. It's really well written with a lot of humor that has made me laugh each of the 5 times i've read it. The smartass comments on every other page kept me awake.
1) Make sure everything you don't need is commented out in the rc's and inetd.conf. Use netstat to make sure the system isn't listening on any ports you don't want it to. When hard to determine ports come up, use sockstat or lsof to find which program is listening on what port.
2) Use ipf or ipfilter to firewall telnetd/sshd/ftpd ports if possible. I prefer those ports only being open to limited ip ranges.
3) If you have local shell users, only give them the userland that they need. Only allow access to programs that you want them to access. Good will doesn't always work. It is also possible to prevent read access to many files in/etc/ and/var/ that shouldn't necessarily be world readable. You may also want to run something like tripwire to alert you if a breach does happen anyway. User process limits and modified rootkits may also be in order. You may also want to look into jail -- though I think the only working non custom implementation is in 4.0-CURRENT right now.
4) Stay proactive and keep up to date with those daemons that you allow world access to. The majority of external network breaches are due to well known exploit scanners statistically being able to find a number of systems who aren't aware or haven't gotten around to fixing problems yet.
5) If particularly worried about DoS attacks, ICMP_BANDLIM may be a good kernel option to use. You would probably also want to block icmp echo requests and responses completely. As well, if you want to be a complete paranoid, you could block all UDP as well (except those that are needed). That still leaves spoofed syn floods though. I don't know the current status of syn rate limiting in 3.3, but i have a kludge built for 3.1 here. You may have to diff the files and make changes manually if there have been any major changes to that code since then.
1) Cost of ownership above and beyond actual product (cd recorder) -- thus limiting their market to those with burners.
2) 2 aa batteries on a normal cd player should give about 25 hours playing time. With an mp3 decoding dsp chip, that time would probably be cut down drastically (some others with no moving parts use one battery and probably have the same playing time).
Therefore, it might be the right product for me, but its mass market appeal is far less than other like products. ----------
Are there any decent players that would, say, read mp3's off a cd and play them like a regular cd player? This sounds better to me than a bulky hard drive (if it is) and expensive low size flash memory. ----------
The majority of slamming of linux that I have seen has been on this forum. It seems people like to argue here. I don't see how it different from any other story on this site where you'll see people arguing.
Second to that, there's irc. People on irc like to talk shit. #freebsd on efnet turns into flame101 as soon as anyone event mentions linux (or NT for that matter):)
I think it's just the medium. The mailing lists are a little less "noisy". I don't blame people for saying "RTFM" whenever someone asks a stupid question in a channel though. Newbies just have to learn how to use documentation and mailing list archives:) ----------
Interesting. RPM might actually be a better solution than pkg_add and pkg_del reworked for version checking; since this sort of thing would be most useful for users with a standard system setup (because they most likely have no idea how to change the system without screwing it up in the first place). Of course, problems will always be introduced when you manually change the system around -- though on freebsd that happens less often since the system is more or less standardized and already works well.
My idea was to provide an alternative to cvsup for RELEASE users who do not know or care to grapple with/usr/src. That of course would require an understandable bug and feature addition database with possibly an application similar to windowsupdate that allowed for specific rating of the degree's in which it was needed as well as effects on the system and current apps. The problem with freebsd though is that someone would have to look through all the src changes and take those which are particularly important and turn those changes into binary updates. Of course, there seems to be more of a need to recompile your kernel for device changes as well as activating certain features in freebsd. So now that I think about it, it's probably better to wait until modularity gets better before making it accessible to more people.
Current users have to be kind of proactive on updating their system though, so an update portal may be a good idea. I was implying that such a system would take a lot of time to implement -- not that it was relatively complicated.
As far as upgrading the entire system as per daily builds as mentioned below; all I can say is yuck:) ----------
Yeah really. I usually just go to one story and find somewhat interesting comments to add points to -- as well as moderating down flame comments that have no point at all.
Nevermind reading the second or third pages of comments at all:). The story would have to be incredibly interesting to spend 3 hours reading comments:). ----------
Because one chose the path of learning how to do such things? I may have led a particularly technology minded life -- but that doesn't mean that someone who focussed their energies on something completely different doesn't have the aptitude or ability to do such things.
I struggle daily with the 100,000 things I could or should be learning. You could say I like to learn. However, I then realize that if my situation were different then I wouldn't worry so much about such things because I wouldn't be driven by the need to succeed and I probably wouldn't care to learn anything at all besides what i consider "fun".
You can psycho-analyze a young and older person and you will find that both are particularly opinionated. I know I am. The fact still remains, though, that younger people are still exploring their possibilities so they may seem more open to learning. However, as I'm sure some people would agree, once you get locked into a particular profession, you tend to not really care about anything else except that which will improve your job. There are just too many things to focus on in your own area of expertise to give a s*** about "new-fangled" technology. I know if I was 60, I would rather be manipulating my retirement plan to accomodate my need to travel while brushing up on my golf stroke.
Yes, knowledge is sometimes motivating and even fun -- but most people don't care about such things that don't directly affect them (you can argue that techno geeks go out of their way to learn such things, but I'd just say that it's in their area of expertise). Do most people care -- as given in an example further up -- how Asynchronous Transfer Mode protocol works and how it's used on every non-legacy telephone network now? Nope. ----------
Slashdot Mirror
I just bought the book today. It's pretty good.
:)
I think some of his best laughs are the ones that deal with current events or fads.
Example: Today's comic
Guy stays late to play rainbow 6 and positions his men for about 9 hours and then caps a terrorist...
May not sound funny to you, but we had a co-op game here at work the other night and we had to do a level over about 20 times due to that
As well:
November 1; Guy tells everyone about new policy to decrease traffic and then goes and tells his buddies they can now download their mp3's at high speeds.
Heh. Guess why we need a t3 where I work?
----------
No this isn't the case. If you want to be a compulsive extreme gamer maybe, but a lot of older video cards do very well in current games. The TNT1 as well as the banshee (voodoo2) are pretty cheap as well as being more than enough for games coming out today.
----------
Try the drivers on the NVIDIA web site. They work very well with opengl games. The current drivers have some problems with video overlays though. The 208 detonator drivers also work very well.
----------
I've directly compared ATi cards in the past, and image quality has been terrible. Now, I haven't tried the new MAXX, but I'll assume it's similar due to the fact that it's two Rage Fury chipsets on the same board. Really, the image quality on these boards sucks. First, it's like viewing a game with 10/10 vision. Textures arent detailed until you're like 2 feet away. You can also see the texture qualities directly changing because the most detailed is limited to that which is directly in front of the player. I've tried this on a variety of games and directly compared it to tnt1, tnt2 and voodoo banshee cards, and there's a world of difference.
Now, they may have the "power" to display at similar frame rates, but I've noticed many artifacts in opengl and direct3d. They do seem to use a lot of trickery to achieve similar frame rates, and it doesn't really bode well for picture quality. This is hardly what I would expect from a 32mb video card.
----------
ipchains has no stateful inspection, good nat connection tracking, a variety of application proxies, vpn protocols, better rule tables, any kind of comparable speed in nat firewalling...
Of course, the applications built upon netfilter in newer versions of Linux will be better, but it's going to be a while before it's even close to checkpoints product.
It is, however, good enough for the home and small business applications.
----------
Hopefully this bubble will gradually deflate instead of an eventual burst.
Cobalt is a good company with some nice products -- but looking at their profit potential, they are being bought at many time over their worth.
Of course, ask any idiot trader and they will tell you that tech stocks are the new wave because we're having a "revolution".
What's happened is that there has been a supply and demand shift for this industry in the past 3 years -- so people just think they can ride it for all they can get. However, the economy as a whole doesn't have too much to worry about unless inflation creeps back up again. It's quite possible, but I think Greenspan has the macroeconomy under control.
----------
er. U9 is gold now. It should be in stores by November 24. I've also played the cd demo and it's an ok game. The controls are sort of action oriented, but they've eliminated many of the stupidities put into ultima 8 (such as jumping problems). Fighting is all sword swinging action (or bow and arrow) and easy to cast spells though. Go here for the official site.
I'm off topic, oh well. Actually, I think it would be nice if half life was finally properly ported to linux as well as the counter-strike mod. Either that or team fortress 2. I can just imagine the lost hours now.
----------
If the iso demo that's out for u9 is any indicator of the final performance, it's going to be complete crap. 15fps on pII 690 with a tnt2 ultra and similar but only slightly better fps using a voodoo based card with glide. I think they should get it to perform well under windows first :). Nice looking game though.
As for heroes III; Nice little game that warrants a couple of days of compulsive playing. I got incredibly bored after building every upgrade for every town type though.
----------
Naw. The market for hardware and components manufacturers is a lot larger than market penetration. The problem is just that profit margins are very low now -- so companies have to achieve very good commodities of scale.
As well, there isn't much room for product differentiation, so the fact that Packard Bell's products and support were inferior doesn't really help. In other words, they didn't react to changing market conditions. This situation is vastly different than it was 3-7 years ago.
----------
While there is plenty to worry about in our macro-economic situation, fear inducing allusions to the great depression are transparent to those who have even briefly studied economics.
Yes, the tech sector may have be an inflating bubble that will eventually burst -- but remember that as long as inflation is at "acceptable" levels, the economy is in no danger of such an event. Also note that while advancements like in the IT field are being treated almost as they can create money magically, they are still real and DO cause shifts in the economy.
----------
Yes, but are we going to balance the business cycle or let it inflate and explode? :)
----------
That trick doesn't work most of the time unless it's 3am or 11 in the morning. Having a fast net link myself, I prefer uploading something decent so that the site will be as such next time I come -- however, though it may seem useful to modem users, the admin will usually come and kick you right off in time (downloading on a modem takes a long time). I've found the majority of the better sites have compulsive admins who seemingly sit by their ftp server status window half the day.
:)
Heck, I've even been kicked off sites after uploading 300 megs of stuff the guy wanted
----------
"but I'd say that if you're looking for warez, the first rule is that it won't be online"
:)
Naa. There are plenty of sites out there. Many that make you click on porn sites actually have a lot of albums -- as well, there are tons of ratio sites on cable modems and university links. If you have a fast link yourself you can amass a gigantic collection within a couple of weeks. I sat down one day and downloaded over 60 punk albums. All I needed was www.audiogalaxy.com and an ok uplink to upload to ratio sites. I've found a few with over 70 full albums each and ratios like 1:100 (most are 1:3 or 1:4); so theres plenty out there
BTW, you can also get mp3 releases of cd's that are due to come out as far as a month away via irc. *cough* I won't tell anywone here where though.
----------
There are virus scanners for linux that could be considered up to date. These scanners are quite capable of running in linux -- They just aren't made by network associates.
----------
The rogers problems have to do with the backbone they use. You have to traverse the @home backbone which is actually pretty fast within itself -- but once you try to get to the internet you'll find incredibly oversold links and/or mae or sprint-nap connections that are terrible. Note that rogers subscribers all around the country have this problem. As well, many @home subscribers in the US suffer from below average service also. I'm sure glad shaw decided to keep their links local with teleglobe, sprint and uunet. Otherwise I'd be stuck connecting to this page at an oversaturated mae-east link.
----------
Yeah exactly. I pay 40 dollars a month for shaw cable access and it's an incredibly good service [at least in my area]. While upload speeds usually top out at 520kbps (65 KB/s), I've seen up to 5.6mbps downlink from a variety of sites (conXion ms update, unh.edu, dn.net, local universities here in toronto, etc).
I'd say it's worth the 40 dollars CDN. They offer business services which allow you to have 5 static ip's and dns for extra as well (70 dollars extra).
----------
Yeah, programming perl is great. It's really well written with a lot of humor that has made me laugh each of the 5 times i've read it. The smartass comments on every other page kept me awake.
The glossary was very nice as well.
----------
1) Make sure everything you don't need is commented out in the rc's and inetd.conf. Use netstat to make sure the system isn't listening on any ports you don't want it to. When hard to determine ports come up, use sockstat or lsof to find which program is listening on what port.
/etc/ and /var/ that shouldn't necessarily be world readable. You may also want to run something like tripwire to alert you if a breach does happen anyway. User process limits and modified rootkits may also be in order. You may also want to look into jail -- though I think the only working non custom implementation is in 4.0-CURRENT right now.
2) Use ipf or ipfilter to firewall telnetd/sshd/ftpd ports if possible. I prefer those ports only being open to limited ip ranges.
3) If you have local shell users, only give them the userland that they need. Only allow access to programs that you want them to access. Good will doesn't always work. It is also possible to prevent read access to many files in
4) Stay proactive and keep up to date with those daemons that you allow world access to. The majority of external network breaches are due to well known exploit scanners statistically being able to find a number of systems who aren't aware or haven't gotten around to fixing problems yet.
5) If particularly worried about DoS attacks, ICMP_BANDLIM may be a good kernel option to use. You would probably also want to block icmp echo requests and responses completely. As well, if you want to be a complete paranoid, you could block all UDP as well (except those that are needed). That still leaves spoofed syn floods though. I don't know the current status of syn rate limiting in 3.3, but i have a kludge built for 3.1 here. You may have to diff the files and make changes manually if there have been any major changes to that code since then.
----------
MP3CD Player
Battery : 4 x AA (Rechargeable or Alkaline) (8 hrs with Alkaline)
Ouch, I wonder what play time they get with that. Looks bulky too. Oh well; not like i could ever fit my shockwave cd player in my pocket anyway.
----------
Now that I think about it;
1) Cost of ownership above and beyond actual product (cd recorder) -- thus limiting their market to those with burners.
2) 2 aa batteries on a normal cd player should give about 25 hours playing time. With an mp3 decoding dsp chip, that time would probably be cut down drastically (some others with no moving parts use one battery and probably have the same playing time).
Therefore, it might be the right product for me, but its mass market appeal is far less than other like products.
----------
Are there any decent players that would, say, read mp3's off a cd and play them like a regular cd player? This sounds better to me than a bulky hard drive (if it is) and expensive low size flash memory.
----------
The majority of slamming of linux that I have seen has been on this forum. It seems people like to argue here. I don't see how it different from any other story on this site where you'll see people arguing.
:)
:)
Second to that, there's irc. People on irc like to talk shit. #freebsd on efnet turns into flame101 as soon as anyone event mentions linux (or NT for that matter)
I think it's just the medium. The mailing lists are a little less "noisy". I don't blame people for saying "RTFM" whenever someone asks a stupid question in a channel though. Newbies just have to learn how to use documentation and mailing list archives
----------
Interesting. RPM might actually be a better solution than pkg_add and pkg_del reworked for version checking; since this sort of thing would be most useful for users with a standard system setup (because they most likely have no idea how to change the system without screwing it up in the first place). Of course, problems will always be introduced when you manually change the system around -- though on freebsd that happens less often since the system is more or less standardized and already works well.
/usr/src. That of course would require an understandable bug and feature addition database with possibly an application similar to windowsupdate that allowed for specific rating of the degree's in which it was needed as well as effects on the system and current apps. The problem with freebsd though is that someone would have to look through all the src changes and take those which are particularly important and turn those changes into binary updates. Of course, there seems to be more of a need to recompile your kernel for device changes as well as activating certain features in freebsd. So now that I think about it, it's probably better to wait until modularity gets better before making it accessible to more people.
:)
My idea was to provide an alternative to cvsup for RELEASE users who do not know or care to grapple with
Current users have to be kind of proactive on updating their system though, so an update portal may be a good idea. I was implying that such a system would take a lot of time to implement -- not that it was relatively complicated.
As far as upgrading the entire system as per daily builds as mentioned below; all I can say is yuck
----------
Yeah really. I usually just go to one story and find somewhat interesting comments to add points to -- as well as moderating down flame comments that have no point at all.
:). The story would have to be incredibly interesting to spend 3 hours reading comments :).
Nevermind reading the second or third pages of comments at all
----------
Because one chose the path of learning how to do such things? I may have led a particularly technology minded life -- but that doesn't mean that someone who focussed their energies on something completely different doesn't have the aptitude or ability to do such things.
I struggle daily with the 100,000 things I could or should be learning. You could say I like to learn. However, I then realize that if my situation were different then I wouldn't worry so much about such things because I wouldn't be driven by the need to succeed and I probably wouldn't care to learn anything at all besides what i consider "fun".
You can psycho-analyze a young and older person and you will find that both are particularly opinionated. I know I am. The fact still remains, though, that younger people are still exploring their possibilities so they may seem more open to learning. However, as I'm sure some people would agree, once you get locked into a particular profession, you tend to not really care about anything else except that which will improve your job. There are just too many things to focus on in your own area of expertise to give a s*** about "new-fangled" technology. I know if I was 60, I would rather be manipulating my retirement plan to accomodate my need to travel while brushing up on my golf stroke.
Yes, knowledge is sometimes motivating and even fun -- but most people don't care about such things that don't directly affect them (you can argue that techno geeks go out of their way to learn such things, but I'd just say that it's in their area of expertise). Do most people care -- as given in an example further up -- how Asynchronous Transfer Mode protocol works and how it's used on every non-legacy telephone network now? Nope.
----------