Obviously the post is intended as humour, and the orbit of this particular satellite effectively prevents this type of surveillance, but... If he can (and he probably can; we're not allowed to know even though they use our money for it), I am damn sure that our fascist government would do exactly this. We are only saved by the fact that computers have no ability to discern either positive identification or criminal intent from satellite photos. That means humans have to sift through all this intelligence, and the government simply doesn't have the manpower to do that on a large scale. So for now I doubt large-scale photointelligence operations are ongoing. But you know the very idea of watching everything every person on Earth does, every minute of every day is enough to get Herr Ashcroft drooling.
To which I say, no problem, and proceed to fuck him in the ass with a railgun. Bye-bye, johnny.
If you really need to back up >20GB or so I find that DLT is the only reasonable option. You can find used DLTIIIXT and IV drives for less than $500 or so. The media is not too costly, maybe $15-20 per tape. You can fit 15-30 or 20-40 on each of these tapes, so for 100G you probably should figure on your annual 0-level dumps taking about 3-6 tapes, and you should have no problem (with your usage pattern) fitting weekly level 1 backups on a single tape each. So a pack of 10 tapes ought to provide you with a month's backups or more. Total cost around $400-500 if you shop carefully. Maybe less now...
Thank you. I agree; it's very important to distinguish between actual safety hazards and politically-correct notions of what type or level of violence is appropriate for children (or adults). If this organization want to compile and publish this list, so be it, but for/. to turn around and claim on their behalf that there's anything "dangerous" about a video game is just irresponsible.
I can take care of script kiddies, virus outbreaks, and idiots who install IIS. It is Congress's responsibility to do only two things: (1) require that the computers and networks belonging to the federal government are as secure as humanly possible, especially those which may contain citizens' records, and (2) protect law-abiding or possibly law-abiding citizens from the three letter agencies by forcefully restricting their activities to legitimate investigations using constitutionally "white" - not "grey" or "marginal" or "illegal as hell" methods. That applies to computer crimes as well as all others, and for practical purposes it should restrict the TLAs to prosecution of known crimes involving federal computers, and pursuit and analysis of foreign intelligence.
Don't protect private companies and individuals from anyone but the government. We can take care of ourselves.
Don't protect the government from law-abiding citizens. We're at sufficient disadvantage already.
Don't protect the privacy of convicted criminals.
Don't create laws that favour any one kind of entity over any other, except law-abiding citizens and corporations over convicted criminals.
Don't legislate exclusions of liability for security breaches. Let the civil courts decide who, if anyone, is responsible for damages due to security breaches.
Don't restrict or attempt to restrict cryptography, and strictly prohibit the three letter agencies from planting or distributing intentionally weakened or defective cryptographic tools.
Don't allow the three letter agencies to wiretap data connections without meeting constitutional requirements - it does nothing to improve security and most likely decreases it by creating additional copies of sensitive information.
Most importantly of all - *DO* build trust in the security community by passing and strictly enforcing JUST, FAIR LAWS in all matters concerning digital security, copyright law, privacy, and civil liberties. In other words, do your job as statesmen and earn the respect and trust of all the citizens you supposedly represent. Your job is MUCH easier to do when we can trust you, and sadly, your record makes that outright impossible.
Obviously, MS biggest problem though is that they don't know when to give up and actually rewrite.
You are technically correct. Certainly this is a major reason that their software sucks so badly that I and many others refuse to use it. But really, is this a problem for the people who care, specifically the stockholders? Nope. Fuckwits still buy it, the profits keep rolling in, and the stock price keeps going up. I'd say that whatever they're doing is working just fine.
You want to build a better product, that's easy; a small child with a mental defect could do that. You want to make more money, good fucking luck.
Too bad voip is the most pointless and useless technology in existence (ok, I lied. Java takes that honor). Why should I even consider changing my wiring and buying a lot of very expensive switches just so that we can implement a more expensive version of the digital phones that we already have working perfectly? Come on people, give me a reason to buy it instead of just running 2-4 cables to each cube...
Actually I think all the vendors who agreed to delay releasing patches for a known severe problem have breached their customers' trust and should be punished. I would like to know what's going to be done to them. Maybe their customers should just stop doing business with them; that usually makes the problem go away on its own.
Given the choice between having Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft wandering the Earth as free men, I'd much rather it be bin Laden. He doesn't pretend he's doing you good when he blows up your buildings, kicks your dog, and rapes your grandmother. At least he's honest - he wants to kill you and end your way of life and he publicly says so; that's a lot more than I can say for this current government. It used to be the leftists doing it "for the children" and now it's the rightists doing it "for the country." It's enough to make you want to go live in a shack in Montana with no electricity until news of the inevitable revolution reaches you.
Take apart this government NOW. Don't bother writing letters; in the current atmosphere nobody is listening to reason. The only legal means left to try is recall petitions. Recall every congressman who votes for this shit and for every senator who voted to confirm Ashcroft. I'm not real sure how it could be made to happen, but you might even try a run at the shrub. Whom to replace them with? The weakest, most ineffectual non-leaders you can find - with any luck they'll waffle and dither around and stab each other in the back continuously so that nothing ever gets done. Congress really works best that way.
The Constitution is the country. You can't defend one without defending the other.
Obviously Mr. Gates has no knowledge of the origins of Free Software, or would like people to think he has none. The earliest Free Software ran on various minis and very early micros, most of which are long since dead. The earliest Free Software to carry the name generally ran on SunOS and the LISP machines at MIT. The FSF was founded in 1983, not before the PC, it's true, but certainly before the advent of widespread clones and standardization, to say nothing of a *popular* platform for home computing at all. Free Software as a concept predates Microsoft by years, and as a name predates any meaningful market in standardized computers. About the closest thing you had at the time to standardized, consistent software was BSD.
Conclusion: This claim is utter rubbish. There's no way that anyone who follows the industry as well as Mr. Gates can be so ignorant, so presumably he just likes to boast. Ignore him for the arrogant fool he is.
More even than that, getting a RDBMS set up is a lot of hard work from sysadmins and DBAs. That work represents an investment, and there's no good reason to take a working system, with that investment, and throw it away. These systems get used as long as they possibly can be, and then a little longer. Migration happens as infrequently as possible. So when my Sun SC2000E isn't powerful enough any more, instead of switching architecture and OS, I'll just buy a new E6500, hook my disk units into it, and hope I don't have to tweak Oracle too much. Much lower risk that way...
Falling in love is easy. Getting her to love you, now that's the trick. If you still think you'll someday find a great woman to share your life with, you're not cynical enough; try harder.
Do yourself a favour and stay away from the women. There are less painful problems to replace your career-related ones. Try alcoholism, compulsive gambling, or a series of midnight bank robberies. No matter what happens to you, you'll be better off than if you fell in love instead.
For about 10 years, the president of the state senate was the kid brother of the major local mafia boss. I kid you not...
Nothing wrong with that. Just look at Nevada... Oscar Goodman is mayor of Las Vegas. Usually the mafia does a much better job of governing than a bunch of bleeding-heart do-gooders with family money and axes to grind.
Sorry, guess you missed the sarcasm. How could anyone be shocked by this kind of thing? It's not surprising at all; M$ doesn't give a fuck about standards or community or anything else. To them the world is about mindshare, market share, and money, in that order. Why even post something like this?
This tactic is more like one kid not allowing another to come to their birthday party because the uninvited kid isn't popular enough. Really, it's quite childish behaviour
As far as I can see this is how the world works. It doesn't end after elementary school. People are bastards and they'll fuck over anyone if they think it'll make them a buck. The only way to win is to be a bigger bastard than the other guy.
ROME - In a new development shocking faithful and infidels alike, Pope John Paul II was revealed to be a Roman Catholic. CNN broke the story shortly after noon Thursday, after an anonymous tip from a recently-excommunicated parishoner was verified by reluctant officials at the Vatican. One such official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said "Yes, I mean, it's true in the technical sense that the His Holiness is, in point of fact, Catholic." The news sparked violent protests among disillusioned churchgoers around the world.
One protester in Brasilia said, "Jesus Fucking Christ, man, the Pope is Catholic? I mean, what's next, Microsoft engaging in anticompetitive business practices? I'm so disillusioned." He then proceeded to overturn and set fire to a police car.
It looks like the future of CPUs is definitely 64bit+
No, the present is 64bit+. The peecee is the only type of workstation or server still shipping with 32-bit CPUs. Sun killed their last 32-bit workstation in 1998. Alpha's been 64-bit forever. SGI has shipped 64bit CPUs since the Indy/Indigo2 and has been running 64bit IRIX by default on everything since last year (the holdout? O2, interestingly enough, because of bugs). I could go on... The reality is that you can already buy 64bit workstations running 64bit OSs with good performance for less than $1000, and in some cases only a few hundred.
The reality is that the peecee is way behind the times.
Therefore, how each of these processors runs legacy code is important.
Very true. Unfortunately neither is really getting it right. For examples of how to support mixed 32bit and 64bit binaries and even OSs on the one 64bit CPU, see the MIPS3 documentation. For a cleaner transition that required changes at the OS level only, take a look at the SPARC V8 -> V9. Can you say "seamless?" I knew you could.
The trick, naturally, is to design a proper instruction set to begin with. Then you can extend and enhance it easily without having to break backward compatibility. Too bad Intel didn't realize that.
Obviously we all have our own favourite pieces of software, but I definitely think the problem is that you used q****. I've done mail setups with postfix, procmail (with full virus filtering) and UW-imap and had no problems for 50 users. Not that 50 is a lot, but there's no known scalability bottleneck either; it ought to work for 5000 just as well. I guess YMMV.
Personally, I find the Brand X programs much harder to configure and use. Perhaps, though, the fact that some people have bad experiences with various pieces of software can be considered a downside also. Though for every q**** horror story I can give you an Exchange horror story. *shrug* I find this argument kind of weak I suppose.
Subscriptions would help a lot...
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 2
I think slashdot should require subscriptions in order to post comments. All the trolls and crapflooders would go away, and then the traffic would be back to reasonable levels...which could probably be supported without any additional revenue, but hey. I like the idea if for no other reason than that it keeps out the losers. 5, maybe 10 bucks a year. Let's not get crazy here. No ads, and you get to post. Simple as that. Read-only static content with normal banner ads, free.
Some good points, but I must take issue with issue #2. While this is certainly true of Free Software, and is a definite negative, it isn't really relevant because even software you pay for somes with explicit disclaimers, in many cases word for word identical to one of those used by the various Free Software licenses. While it's unfortunate that virtually no software comes with a warranty, this fact can't be used to differentiate. Only "managed solutions" and similar high-end products that include software, support, and SLAs will provide you with any kind of warranty, and these may (and usually do) include various software under both Free and non-Free licenses, selected according to your specific requirements.
The problem with relying on something like Microsoft's writings for this is that most of what they write is in fact false. There are probably good reasons why open source software might not be useful or appropriate in some circumstances. Of course, it's much more likely that you can say that about some particular piece of software. Either way, though, since most of what Microsoft either believes or wants others to believe about software licensing in particular is outright lies, it isn't really useful information from a research perspective.
Much more relevant are anecdotes from the field, which I will hope you will find here.
I am a systems administrator at a small software company in the valley. Although our product runs on a variety of Free and non-Free systems, many of our developers are working on a very proprietary system and using little or no free software. My infrastructure, by contrast, is almost entirely Free. The drawback is not in the performance or feature set of the software I am using to provide services - in fact everyone is extremely happy with it. The drawback, rather, is in constantly having to fight to use good quality Free software in an environment where the mindshare belongs almost entirely to Brand X. As an example, it gets old very quickly explaining to people why we shouldn't be using Exchange Server to handle our mail, especially when our current Free Software mail server has been doing its job perfectly well.
I don't know how relevant this is, but perhaps you will find it interesting. Good luck.
And as you can see from my spam-armoured e-mail, I don't exactly live in Silicon Valley...
Ironically, there are MANY parts of silicon valley wherein good broadband is also not available. DSL is not available in practically all of Sunnyvale, nor in many parts of West and South San Jose. Cable, well, between the lack of choice in ISPs and the horrible TOS, it's not worth it even if it were free.
If the notorious DJB ever decides to release his software under a Free license, then perhaps it will be included.
That said, if djbdns ever ships as the default name server, I will stop using Red Hat. Not because I don't know how to replace it with BIND, but on the basis of "if they'll include THAT, I can't trust anything else they included, and I don't have time to sift through it all and replace the trash." BIND works. BIND 9 works well and has a much better security record than previous versions. Besides, (evil grin) when BIND holes are found, the BIND team acks and patches them, and you better believe the whole world will know about them.
Re:don't understand the need for constant upgradin
on
Red Hat 7.2 Released
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· Score: 2
I'm still running 6.2 w/ any patches that
concern me.
I don't particularly see any need to upgrade
to 7.0, 7.1 or 7.2 for that matter.
What's the big deal?
Nothing. Relax and go about your business. Your license to use the software will not expire. Ever.
No, really. We don't do that kind of thing here. In fact, you can still get and use Red Hat 2! Or even, if you can find it, SLS. Instead of requiring you to buy every new release, tested before shipping or not, the Free Software community, which includes Red Hat, had the vision to make sure you can continue to use whatever software you feel is best for as long as you want to use it.
Hasn't anyone figured out Red Hat's release schedule yet? Like clockwork, April and October. Every six months, a new release. Downloading ISOs after August or February is a waste of time...
Slashdot Mirror
To which I say, no problem, and proceed to fuck him in the ass with a railgun. Bye-bye, johnny.
If you really need to back up >20GB or so I find that DLT is the only reasonable option. You can find used DLTIIIXT and IV drives for less than $500 or so. The media is not too costly, maybe $15-20 per tape. You can fit 15-30 or 20-40 on each of these tapes, so for 100G you probably should figure on your annual 0-level dumps taking about 3-6 tapes, and you should have no problem (with your usage pattern) fitting weekly level 1 backups on a single tape each. So a pack of 10 tapes ought to provide you with a month's backups or more. Total cost around $400-500 if you shop carefully. Maybe less now...
Thank you. I agree; it's very important to distinguish between actual safety hazards and politically-correct notions of what type or level of violence is appropriate for children (or adults). If this organization want to compile and publish this list, so be it, but for /. to turn around and claim on their behalf that there's anything "dangerous" about a video game is just irresponsible.
Don't protect private companies and individuals from anyone but the government. We can take care of ourselves.
Don't protect the government from law-abiding citizens. We're at sufficient disadvantage already.
Don't protect the privacy of convicted criminals.
Don't create laws that favour any one kind of entity over any other, except law-abiding citizens and corporations over convicted criminals.
Don't legislate exclusions of liability for security breaches. Let the civil courts decide who, if anyone, is responsible for damages due to security breaches.
Don't restrict or attempt to restrict cryptography, and strictly prohibit the three letter agencies from planting or distributing intentionally weakened or defective cryptographic tools.
Don't allow the three letter agencies to wiretap data connections without meeting constitutional requirements - it does nothing to improve security and most likely decreases it by creating additional copies of sensitive information.
Most importantly of all - *DO* build trust in the security community by passing and strictly enforcing JUST, FAIR LAWS in all matters concerning digital security, copyright law, privacy, and civil liberties. In other words, do your job as statesmen and earn the respect and trust of all the citizens you supposedly represent. Your job is MUCH easier to do when we can trust you, and sadly, your record makes that outright impossible.
You are technically correct. Certainly this is a major reason that their software sucks so badly that I and many others refuse to use it. But really, is this a problem for the people who care, specifically the stockholders? Nope. Fuckwits still buy it, the profits keep rolling in, and the stock price keeps going up. I'd say that whatever they're doing is working just fine.
You want to build a better product, that's easy; a small child with a mental defect could do that. You want to make more money, good fucking luck.
Too bad voip is the most pointless and useless technology in existence (ok, I lied. Java takes that honor). Why should I even consider changing my wiring and buying a lot of very expensive switches just so that we can implement a more expensive version of the digital phones that we already have working perfectly? Come on people, give me a reason to buy it instead of just running 2-4 cables to each cube...
Actually I think all the vendors who agreed to delay releasing patches for a known severe problem have breached their customers' trust and should be punished. I would like to know what's going to be done to them. Maybe their customers should just stop doing business with them; that usually makes the problem go away on its own.
Take apart this government NOW. Don't bother writing letters; in the current atmosphere nobody is listening to reason. The only legal means left to try is recall petitions. Recall every congressman who votes for this shit and for every senator who voted to confirm Ashcroft. I'm not real sure how it could be made to happen, but you might even try a run at the shrub. Whom to replace them with? The weakest, most ineffectual non-leaders you can find - with any luck they'll waffle and dither around and stab each other in the back continuously so that nothing ever gets done. Congress really works best that way.
The Constitution is the country. You can't defend one without defending the other.
You don't have to go to Drew U however. I certainly didn't.
Why is this funny? It's true. Microsoft makes a product. Nobody forces you to buy it. Where's the beef?
Conclusion: This claim is utter rubbish. There's no way that anyone who follows the industry as well as Mr. Gates can be so ignorant, so presumably he just likes to boast. Ignore him for the arrogant fool he is.
More even than that, getting a RDBMS set up is a lot of hard work from sysadmins and DBAs. That work represents an investment, and there's no good reason to take a working system, with that investment, and throw it away. These systems get used as long as they possibly can be, and then a little longer. Migration happens as infrequently as possible. So when my Sun SC2000E isn't powerful enough any more, instead of switching architecture and OS, I'll just buy a new E6500, hook my disk units into it, and hope I don't have to tweak Oracle too much. Much lower risk that way...
Do yourself a favour and stay away from the women. There are less painful problems to replace your career-related ones. Try alcoholism, compulsive gambling, or a series of midnight bank robberies. No matter what happens to you, you'll be better off than if you fell in love instead.
Nothing wrong with that. Just look at Nevada... Oscar Goodman is mayor of Las Vegas. Usually the mafia does a much better job of governing than a bunch of bleeding-heart do-gooders with family money and axes to grind.
This tactic is more like one kid not allowing another to come to their birthday party because the uninvited kid isn't popular enough. Really, it's quite childish behaviour
As far as I can see this is how the world works. It doesn't end after elementary school. People are bastards and they'll fuck over anyone if they think it'll make them a buck. The only way to win is to be a bigger bastard than the other guy.
ROME - In a new development shocking faithful and infidels alike, Pope John Paul II was revealed to be a Roman Catholic. CNN broke the story shortly after noon Thursday, after an anonymous tip from a recently-excommunicated parishoner was verified by reluctant officials at the Vatican. One such official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said "Yes, I mean, it's true in the technical sense that the His Holiness is, in point of fact, Catholic." The news sparked violent protests among disillusioned churchgoers around the world. One protester in Brasilia said, "Jesus Fucking Christ, man, the Pope is Catholic? I mean, what's next, Microsoft engaging in anticompetitive business practices? I'm so disillusioned." He then proceeded to overturn and set fire to a police car.
No, the present is 64bit+. The peecee is the only type of workstation or server still shipping with 32-bit CPUs. Sun killed their last 32-bit workstation in 1998. Alpha's been 64-bit forever. SGI has shipped 64bit CPUs since the Indy/Indigo2 and has been running 64bit IRIX by default on everything since last year (the holdout? O2, interestingly enough, because of bugs). I could go on... The reality is that you can already buy 64bit workstations running 64bit OSs with good performance for less than $1000, and in some cases only a few hundred.
The reality is that the peecee is way behind the times.
Therefore, how each of these processors runs legacy code is important.
Very true. Unfortunately neither is really getting it right. For examples of how to support mixed 32bit and 64bit binaries and even OSs on the one 64bit CPU, see the MIPS3 documentation. For a cleaner transition that required changes at the OS level only, take a look at the SPARC V8 -> V9. Can you say "seamless?" I knew you could.
The trick, naturally, is to design a proper instruction set to begin with. Then you can extend and enhance it easily without having to break backward compatibility. Too bad Intel didn't realize that.
Personally, I find the Brand X programs much harder to configure and use. Perhaps, though, the fact that some people have bad experiences with various pieces of software can be considered a downside also. Though for every q**** horror story I can give you an Exchange horror story. *shrug* I find this argument kind of weak I suppose.
I think slashdot should require subscriptions in order to post comments. All the trolls and crapflooders would go away, and then the traffic would be back to reasonable levels...which could probably be supported without any additional revenue, but hey. I like the idea if for no other reason than that it keeps out the losers. 5, maybe 10 bucks a year. Let's not get crazy here. No ads, and you get to post. Simple as that. Read-only static content with normal banner ads, free.
Bottom line: No warranty on software. Get an SLA.
Much more relevant are anecdotes from the field, which I will hope you will find here.
I am a systems administrator at a small software company in the valley. Although our product runs on a variety of Free and non-Free systems, many of our developers are working on a very proprietary system and using little or no free software. My infrastructure, by contrast, is almost entirely Free. The drawback is not in the performance or feature set of the software I am using to provide services - in fact everyone is extremely happy with it. The drawback, rather, is in constantly having to fight to use good quality Free software in an environment where the mindshare belongs almost entirely to Brand X. As an example, it gets old very quickly explaining to people why we shouldn't be using Exchange Server to handle our mail, especially when our current Free Software mail server has been doing its job perfectly well.
I don't know how relevant this is, but perhaps you will find it interesting. Good luck.
Ironically, there are MANY parts of silicon valley wherein good broadband is also not available. DSL is not available in practically all of Sunnyvale, nor in many parts of West and South San Jose. Cable, well, between the lack of choice in ISPs and the horrible TOS, it's not worth it even if it were free.
That said, if djbdns ever ships as the default name server, I will stop using Red Hat. Not because I don't know how to replace it with BIND, but on the basis of "if they'll include THAT, I can't trust anything else they included, and I don't have time to sift through it all and replace the trash." BIND works. BIND 9 works well and has a much better security record than previous versions. Besides, (evil grin) when BIND holes are found, the BIND team acks and patches them, and you better believe the whole world will know about them.
Nothing. Relax and go about your business. Your license to use the software will not expire. Ever.
No, really. We don't do that kind of thing here. In fact, you can still get and use Red Hat 2! Or even, if you can find it, SLS. Instead of requiring you to buy every new release, tested before shipping or not, the Free Software community, which includes Red Hat, had the vision to make sure you can continue to use whatever software you feel is best for as long as you want to use it.
Imagine that. You get what you paid for.
Hasn't anyone figured out Red Hat's release schedule yet? Like clockwork, April and October. Every six months, a new release. Downloading ISOs after August or February is a waste of time...