Here at TAMU, it seems as though the math department has standardized on Linux. All computer labs run Linux and KDE. After about five minutes to get used to KDE, any student can use it. The learning curve is extremely shallow. The TAs never get bothered about it because, like I said, the students have no problems with it.
I've always had a theory that in order to progress through the levels of computer mastery, one must spend enough time with the computers and networks to really appreciate what they are and what they do.
It is this appreciation that keeps people inline and not constantly bringing down the networks and stuff, cause god knows how easy it would be. Even l0pht said it once on TV. Back to the point: if you want to learn the net, first you have to respect it. If you're eager to hurt it, you'll never get to your goal. A bit philosophical, perhaps, but we are its caretakers, we know its weaknesses, but at the same time we love it as a son too much than to exploit our knowledge for bad.
So anyway, look at it this way, DoS is distructive, there are constructive ways to get attention too. I don't really care what the good reason was, interfereing with the operations of that many people is just a bad thing.
Now a VERY constructive use of energy would be to work more towards one of the geek unions that get talked about occasionally, or maybe a dataheaven somewhere. Both would get attention, but would be good anyway.
So you advise any "revolutionaries" to go DoSing random sites as their plan A? At least these people should have put forth an real effort to get their story out before launching attacks that harm the Net usage of other people. A DoS attack is, IMHO, a very very negative thing in that it destroys entire servers without prejudice, plus it wastes bandwidth all over the Internet. I'd say that if these people had made a concerted effort to get their story out, someone either on/. or in the media or at least at one of the attacked companies would know about it.
As far as CNN, sure every news story has a motive behind it, but it's kinda like quantum physics... you need a bunch of biased news sites to cancel each other out to get to the truth.
As far as organization, grab a couple of servers on high speed connections (including private computers in university dorms) and set them all up with scripts that will all go off at the same time. Heck, what if someone released an "unoffical" version of AllAdvantage that includes a DoS engine?:)
The point is this could just be one guy who was bored last weekend because his girlfriend dumped him.
Here is a scheme for doing one thing and doing it well: checking mail, one thing. sending mail, one thing. reading mail, one thing. GUI that holds it all together, one thing. Other interfaces (graphical or not), other single things.
This way, the other interfaces can make use of the checking, sending, and reading mail programs (and of course there are others programs too) to use them as they like. For instance, an icon on your desktop could alert you to when you have mail, and an icon built into an application can too. No need to poll the POP server twice, just have the check for mail program poll it once and send the result to whatever programs want it.
Plus, so you don't like the GUI that came with the mail program... write your own without having to rewrite all of the single applications.
Ignore that lpr is a nightmare and realise that to print in UNIX just about any program calls lpr... they don't rewrite the printer drivers because the seperate program philosophy leads to heightened flexibility (develop a brand new mail protocol? Just rewrite send and don't worry about ther repercssions), better code, and more choice for the end user (GUIs and such).
Star Office, I believe, uses a lot of Java code... of course it's going to be slower, don't blame the philosophy.
Yes, I've used Excel and Outlook Express... Excel I like, but as for OE, I used Netscape Mail because it ran twice as fast and did everything anyway.
... or else this is the stupidest group of revolutionaries around.
I mean come on... attacking Yahoo? A place that catalogs information? and CNN? An information source? The Internet is about information, why would anyone who knows that attack places that distribute bood information for free?
At least if they would have attacked AOL it could be because of the stupidity of AOLers (though they're not as bad anymore). Or they could have attacked a known spam ridden network. Heck, how about attacking MPAA online and websites of governments who are net unfriendly?
Their choices of targets are very stupid, appearantly aiming for the biggest publicity bang they can think of. This isn't a revolution, just a media stunt by a bunch of kiddies.
Oh and as for eBay... cheep computer parts:) leave it alone.
I always thought Outlook Express was bloated to the extent of being pretty much useless... I never considered it powerful, just a memory hog that doesn't do things as well as the stand alone applications.
For that exact reason it is very much against the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well.
The thing is what if they won't lisence it to a company to build a Linux player? Just as Sorrenson won't/can't lisence their codecs to make a player for Linux, I thought I head something about a refusal to lisence the DVD stuff to Linux developers.
In any case, reverse engineering is legal, and some parts of the DVD incription algorithms are even publicly documented.
Our arguement is that it shouldn't be/isn't illegal to do it the way we did it. That's all.
I've heard the point made that since Linux programs can easily be ported to Windows, but not the other way around, people are more powerful using Windows. Doesn't really seem fair, but it's true.
I guess the issue is empowerment. Let's just focus on being able to do the most with our OS.
:) It's called a silver box, I think. Maybe chrome. Oh well, in any case here's how it works:
In a lot of cities the traffic lights have little light sensors that look for the flashing of emergency vehicles and change the lights for them. My friend and I set about to make a little light to put on top of his jeep that would flash infrared light (so it wouldn't be seen by others) at the traffic lights to change them.
Also, recently there was an insane lawsuit here where a guy's family is sueing the city because an ambulance changed came through changing the light and crashed into the car, killing both occupants.
The funny part is that the car was stolen, both people were very drunk, there were a bunch of other cars stopped at the light so the car swerved into the other side of the street to get around them and through the intersection, and I think they might have been carrying illegal firearms in the car. All people in the ambulance were killed too. And yet, that family is sueing. God, what a world.
The problem is in that the codecs used to actually compress/encode the data are developed as the result of much research (appearantly). For this reason, the companies who develop the codecs are able to charge an arm and a limb for rights to use them. They aren't going to just release them for free. Maybe they are justified in charging bunches for the codecs, I really don't know.
And then there's the ones that are free:) like MPEG. Why can't people just stick to MPEG? Does it have inherent flaws, scalability and otherwise?
Out of curiousity, how close is WINE to being able to run media player, and quicktime for that matter?
At my college there are all kinds of streaming media files on our resnet that I would love to be able to watch on my computer, but unfortunately I always end up having to walk down the hall to borrow another computer to use media player and quicktime.
From what I understand, Apple bought exclusive rights to Sorenson's codec. It doesn't matter if Sorrenson wants to give it away now, for all intents and purposes it belongs to Apple.
The thing is that these don't detect more than the car sitting above them, right? Something working on cell phone signals would be able to detect further out.
More importantly, a cell phone sensor could be retrofitted to an intersection much more easily than digging up the streets.
I've always liked the idea of sending all kinds of data kinda like this. Ya know, DeCSS isn't legal? Write a "compression/decompression" program that substitutes the word "Dear" in for the first half of the code and the word "Chris" as the second half of the code. Upload the binaries of this program all over the net, cause how is someone going to stop you from uploading a program that decompresses data?
The fun is when people download the program, and run it on a text file that is theoretically the beginning of a letter to Chris (Dear Chris). The output will be the DeCSS source code. Woohoo.
I don't think it was okay at all to stop it. I don't support trademark enforcement on domain names. If this was Microsoft making people stop the selling, all the slashdot crowd would be up in arms.
I'm still looking to see how this is different from other things we've seen on/. I know the guy was auctioning it off so perhaps that's a bit different, but people in these threads have also been saying to get Linux away from the LinuxOne site and all. It's just not right.
It doesn't matter who's doing the wrong thing... it's still the wrong thing, and it makes me kinda angry to see all of you people cheering what you would be jeering if it were from anyone else.
I thought the same thing.... But it's not like mp3.com won't win a lawsuit about that:) I used to like mp3.com, back when it was a repository of information about mp3s, but not so much anymore now that it just sells stuff.
Well the purpose of government is to govern... you know, control. If people could control themselves then government would be unnecessary.
The problem is that people can't control themselves, and so we need the government. It's a matter of an evil cancelling out another evil.
Why is it evil? Well by evil I meen negative... evil is perhaps too strong a word. ANYWAY, the reason government is something that should be avoided is that it has to drain energies off of society. We have to work to pay for its existance. Even if we didn't have to pay taxes of any sort, it would still take government workers to run it spending energy then.
If government wasn't necessary it should cease to exist so all of the energy could be returned to the people instead of being thrown to/dev/null.
Perhaps another way to put it is that government is just a correction to a direction... any correction takes energy. When there is nothing else to correct, the energy can be put to better use. Of course I doubt government will die that easily, but now I'm just rambling late at night:)
Slashdot Mirror
"Ideas were long considered communal property" or however it said it... I like :)
Good link.
Here at TAMU, it seems as though the math department has standardized on Linux. All computer labs run Linux and KDE. After about five minutes to get used to KDE, any student can use it. The learning curve is extremely shallow. The TAs never get bothered about it because, like I said, the students have no problems with it.
All in all, it seems to be a great success.
~Chris
I've always had a theory that in order to progress through the levels of computer mastery, one must spend enough time with the computers and networks to really appreciate what they are and what they do.
It is this appreciation that keeps people inline and not constantly bringing down the networks and stuff, cause god knows how easy it would be. Even l0pht said it once on TV. Back to the point: if you want to learn the net, first you have to respect it. If you're eager to hurt it, you'll never get to your goal. A bit philosophical, perhaps, but we are its caretakers, we know its weaknesses, but at the same time we love it as a son too much than to exploit our knowledge for bad.
So anyway, look at it this way, DoS is distructive, there are constructive ways to get attention too. I don't really care what the good reason was, interfereing with the operations of that many people is just a bad thing.
Now a VERY constructive use of energy would be to work more towards one of the geek unions that get talked about occasionally, or maybe a dataheaven somewhere. Both would get attention, but would be good anyway.
~Chris
So you advise any "revolutionaries" to go DoSing random sites as their plan A? /. or in the media or at least at one of the attacked companies would know about it.
:)
At least these people should have put forth an real effort to get their story out before launching attacks that harm the Net usage of other people. A DoS attack is, IMHO, a very very negative thing in that it destroys entire servers without prejudice, plus it wastes bandwidth all over the Internet. I'd say that if these people had made a concerted effort to get their story out, someone either on
As far as CNN, sure every news story has a motive behind it, but it's kinda like quantum physics... you need a bunch of biased news sites to cancel each other out to get to the truth.
As far as organization, grab a couple of servers on high speed connections (including private computers in university dorms) and set them all up with scripts that will all go off at the same time. Heck, what if someone released an "unoffical" version of AllAdvantage that includes a DoS engine?
The point is this could just be one guy who was bored last weekend because his girlfriend dumped him.
~Chris
Here is a scheme for doing one thing and doing it well:
checking mail, one thing.
sending mail, one thing.
reading mail, one thing.
GUI that holds it all together, one thing.
Other interfaces (graphical or not), other single things.
This way, the other interfaces can make use of the checking, sending, and reading mail programs (and of course there are others programs too) to use them as they like. For instance, an icon on your desktop could alert you to when you have mail, and an icon built into an application can too. No need to poll the POP server twice, just have the check for mail program poll it once and send the result to whatever programs want it.
Plus, so you don't like the GUI that came with the mail program... write your own without having to rewrite all of the single applications.
Ignore that lpr is a nightmare and realise that to print in UNIX just about any program calls lpr... they don't rewrite the printer drivers because the seperate program philosophy leads to heightened flexibility (develop a brand new mail protocol? Just rewrite send and don't worry about ther repercssions), better code, and more choice for the end user (GUIs and such).
Star Office, I believe, uses a lot of Java code... of course it's going to be slower, don't blame the philosophy.
Yes, I've used Excel and Outlook Express... Excel I like, but as for OE, I used Netscape Mail because it ran twice as fast and did everything anyway.
~Chris
... or else this is the stupidest group of revolutionaries around.
:) leave it alone.
I mean come on... attacking Yahoo? A place that catalogs information? and CNN? An information source? The Internet is about information, why would anyone who knows that attack places that distribute bood information for free?
At least if they would have attacked AOL it could be because of the stupidity of AOLers (though they're not as bad anymore). Or they could have attacked a known spam ridden network. Heck, how about attacking MPAA online and websites of governments who are net unfriendly?
Their choices of targets are very stupid, appearantly aiming for the biggest publicity bang they can think of. This isn't a revolution, just a media stunt by a bunch of kiddies.
Oh and as for eBay... cheep computer parts
~Chris
I always thought Outlook Express was bloated to the extent of being pretty much useless... I never considered it powerful, just a memory hog that doesn't do things as well as the stand alone applications.
For that exact reason it is very much against the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well.
~Chris
The thing is what if they won't lisence it to a company to build a Linux player? Just as Sorrenson won't/can't lisence their codecs to make a player for Linux, I thought I head something about a refusal to lisence the DVD stuff to Linux developers.
In any case, reverse engineering is legal, and some parts of the DVD incription algorithms are even publicly documented.
Our arguement is that it shouldn't be/isn't illegal to do it the way we did it. That's all.
~Chris
But it doesn't effectively control access to the work :) You can copy the DVD all you want and the keys will still work on it.
~Chris
I have a copy of it if anyone wants it :)
It's quite useless with today's versions of asf.
Just something I dug out of the deep bowels of the Internet.
~Chris
I've heard the point made that since Linux programs can easily be ported to Windows, but not the other way around, people are more powerful using Windows. Doesn't really seem fair, but it's true.
I guess the issue is empowerment. Let's just focus on being able to do the most with our OS.
~Chris
Are you serious?
How did you do it?
~Chris
:) It's called a silver box, I think. Maybe chrome. Oh well, in any case here's how it works:
In a lot of cities the traffic lights have little light sensors that look for the flashing of emergency vehicles and change the lights for them. My friend and I set about to make a little light to put on top of his jeep that would flash infrared light (so it wouldn't be seen by others) at the traffic lights to change them.
Also, recently there was an insane lawsuit here where a guy's family is sueing the city because an ambulance changed came through changing the light and crashed into the car, killing both occupants.
The funny part is that the car was stolen, both people were very drunk, there were a bunch of other cars stopped at the light so the car swerved into the other side of the street to get around them and through the intersection, and I think they might have been carrying illegal firearms in the car. All people in the ambulance were killed too. And yet, that family is sueing. God, what a world.
~Chris Carlin
The problem is in that the codecs used to actually compress/encode the data are developed as the result of much research (appearantly). For this reason, the companies who develop the codecs are able to charge an arm and a limb for rights to use them. They aren't going to just release them for free. Maybe they are justified in charging bunches for the codecs, I really don't know.
:) like MPEG. Why can't people just stick to MPEG? Does it have inherent flaws, scalability and otherwise?
And then there's the ones that are free
~Chris
Out of curiousity, how close is WINE to being able to run media player, and quicktime for that matter?
At my college there are all kinds of streaming media files on our resnet that I would love to be able to watch on my computer, but unfortunately I always end up having to walk down the hall to borrow another computer to use media player and quicktime.
~Chris
From what I understand, Apple bought exclusive rights to Sorenson's codec. It doesn't matter if Sorrenson wants to give it away now, for all intents and purposes it belongs to Apple.
~Chris
The thing is that these don't detect more than the car sitting above them, right? Something working on cell phone signals would be able to detect further out.
More importantly, a cell phone sensor could be retrofitted to an intersection much more easily than digging up the streets.
The problem is that this prances on the line between trademark and stupidity.
There'd be nothing left if every business took control of every name having any resemblance at all to their names.
Use the cell phone density to monitor how many people are at different parts of an intersection to control the street lights...
No more sitting at a red light watching noone go through.
~Chris
I ordered mine yesterday :)
A link to the page is in this discussion somewhere... I think it was being sold at copyleft
~Chris
The fun is when people download the program, and run it on a text file that is theoretically the beginning of a letter to Chris (Dear Chris). The output will be the DeCSS source code. Woohoo.
~Chris Carlin
I don't support trademark enforcement on domain names. If this was Microsoft making people stop the selling, all the slashdot crowd would be up in arms.
I'm still looking to see how this is different from other things we've seen on
It doesn't matter who's doing the wrong thing... it's still the wrong thing, and it makes me kinda angry to see all of you people cheering what you would be jeering if it were from anyone else.
~Chris
Has anybody tried to run Quicktime through WINE?
Maybe it would play the movies and our troubles are (partially) solved.
~Chris
I thought the same thing.... :)
But it's not like mp3.com won't win a lawsuit about that
I used to like mp3.com, back when it was a repository of information about mp3s, but not so much anymore now that it just sells stuff.
~Chris
The problem is that people can't control themselves, and so we need the government. It's a matter of an evil cancelling out another evil.
Why is it evil? Well by evil I meen negative... evil is perhaps too strong a word. ANYWAY, the reason government is something that should be avoided is that it has to drain energies off of society. We have to work to pay for its existance. Even if we didn't have to pay taxes of any sort, it would still take government workers to run it spending energy then.
If government wasn't necessary it should cease to exist so all of the energy could be returned to the people instead of being thrown to
Perhaps another way to put it is that government is just a correction to a direction... any correction takes energy. When there is nothing else to correct, the energy can be put to better use. Of course I doubt government will die that easily, but now I'm just rambling late at night
~Chris Carlin